Narrative dimensions of philosophy: a semiotic exploration in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Austin

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Narrative Dimensions of Philosophy: A Semiotic Exploration of the Writings of Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Austin

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Narrative Dimensions of Philosophy

10.1057/9780230599345 - Narrative Dimensions of Philosophy, Sky Marsen



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A Semiotic Exploration in the Work of Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Austin Sky Marsen Victoria University of Wellington




© Sky Marsen 2006

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00532–7 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–00532–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marsen, Sky. Narrative dimensions of philosophy : a semiotic exploration in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, and Austin/Sky Marsen. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–00532–2 1. Philosophical literature ––History and criticism. 2. Semiotics. 3. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. Phénoménologie de la perception. 4. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855. Enten-eller. 5. Austin, J. L. (John Langshaw), 1911–1960. How to do things with words. I. Title. B72.M355 2006 121⬘.68—dc22 2006046446 10 15

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List of Figures and Tables

vii

Preface

viii

1 Language, Knowledge and Reality

1

2 The Narrative Framework

23

3 Textual Dimensions and Narrator Roles

60

4 The Meaning in Existence: Freedom through Action in Merleau-Ponty’s World

95

5 Presupposed Worlds

123

6 The Return of the Hero: Embodied Identity in Kierkegaard’s World

143

7 The Winner’s Game: Out and About in Austin’s World

163

References and Bibliography

178

Index

190



Contents



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Figure 2.1 Propp’s narrative sequences

43

Figure 2.2 Actantial model

44

Figure 2.3 Actantial mode of utilitarianism

46

Figure 2.4 Narrative trajectory

46

Figure 2.5 Actantial model for opening of ‘The Seducer’s Diary’

48

Figure 2.6 Narrative structure of porosity

54

Figure 2.7 Actantial model for porosity

55

Figure 2.8 Actantial models of Phantom

56

Figure 2.9 Actantial model of Tokyo nuclear plants

58

Figure 3.1 Textual dimensions

65

Figure 3.2 Semiotic square of narratorial participation

70

Figure 3.3 Semiotic square of enunciator roles

75

Figure 4.1 Aphonic girl model one

116

Figure 4.2 Aphonic girl model two

117

Figure 4.3 Aphonic girl model three

117

Figure 7.1 Actantial model of Words

168

Table 2.1 Semiotic modalities

47

vii



List of Figures and Tables

This book proposes a narrative-semiotic reading of philosophical writing, explains how this can be done and what its significance is for the textual construction of meaning, and analyses three philosophical texts to illustrate this kind of reading. It is not a book on philosophy as a system and method of knowledge, but rather on the ways in which language, and in particular written language, enables the body of texts known as philosophy to exist. Its main guiding hypothesis is that the philosopher-writer, in order to communicate meaning about such concepts as truth, reality and knowledge, uses language to create an order of things where these concepts can function semiotically, that is, as signs, through their interrelational positions. The extra-textual, ‘real’ or phenomenal, world that the text describes is thus filtered by the strategic manipulation of the verbal signs that created the intra-textual world. Semiotics is the systematic analysis of the constitution of signs and of the ways these signs interact to form a text. Meaning is a semiotic concern inasmuch as it is generated by the representations that are formed by different sign combinations and oppositions. To my knowledge, there is no detailed semiotic analysis of a book-length philosophical text. In fact, much of the work of narrative semioticians has focused on simple narratives, such as fairy tales and short fiction, or on propositional utterances extracted from theoreticalscientific texts. Therefore, an aim of this book is to test the analytical tools devised in narrative semiotics by applying them to complex and multi-layered texts. At the same time, approaches to philosophy in terms of its textual nature, that is, in terms of the stylistic and story-telling techniques through which philosophical knowledge is presented, do not have a strong presence in theoretical literature. So, a parallel aim of the book is to suggest a new way of understanding the means available to writers to theorize and discuss humans’ relationship to the world. My approach to the philosophical texts analysed here requires some clarification. My perspective as a narrative semiotician motivated me to approach the texts on their own terms, as self-contained



Preface

entities, instead of placing them in a tradition of thought and comparing them with other philosophical schools or movements like a more conventional interpretation would be expected to do. In this respect I engaged with the texts from an outsider’s perspective, and therefore as an innocent to ‘expert’ opinion. The result is a reading of the selected texts in terms of the world that they construct through their stylistic structure and writing strategy more than in terms of their intertextual references to other philosophical texts. Following the advice of Maurice Blanchot (1988), who wrote that to truly understand a book one has to give oneself to it, I attempted to blend my voice with that of the writers and to reach an understanding of the texts by following their movement. This makes my orientation towards the texts less critical and argumentative, and more analytically interpretative and descriptive. In other words, and this is an axiomatic point, in order to undertake my analysis of these texts, I first had to believe them and place trust in their value. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the book is likely to interest several audiences. It expands the scope of semioticians and literary theorists, by demonstrating how analytical concepts formulated primarily for fictional narratives can be applied to other texts. Also, narrative theorists and narratologists are presented with a revised, eclectic definition of narrative. Finally, scholars in the philosophy of MerleauPonty, Kierkegaard and Austin will find here what may perhaps seem to them an unorthodox, but at the same time also, I hope, interesting and innovative, approach to the work of these philosophers. The texts analysed are Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (French edition, Gallimard, 1945), Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or Parts I and II (translated by H. Hong and E. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1987, originally published in 1843), and John Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (edited by J.O. Urmson, Oxford University Press, 1962, from lectures delivered in 1955). The book should guide readers through these works, regardless of how informed they are about them to begin with. So, it is expected that those with no, or little, knowledge of phenomenology, existentialism and speech act theory will gain some understanding of these philosophies from the book’s discussion. Those with a deeper knowledge of the texts, and the philosophies they espouse, will obviously be able to engage with the ideas presented here on a different, possibly more critical, level. In any case, readers are advised to have at least access



Preface ix

Preface

to the texts analysed, in order to better context the discussion in light of their own objectives. A note on translation would be useful at this point. For both Phenomenology of Perception and Either/Or, I have compared the extracts used here with the respective French and Danish versions, and in the case of Phenomenology of Perception the extracts are my own translations. Although the use of translation in the analysis of text is often considered problematic, the semiotic approach outlined here focuses on the world constructive aspects of discourse and so does not suffer in the semantic transposition that occurs when signs are translated from one language into another. Most of the work presented here is original. However, some of it has appeared in different forms in published articles. A version of Chapter 3, ‘Textual Dimensions and Narrator Roles’, was published as ‘To be an actor or to be an observer? A semiotic typology of narrator roles in written discourse’ in Semiotica 2004, 149-1/4. A version of Chapter 5, ‘Presupposed Worlds’, was published as ‘How to mean without saying: Presupposition and implication revisited’ in Semiotica 2006, 160-1/4. Finally, a version of Chapter 6, ‘The Return of the Hero: Embodied Identity in Kierkegaard’s World’ was published as ‘Who if not he? A narrative semiotic reading of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or’ in Philosophy Today 2004, 48.



x

Language, Knowledge and Reality

I act with complete certainty; but this certainty is my own. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Overview This book explores the use of language in constructions and representations of knowledge, identity and reality, by focusing on the textual, and more specifically narrative, structures of selected philosophical works. How language relates to the extra-linguistic, phenomenal world becomes, therefore, pertinent as a starting point. This chapter overviews some main hypotheses that have guided theoretical approaches to the relations among language, knowledge and reality, and positions the concerns and principles of this study within that framework. It also presents the motivation and hypotheses guiding this book and outlines the theoretical areas that provide its methodological impetus. I begin by situating my research against a background of approaches with similar objectives, then go on to an exposition of the aims and hypotheses motivating this study, and an explanation of the main concepts used. I end with a description of the composition of the chapters.

Knowledge in language The study of knowledge through language or the study of language in the construction and transmission of knowledge has a long 1



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history in the Western tradition of thought. This history has been heterogeneous and has taken a multiplicity of forms, mainly because the definition of pertinent concepts, such as ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’, etc., have followed distinct and, at times, opposing lines. Generally, at one extreme are theories which propose that linguistic constructions are the only basis we have to approach the concept of knowledge, and that what can be known is precisely what can be talked about; or, in other words, that knowledge is constructed through language. At the other extreme, others maintain that language is the best, or only, access there is to a knowledge that exists in a non-verbal domain, or, in other words, that language does not create knowledge but constitutes one of the most effective vehicles for its communication. Approaches to the relations between language and reality underpin the value attached to the knowledge produced by different texts. For example, the distinction between the epistemically underprivileged category of fiction and that of non-fiction, with its claim to varying degrees of ‘truth’, although occasionally put to question by some philosophers, remains prominent in many aspects of Western thought. A division of texts into those that provide information about the ‘real’ world and those that create imaginary constructs of what the world could or should be like underlies much of the textual classification that takes place in a range of social institutions, from university departments to bookshops. Generally speaking, approaches that blur the distinction between fiction and non-fiction tend to embrace constructivist principles, seeing the major function of language to be the creation of representations of reality, and/or the expression of subjectivist principles. These acknowledge the importance of the enunciator’s beliefs and attitudes when evaluating the nature of the knowledge presented in an utterance. On the other hand, approaches that favour a clear distinction between the factual and the fictional tend to assume a more or less direct accessibility to reality via verbal constructs. The quest for knowledge, according to the latter group of approaches, would be to determine the semantic constitution of particular lexemes by tracing the ways they connect to, or refer to, the extra-linguistic world. In the latter part of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (as exemplified by Philosophical Investigations, 1958 [1953]), objects and reality are known through the words used to designate them. Linguistic



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constructions are formed according to the rules of particular ‘language games’ and an appeal to an extra-linguistic reality from which signs draw their significance or their meaning would constitute a circular argument, since what is extra-linguistic can itself only be indicated through particular uses of words. Knowledge, therefore, consists mainly of a creation of meanings rather than of a discovery of objects and relations. Interpreting this proposition semiotically, we could say that ‘language games’ constitute the discursive conventions which provide instructions for the construction of the signified. In order to trace the signified of the signifier /knowledge/, therefore, or the meaning of the term, one should not search in the world of aesthetically perceptible objects to which the concept would refer, but in the interactive situations created by the ways speakers use the signifier. Wittgenstein’s approach to the role of language in epistemology opened a dimension whose importance was most often overlooked in previous philosophical systems, namely the semantic, and in particular, the connotational structure of linguistic signs. Wittgenstein showed that much of language consists of words whose meaning can only be explained by making explicit their uses through articulated examples, and not by physically pointing to objects. In order to explain the use of a sign, one has to put it in a situation or context that will highlight its attributes and functions. The signifier /reality/, for instance, constructs its signified by means of how it is used in different utterances. Another significant development in theorizing the relations between language and reality comes from speech act theory, as associated with the work of John Austin (1962). This approach introduced a practical element into the philosophy of language: instead of looking at the representational function of the linguistic sign, speech act theory changed the focus onto the effects that the sign, when uttered by a speaker in a particular setting, has on the world. The novelty of Austin’s observations lies in his definition of the utterance as an event, which turns words into actions assessable by the criterion of effectiveness, that is, according to whether they work or not in implementing the enunciator’s intention in a visible way. Through his typology of linguistic performance, Austin added the elements of embodiment and intentionality in the repertoire of language functions, and enabled the concepts of agent and role to be included when distinguishing the constitutive features of a text. This



Language, Knowledge and Reality 3


way, in addition to simply uttering a meaningful utterance by following the grammatical rules of the language (as happens in locutionary acts), speaker-writers can perform acts that bind them personally with their audience, by articulating an attitude or intention towards an event, such as when their words warn, wish, promise, etc. (as happens in illocutionary acts). Also, they can induce a reaction from the audience, for example when the receiver of a warning heeds the warning, and thereby ‘change’ or affect the behaviour of the audience in some way (as happens in perlocutionary acts). In a similar fashion to Wittgenstein, Austin approached language in terms of the ‘rules of the game’, although in the case of speech act theory, ‘game’ would designate the societal and situational parameters of a linguistic exchange. ‘Reality’, from this perspective, would describe the contexts in which individuals can express intention and (inter)act through language. Although neither Wittgenstein nor Austin considered the distinction between fictional and non-fictional utterances as an independent topic of investigation, Austin’s work generated a series of theories on the nature of speech acts in different text types (Pratt, 1977; Ryan, 1984, 1991), the most influential of which, it would be justified to say, is that of John Searle (1975, 1979). More on this will be said in Chapter 2 in the discussion on approaches to narrative as reality or fiction. At this stage, it should suffice to say that theories that support typological distinctions of utterances and texts in relation to extra-textual factors, such as the nature of the enunciation or the material verifiability of referents, are generally based on two hypotheses: first, that speakers have different intentions when uttering a piece of information, that is they aim to achieve something through their words, and that this intention determines the status of the information; second, that utterances can be classified as fictional or not, depending on whether the act of enunciation is ‘real’ or ‘pretended’ according to the speakers’ commitment to support the truth value of the statements they are making by some means of extra-textual verification. For text theory and analysis, these hypotheses pose some problems. The objection that these hypotheses are biased towards oral speech, and do not take into account the specific nature of written discourse, has received much attention in the theoretical literature, most notably through the critical interchanges between



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John Searle and Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 1977, 1984). In addition to this objection, however, this type of approach would need to take into account at least two other factors. The first factor involves the fact that notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are defined and evaluated differently cross-culturally, which makes them specific, rather than universal, categories of classification. The second, parallel factor involves the consideration that evidence provided for a statement or assertion tends to be heavily dependent on the discursive form of the assertion itself. For example, a statement whose linguistic composition is highly conceptual cannot be proven true in the same way that a statement whose signifieds have materially verifiable referents can be – a fact, indeed, that may cast some doubt on the category of illocutionary acts itself. Consider each of these factors in turn. First, it has been widely attested that attitudes to truth and its verifiability change with time and vary across cultures – not only national cultures, but also cultures of specific groups and institutions within one nation. For example, in a study entitled Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Greco-Roman historian Paul Veyne (1984) points out that, when dealing with systems of knowledge, instead of talking about beliefs we should be talking about truths and that these truths are themselves created by the imagination (Veyne, l984: 11). In other words, the question whether a specific people believe in the truth of something is inaccurate since it is the concept of ‘truth’ itself which is variable and depends on the way it is constructed and positioned in the dominant narratives that make up the culturally accepted bodies of knowledge. Hence, a better way, according to Veyne, of approaching the study of epistemic systems could be to trace the modalities of belief activated by particular ‘programs of truth’, which are manifest in different discourses: there has existed a plurality of programs of truth over the centuries, which carry different distributions of knowledge, and it is these programs that explain the degrees of subjectivity in the intensity of belief, bad faith, contradictions within one individual (1984: 39, my translation). Therefore, the criteria in establishing truth vary according to particular programs, and this is not so only as regards cultures and social contexts disparate in time and setting, but also in the plurality of programs





which exist within one cultural context. In modern Western societies, for example, the truth of religion is not the same as the truth of science and each carries its own standards of verification, and, by extension, its own modality of belief. An individual participating in both discourses, therefore, would be positioned differently with regard to her knowledge in each discourse, a fact which accounts for the seeming hypocrisy of contemporary, post-modern life. Veyne continues, it is clear that the existence or non-existence of Theseus and of gas chambers at a particular point in space and time has a material reality that owes nothing to our imagination. But awareness or not of this reality or unreality, how it is interpreted, depends on the program in use. It does not impose itself; things do not appear in front of our eyes (1984: 117, my translation). Talking about the epistemic system of Hellenic Greece, Veyne points out that the truth of a statement was based on two main criteria: the addressee’s personal verification of the information according to his or her own experience, and the reputation of the enunciating source (Veyne, 1984: 40). Statements that did not correspond to general everyday experience, and this included a great part of privileged and authoritative knowledge such as that offered by myth and history, as well as those that caused the addressee no harm and procured the enunciator no illegitimate gains, were considered neither false nor true – a fact, however, which did not compromise their epistemic status, since truth and knowledge were not considered equivalent. Consequently, in this culture’s epistemic system, with its emphasis on the pragmatic relations established between addressor and addressee (that is, on the relevance of the utterance for a particular communicative context), the speaker’s ‘true’ intention or belief would play a very minor role and a distinction between ‘genuine’ and ‘pretended’ illocutionary force would lose its significance as a criterion for textual classification and information evaluation. In fact, the situation is not too different in post-modern societies where the high level of heteroglossia has brought about a questioning of the notion of truth, even as far as previously authoritative and non-negotiable discourses are concerned. The multiplicity of discourses in which contemporary individuals participate means that the semiotic construction of propositions may activate different



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programs of truth and bring into play different forms of evidence. This brings us to the second factor that can be used to undermine referential theories of language: the structure of the utterance itself. Distinguishing different types of utterance based on the degrees of ‘creativity’ that they exhibit, such as metaphorization, connotation, self-reflexivity and polysemy, has a respectable history in pragmatics and the philosophy of language (Lakoff 1987, Ruthrof 1992, Berrendonner 1981). For example, Alain Berrendonner (1981) distinguishes three main categories of propositions with regard to their truth value. Onto-alethic propositions have an axiomatic or truistic aspect and carry their own truth in their composition. Examples would include the verbal articulation of mathematical equations, such as ‘two plus two equals four’. Koino-alethic propositions are culturally determined and reflect the values and principles of a community in their composition. Examples would include the articulation of ethical precepts, such as ‘killing is wrong’, and ideological tenets. Idio-alethic propositions reflect the subjective truth of their individual speaker in their composition. Examples would include utterances that express the mental or affective state of the speaker, such as ‘I am happy’. What distinguishes these propositions is that the extra-textual context that needs to be accessed for the proposition’s truth value to be assessed is different in each case: the truth of ‘I am happy’ cannot be ascertained in any way similar to the truth of ‘two plus two equals four’ because the knowledge presented in each emanates from a different source. Similarly, the classic work of Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses (1961), has shown the dependence of evidence on the verbal, and more specifically the rhetorical, construction of theories. As is known, Pepper classified the major hypotheses of epistemology and science into types by tracing their common elements; he then delineated the kinds of evidence needed for each type to be proven or supported. Pepper did this by extracting and analysing the main metaphorical structures around which the hypotheses are constructed – the ‘root metaphors of world hypotheses’. His typology distinguishes four main categories into which these hypotheses can be included: Formalism, including the hypotheses based on the root metaphor of ‘similarity’, Contextualism, based on the root metaphor of the ‘historic event’, Mechanism based on the metaphor of the ‘machine’ and Organicism based on the root metaphor of ‘process as integration’.





Pepper then went on to discuss the ways in which structures of evidence are integrated within these hypotheses and demonstrated how the common belief that science or philosophy is based on extratextual or materially verifiable elements is in fact misleading since ‘proof’ can only be what is logically acceptable by the requirements of each model of knowledge. In other words, he proposed that the same root metaphors that generate theories also determine what forms of evidence will be used in each case. For example, physics or medical science require proof based on experimentation and repeated observation of the same phenomenon or causal chain – ‘multiplicative corroboration’. Most of the arguments used in various types of philosophy, on the other hand, rely on the logical connections among their constituent parts, on processes of reasoning and on drawing logical deductions from given premises – ‘structural corroboration’. Within this framework, the claim that a speaker should be ready to provide evidence for his or her statements brings to question not only the culturally constructed definition of evidence and the concept of truth on which it is based, but also the discursive form of the statement itself. In contrast to semiotic approaches, referential approaches to language often underestimate the power of representation. Because of the representational and abstract nature of language, the object to which a sign is taken to refer is itself a sign and, therefore, already invested with significance in particular contexts, making unmediated access to a linguistic concept’s ‘reality’ unattainable. The idea that we can access the sign’s referent in the phenomenal world, ‘as it is’, devoid of representational value, is an idealization of the process of signification, which is designed to construct, and therefore to conceal, as much as it is designed to describe and reveal. In the words of Horst Ruthrof, ‘all representational systems in a particular language […] make us grasp whatever we attend to as something else’ (1992: 155, emphasis in text). As opposed to iconic or indexical semiosis, where the sign is in some way linked physically to the referent and has therefore more sensory input, symbolic semiosis, as occurs in language, is a strongly cognitive-based system, and involves a considerable degree of learning and belief to seal its effect. For instance, when one says one knows history or philosophy one actually means that one knows (and, in many cases, believes) what has been said (or written) about these subjects as forms of discourse passed on from a source.



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One does not recognize by the term ‘history’ or ‘philosophy’ concrete objects of the natural world that can be grasped whole by the senses (Veyne, 1984: 120). The deferring nature of the linguistic sign assumes a different kind of significance when seen within the broader context of knowledge creation and acquisition. Although knowledge is conventionally seen as a function of the cognitive faculties, the embodied nature of these faculties brings into play sensory, emotive and experiential factors: in addition to ‘I know’ and ‘I believe’ place should be made for ‘I feel’ in the repertory of responses to physically perceived phenomena. This experiential-subjectivist factor, emphasized by existentialist philosophy, complements the ‘as-something-else’ representation created in the linguistic-cognitive processing of signs, producing another dimension in the individual’s interaction with reality. This dimension, the dimension of knowledge-in-embodied-consciousness, necessitates a different kind of presence in the knowledge-generating situation, one precipitated by an awareness of ‘being there’ when the situation emerges. The knowledge of reality that arises from this awareness does not remain on the cognitive level, as a collection of data, but becomes incorporated in the individual’s performance in everyday life. This situation is most aptly imaged by one of the narrators of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: My charming reader, in this book you will find something that you perhaps should not know, something else from which you will presumably benefit by coming to know it. Read, then, the something in such a way that, having read it, you may be as one who has not read it; read the something else in such a way that, having read it, you may be as one who has not forgotten what has been read (Kierkegaard, 1987: 15). Here, the male narrator addresses his female narratee, introducing the physical element of gender, and in this case, romance, in the knowledge producing interaction. At the same time, the actual interaction itself is self-referential, abstract (i.e., non-physical), and cognitive – it is the book itself where the utterance is located. This juxtaposition of different loci of signification leads one to see, without the text actually saying it, that the indeterminacy which is formed when experience is put into words and becomes ‘something else’ may be bridged by the subject’s creative act of attributing




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Narrative in language The approach to the philosophical text proposed in this study improvises and expands on the tenets of Wittgenstein and Austin’s conception of language by suggesting that the linguistic sign is comprehended and communicated as an element of narrative. The creation and communication of knowledge, therefore, takes place through the ways in which signs are combined to form images of action sequences. Why choose narrative as the measure for knowledge creation? There are two reasons. First is the function of narrative to give a physical form to, or ‘embody’, signs: narrative introduces a sensoryaesthetic element in cognitive processing, by representing sequences of enactment or performance that can be grasped only in relation to an embodied perception. Second is the ubiquity of narrative: although ethical norms, aesthetic values, identity concepts and the grammatical structures through which these are constructed differ cross-culturally, the function of story-telling in community formation is universal. Consider each of these reasons in more detail. Much of the philosophy of language, as well as structuralist text theory, privileges language, as an abstract cognitive function, at the expense of aesthetic, bodily, experience in the creation of knowledge. This favouring of the linguistic reflects the rationalist-mentalist axioms of these approaches, and leads to text analysis in terms of propositional structure and formal linguistic properties. As a number of theorists have shown, however, linguistic communication is also, to a considerable extent, metaphoric of physical processes and sensory phenomena (Lakoff and Johnson, 1988; Ruthrof, 2000). The organization of signs into narrative form creates a nexus of formal semiotic properties coloured with subjective input. Narrative includes the acts of its narrator manifest in the discourse (describing, providing conditions, commenting, etc.), the positing of agents (both human and conceptual) and their interrelationships, as well as indications on the time and location of the narrator (deixis) and of the events recounted. Therefore, it not only presents information but



meaning to the inherent ambiguity of the sign. This takes us to the topic of the next section, the role of narrative in language and knowledge.

also outlines the enunciative and perceptual framework in which this information becomes meaningful. Narrative structure activates specific semantic aspects of signs through their juxtaposition with other signs within an integrated whole. In the study of narrative, therefore, as opposed to most other forms of linguistic analysis, the sign is not seen in isolation nor just in relation with its position in a syntagmatic chain, but through the way it is ‘put in action’ in a world which includes the negation of continuity marking the act of enunciation, the semantic structuring of the utterance, the syntactic co-ordination of information, and indices establishing the contract between the enunciator and the audience. To return to the previous example of the signifier /reality/, the semantic units that constitute its meaning, its semes, give it the potential to be integrated in certain types of narrative world but are not sufficient in themselves to determine its attributes or the role it plays in a story. No definition of /reality/ can determine its potential epistemic functions, that is, the kinds of knowledge that it is able to produce. It is what Paul Ricoeur (1984: 101–9) calls emplotment (mise en intrigue), the integrating force that brings together diverse elements into a unified whole, regulated by its own temporal dimensions, which ultimately enables semantic structure to be realized and the potential for meaning to emerge. The particular and unique organization of linguistic signs characteristic of narrativity represents the link between the subjective and the objective, the perceptual and the linguistic, the production and reproduction of meanings, entailed in the creation of knowledge. This study proposes that the epistemic functions of the linguistic sign are triggered by the sign’s spatial and temporal positioning in a causal arrangement. Thus, in answer to Paul de Man’s statement that ‘literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge ‘reality’ but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world’ (de Man, 1986: 4), it could be said that although literature (in the sense of the written linguistic text) may be regulated according to the rules of the linguistic sign and not those of the phenomenal world, it constructs an image of the phenomenal world and makes a comment on it. In this respect, narrative is not just a description of a causal development of events, it is also an image of the world created through language.





In addition to the physical-aesthetic aspect of narrative, its ubiquity is another reason why it provides an ideal standard with which to study the textual construction of knowledge. Narrative is generally acknowledged to underlie a large number of discourses and text-types, even in cases where it is not explicitly present in the form of a story. In his study of pictorial representation, Louis Mann proposes that narrative elements are present in most semiotic systems ‘thanks to this property that all narratives possess in their substance of meaning, regardless of the particular modalities in which they are narrated’ (Marin, 1971: 24). And, in fact, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in narrative models or narratological methods of analysis in diverse areas of research, such as history, philosophy, music, painting and interactive media (Bastide, 1979; Harre, 1990; Kramer, 1995; Kreiswirth, 1992; Nash, 1990; Kalinowski, 1985; Hukkinen, Roe and Rochlin, 1990; Tarasti, 1979, 1994; Myers, 2001). E. Roe (1992), for example, in an article on the pertinence of narrative for policy analysis, points out that policies are formed through the creation of texts which generally involve a number of often contradictory stories. Thus, a better comprehension of the issues involved in the policies and an evaluation of their merits and drawbacks would profitably rely on a literary-textual approach. Such an approach would need to satisfy two main criteria: First, the approach should enable one to analyze the stories and scenarios that bureaucrats, policymakers, and others tell as a way of simplifying or complexifying the uncertainty revolving around the issue of concern, particularly when the truth-value of these stories cannot be ascertained or agreed upon. Second, the approach should be able to address the further uncertainty arising because these differing stories are often times conflicting, if not orthogonal to one another (Roe, 1992: 559). This writer proposes that narrative analysis would fulfill these criteria and even suggests that those involved in policymaking or policy analysis should undertake mandatory training in narrative theory as part of their education. Also, the use of narratives in a variety of psychological experiments has been widespread and has generally indicated that people’s responses to information presented in story form are different from



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their responses to information with the same content presented in other forms, such as enumeration, tabulation and schematization. To take one illustration from this context, Alvin Goldman (1986) cites an experiment carried out on the attitudes of various individuals towards welfare recipients. In one case a description of a welfare recipient was given. This described an obese and irresponsible woman who had been on welfare for many years, lived with a succession of “husbands”, in a home full of dirty and dilapidated plastic furniture, with cockroaches walking about in the daylight, and so on (Goldman, 1986: 274). In another case the subjects were given statistical information on the same topic. The latter case showed no effect on the attitudes of the subjects whereas the former incited a marked reaction against welfare recipients. Such experiments lend credence to the hypothesis that individuals process narrative structures differently from other organizations of language and that stories tend to be more influential in the processes of perception and of interpretation than texts that exhibit a low degree of narrativity.

Philosophy as world construction This study approaches philosophy in terms of text and discourse, and aims to trace the narrative strategies through which theories about the world and reality are constructed. It is based on the hypothesis that philosophical texts which are about reality and identity are world constructive and self-reflexive. In other words, they present a view of the world by creating a microcosm of it through their discourse, this way both describing aspects of the world and reflecting traces of their described object within their composition: since they describe the world of which they are part, they also describe some aspects of themselves. Taking world and narrative to be closely related concepts, with the latter signifying someone’s interpretation of the world, philosophical discourse and narrative can also be seen to be in a relation of correspondence. As William James noted, philosophy ‘is the habit of always seeing an alternative’ (James, 1925: 58). Thus, to theorize about the world involves, in many ways, creating a world and





commenting on it. In this respect, narrative is the reaction that takes place when someone assumes an enunciative position in order to say something about the world, and consequently becomes the narrator of a story. Through the act of enunciation, the enunciator marks a rupture with pre-discursive chaos and places him/herself in a particular position with regard to his/her utterance. In addition, the framing of the utterance, its semantic composition and the spatio–temporal arrangement of its signs mark a perceptive viewpoint which signifies the speaker’s attitude towards the phenomenal world and towards his existence in this world. It can, therefore, be said to be one possibility of perception manifest through someone’s story. Following a similar line of reasoning, narrative not only reflects the enunciator’s perception of the world, but also exists as an object in the world and is, consequently, like the rest of the world, open to the interpretations of its perceivers. These reach an understanding of the text by also assuming an enunciative position towards it; in other words, by responding to it. As the textual world construction becomes an object of perception, any attempt to interpret it or to propose an alternative will entail a similar creation of another world and another possibility of perception. At the same time, although each interpretation is regulated by the reader’s cultural and individual circumstances and expectations, textual structures present an assumed order of things through lexical and syntactic choice, and the selection and combination of particular signs. This way, as Umberto Eco (1991) explains, the text’s ‘openness’ to interpretation is, in fact, to a considerable extent dependent on formal properties. The narrative’s progression and its coordination and subordination of sequences produce a thematic pattern of consistency or inconsistency, and thereby provide instructions to the readers on ways to decode the text by creating another text, the text of interpretation, and give it a role in their own life stories. Finally, the world constructive aspect of philosophical texts is closely tied with their epistemic (or knowledge creating) aspect. In other words, in presenting the development of certain events and the execution of certain actions by performers with specified attributes, these texts convey information about how it is possible for such events and actions to occur. As is pointed out by Greimas and Courtés, ‘the goal of any discourse is to make something known, a communication, and as such, it is an exploitation of ruses, a cognitive game, the analysis of which must render the rules explicit’ (Greimas and Courtes, 1976: 438). Thus, a study of philsophical knowledge



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through narrative could provide the guidelines for an understanding of the discursive techniques involved in the construction of a perceptive system and a related ideological point of view. Modes of justification and reasoning, confirmation and refutation of arguments, concealment and recognition of identity, relations of causality – all are elements of world construction and knowledge creation, and manifest in narrative sequences that can be found both in the worlds of what are conventionally called ‘stories’, and in those of texts classified under the more academically credible title ‘philosophy’. A fairy tale can be seen as having an epistemic function in the same way that a philosophic treatise can, and a philosophic treatise can be seen to be telling a story in the same way that a fairy tale can, although the signs they use may have different semantic forms and exist on different levels of abstraction. In fact, as is noted by Hayden White, all written discourse may be seen as ‘cognitive in its aims and mimetic in its means’ (1978: 122). Thus, the subsequent chapters will attempt to demonstrate that texts whose objective is the understanding of the nature and processes of knowledge, such as philosophical texts, share with fictional narrative the strategic use of signs that indicate the relations between mental and physical states, causal connections, perception of reality, and action. In this respect, both philosophic and fictional texts create knowledge through narrative, that is, they tell a story about knowledge, and also thematize narrative in their knowledge. Perception, causality and action pertain to the field of narrative since they are all aspects of life – the basic narrative model. Situations of knowing bring into play situations of narrating and show the fundamental interdependence and reflexivity of narrative, knowledge and human existence.

Narrative and world construction Definitions of and approaches to narrative will be given in the next chapter. This section outlines the overall mapping of narrative structure onto textual world construction, and justifies the choice of narrative as the common element in different discourses. The first act of textual world construction is the marking of a difference in the undifferentiated mass of accumulated knowledge – the creation of a space for itself from chaos. In other words, the beginning of an act of narration is signalled by a rupture with the previous state of non-narration which ‘frames’ the narrative, in the sense given to





this term by Ian Reid as ‘the process of demarcating phenomena in a double-edged way that is simultaneously inclusive and exclusive’ (Reid, 1992: 44). One must begin a story from somewhere; one cannot begin from nowhere as one cannot begin from the absolute beginning, but must assume some shared knowledge with the addressee. One of the fundamental links between philosophical and fictional textual orders lies in that both the commencement of narrative and the positioning of oneself to create knowledge (or acquire knowledge, both processes of creation and interpretation being governed by essentially similar rules) entail discontinuity from a pre-existing disorder. This initial rupture turns an act of narrating into an act of creating knowledge, and this has been brought to attention by several scholars writing from different perspectives. For example, Algirdas-Julien Greimas notes that all knowledge of the world begins with ‘the projection of the discontinuous on the continuous’ (Greimas, 1979: 129). Also, Michel Serres points out that ‘[t]he discourse, the course taken is of canonical simplicity: it is deductive, it constructs reality, it constructs the real by starting with the difference’ (Serres, 1980: 33). Finally, Gilles Deleuze (1991) proposes a definition of philosophy as a creation of concepts which are used to impose order on pre-conceptual, and therefore, unrepresented chaos. Along the same lines, Wittgenstein’s proposition that ‘[a]lthough there is something arbitrary in our notations, this much is not arbitrary – that when we have determined one thing arbitrarily, something else is necessarily the case’ (Wittgenstein, 1961: 17) is not only valid as far as the structure of logical propositions is concerned, but also reflects the principles of narrative patterning: although the point of demarcation setting the situation of the story is not itself determined by factors that transcend its existence, it determines the subsequent development of the narrative and the set of patterns that this development reflects. From the time demarcation takes place, the story is set, so to speak, and what is included in one sequence is in some way related to preceding and subsequent sequences. The formation of narrative in philosophical discourse is examined in this study through the following interrelated topics: (a)

The delimitation of performers of actions, the specification of their roles in the narrative, the states in which the narrative is



16

(b)

(c)

segmented, and the processes of transformation from one state to another, all elements pertaining to what narratologists call the story (or its various other titles, fabula, histoire, etc.). This topic includes an examination of narrative as trajectory, the sequence of acts performed by an agent, and as schema, the organization of acts and their agents in interrelated positions. The sources of discourse within the narrated world: the functions and manifestations of the presenter of information, or narrator, and the integration of other speaking subjects. This includes the distribution of discourses in the text, their attribution to an emanating source (when the speaking subject has a role akin to the one of an agent in the story), or their appropriation by the narrator’s speech – all elements of narrative discourse (or its various other titles, sjuzhet, récit, etc.). The legitimation of the information presented: the structures and strategies used to authenticate what is said, and the impact these strategies have on world construction. I attempt to show that the knowledge offered in a text is reflected in the structure of the discourse. For example, phenomenological texts, which assert that knowledge is attained only through the role of the individual learning subject’s consciousness rather than by direct access to specific objects in reality, tend to exhibit subjective patterns of discourse and use signs composed with the semantic categories of /experience/, /meaning/ and /understanding/. They contain self-reflexive devices in that their discourse reflects the message that it constructs.

Narrative does not involve only the creation of a world, it also involves the communication of this world. The question that emerges is to what extent can an intra-textual analysis show the basis of this communication. In other words, does the text, in creating knowledge, also create the conditions of the effect this knowledge can have on the one who knows? What is the perlocutionary function of the philosophical text? I use the analytical tool of presupposition (the focus of Chapter 5) to show that a text assumes an order of things as given and it is with this order as background that its ‘new’ knowledge is created. For example, a question is by definition an indication of ignorance: one asks in order to obtain some knowledge of which one is ignorant. If the questioner, however, had





no conception of what s/he was looking for, the question itself would have been inconceivable – one does not ask what time it is, for example, if one is not already aware of the concept of time, of methods and instruments for measuring time, etc., and if one does not expect the addressee to share this awareness. Although extensive research has been carried out on the concept of presupposition by linguists and philosophers, and some mention of presupposition is also made by narratologists as regards its function in the propositional level of narratorial discourse, a study of presuppositional structures in the textual creation and communication of knowledge seems to be missing in theoretical literature. However, these structures indicate the cognitive competence of the parties involved in an act of enunciation and thus designate what the enunciator assumes as a true or real order of things, which s/he expects his/her interlocutor to accept. Taking narrativity to encompass the circumstances in which a story unfolds and the ones that it creates through its progression, the presupposed world encompasses the ‘as if’, the conditions necessary for particular circumstances to emerge. Acknowledgement of its presence in the world of the text not only helps to understand the way this world is put together, but also to distinguish the power relations underlying the creation and transmission of its knowledge.

Some terminological distinctions I assume the narrator to be the ‘verbal medium of narrated events’ ˆ (Dolezel 1970: 79), and not to exhibit any direct links with the author of the text. The narrator is a logical necessity, presupposed by the existence of the text and does not have to be present in any way in the narrative, either by playing a role in the events or through enunciative markers, such as the narrating I. In the subsequent pages, I use the term narrator even in cases where enunciator may seem more appropriate, that is, in cases where the information presented does not take the form of what is usually regarded as a story. Since I take philosophical discourse to exhibit, in some form or another, implicitly or explicitly, narrative structures, an emanating source of discourse is also a potential narrator. Similarly, following the work of Gerald Prince (1982), I consider the narratee as a textually constructed device not associated in any



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way with the reader of the text. The narratee represents a spatio–temporal and evaluative position towards which the narrative discourse is directed and whose assumed knowledge and anticipated response is manifest in textual indices and markers, such as the use of pronouns, the inclusion of rhetorical questions, the use of certain demonstratives denoting objects or situations in an assumed shared extra-textual world, and what Prince calls ‘metanarrative or metalinguistic explanations’ (Prince, 1982: 19), comprising textual signs of the narratee’s knowledge or lack of it. This last index of the narratee includes explanations of terms or objects, implying that the narratee does not understand them a priori, as well as an absence of explanation in cases where the narratee is assumed to have prior knowledge of or should never acquire a specific piece of knowledge. I use audience in the same way, as interchangeable with narratee. The concept of knowledge is used here to encompass three dimensions, which, adapting philosophical usage, may be called the informative, the ontic, and the epistemic. The informative dimension includes spatio–temporal specifications for the location of objects, and descriptions of the unfolding of events. The ontic dimension includes the existence of objects, and the epistemic dimension encompasses issues that reflect upon the nature of knowledge, such as how something is learned, the relations between the knowing and the known, etc. These three dimensions correspond to the three textual dimensions of analysis which are distinguished in this study and which are described in detail in Chapter 3. Following the definitions of pragmatist Oswald Ducrot (1972, 1984), utterance is used here to denote discourse containing indices of the enunciation and of the speaking subject, and it is contrasted with sentence, which denotes the grammatical relations among lexemes on the level of language. In view of the fact that, as was noted above, someone’s discourse is also, potentially, someone’s story, the term utterance is considered here as equivalent to the term narrated. Enunciation is used following the definition of Joseph Courtés as ‘a linguistic, or more generally a semiotic, instance that is logically presupposed by the utterance and whose traces can be detected in the discourse under examination’ (Courtes, 1991: 246). Since discourse constitutes an act of communication, its production is also ‘an arrangement of knowledge, the mechanisms of its transmission and of its reception’ (Greimas and Courtés, 1976: 436). Enunciation,





therefore, is defined here as the process of knowledge organization by means of linguistic signs. Also, a few remarks should be made concerning the concept of ‘culture’, which constitutes one of those ‘falsely transparent’ terms that G. Genette (1982: 11) warns about, extensively used in contemporary textual studies but not often defined. I use this term in this study to designate a system of discourses, codified by usage, which denote a set of conventional practices. As the regulation of discursive laws of representation, culture can be as much an individual phenomenon (idio-culture), as it can be a social one (socio-culture). In addition, both the discourses and the practices they represent may be complied with, circumvented, subverted or inverted in a particular textual construction (as has been shown, for example, by de Certeau (1982) for oppositional practices of everyday life, and by Chambers (1991) for oppositional narrative). Finally, a few words should be said about a very significant aspect of philosophical narrative – the extensive use of abstract signifieds. The comprehension and mental processing of signs with abstract signifieds is a complicated and controversial issue both in cognitive theory and in pragmatics, and its detailed analysis surpasses the limits of this study (Berrendonner, 1981; Zholkovsky, 1984). Nevertheless, the fact that it is a simpler process to create mental images from utterances composed of signs whose signifiers denote tangible objects is widely accepted, and explains why abstract discourses are not generally understood by children or those who are uninitiated in the particular discourse conventions. This is significant for the present purpose because the degree of abstraction that is chosen by the narrator to construct his/her world also reflects the choice of audience, and indicates the narratorial attitude towards the object of knowledge. It is no coincidence, for example, that mentalist theorists tend to construct their worlds in more abstract discourses than phenomenological-existentialist theorists, who ground their ideas on the value of embodied experience, and reflect this in their dsicourse. To my knowledge, the most comprehensive analytical tool for the study of degrees of abstraction in discourse, and the one that will be used here, is the semiotic distinction between figural and thematic signs (Greimas and Courtés, 1979, Courtés, 1991). Briefly, the figural level consists of signs with potential referents in the material or phenomenal world, like /dog/ or /house/. The thematic level consists of



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units with no corresponding object in the material world, like, for example, /love/ and /enthusiasm/. Courtés offers two examples to illustrate these semantic categories: one is of a visitor in a foreign country observing gestures but not being able to understand their meaning without an explanation (Courtés, 1991: 164). In this case the explanation would act on the gestures as a thematization of the figural. The second example is from one of Perrault’s tales: […]this mother[…]I had a terrible hatred for the youngest girl. Among other things this poor child had to go twice a day to fetch water a long way from home and carry it back in a big jug (Courtés, 1991: 165, emphasis in text). In this case, /hatred/ is the theme that is subsequently figured in the next two sentences, which describe what /hatred/ means for this narrator. Pursuing this semantic distinction further, we may note a number of signs that belong to the same semantic category but are situated on different levels of abstraction, like, for example, the verbs /be/ and /constitute/, /make/ and /render/, the nouns /thing/ and /factor/, etc. Also, metaphorical and connotative structures, and rhetorical forms in general, are often composed by the juxtaposition of thematic and figural elements. For instance, calling the style of a writer her ‘signature’ and describing someone’s words as ‘sharp’ are examples of using figural lexemes to qualify thematic situations; interpreting a smile as a ‘sign of pleasure’, and describing someone with few material possessions as a ‘failure’ are examples of thematic lexemes used to designate figural situations. This way, Roe’s distinction between stories, which have ‘beginnings, middles and ends’ and arguments, which have ‘premises and conclusions’ and constitute therefore ‘nonstories’ (Roe, l992: 563) assumes a different meaning considering that /beginning/ is a figural lexeme and /premises/ a thematic one. Consequently, Roe’s distinction, rather than designating a typological, and, therefore, exclusive dichotomy, could be seen as indicating two instances in a narrative continuum, a continuum whose basis does not lie in syntactic arrangement but on the level of conceptualization of the selected signs.




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The book is arranged as follows. In Chapter 2, I give an overview of narratological theory from which an analytical definition of narrative is derived. This chapter also sets up a methodological model for a detailed analysis of narrative processes at work in philosophical texts. In Chapter 3, I outline a typology of narrator roles and the textual dimensions on which knowledge is constructed in non-fictional texts. In Chapter 4, I apply the methodological and theoretical discussion of the preceding chapters to a comprehensive analysis of a philosophical text, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1946). I attempt to demonstrate the relevance of the semiotic method and its conceptual tools on a text which not only does not exhibit the narrativity of what has traditionally been called a story, but whose high degree of conceptualization and complexity of syntagmatic organization also marks its difference from the simple stories usually favoured in semio-narratological analysis. In the subsequent chapters I turn to pragmatic issues, and in particular to the links between the world created by the text and the world to which the text refers. In Chapter 5, I look at the concept of presupposition and at its relevance in narrative world construction. I attempt to show that the authentication or validation of the knowledge offered in a text depends to a large extent on an assumed order that shows the questions to which the narrative world provides the answers, and may be inferred from the textual signs and their interrelations. In Chapter 6, I offer an illustration of the role of presupposed knowledge in world construction through an interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Parts I and II (1987 [1843]). Finally, in Chapter 7 I conclude the discussion by examining John Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) in terms of its world-constructing features.



Structure of the book

The Narrative Framework

The thing perceived is conceived as having life and movement and such is the primary expression of it. Conceptions are thus born as acts of the imagination. —Johan Huizinga

Overview This chapter delineates a narrative-semiotic method of textual analysis, and shows how it may lead to an understanding of the discursive processes involved in the construction and communication of knowledge. The first part provides a critical discussion of contemporary narrative and semiotic theories, highlighting pertinent methodological issues that emerge from the different approaches; the second part outlines the eclectic model of analysis that will be used in this study, and shows some examples of its application.

The story of narrative theory Contemporary narrative theory is diverse and multifaceted. Of the many features and concepts that have been used to develop narrative theories, the following stand out: • Definitions of what narrative is. • Divisions of narrative into different textual levels. • Descriptions of the nature of agents, actors, actants and characters – the performers of action. 23



2

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Defining narrative and describing its textual levels While it is generally agreed that not all texts are narrative, not much agreement exists on the elements that actually do distinguish a text as narrative. For example, trying to bring some unity to an otherwise disparate collection of approaches, Gerald Prince (2003), in a survey of narratology, proposes this rather convoluted definition: For an entity to be a narrative, it must be analyzable as the representation of one (or more than one) non-randomly connected, non-simultaneous, and non-contradictory transformation of one (or more than one) state of affairs, or one (or more than one) event which is not logically presupposed by the transformed state and/or does not logically entail its transform (Prince, 2003: 6). The prominent defining characteristics of narrative distinguished here by Prince are representation (i.e., a form of telling or showing), transformation (i.e., a form of change) and forward motion of the story (i.e., the present presupposes a past, although this past did not cause the present). The concepts of representation and event present in this definition evoke the common division of narrative into different levels, comprising the telling, the story and the narrative (Genette, 1972) or the discourse and the story (Chatman, 1978, Bal 1983) of the structuralist narratology of the 1970s and 1980s. The temporal element (the shift in time between the telling and the told) and the division of the text into a presentational process and a presented product could well be the two most widespread defining criteria of narrative. At the same time, finality, which is related to both, also often comes up in discussions of what constitutes narrative. The issue of whether a writer knows the ending of the story before s/he begins writing is contentious, in both creative and academic circles. In relation to definitions of narrative, this issue takes the form of the questions ‘Is the story finished before it is narrated, or does the narration create it?’ and ‘Does the narrative presuppose the story?’



• Discussions on the status of narrative action in relation to physical performance and life. • Perspectives on the relations between narrative and fiction, and on the nature of reality.

For example, Jerome Bruner (1986) supports a distinction between narrative and argument to be a natural dichotomy of the verbal representation of the world as this is organized by mental faculties. Bruner sees narrative as being essentially a creation of a world bound by the particular circumstances posed by the story, whereas scientific arguments and theoretical discourses create a world ‘that has an “existence” linked to the invariance of things and events across transformations in the life conditions of those who seek to understand’ (1986: 50, emphasis in text). Similarly, for Porter Abbott (2002), a criterion of narrative is that the story must at least appear to exist before it is narrated, so that the narrator appears to tell something that has happened. A different way to approach time in narrative, however, and one especially relevant to the present study, which is concerned with the textual communication of knowledge, is to see it as a narrator’s strategy chosen to represent an event, situation or state of affairs as being continuous, repetitive, completed or imminent. There are stories of eternal situations as well as stories depicting finite events; thus, if the aim of the text analyst is to examine how discursive worlds construct knowledge, the various manifestations of time that emerge in different texts become instrumental in reconstructing the attitude of the text towards time, agency and reality. Two other factors become relevant when considering the status of time in textual constructions. First, time is not only a sign denoting the physical processes of change; it is also a semiotic category that is embedded in language in forms other than just verbal tense. For example, the lexemes /regret/ and /disappointment/ signify past time, the same way that /hope/ and /warning/ signify future time through the past states that their semantic composition presupposes, no matter what the tensed aspect of the syntagms in which they appear is. Second, atemporality (i.e., the construction of a world in the present indicative), in fact, may encompass several time orders, given that the permanent present tense includes within its structure instances of past realization. The fact that something is presented as happening always logically implies that the enunciator believes it happened in the past and will happen in the future. For example, this proposition: (a)

Water boils at a hundred degrees Celsius



The Narrative Framework 25

26


would imply this proposition: Someone observed water boiling at a hundred degrees Celsius and told someone else.

Discourse that is not tensed most often carries temporal frames of interpretation as logical, but implicit, extensions of the utterance itself. As Courtés points out, discourse always ‘has a memory’ and a ‘history’ in containing traces of previous manifestations: contrary to logic, which works, so to speak, in an atemporal way, we could say that discourse remembers, maintaining thus always traces of previously acquired positions. It functions as if it were given to a personal history in the syntagmatic unfolding of narrative. That is to say, at each point of its narrative trajectory, it defines itself by what it had been, by the different stages it had known, by the different transformations that trace its becoming (Courtés, 1991; 238). Considering such concerns, a place should be allocated to the implied narrative in literary and textual theory, along with the implied author and the implied reader. Finally, innovations brought about by developments in different media, and the theoretical interest they have spurred, have shown different ways to conceptualize and represent time and to re-define narrative. To take one example, filmmakers have experimented with digital technology to represent actions in diverse temporal frameworks. One such innovation has come to be known as ‘bullet time’, from the famous sequence in the film The Matrix (1998) where the protagonist is seen to dodge bullets – a phenomenon that is physically impossible to re-create in the extra-textual world. The way this is established is by substituting the traditional physical camera with a virtual one, resulting in the camera’s perspective being disconnected from the space and time of events in the narrated world. This technique is associated with the visual sign, which has indexical properties and cannot be reproduced with the linguistic sign whose relations with the object it signifies are representational. In a similar fashion, some computer games (for example, Max Payne and Enter the Matrix) include an effect where the protagonist



(b)

moves in ‘real’ time, whereas all other agents move in slow motion. When put in written language, this phenomenon can be described, but it cannot be shown (even with typographic techniques, such as stretching words by repeating some letters) given the inherent staticity of the printed word. Written language can, however, provide instructions or stage directions for the reader to image the scene in his/her imagination. In contrast to communication theorists, classical narratologists had, to a large extent, neglected the influence of the medium over the message or, in this case, the narrative. Even though many theorists included more than linguistic narrative in their analyses (such as Christian Metz and Seymour Chatman, who discussed film), they tended to downplay the extent to which the medium affected the representational techniques through which the story was transmitted. This was largely due to the fact that language was often taken as the semiotic prototype. Many contemporary approaches, however, have shifted this emphasis onto the constitutive elements of the medium, and have seen this as producing different semiotic systems, and by extension, different definitions of narrative. This enterprise has also entailed that new concepts be devised to free the sign from its linguistic constraints and to cater for the differences in medium-produced features. Such approaches include the work of Torben Grodal (1997) on film genres and their relations to emotivecognitive processes, the work of David Myers (2003) on the types of signs created in the play of computer games and the work of Eero Tarasti (1994) on the narrative elements of musical compositions. At the same time, while enlarging the scope of narratology, this recognition of the importance of the medium has also meant that defining what narrative actually is has become an even more complex endeavour than it was before. The question now is no longer ‘what is narrative?’ but ‘what is narrative in X medium?’ or, more accurately, ‘what kinds of narrative does X medium produce?’.

Describing agents Interestingly, Prince’s definition given above does not include the element of agency or agent. For others, in contrast, this is a fundamental criterion of narrative. For example, Dorrit Cohn (1999) defines narrative as ‘a series of statements that deal with a causally related sequence of





events that concern human (or human-like) beings’ (Cohn, 1991: 12). She thereby marks not only the element of agency but more specifically the human element. Mark Wolf (2001) also includes characters in his definition of narrative with regard to video games, proposing the definition, ‘characters in conflict within an on-screen or “diegetic” world’ (Wolf, 2001: 93). Finally, Jon Adams (1991) suggests that causally related events are not sufficient to trigger the presence of narrative, unless there is also an aspect of intention that connects the events in a meaningful way – what he calls ‘intentional explanations’. In earlier structuralist approaches, the human element was underemphasized, but the importance of agents was acknowledged. In Claude Bremond’s (1973) model, for example, narrative structure comprises actions and agents. Actions may signal change (amelioration-degradation) or non-change (protection-frustration) and can be voluntary or non-voluntary; agents, the influencers, include in their construction their reciprocally presupposed sign, patients, the influenced. Thus, this model accentuates in each action and in each agent the presence of its opposite. In the narrative semiotic model, described in more detail later in the chapter, agency is divided into actants and actors, which reflects the textual division into the deeper narrative level and the surface discourse level. Thus actants are the ‘empty’ logical positions of the narrative level, determined by actional structure, that are ‘filled’ with the particular manifestations of character – the actors – when the story is put in discourse. In an analytical paradigm that involves the author, the agent and the narrator, the following relations can be traced. The author carries implications of control of consequence (s/he knows what will happen); the agent carries implications of freedom to act within an established environment (the ‘given’ in existentialist terminology); finally, the narrator carries implications of communicating represented action. Much of the understanding we have of an agent comes from how s/he makes inferences from perceived data – inferences that can be shown in both verbal responses and physical action. However, these inferences also reflect the world that this agent lives in, in other words, the values, beliefs, motivations and attitudes that the character entertains in relation to external stimuli. The agent lives in a certain world and that is why s/he has a set of responses. It is not the



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Conceptualizing life and action The element of action has seen some interesting interpretations too. Following the seminal article by Teun Van Dijk (1976) on the status of narrated, or represented, actions in relation to lived, or performed, actions, several theorists have contributed to the topic. For example, Raphael Baroni (2005) distinguishes between discursive action, one that entails a narrator and a receiver, and represented action, one that entails an agent who is in some way separate from the narrator, be it because of a temporal shift between the time of the recounted action and the time of the narrated action or because of third-person narration, where the narrator recounts the actions of another. He points out that a theory of action can assist narratology in its endeavours, but emphasizes that story actions, as opposed to real-life actions, often contradict the patterns of behaviour that are characteristic of every day social life (Baroni, 2005: 53). He therefore makes a distinction between action as it is narrated, and action as it is lived. This challenges the structuralist narratological program of formulating concepts, which although originally devised for fictional narratives, could become the basis of a ‘unified theory of the structure of human behaviour’ (Bremond, 1973: 80). This debate on the status of action has links with another debate, concerning the narrative status of life itself: Is life, like Roland Barthes (1966) famously exclaimed, itself a narrative? For some theorists, especially those in the phenomenological tradition, fictional narratives both reflect and influence human experience. Paul Ricoeur (1984, 1986), for instance, approaches narrative as an experience of time which takes place through the emplotment (mise en intrigue) of perceived elements into a unified whole. Emplotment, a key notion in Ricoeur’s theory, is a process of synthesizing the heterogeneous by selecting and then combining elements derived from aesthetic experience and culture. Ricoeur sees the emplotment characteristic of narrative as creating a textual order in which the productive imagination is schematized. The sedimented discursive systems associated with cultural tradition (the re-productive imagination) are juxtaposed with new



responses that create the world, nor does the world quite pre-exist the responses – the world is not the same for every one, and the task of narrative is to show how the world can change in relation to the agents’ acts and intentions.


interpretations, and allow for new meanings and expectations to emerge and action to become possible. Through its two main characteristics of time and action narrative assumes a privileged position in human cultures as a catalyst of both tradition and innovation. For this approach, an individual should seek the power to be the narrator of his/her life, even though s/he cannot be its author (Ricoeur, 1986). The question about whether physical actions in the real world are equivalent to, or reflect, actions expressed in language often overlooks the normative effect of text on reality: narrated actions, even if they are semiotically different from enacted actions can, nevertheless, influence how physical actions are perceived and subsequently performed. One only has to observe children’s (and often adults’ too) behaviour after they have watched an adventure film, for example, to understand the power of representation on reality. Besides, by describing an individual or group’s behaviour, one (especially one with political or ideological power) is indirectly telling this individual or group how to behave and what actions to perform. Describing narrative as reality or fiction Finally, as was described in Chapter 1, narrative is also sometimes included in theories of fiction. Since this is directly connected with approaches to knowledge, it merits some more attention. Although it is generally accepted that a story can be as much ‘real’ (news stories being one example) as it can be fictional, narratological theory has focused to a large extent on fictional narratives making an implicit connection between narrativity and fictionality. On the whole, approaches to fiction in narrative theory take one of three forms. First, some theorists claim that writers of fictional texts do not produce ‘genuine’ utterances but ‘pretend’ to do so, although their utterances have the semblance of sincerity. This approach is associated with Speech Act Theory (Martinez-Bonati, 1981, Pratt, 1977, Ryan, 1984), especially the work of John Searle (1975, 1979), and could be named the ‘fictional enunciation’ approach. It is based on the hypothesis that speakers have different intentions when uttering a piece of information (for example, to warn, to threaten, to promise, etc.), and that this intention determines the status of the information. Searle (1975), for example, supports a sharp distinction between unreal knowledge, such as that offered by fictional texts, and real knowledge, that is, information that the speaker intends to be



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accepted as true. The main criterion used for this distinction is authorial (the speaker’s) intention: if the author ‘pretends’ his or her utterances have an object in the real world, that is, is not committed to their truth value, then these utterances cannot be considered as ‘genuine’ illocutionary acts. He distinguishes four rules with which speech acts must comply in order to be considered ‘genuine’: (1) (2) (3) (4)

The essential rule: the maker of an assertion commits himself to the truth of the expressed proposition. The preparatory rules: the speaker must be in a position to provide evidence or reasons for the truth of the expressed proposition. The expressed proposition must not be obviously true to both the speaker and the hearer in the context of utterance. The sincerity rule: the speaker commits himself to a belief in the truth of the expressed proposition (Searle, 1975: 322).

As can be imagined, and despite the fact that Searle’s own example is a novel, these rules are extremely difficult to apply to written texts. The notion of context where writing is concerned does not have the same binding force as in cases of oral communication. In many cases (‘found’ manuscripts being one example), the reader cannot know the intentions of the writer. Even in cases where the text includes specifications on the veridical nature of the information that it contains, these specifications are instances of narratorial strategy rather than authorial intention. When we read instructions in a user manual, for instance, it is more our trust in the ‘truth’ of these instructions, as this is circumscribed by culturally established communication conventions, that leads us to consider them as nonfictional rather than an inherent characteristic in the structure of the discourse. So, although the enunciator’s intention may be significant in some circumstances, it could be misleading if applied to all communication indiscriminately. In fact, although Searle claims that ‘theories of language should be able to deal with any text at all and not just with specially selected examples’ (1975: 322, note 3), his own choice is limited to a restricted range of statements. Second, other writers take the approach that it is not the enunciation that is fictional, but the utterance, especially the objects referred to in the utterance (Donnellan, 1966; Pavel, 1976, 1986; Nunberg, 1978; Parsons, 1980; Danon-Boileau, 1982; Whiteside and





Issacharoff, 1987; Allen, 1989; Crittenden, 1991). This ‘fictional utterance’ approach is associated with Possible Worlds semantics, for which a fictional utterance differs from a non-fictional one not because it has no reference or genuine intention, but because its signifiers have referents in a ‘possible’ and not in the ‘actual’ world. The signifier /Sherlock Holmes/ (a favourite example of Possible Worlds theorists), for instance, has a signified which can be constructed with contextual knowledge as a human male, and also a referent, a particular human male with a corporeal existence who exists somewhere regardless of what is said of him. The basic question that needs to be asked, according to this approach, is in which world does this referent exist, the real or a possible one? Possible World semantics supports the idea that texts are made up of a combination of signs with some real and some possible referents, and fictionality is a discursive aspect that manifests in any text, rather than being a characteristic of certain texts only. To the level of signification of the sign through the relations between its two parts, signifier and signified, is added another level, that of the referent denoting an object whose existence, or potential for existence, remains unchanged by what is said about it. For this reason, most theorists belonging to this group assess with regard to their fictionality status only concrete objects, signs with which ‘criteria of identity and enumeration’ (Crittenden, 1991: 40) are associated. Possible Worlds theories are based on the assumption that the world to which textual signs refer, whether real or possible, exists outside the text – the context of the utterance is not the same as the context of the reference. In cases where reference is to the actual world, certain elements of the context of the utterance coincide with elements in the context of the enunciation; in cases where reference is to a possible world, textual signs evoke a context that exists somewhere in extra-textual space. This assumption has significant consequences as far as an analysis of the narrative construction of knowledge is concerned because it leads to a reading in which narrative agents are considered according to their existential status, their identity and origins, and not according to their functional status in configuration. Thus, there is an explicit or implicit standard comparison between a pre-established body of knowledge, what is known to exist, and the agents that are brought into play in the narrative.



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In a parallel way, this approach is relevant to texts whose signifieds are primarily figural, in which case the notion of reference becomes significant. Proper names like Sherlock Holmes, for example, refer to objects with a physical existence, making the question of their locality and corporeality pertinent. Thematic signs, such as those with which most philosophical texts are primarily composed, work according to different rules. The word /body/ in Merleau-Ponty’s work, for example, does imply to a certain extent knowledge of the physical phenomenon of corporeal presence that it denotes. However, its actual significance or, one would be tempted to say, its ‘meaning’ in Merleau-Ponty’s discourse is determined also, and significantly so, by its positioning in the text (i.e., what Merleau-Ponty says about /body/ constructs the object) as well as by intertextual reference to other philosophical texts. In addition, to approach narrative agents with regard to where they belong and assume that this context is external to the utterance may lead to a limited reading that could overlook what the text has to say precisely about this context of belonging. The /real/, the /actual/ and the /true/ are signifiers whose signifieds are constructed by the narrative schemata in which they are allocated roles. Every time that these signifieds are explained in a discourse, whether by metadiscursive commentary or by the way they are emplotted, the signifiers assume their new identity following the instructions of their narrator. Any attempt to capture their ‘true’ signifieds by identifying the object to which they refer could well lead to an infinite regress revolving around the reality of that which has already been assumed as real. This is very aptly described by the narrator of Either/Or, A: What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed ] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale (Kierkegaard, 1987: 32). The third approach, which we may call the ‘hyperreality approach’, follows the lead of Jean Baudrillard’s (1981) post-modern philosophy in seeing reality as being formed by its various representations, especially through the influence of mass communication media. According to this, using language or image to access an objective,





unmediated reality is impossible, since any discourse is to various degrees a fictionalization. Martinez and Scheffel (2003) find an instance of such an approach in action, in the case of ‘borderline journalism’. They describe the example of the Swiss journalist Tom Kummer, who between 1995 and 1999, published a number of interviews with Hollywood celebrities in well-known German journals. In 2000 it was found that Kummer never actually interviewed the stars, but instead collected some information from secondary sources, and produced some other information from his own imagination. When held to account, Kummer’s justification was that he intended to produce an ‘implosion of reality’. Martinez and Scheffel interpret the fact that Kummer’s justification was not accepted and that he fell from grace in the journalistic establishment as evidence that we recognize reality from fiction and disapprove when the boundary between the two is transgressed. This is interestingly reminiscent of Searle’s statement that ‘we all have no difficulty in recognizing and understanding works of fiction’ (Searle, 1975: 325). The idea that the difference between reality and fiction is self-evident, however, appears to be based on rather simplistic premisses. In the examples offered by Searle, and Martinez and Scheffel, readers respond to the text as fiction only after they know that it is fiction. This response is, therefore, oriented to the transgression of a social convention, and not to a textual, let alone a narrative, quality. It is not a matter of ‘understanding’ or ‘recognizing’ the text as something fictional, but rather of measuring its value against one’s interests and beliefs. The issue seems to be more one of relevance than of truth. Consider, for instance, Sergei Eisentein’s film October (1926) made with people who actually took part in the October Revolution. The characters in the film refer to ‘real’ people even more than names in a text refer to extra-textual entities because in this case it is not a question of reference but of identity. Individual elements (in this case the characters) refer to extra-textual signifieds who are materially identical to their signifiers. However, the knowledge presented in the world of the film cannot be said to rely on the physical properties of its agents. Would the story lose its significance or point, for example, if the spectator not only did not know that the actors were ‘real’ participants in the revolution but had not even heard of the revolution? The emphasis on confirming the validity of the



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distinction between fiction and reality can be quite misleading. Maybe a more interesting question than whether a text is fictional or true would be why we need to know and why we feel our integrity depends on knowing. Going now to theoretical approaches to narrative, these can be grouped in the following broad categories, according to their attitudes and responses to the five definitional and methodological features described above: structuralist and post-structuralist narratology, contextualist and culturalist narratology, phenomenological narrative theory, cognitive narratology and narrative semiotics. Consider each in turn. Structuralist and post-structuralist narratology The concept of a narratology which would formulate a rational methodology for the systematic study of the conditions of possibility of the text type called ‘narrative’ has its origins in the structuralist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A fundamental motivation of such a narratology is to delimit the parameters of the narrative text in a way that would allow the analysis of the text on its own terms as a set of self-sufficient structures, whose interrelationship provide the conditions for meaning. This avoids recourse to extra-textual and subjectivist aspects, such as biographical, social and psychological factors. Instead, narratology looks at the discourse used to present a story, the relations between the narrator and the narrative (i.e., between the one who tells and what is told) and the organization of the different voices in the text (i.e., what is presented as a description in the narrator’s voice and what is presented as the speech and/or point of view of a character) (Barthes, 1966; Genette, 1972; Chatman, 1978; Bal, 1983, 1993; Banfield, 1982; Beer, 1983; Chateauvert, 1993; Prince, 1982, 1983, 1992b; Gibson, 1996). Time, an element downplayed in other approaches, such as the semiotic, assumes prominence in narratological approaches. Therefore, tense, in verbal stories, is important in showing when an event occurred. Also, the juxtaposition of sequences, in both verbal and visual stories, affects the order in which events occur and the order in which we know they occur. In the highly influential ‘Discours du recit’ (1973), for example, Gerard Genette proposes a tripartite division of the text into the story, the narration and their intermediary, the narrative.




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(a)

(b)

(c)

The interaction of narration with narrative in the category of time as this is sub-divided into: the order of time, duration, and frequency. The first describes the way segments of the narrative correspond temporally with each other; the second concerns the temporal relations within one narrative segment; and the third refers to the ways narrative segments are repeated or alternate. For example, a story can be told as a flashback (analepsis), it can be seen or predicted before it actually occurs (prolepsis) or it can be repeated at different stages (iteration). The different techniques of incorporating modes of discourse in the narrative, which include elements of distance between the act of narration and what is narrated, and the point of view, or focalization, orienting the narrative. The various ways the enunciative voice is integrated into the narrative. These include forms of identification between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the utterance, and the types and functions of narrator and his/her relations with the narrative. A story told by one of the characters has certain constraints and liberties, while a story told by someone external to the action has certain other constraints and liberties. A story can be told by a narrator who is external to the location and action of the events, in which case s/he would be extradiegetic. A narrator who is a character in the story would be intra-diegetic. In a parallel way, a narrator who tells someone else’s story is hetero-diegetic, while one who tells his/her own story is homo-diegetic.

Post-structuralist approaches to narrative tend to retain the construction of their object of study as text and as linguistic composition, but also tend to downplay the universalist, typologizing and objectivist emphases of structuralist methods. This has made it possible and desirable for narrative analysis to include methods of pragmatics and speech act theory (Pratt, 1977; Kearns, 1999) as well as stylistic evaluations (Toolan, 2001; Herman, 2002), all of which open the way for the study of the less literal and more ironic and playful aspects of narrative.



Concentrating on the narrative level, he divides his analysis into three main categories:


For many narrative theorists, the formal models proposed by structural narratologists are limiting and fail to acknowledge the complex socio-cultural and interpersonal factors that come into play in the creation and communication of stories. This is encapsulated in Herrnstein Smith’s statement that the emphasis of narratology should change from text structure to ‘why, in any given instance of narrative discourse, someone has chosen (or agreed) to tell someone else that something happened and why the latter has chosen (or agreed) to listen’ (Herrnstein Smith cited by Chatman, 1990b: 312). Using a model of theatrical performance, Marie Maclean (1988), for example, shows how a story changes according to the audience for which it is intended, and how the relations between the narrator and the narrative are in fact to a large degree dependent upon the relations between the narrator and the narratee. As she aptly points out, it should not be forgotten that enunciation is complemented by denunciation and renunciation (Maclean, 1988: 40), the input of the reader in the construction of the text. She explains: The recent emphasis on the sujet de l’énonciation, while beneficial in clearing away naive pictures of the single omnipotent author and substituting a study of the workings of discourse, still carries the danger of all subject orientation. We do not seem to have an equivalent term for the other active partner in the act of the creation or destruction of the text (Maclean, 1988: 39, emphasis in text). Also, Horst Ruthrof (1981, 1995) gives a closer examination of the two levels of narrative, the presentational process and the presented product, showing how the actions of agents in the story correspond (by analogy or opposition) to the actions of the narrator in recounting them. Accordingly, the fact that a narrator may say one thing and do another assumes significance for the knowledge presented in the text. It is a way to signify narratorial attitude and thereby produce such effects as irony, parody, etc: Narrative structure has room for a large variety of acts of narrating apart from reporting, describing, or remembering. We find acts of teaching, reprimanding, exhorting, ridiculing, explaining, projecting, comparing, prophesying, or abstracting. At the same time, such



Contextualist and culturalist narratology

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This category of narrative theory is diverse and heterogeneous. Some writers have incorporated the study of narrative in critical studies of the oppositional in discourse (Chambers, 1991), others have linked it with gay culture (Roof, 1996; Lanser, 1995), and yet others have used post-modern social concepts to analyse it (Currie, 1998). The re-consideration of narratological methods to suit genres other than the linguistic text could also be placed in this category, and this includes the work of David Bordwell (1985) on film and Manfred Jahn (2001) on theatre. Phenomenological narrative theory Following the philosophical traditions associated with writers such as Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Gadamer, some theorists see narrative as reflecting the interaction between individual consciousness and the social environments in which this consciousness evolves. Stories, according to such approaches, are created and received as interpretations of human situations – of the ‘human condition’. Phenomenological approaches to narrative, therefore, follow the stages of the hermeneutic process, intelligere, interpretare, applicare, going from an aesthetically perceptual reading to a retrospective interpretation and then to a historical integration of the text within the cultural contexts of its production and its reception. This interpretation aims to show how the text answers the questions posed by these contexts, and how in turn it poses different questions that regulate the knowledge that individuals have about the world (reference), about other individuals (communication) and about themselves (self-understanding) (Ricoeur, 1986). According to this approach, narrato-logy is unacceptable because it introduces a rationalization of narrative that reconstructs it on a ‘second degree’. The formal models that structural and semiotic methods apply to the text favour analysis at the expense of interpretation, and impose an external order on the text, which transforms it into a static and pre-determined object. For Ricoeur, it is the task of phenomenological critical theory to establish the precedence of ‘narrative intelligence over narratological rationality’ (Ricoeur, 1986: 231).



acts are always the codified expression of specific directional activities of consciousness; they are not merely acts of explaining or abstracting, but always acts of explaining something, prophesying something, or ridiculing something (Ruthrof, 1981: 122).

The question remains whether interpreting a text with reference to the individual or socio-historical expectations of the contexts in which it is received is not itself an imposition of identity, and whether the methods involved in establishing links between text and environment do not also constitute a rational operation which works according to its own conception of causality and of subject-object relations – whether, in fact, there can be interpretation without analysis. It may be argued that any attempt to determine aspects of a text, whether by means of external considerations or by formal analysis of its structures, gives rise to another text governed by its own composition, and that what is referred to by the term ‘knowledge’ is the continual process of text interpretation through text construction. Cognitive narratology Research in cognitive science is instrumental in showing the relations between universal human mental patterns and their manifestations in specific, individual or cultural, instances. In this respect, such research has contributed significantly to an understanding of the distinction, favoured by structuralist theorists, between the innate and the acquired. By striving to understand the human neurophysiological apparatus, which underlies a form of universal cognitive competence, cognitive science has shed light on the categories that exist objectively in the world and those that are determined by cultural choices. Colour, for example, exists as wavelengths of light that are perceived by the senses, but the actual distinctions and definitions of colour categories are established in a cognitive operation ruled by cultural variants. The search for ways to program computers and artificial intelligence systems in a manner that resembles human thought also brought to light the integral role of narrative in mental processing (Schank and Abelson, 1977; Groenendijk and Stohof, 1984; Stillings et al., 1987; Van Dijk, 1980; Fauconnier, 1984; Vignaux, 1988). Cognitive science research has found that individuals respond more strongly to emplotted data and also tend to recognize isolated pieces of information by activating mental frames in which this information is juxtaposed and compared with stored knowledge. Stillings et al. (1987), for example, distinguish schemata, ‘for complex visual scenes, such as what a room looks like’; scripts, ‘for complex activities, such as going to a restaurant’; self-schemata, ‘for people’s personalities, including one’s own’ (Stillings et al., 1987: 31).





Understandably, such findings have had an effect on theories of narrative (Ryan, 1991; Herman, 1997, 2001; Eder, 2003). The cognitive approaches to text that have developed emphasize the competence of both producers and recipients of texts to create, recognize, understand and remember a story. In this case, the narrative structure is no longer immanent to the text but to the human mental faculties that make such discursive constructions and their communication possible. The work of cognitivists also underlines the significant factor of aesthetic and emotive response to text perception: what makes it possible for a text to be surprising, exciting, shocking or even just interesting? Although cognitive narratology shares with structuralist and semiotic approaches the anti-behaviourist tenet that mental processes control physical response, linking perception with cognition, its scope includes an examination of the ways that different texts, genres and media are able to elicit sensory and emotive feedback from their audiences by combining signs in a manner specific to their type. As Jens Eder (2003) explains, ‘[b]y integrating cognitive theories into narratology, narratologists are no longer compelled to define narrative phenomena exclusively using purely structural features. Instead, they can combine structural features with functional, reception-dependent features, and that has advantages for the applications of narratological categories’ (Eder, 2003: 292). The multimedia and multisensory nature of film makes it easily conducible to cognitive analysis, and indeed several interesting studies in cognitive-narrative analysis come from the domain of film (Bordwell, 1989; Branigan, 1992; Grodal, 1997). For Torben Grodal (1997), for instance, film is a special medium in relation to cognitive factors, because it does not signify objects, like linguistic texts do, but allows viewers to experience reality in a certain way. It works on a level that connects the emotive with the cognitive, and enables viewers to interpret the meaning of the images through strong empathic identification. In this way, film acts as a kind of filter of the world, and is neither purely referential nor representational. Also, Branigan (1992) suggests that narrative is located in the minds of the producers and recipients of a film rather than in the film itself. He points out that ‘[n]arrative in film is the principle by which data is converted from the frame of the screen into a diegesis – a world – that frames a



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particular story, or sequence of actions, in that world; equally, it is the principle by which data is converted from story onto screen’ (Branigan, 1992: 36, emphasis in text). The next section deals with narrative semiotics. As this study makes extensive use of narrative semiotic methods and concepts, more detailed attention is given to this approach. The following discussion overviews the main narrative-semiotic methodological considerations and tools of analysis, so readers with more than elementary experience in this field could skip this section.

Narrative semiotics For Greimas (1971, 1982), the minimal narrative is the trajectory uniting a seeking Subject with a sought-after Object – the narrative program. For Bremond (1973), the minimal narrative is the transformational sequence beginning with the designation of a lack, going to a series of actions aiming to fill the lack and ending with a ransformed initial state, where the lack has or has not been filled. In all cases, narrative is defined as a textual structure and contrasted with discourse – discourse being the individual manifestations, or instances, in which the universal underlying narrative relations are presented. From Saussurean linguistics, narrative semiotics retains three principles: (a)

(b)

The bi-partite division of the sign into the signifier, the material manifestation of the sign, such as in a word, and the signified, the conceptual element of the sign, which allows a signified to be understood as meaningful. This is important because it underlines the privileging of the linguistic sign by narrative semiotics, as opposed to, for example, Peircean semiotics, whose tri-partite definition of the sign permits easier access to conventional (symbolic) and visual (indexical and iconic) signs within its scope of analysis. The emphasis on the representational (as opposed to referential) function of language, and the correlative emphasis on the arbitrary (as opposed to motivated) nature of the sign. This favours a conception of language as functioning according to rules intrinsic to its own system, and not dependent on the rules of the physical world. For this reason, a constructivist




(c)


philosophy of knowledge becomes more conducive to narrative semiotic text analysis than do more pragmatic approaches, such as speech act theory, whose principal aim is to trace the enunciator’s intention and influence on the world. The division into langue and parole, and its correlatives competence and performance. This carries two implications. First, it implies that instances of discourse, parole, are syntactically reducible to a set of generating principles of limited variation, langue. Analysing this set of variables enables the linguist and semiotician to distinguish the sign combinations that make the discursive manifestations possible. This divides the text into two ‘realities’ connected by multiple reflexive and co-dependent links, adding an extra dimension to the text.

Second, it implies that the thematic logically precedes the figural, or in other words, that thought precedes action. This indeed, is consistent with the findings of cognitive research, which place the functions of understanding, recognizing, remembering, etc. in mental frames regulated by specific sections of the brain. Simply put, in order for one to recognize a face, one needs to have a mental faculty that makes this ‘performance’ of recognition possible. At the same time, however, this second implication is often problematic, especially in cases of physical action: although one may need to think of an action before one performs it, the thought would most likely consist of an image of the action. The performer would, therefore, need to somehow know what the action is not only before s/he performs it, but also before s/he thinks of it. Such concerns have been voiced by various theorists, notably those in the line of the anti-methodical and anti-rational deconstruction (Derrida, 1968), and will not be developed further here. At this stage, it suffices to point out that the division between discursive and generating structures reflects the philosophy of knowledge of narrative semiotics, and becomes significant here precisely for this reason. From Propp’s (1968)[1928] morphological approach to the folktale, narrative semiotics borrows the category of function as a fundamental in universal narrative structure. As is known, Propp’s originality lay in his shifting focus from nominal to verbal structures and looking thus not at who the characters of the stories were – as had been



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the traditional approach – but at what they did or happened to them. These acts he called ‘functions’, with function being ‘an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action’ (Propp, 1968: 21). Propp’s contribution to the analysis of narrative lies in his application of the deductive method to narrative texts, that is, in his abstraction through extensive comparison of semantic units from sequential processes, which can subsequently be used to trace syntactic functions. The analytic models which he extrapolates concentrate on the actions that follow the initial situation signalling the commencement of the narrative, and on the roles needed to carry out these actions. This can be presented graphically as in Figure 2.1. Propp’s aim was to distinguish and analyse the occurrences that take place, or situations that arise after a story has begun and the context has been set, and the identities of the agents. As has often been noted by subsequent narrative theorists, weaknesses in this model for universal applicability include the culturally restrictive nature of the corpus and the linear progression of functions, which reflects a causal bias, challenged by complex and experimental narratives. The advantage to his method lies in the lesson that, through comparison, similar structures can be traced in narratives and that by formalizing these structures, that is by playing down semantic content and cultural manifestation, a better understanding of the ways humans use language to create and communicate knowledge can be achieved. Greimas’ (1966) re-formulations of Propp’s category of function produced three models, subsequently used in narrative semiotic analysis: the model of functions (the actions performed), the actantial model (the performers of the actions) and finally the model of the quest (the transformational stages of development). The first two models are used to analyse narrative in terms of schema (schéma narratif ), while the third is associated with narrative in terms of trajectory (parcours narratif ).

Initial Situation beginning of narrative, usually designating a lack

Actions/Performers 31 functions performers

and

Climax 7

end of narrative, liquidation of lack

Figure 2.1 Propp’s narrative sequences




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(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Contract (relations between actantial Sender and Subject). Struggle (relations between actantial Subject and Object). Communication (relations between actantial Sender and Receiver). Presence (or Absence). Rapid Displacement.

The actantial model has had a wide appeal in the history of narratological theory (Gothot-Mersch, 1974; Mathieu, I974; Hénault, 1983). This is shown in Figure 2.2. The predominance of one or another of the functions in a narrative would induce its classification in a particular type of story structure. For example, stories that involve the questions ‘why is this happening?’, ‘what is the meaning of life?’, etc. (as is the case in many existentialist texts) tend to be constructed around contractual relations between Sender and Subject. On the other hand, stories that involve the questions ‘how can I/he do this?’, ‘when will I/she get this?’, etc. (as happens, for instance, in epic style, hero-based stories) tend to be constructed around relations of struggle, entailing a predominance of actions aiming to conjunct the Subject with the Object. It is important to note that this model’s elements do not denote the identity of specific agents. Instead, they designate the main positions SENDER (the one that motivates the action)

RECEIVER (the one that profits from the action) SUBJECT (the performer of the action)

HELPER (the one that aids the subject in its quest)

OBJECT (the desired goal)

OPPONENT (the one that hinders the subject in its quest)

Figure 2.2 Actantial model



In the final reduction of Propp’s functions, Greimas distinguishes five main categories of action:

that agents take in the performance of their acts and the unfolding of events, and are, in fact, reflexively linked with the functions: the actions performed by a particular textual agent in a sequence of the story position this agent in one of the actantial categories. For instance, the position of Sender, which is of vital importance in the construction of knowledge, since it indicates the motivations or reasons of an act, belief or event and, thus, underlies the causal principles with which the particular textual world is created, need not designate just one agent nor need this agent, or agents, have anthropomorphic qualities. In fact, the position of Sender may be occupied by any agent or agents that act as the cause of a series of actions leading to a result (a King, the Mind, Love or Gravity constitute equally suitable candidates for the position of Sender). Similarly, if the one who performs the actions leading to the final result is the same as the one who motivates them, the positions of Subject and of Sender are occupied by the same agent, and the same is true of the other positions. Finally, especially as regards long and/or complex narratives, the one(s) who is (are), say, the Helper in one narrative sequence may adopt another position in another sequence and failure to detect this shift in positioning may distort the knowledge presented in the text and the subtleties of meaning that it offers. For example, consider the definition of the ‘greater happiness principle’ from the Dictionary of Philosophy (Flew, 1979: 135): The basic tenet of utilitarianism holds that the supreme good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Happiness is construed as the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain; it is contended that only in terms of this programme do concepts like “good”, “duty”, and “right” have meaning and application. Although this utterance is rhetorically an explanation and not a story, following the axioms of narrative semiotics, the narrative structure of discourse allows us to extrapolate an actantial model. According to this utterance, utilitarianism teaches that people should seek the happiness of the majority as against the happiness of a minority or the pain of the majority. Therefore, pain is the Opponent to be overcome and concepts such as ‘good’, ‘duty’, and ‘right’ are Helpers or Opponents according to whether they accept the dictates of the Sender. This is represented diagrammatically in Figure 2.3.




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Utilitarianism

Majority

Happiness of the majority Figure 2.3

Pleasure Actantial mode of utilitarianism

Pain

The model of the narrative trajectory represents the sequential aspects of the story, that is, the way one stage is transformed into another during the developmental chain of narrative unfolding and is divided into four stages, the initial situation, the qualifying test, the decisive test, and the glorifying test. (Figure 2.4). For complex narratives, the model of the trajectory should be adapted to allow for a range of potential responses of the Subject to the situations in which he, she or it acts. For instance, the Subject may be deprived of the object of value or s/he may renounce it; the Subject may also accept the dictates of the Sender or s/he may violate them, etc., all extremely important tactical moves in the creation of knowledge. In addition, complex narratives with various levels of action and a considerable number of agents require that these stages be flexible enough so as to be repeated in different sequences within the larger whole. Looking at the semantic structures of the stages of the test, the qualifying stage corresponds to competence, the decisive test to performance and the glorifying test to recognition. The competence presupposed by the two final stages of the test is modalized by the four modalities /knowledge/, /obligation/, /ability/ and /volition/. These are projected along the axes of Being and Doing, and evaluated positively and negatively producing the combinations presented in Table 2.1. Note that the modality of obligation, /having to/, presupposes external coercion and therefore carries a negative value, which reverses the values activated in this modality. In addition to affecting individual actions within a narrative, modalities can form the basis of different kinds of philosophy. For example, existentialist texts revolve

Initial Situation - Qualifying Test - Decisive Test - Glorifying test Figure 2.4 Narrative trajectory



Society


BEING

DOING

KNOWING

HAVING TO

BEING ABLE

WANTING

Knowing to be (+) Not knowing to be (−) Knowing not to be (+ −) Knowing to do (+) Not knowing to do (−) Knowing not to do (+ −)

Having to be (−) Not having to be (+) Having not to be (− +) Having to do (−) Not having to do (+) Having not to do (− +)

Being able to be (+) Not being able to be (−) Being able not to be (+ −) Being able to do (+) Not being able to do (−) Being able not to do (+ −)

Wanting to be (+) Not wanting to be (−) Wanting not to be (+ −) Wanting to do (+) Not wanting to do (−) Wanting not to do (+ −)

around sequences of /not having to be-do/, as reflected in the existential-phenomenological maxim ‘Freedom is the ability to say no’. Similarly, texts of negative mysticism and Zen philosophies activate the modality /not wanting to be-do/, in the sense that desire in such systems of thought is perceived to lead to suffering and constitutes an obstacle to be overcome. An argument proposed in this study, which I elaborate later in this chapter, is that the modality of /knowledge/ is actually of much more consequence to the narrative structure of a text than the other three modalities and can be seen to encompass them. Even a text that claims that being is more important than knowing presents this as a form of knowledge and is, therefore, based on a certain kind of knowing. In fact, the act of narrating itself entails the communication of knowledge, as the etymological roots of the verb to narrate (narrare-gnosis) show. As an example of the above points, consider the opening lines of Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ (Kierkegaard, 1987: 303): Hide from myself, I cannot; I can hardly control the anxiety that grips me at this moment when I decide in my own interest to make an accurate clean copy of the hurried transcript I was able to obtain at the time only in the greatest haste and with great uneasiness. The episode confronts me just as disquietingly and just as reproachfully as it did then. Contrary to his usual practice, he had not locked his desk; therefore everything in it was at my disposal […].



Table 2.1 Semiotic modalities


This segment is extracted from a larger narrative and, therefore, examination of the whole text would be necessary to ascertain its significance. However, as was noted earlier, long or complex narrative contains a series of sequences, which being fragments of a whole, not only reflect this whole in some way (by analogy, contrast, metonymic representation, etc.), but also constitute mini-narratives in themselves, from which a model of action can be derived. Thus, the semantic composition of signs in this segment indicates the position of agents and their epistemic organization. Actantially, it can be inferred that the Sender is reflexive, that is, it is not external to the narrator. The narrator reproaches himself for what he did and, therefore, introduces the theme of guilt, which in turn, points to the narrator as the initiator of the action; in addition, the first phrase, ‘hide from myself’, designates the narrator as being responsible for his action, and so does the phrase, ‘in my own interest’, which also designates the narrator as Receiver of his action (Figure 2.5). The narrator’s awareness that he is doing something negative or disapproved of presupposes the implicit presence of ‘another’, an external source of validation – the narrator is being watched by someone whose narrative program is opposed to his own. The lexemes with which the narrator describes his actions illustrate the semantic category of /guilt/, which carries a negative evaluation of the semes of /decision/ and /responsibility/. The modalities that control the narrator’s action are /wanting to do/ (the narrator’s own program) and /having not to do/ (the ‘other’s’ program). As the modality of obligation carries the possibility of coercion, the ‘other’s’ program is presented as more legitimate than that of the narrator. As will be seen in more detail in Chapter 6, this analysis has brought

Narrator / Curiosity

Narrator Narrator

Transcript

Absence of owner / Unlocked desk

Guilt /Anxiety

Figure 2.5 Actantial model for opening of ‘The Seducer’s Diary’



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to light, in rudimentary form, some of the major elements at play in the construction of knowledge in Either/Or. The formulations of narrative semiotics have shown that a story is not a narrative. Rather, it is a relatively self-sufficient structure that exists independently of the techniques in which it is communicated. This is what allows the story of, say, Cinderella to be reproduced in many different narratives while maintaining its core story intact. However, the ways in which particular narratives re-arrange story elements and the modalities that come into play in narrating strategies provide a commentary to the story, and are pivotal in understanding the knowledge created in the text. In fact, many typical reactions to stories, such as surprise, curiosity and suspense, depend not on what is universal or inherent in narrative, but on how particular stories differ or their unique perspective on phenomena that are meaningfully relevant to human practices. The analytical tools described above, therefore, need to be revised in light of such considerations, and updated to take into account the issues raised by recent narratological theory. The next section attempts such a synthesis, and outlines the model of analysis that will be used in the subsequent chapters.

Towards an eclectic narrative semiotic model The prototypical narrative accepted by most narratologists is: Someone tells someone else that something happened. The prototypical narrative program distinguished by narrative semioticians is: Someone wants to do/get/be/know something. Combining the two, we get: Someone tells someone else that someone (who may or may not be one of the interacting parties) wants to do/get/be/know something. The narrative interaction (which, in written texts, is itself part of the narrated utterance) indicates the power relations and circumstantial





assumptions that frame the story. The story structure constructs a world, where the interrelational positioning of elements and outcome of actions present knowledge about identity, agency and causality. Meaning emerges in the reader’s consciousness by means of the ways in which s/he recognizes and understands this knowledge, in relation to his/her own positioning in the extra-textual world, and according to the experiences, beliefs and values that develop from this positioning. In this framework, the following features can be distinguished to be characteristic of narrative: A PRESENTER OF INFORMATION, OR NARRATOR, AND AN AUDIENCE.

These may or may not play a role in the narrative but their existence is evidenced by the delimitation, organization and presentation of events from a specific perspective: this presenter is the main source of discourse although the narrative may contain other speaking subjects. Moreover, the logical presence of a narrator in an utterance also indicates that the world constructed in a text is always formed in someone’s discourse and constitutes someone’s world. Thus, subjectivity in discursive world construction is not due to a bias on behalf of the enunciator but due to the structures of narrativity itself. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, the actantial function of the narrator plays a major role in the construction of epistemic themes in a text: whether the narrator may be identified as the actantial Subject or is situated in the position of Sender, etc, is an important consideration for an understanding of the distribution of knowledge, and of power, in the world of the text.

PRESENTATION OF INFORMATION OR NARRATED UTTERANCE.

This is logically presupposed by the above feature. It takes place through the narrator’s discourse and consists of the informational content, including the integration of speaking subjects other than the narrator, and of enunciating voices, manifest in focalizers, codes and registers evoking different contexts of enunciation, and acting to authenticate or legitimize the presented information. Within the lexemes and syntagms making up the narrated can be traced the indices of the one who speaks, the one who observes and the one who knows.

AGENTS OR ACTORS (I consider these terms as equivalent here). These may be active, bringing about a transformation, passive, subjected to influence or change, or reflexive, causing a modification to their own state. The actantial model represents the interrelationships and positioning of these agents in their basic or primitive story form.



50


These follow a rupture with pre-narrative chaos, which gives the story its identity, leading to the acquisition of an object of value (which could also, of course, be the preservation of the initial situation). They form the narrative trajectory, comprising: • The initial situation, the point of demarcation, which indicates a difference, lack, ambiguity, hypothesis or question. This need not be set at the beginning of the narrative (as usually happens in folktales and simple stories), but can be dispersed throughout the text in signs that reflect the elements of the narrative space created by the text out of semiotic chaos, and the assumptions of the narrator regarding audience expectations. • A series of actions, which may be dynamic (equivalent to verbs of action) or static (equivalent to verbs of perception). This way, a mental response of a character in a story constitutes an action insofar as it may function as an index of transformation from one stage to another in the narrative progression. These actions, furthermore, manifest degrees of modalization according to the four modalities, /knowledge/, /ability/, /obligation/ and /volition/, and are evaluated along the orders of euphoria (positive) and dysphoria (negative). • An aim, result, goal or desired object (I consider these terms as equivalent here). This can take the form of an object to be obtained, new knowledge to be acquired, destination reached or identity formed, etc. This aim need not be intentional but may be the result of natural processes, such as the erosion of a rock.

A SPATIO-TEMPORAL DIMENSION.

This consists of signs indicating the duration of events and the positioning of the narrator with regard to these events. The double temporal order favoured by several narratological approaches is not retained here, since the epistemic theme privileged by a story may be precisely the infinity of an action and the knowledge of how things are always, regardless of the knower’s location.

GIVEN, OR PRESUPPOSED, KNOWLEDGE. This acts as a logically necessary background to the world created in the narrative, that is, to the setting of the initial situation, the choice of agents, their actions, and the relations between the transformational stages. This background, assumed or pre-given knowledge (which constitutes the focus of



TRANSFORMATIONAL STAGES.


Chapter 5) has tended to be neglected by narratological theories. However, logically, it is the sine qua non of a narrative act: that a certain aim or result is desirable or valued, that there are specified ways of achieving this and that certain events will or will not take place if certain factors are present, all are indices of an ‘order of things’, which is taken for granted in the unfolding of the narrative and without which the narrated utterance would, in fact, be meaningless. AN EPISTEMIC ASPECT This is an extension to the previous feature, and denotes the organization of knowledge in a text. It includes the discursive structures that indicate how something is known, what may become known, who may know and under what circumstances, and what types of knowledge exist. This logical omni-presence of the modality of /knowledge/ as a, more or less marked, modifier of narrative structures, does not seem to have received the attention it merits. Interestingly however, it has been noted, in various forms, by several writers in the tradition of narratology. For example, Vladimir Propp (1968) [1928] says:

If functions which follow one after another are performed by different characters, the second character must know all that has taken place up to that time. In connection with this, an entire system for the conveying of information has been developed in the tale, sometimes in very artistically striking forms. At times, this notification is absent from the tale, and then characters act either ex machina or are all-knowing. On the other hand, notification is sometimes employed where it is not at all necessary (Propp, 1968: 71, my emphasis). Consider an example. If an agent in a story achieves an aim because s/he has in his/her possession a special weapon, the action of accomplishment would be modalized by /ability to do/. However, this modality presupposes the mediation of knowledge: the agent used the weapon either because s/he knew its power or in ignorance of its power, both aspects of /knowing/. In a similar fashion, on the pragmatic plane, the narrative organization of the sequence of accomplishment also communicates a certain knowledge to the audience of the story: not only that one achieved a specific aim under given circumstances with the power of the particular weapon,



52

but also that it was possible for one to achieve this power with the particular weapon. The epistemic aspect can be made explicit through meta-narrative techniques, such as definition, commentary, etc., or it can be implicitly present in the progression of the story and dispersed in the rhetorical and semantic structure. A HUMAN ELEMENT. Although a narrative need not include human or anthropomorphic agents, it is to varying degrees at the service of human interests. This is in many ways presupposed by the knowledge-communicating aspect of narrative. Knowledge about the world, about how things work (procedural knowledge), what things are (ontology) and how we know about them (epistemology) involve an element of human curiosity and a relevance to the human pursuits of survival, reassurance and fulfillment. Even in cases where narrated events and phenomena do not involve human agents, the fact that these events and phenomena can be an object of knowledge assumes also the presence of a knowing subject and a situation of communication. The sense of wonder about the world, which is so tightly linked to narrative, carries with it an awareness of self and others as part of this world, making narrative a fundamentally human enterprise of sense creation and social adjustment.

I refer to the particular organization of the above features in a text as narrative configuration. This is defined as a strategic positioning of signs, which activates specific attributes of these signs according to the ways they are interrelated, and which constructs the text-as-knowledge.

Applications of the narrative configuration This section describes examples of text analysis using the narrative configuration, taken from scientific, poetic and journalistic discourses. For an example of the manifestation of narrative features in scientific discourse, look at the following extract from a geology textbook: The dependence of initial porosity on gram diameter is due to the ratio of gravitational to frictional forces acting on the grains. As the grain size decreases, friction forces become comparable to





the gravitational forces acting on a particle at an earlier stage of settlement. Thus, smaller size particles form a rigid sedimentary framework with a larger initial porosity. When a sediment is buried, the increasing stress compacts the sediment to smaller volumes, with the volume change being primarily a loss of porosity (Gueguen and Palciauskas, 1994: 19). The three agents here are gravitational and frictional forces, and porosity; there is also the implied actant, earth as can be inferred from the lexeme /buried/. All the actants, except earth (which causes gravitational forces to increase), perform certain actions which can be measured on a continuum of activity – passivity, with the most active on one end and the least active on the other (Figure 2.6). Grain is a mediating agent, being used by the gravitational and the frictional forces to influence the state of porosity. The transformational sequences are constructed with quantity as the mediating agent, reflected in the lexemes /diameter/, /ratio/, /size/, /smaller/, /larger/, /increasing/ and /loss/. More analytically, gravitational and frictional forces are mediated by amount, grain is mediated by size and porosity is mediated by volume. These sequences comprise a set of acts mediated by time, which manifests in the references to change in quantity as well as in the syntagms as the grain decreases, when a sediment is buried, increasing stress and earlier stage, and by location, which can be traced in the lexeme /buried/. The model of the narrative trajectory takes the form of porosity going through certain transformational stages which affect its volume and thereby influence the condition of the rock. These stages, governed by geological conditions, are initiated by the interaction of gravitational and frictional forces and their instrument, grain (Figure 2.7).

gravitational forces grain

(earth)

porosity

frictional forces Figure 2.6 Narrative structure of porosity



54


All look and likeness caught from Earth All accident of kin and birth Had pass’d away. There was no trace of Aught on that illumined face. Upraised beneath the rifted stone But of one spirit all her own, She, she herself and only she, Shone through her body visibly http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Phantom.html Besides the time of the enunciation (implied present), three temporal sequences can be traced: the time when the lack or initial situation that began the narrative emerged, the time when this situation was altered and the time of the utterance. Although the poem describes two narrative sequences, there is also an implicit sequence present between the two and signified by the syntagm upraised beneath the rifted stone. This configures the actantial Subject she as a passive agent and the narrative transformation leading to the acquisition of the object of value involves an unknown Sender and an undetermined program of action. In the narrative sequence which comes temporally first, the Subject assumes an appearance because of the circumstances of her physical beginning (/earth/, /kin/ and /birth/ belonging to the

geological conditions

condition of rock porosity

volume change

gravitation

friction

Figure 2.7 Actantial model for porosity



For another example, this time taken from poetic discourse, consider the poem Phantom by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:


semantic category of physicality). In the second, mediating narrative sequence, the situation undergoes a change, although the agents and actions of this change are absent. In the third sequence, the acts influencing the Subject bring about the desired result and her appearance is different, merging physical (/face/, /body/) and metaphysical (/spirit/) elements. These sequences configure the agents in the actantial positions as in Figure 2.8. Epistemically, this narrative configuration brings into play the philosophical distinction between body and mind and relates this to the concepts of existence and of possession or ownership of knowledge – of authorship. The source of knowledge is located in the personal existence of the human subject (the beginning and development of life modified by the transformations entailed by the succession of narrative sequences and manifest in the verbal shifts). The lack which the narrative aims to fill involves the integration of

S1 Kin/Birth/Earth

Kin/Birth/Earth She

Identity 1 Accident

Spirit

S2 Unknown mediating action leading to transformation / Introduction of new Sender, Phantom. S3 She ? (Phantom) She

Identity 2 Spirit

Kin/Birth/Earth

Figure 2.8 Actantial models of Phantom



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mind and body and was brought about by forces external to the subject. It is through the influence of mental elements acting on the instructions of a mysterious Sender that integration is established and possession of the source of knowledge – personal identity – is attained. In the last example we consider the feature of given or presupposed knowledge. This example comes from a journalistic article in New Scientist: Ten of Tokyo’s cracked and ageing nuclear power plants could be switched back on this summer to help alleviate an impending power crisis facing the city. But green activists say the Tokyo Electric Power Company is exaggerating the crisis as an excuse to re-commission the damaged nuclear plants (Fitzpatrick, 2003: 9). This extract carries the following presupposed ideas: • Tokyo exists (this referential presupposition would carry the truth value of the utterance, according to formal presupposition theory, which considers proper nouns as carrying reference, and therefore truth value). • Tokyo has more than ten old nuclear plants. • The ten old nuclear plants are switched off. • Nuclear power plants can alleviate power crises. • The Tokyo Electric Power Company is an authority on power crises. This presupposed knowledge gives rise to the following rudiments of an implied narrative: • The nuclear power plants are ineffective and possibly dangerous (manifest in the lexemes /cracked and ageing/ and /damaged/). • The Tokyo Electric Power Company has said that there is an impending power crisis (if it has exaggerated it, it can be inferred that it said it). • The green activists are against switching on the nuclear power plants (manifest in the connotations of /excuse/ and /exaggerate/, which attribute negatively evaluated actions to the Tokyo Electric Power Company).





In addition to this propositional analysis, we can interpret the utterance on an actantially narrative basis. Four narrative agents can be distinguished here: the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the green activists, the city of Tokyo and the nuclear power plants. The narrative positioning of these four agents determines the unfolding of events. Although the narrative is not complete, we can still construct an actantial model that shows the interrelationships of the agents and their roles in the action. The nuclear power plants are set as the actantial Subject, sent on a quest by the Tokyo Power Company to provide electricity and prevent a power crisis. The city of Tokyo would benefit from the conjunction of Subject with Object, while the green activists and the plants’ damaged state oppose the Subject’s quest. The role of helper is not assigned in the utterance but it can be inferred that the legislation that empowers the Power Company would assist the fulfillment of the quest (Figure 2.9). In order for the narrator to describe this situation, a presupposed order of things, or ‘world’, must be present. The most important element in the presupposed world is that electricity is valued as an object to be acquired, and its lack constitutes an undesirable state that should be avoided – this is where the conflict to be resolved lies. Contesting this presupposed value (i.e., saying that electricity is not

Tokyo Power Company (Sender)

Tokyo (Receiver) Nuclear Plants (Subject)

Prevention of crisis- Provision electricity of (Object)

Green activists and Sender Cracked and ageing state of plants (Opponent)

Legislation empowerin the (Helper)

Figure 2.9 Actantial model of Tokyo nuclear plants



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important) would be as detrimental to the communication as would the referential invalidation of Tokyo (i.e., proving that Tokyo does not exist). In addition to this, other elements of the presupposed world include that the Tokyo Power Company has control over nuclear plants, which it considers to be a potential source of electricity. Also, the green activists are an alternative authority source on electricity, but their interests conflict with those of the Tokyo Power Company. On the implied level, the world that can be inferred is one where corporate administration is active, and where immediate utilitarian goals (preventing a power crisis) may have long-lasting effects on other goals, such as the sustainability of the environment.




Textual Dimensions and Narrator Roles

The same relationship can regain significance in another way. —‘A’ in Either/Or I

Overview In the visual media, such as film, painting and theatre, how an object is represented plays a more important role in forming audience attitudes than what the object actually is. Compositional elements such as light, angle and colour form an impression of the object and elicit a response towards this object often even more than explicit descriptions and represented events. The text comments on its object and communicates knowledge about it through the signs chosen to represent it and their interrelationships. This chapter outlines a division of the text into a set of dimensions that manifest different organizations of the epistemic aspect, and a typology of narratorial roles based on the relations between the narrator and the knowledge presented in the utterance. My aim is to formulate and support a new theoretical framework of text analysis suited to non-fictional, and in particular philosophical, discourse.

Textual dimensions Consider these utterances: (a)

Last year, I got an idea that I developed into this book. 60



3

Textual Dimensions and Narrator Roles 61

An idea is a thought or mental image of a possibility. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Utterance (a) describes two actions: getting an idea and developing it into a book. It presupposes knowledge of /idea/, although the action sequence in which /idea/ is placed (‘developed into this book’) also gives indications on the lexeme’s meaning. In addition, this utterance contains deictic markers (‘last year’, ‘I’ and ‘this’), which delimit the parameters of the scope of the utterance within a personal story. Utterance (b) defines /idea/ by describing its attributes. It is the least actional of the three utterances, but at the same time, it images the lexeme /idea/, enabling its actantial potential. Utterance (c) evaluates the importance of an idea in relation to /power/ and /time/. The utterance presupposes knowledge of /idea/ and its epistemic aspect lies in measuring the value of an idea. Along these lines, I distinguish three textual dimensions in which the epistemic aspect is organized: the paratactic, the onomastic and the noetic. The paratactic dimension The paratactic dimension constitutes the sequential order of narrative units, in the form of events, changes and developments of previously described states. This dimension is analogous to the syntactic organization of linguistic signs in a sentence, and its semiotic impact is formed by the combination of lexical units in a syntagmatic chain. It is composed of signs which indicate the order of events or actions and progression in a narrative world, ‘what happens’, and is functionally equivalent to verbal structures. The paratactic dimension encompasses temporal order, the time sequence of actions with regard to the whole, and utterances of doing. It becomes activated when we learn about an object by means of what it does or happens to it. The onomastic dimension The onomastic dimension consists of ontological elements dealing with questions of the choice of status, such as naming and identity. It involves the choice of the lexical composition of a narrative text, encompassing the aspects of discourse that qualify or delimit who or what will be positioned in particular actantial positions and providing evaluative information regarding their identity. It constructs



(b) (c)


meaning by definition, and by the implications carried in the naming and qualifying of agents (both anthropomorphic and not). It is spatially centred and involves utterances of being. The onomastic dimension includes what Oswald Ducrot (1984) calls derived words (of the author), signs which are part of the narrative act of communication and are located in the actual selection of speaking and acting subjects rather than in the discourse. This selection is itself part of the message of the text. As Ducrot points out, derived words are: ‘the ones the author addresses, no longer through his interpretation of characters, but through the fact itself of representing his characters, through his choice of them’ (Ducrot, 1984: 226). An example of the function of this dimension for textual signification can be seen in cases where knowledge is transmitted by an unreliable source, someone configured as a liar or an idiot, for instance; however plausible this knowledge may be on other levels, it is negatively modified because of its emanating source. An interesting example of this is provided by Ducrot, who points out that Molière was reproached for having ascribed the culturally respectable defence of religion to a character, Sganarelle, who possessed disreputable or grotesque characteristics (Ducrot, 1984: 225). The fact that Sganarelle is the emitter of religious knowledge was seen to somehow invalidate this knowledge – an interpretation causing shock in a community that axiologized this knowledge positively. Following the same form of logic, it could also be assumed that this fact would have delighted a community where religious discourse was negatively axiologized. What Moliere did was to ironize (and, thus indirectly, to question) religion by juxtaposing it with a negative subject of enunciation. Given the nature of linguistic structure, the paratactic and onomastic dimensions should be seen as mutually inclusive with the one logically presupposing the other, in the same way that the principle of selection is inextricably linked with the principle of combination. An agent’s semiotic construction is reflected in his, her or its act in a sequence. However, the predominance of elements in the paratactic dimension over the onomastic and vice versa, or the juxtaposition of structures pertaining to the two dimensions influences the epistemic aspect and gives the narrative world a particular form or colour. Utterances where information is presented in the



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(a)

You lie

does not have the same implications as telling someone (b)

You are a liar.

Utterance (a) describes the addressee’s actions; utterance (b) describes the addressee him/herself. Utterance (b), constructing its epistemic aspect in the onomastic dimension, implies a higher degree of certainty and is more evaluative than utterance (a), which constructs its epistemic aspect in the paratactic dimension and has a more objective bias. Utterance (b) draws a conclusion from an observation, whereas utterance (a) describes the observation. The noetic dimension The noetic dimension includes meta-discursive elements commenting on or interpreting an action, event, statement or object. As it encompasses paratactic and onomastic structures in its composition, it can be seen to cut across the other two dimensions. It serves to prioritize, to subordinate and to structure information, and to attach evaluative comments on the order of events or quality of objects. On the level of the utterance, it manifests mostly in subordinate clauses that serve to modify the information presented in the main clause. Consider this utterance about Maskelyne, the astronomer who discovered longitude: Maskelyne took up, then embraced, then came to personify the lunar distance method. The man and the method melded easily, for Maskelyne, who put off marrying until he was fifty-two, enslaved himself to accurate observation and careful calculation (Sobel, 1995: 112, my emphasis). The first sentence presents information paratactically – Maskelyne is the agent of a series of acts. The main clause of the second sentence (‘the man and the method melded easily’) is modified by two subordinate clauses that purport to explain, noetically, the



paratactic dimension signify what something or someone does, denoting change, while the ones where information is presented in the onomastic dimension signify what something or someone is, denoting permanence. To take a simple example, telling someone


information in the main clause. Thus, the information that Maskelyne put off marrying until he was fifty-two is presented as being pivotal in understanding the agent’s motives for his other actions. In addition, the choice of /enslaved/, which is selected at the expense of other syntactically equivalent but semantically different lexemes, such as /devoted/, further indicates the narrator’s evaluative position in relation to the acts of ‘accurate observation and careful calculation’. On the level of the enunciation, the noetic dimension contains signs of the act of enunciation, which direct the reader out of the narrative to the narration itself and to an order of things that exists independent of the recounted events. Therefore, it is the textual dimension in which narratorial position and authority are brought into play as well as the one where the process of framing the narrative world is located. In the above-cited utterance, the noetic dimension carries the narrator’s preconceived ‘order of things’, or what I call here the ‘presupposed world’ (the focus of Chapter 5). In this world, being accurate and observant does not go well with marrying young and is also not a condition to which one should aspire. The noetic dimension is where the story gains a plot, that is, where instructions for constructing the logic of events and of information is located. In narratives where such instructions are rare or absent, the epistemic aspect would tend to be constructed around concepts of uncertainty, subjective perception, mystery, etc. The links between the textual dimensions distinguished here with the narrative features of discourse outlined in Chapter 2 can be traced easily. Thus, the features designating the sequential aspects of narrative form part of the paratactic dimension. The construction of agents and the delimitation of their attributes as well as the aimed result or object of value are part of the onomastic dimension. Finally, presupposed knowledge and signs of narratorial presence and control are included in the noetic dimension. This distribution of narrative features in the textual dimensions may be represented diagrammatically in Figure 3.1. The textual dimensions could also help to sketch a typology of text types according to their distribution and organization of knowledge. When the epistemic aspect is distributed mostly in the onomastic dimension, texts have a strong referential function and exhibit an emphasis on classification and ontology. Texts from the academic disciplines of botany, anatomy, etc., would constitute examples and



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Noetic Dimension Knowing

Narrator roles

Onomastic Dimension Being Agents Desired Objects/Aimed States of Being

Paratactic Dimension Doing Acts and their modalities Transformational stages Figure 3.1 Textual dimensions

so would genealogies, which although involving a temporal element and being therefore diachronic, indicate the establishment of identity and consist of naming. When the epistemic aspect is distributed mainly in the paratactic dimension, it gives rise to forms of knowledge that involve skills acquisition such as learning or teaching someone such procedures as driving, dancing, etc., and to the description of sequential actions, processes or events. The epistemic aspect distributed predominantly in the noetic dimension produces theoretical texts, ‘meta’ discourses such as metafiction, and philosophical texts, which exhibit various degrees of ‘a denial of negotiatory speech’ (Ruthrof, 1992: 143).



Presupposed knowledge

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All discursive constructions have a main emanating and organizing source, the presenter of information, or narrator, who is responsible for the amount, detail, hierarchical order and, potentially, explicit evaluation of the information presented. In addition, within the narrator’s discourse there are multiple signs, lexemes and syntagms that indicate the embedded presence of other enunciators and attitudes, which represent ‘the generally fragmentary establishment of the subjects of knowledge’ (Greimas and Courtés, 1976: 438). As the pioneering work of Emile Benveniste (1966) and of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986) has demonstrated, discourse contains elements of intersubjectivity and heteroglossia. One’s utterance is not only directed to an abstract or physically present hearer; also within an utterance there are integrated multiple lexemes, syntagms, codes and registers which point to a range of enunciating sources and potential contexts. Some of these belong to different speaking subjects with a specified role in the narrative, while some others are indices of the spatio-temporal, actantial and/or ideological perspective taken by the narrator in presenting certain information and are characteristic of the one who sees (Genette, 1972; Uspensky, 1973; Lotman, 1975; Bal, 1983; Aumont, 1983; Fontanille, 1989). Narration and focalization are different instances in the unfolding of the narrative. In the words of Mieke Bal: The actor, using the action as material, makes it into a story (histoire); the focalizer, who selects actions and chooses the angle from where he presents them makes it into narration (récit), while the narrator puts the narrative into words; he makes it into a narrative text (texte narratif) (Bal, 1983: 32–33). In this section, I demonstrate an application of these narratological formulations to the voices of knowledge in philosophical discourse. I suggest that the knowledge presented in a text is not constructed only on the propositional level (i.e., what is said) but is based also on the relations among who speaks, who sees and who knows and is dispersed in the organization of narrative segments within the utterance. Therefore, the knowledge of a text is inextricably linked with the world of a text.



Narrator roles

To support this hypothesis, I examine some of the ways techniques of narration are present in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Phenomenology) and in Sφren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and the effect these techniques have on the epistemic aspect. My intention is to formulate a typology of the narrator that would be suited for an understanding of the epistemic aspect of narrative configurations. Consider these two utterances, proposed by Gerard Genette (1972: 255): (a) (c)

For a long time now, I have been going to bed early Water boils at one hundred degrees.

Genette maintains that the first utterance is different in narrative status from the second in that the former can be interpreted only with reference to the subject and situation of the enunciation: ‘I’ refers to the enunciator and the present perfect tense attains its significance in relation to the time of the enunciation. The second utterance, on the other hand, makes no mention of the enunciation and has no marked presence of its enunciator. Genettte concludes that, because of this, the first utterance exhibits a higher degree of narrativity than the second. Looking at these utterances in a different way, however, it appears that, although the second utterance denotes a temporality beyond the boundaries of the enunciation and even beyond the speaker’s discursive existence (in that water boiled at one hundred degrees before the narration took place, continued to boil at one hundred degrees at the time of narration and will continue to do so after), it is, nevertheless, appropriated or ‘owned’ by an enunciator through the act of instantiation (Benveniste, 1966), in which language is put to discourse by a (marked or inferable) uttering ‘I’. Thus, despite the fact that the knowledge presented may not depend on the narrator’s personal existence, it does not cease to be bound by the act of enunciation that produced it. Therefore, a narrator can be said to be present in both utterances for two reasons. One reason is logical: any utterance, by definition, has a ‘controlling mediator’ (human or not) between the uttered information and its verbal representation. As Manfred Jahn (2001) points out, The narrator is not so much the one who answers to Genette’s question “who speaks?” or who betrays herself or himself by using




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The second reason is fiduciary and contractual: through the act of reading, a relationship of trust or complicity is formed between the reader and the source of enunciation, with the former expecting to be imparted some information for various purposes (instruction, entertainment, etc.). Returning to Genette’s examples, the (absent) enunciator plays as important a role in the interpretation of the second utterance as does the (present) enunciator of the first one. From the first utterance the reader learns that the narrator is someone who goes to bed early and has done so for a long time, and from the second that the narrator is someone who measures heat and establishes links between temperature and an alteration in the state of certain elements. To say that the narrator of the second utterance speaks on behalf of science in that his place can be taken by any scientist, would be as useful to text analysis as saying that the narrator of the first utterance speaks on behalf of those who go to bed early because any one of these could have uttered the statement. I suggest that the significant difference between these two utterances lies not in the presence or absence of a narrator and in the marked or unmarked enunciation, but in the distance of the narrator from the acts recounted (Marsen, 2004b). In the first utterance the narrator plays a part in the events (i.e., is present in both utterance and enunciation), while in the second he recounts what he observes, believes or knows. This difference in narratorial participation not only exhibits a stylistic variation but also reflects a different strategy in legitimating information. In the first instance, information is subjectively legitimated: it is the narrator that is personally accountable for its truth value. In the second it is objectively legitimated and should be objectively verifiable in the material world. However, these are not the only degrees of narratorial distance that are possible. Consider the following example from Either/Or I: No one comes back from the dead; no one has come into the world without weeping. No one asks when one wants to come in; no one asks when one wants to go out (p. 26).



the first person pronoun but the agent who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told (especially from what point of view, and in what sequence), and what is to be left out (Jahn, 2001: 670).

There is no incorporation of the narrating ‘I’ in this utterance, so the narrator is not talking about himself as a participant in the narrated events. Nevertheless, the narrator here cannot be said to be merely observing acts external to his own existence. A contextual examination of the text from which this utterance is extracted would reveal that the information presented here is relevant not only for the audience to which it is addressed, but also for the narrator himself: ‘no one’ includes the subject of the enunciation insofar as he is also ‘one’. In fact, it could be said that even if considered in isolation these two sentences exhibit if not an identification at least an empathy with the condition described and this is mostly manifest in the spatiotemporal position of the emanating source: the tenses and verbs used indicate that the speaker is a living being in the world. In addition, this utterance is remarkable in that the narrative configuration activated by the organization of the signs does not only present information about an order of things; it also evokes the principal themes of the act of world creation itself: life (action, creation), death (inertia, passivity), volition (want), movement and spatial displacement (come, go), time (come back, when) language (asks) and the other (who, interestingly, has no specified identity; like the narrator he too is no one). Furthermore, the negative aspect, characteristic of the negation necessary for a story to commence, also signifies a lack, the inability to control life and death. In this way, the configuration reflects both the enunciation (the process of world creation) and the code (the narrative function of language itself). In such an organization the narrator logically occupies both the positions of actantial Subject (desperate human) and detached observer by presenting events in which he is directly involved while at the same time being critically distant. Thus, the degree of participation is higher than would be the case if the narrator were simply an observer of acts external to his existence. In contrast to this narratorial strategy, consider this extract from Either/Or II: I have seen people in life who have deceived others for such a long time that eventually they are unable to show their true nature (p. 160). The strongly emotive element of the previous extract is here replaced with an evaluative and critical element. The narrator describes events





he has personally experienced but does not identify with – they have presented themselves to him through other people. The narrator relates to these events by adopting an ethical position, and judging their motive and consequence. Although the marked deixis of the utterance (‘I have seen ... ’) indicates personal ownership of the presented information, the negative evaluation implied in the ethical standpoint creates considerable distance between the narrator and the events; the acts of deception leading to inability to show one’s true nature are contrary to the narrator’s own behaviour, as this is implied by the structure of the utterance. Having selected /distance/ as the main semantic category at play in narratorial participation, and looked at some examples, we can elucidate this further by projecting it onto a semiotic square, the basic dynamic tool that brings to light patterns of relationships in signs. Following narrative semiotics, a semiotic square is constructed by posing the selected semantic category with its contrary, then negating the two terms to show a relation of contradiction and finally asserting the resulting terms to introduce a relation of complementarity (Greimas and Courtés, 1977; Flock, 2001). Following Saussurean semiotics, the semiotic square is based on the premisse that words mean through their relations with other words – their opposites, complementaries and contradictions. In our case here, the contrary of /distance/ would be /immersion/ and their contradictory terms would be /non-distance/ and /nonimmersion/ respectively. /Non-immersion/ would be complementary to /distance/, while /non-distance/ would be complementary /immersion/. This produces the semiotic square in Figure 3.2. Projecting a semantic category onto the semiotic square shows the network of relations in which the category is organized, and identifies the possible transformations of meaning that can be generated. distance----------------vs---------------immersion

non-immersion------------------------non-distance Figure 3.2 Semiotic square of narratorial participation



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Thus, narratorial strategies of /distance/ produce objective analysis, detailed and accurate object-based description, low or no marked presence of the enunciator through deixis, and low or no emotive content. Strategies of /immersion/ produce narratorial identification with agents in the utterance, more marked tense and aspect indicating finite or specific spatio-temporal boundaries (as in past, present perfect, present continuous and future tenses), and a higher degree of personification of agents manifest in a privileging of figural signs (i.e., signifiers with physical or anthropomorphic signifieds) rather than thematic signs (i.e., signifiers with abstract signifieds). Strategies of /non-distance/ produce a blurring of agent identities leading to ‘stream of consciousness’ discourse, high emotive content, subjective colouring of discourse through self-reflexive qualifiers and nondefinite or fluctuating spatio-temporal markers. Finally, strategies of /non-immersion/ produce marked deixis but no identification with the agent in the utterance, and a high evaluative content, which can lead to irony or sarcasm, if there is consistent negative evaluation of agents or acts in the utterance. Keeping these points in mind, a typology of enunciator roles suitable for philosophical texts (but not necessarily limited to these) may be outlined for further testing. For cases where the narratorial strategies show a valorization of /distance/, we could name the role used observer. For cases where /immersion/ is valorized, the role could be named actor. Where there is /non-distance/, witness would be a suitable name for this role, as it suggests its characteristic element of subjective observation. Finally, where /non-immersion/ is valorized, the name judge would encompass the element of critical commentary of this role. The word ‘role’ should be emphasized as it shows the element of performance that is involved: each mode represents an adopted ‘persona’ manifest in stylistic devices, and should not be taken to describe any ‘real’ psychological characteristics of authors. We can distinguish the main characteristics of observer role as a consistently external point of view, which leads to a presentation of the narrator as ‘knower’ or ‘seer’ (as opposed, for instance, to ‘doer’ characteristic of actor role). This tends to be constructed by mostly inferable deixis (manifest in a low presence of personal pronouns), a high degree of abstraction (more thematic than figural signifieds) and a tendency to nominalization. In contrast, the main characteristics of actor role would include a high degree of figuration, with





agents mostly designated by signs with figural signifieds, as well as a prominence of marked deixis, especially in the use of first and second person pronouns. In addition, this mode carries an emphasis on verbs, with a correlative emphasis on tense and aspect. Finally, actor mode would favour an internal point of view, with acts ‘seen’ from within the context of the utterance, a technique that helps to create an image of the narrator as virtual or actual agent. Looking at the next pair, the main characteristics of witness role include a high level of thematic signifieds, combined with a high level of evaluative signs and/or signs of subjectivity. This is complemented by a (sometimes paradoxical or contradictory) juxtaposition of external and internal points of view, which, if recurrent, can create an image of the narrator as anxious or hysterical, and a low presence of marked deixis, but a strong presence of inferable, unmarked deixis (often manifesting as narration by a hidden or mysterious self). In contrast, the main characteristics of judge role include a predominance of marked or inferable third person deixis, constructed by techniques of detachment, such as evaluation, sarcasm or formality. This is coupled with a consistently external point of view that emphasizes the non-identification of the narrator with any agents in the utterance; this could be positive, as in discourses of admiration, or negative, as in discourses of criticism. Finally, judge narrators tend to be the sources of a strongly evaluative and/or normative (as in rule-creating) discourse, which may often create an image of the narrator as ethical, smug or righteous. It should be kept in mind that, as with any formulation based on the semiotic square, these types have a heuristic value for purposes of analysis and do not represent clear-cut, exclusive categories. In fact, an appropriate way of seeing them would be in terms of a continuum of degrees of participation within each type. A narrator role is triggered, but not established, at the lexical level, given that point of view and evaluation are locked in the semantic structure of words. Describing an animal as /canis familiaris/ or /cur/, for example, denotes the same referent in the world, but connotes a different attitude towards this referent and thereby gives it a different meaning. /Canis familiaris/ suggests the enunciator sees the referent more objectively and with greater distance than does /cur/, which indicates a much stronger emotive reaction: the first name would, therefore, be consistent with observer or judge role and the second with actor or witness role.



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In order for the enunciator to fully capture a role, however, the selected ‘attitude’ would have to be sustained consistently throughout the text. Similarly, the same narrator may assume different roles in different segments of the text, with the shifts in role throwing light on narratorial ‘attitude’ towards a piece of information, relation, event or action. For example, an observer role may slip into actor role through the ‘stage directions’ effect that is produced when the enunciation is referred to (as in transitional sentences, such as ‘Having discussed X, I will now look at Y’). Again, it would be the major role, the one adopted extensively and permeating the whole text, which would give the text its form and colour. Gilles Deleuze (1967) gives an interesting example of an inappropriate shift from observer to witness in his study of the writer Sacher-Masoch. In a note, the narrator warns against bias in scientific writing by citing an example taken from Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis: Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, revised by Moll, is a collection of cases of the most abominable perversions for the use of doctors and jurists, as the subtitle indicates. Assault, crime, bestiality, disembowelling, necrophilia, etc, are all treated with the appropriate scientific detachment without passion or value judgement. With case 396, however, the tone changes: ‘a dangerous pigtail fetishist was spreading anxiety in Berlin ...’ And this comment follows: ‘these people are so dangerous that they ought definitely to be subject to long-term confinement in an asylum until their eventual recovery. They do not by any means deserve unqualified leniency ... When I think of the immense grief caused to a family in which a young girl is thus deprived of her beautiful hair, I find it quite impossible to understand that such people are not confined indefinitely in an asylum (Deleuze, 1967, p. 135, n. 5, my emphasis). Krafft-Ebing’s ‘show of prejudice’ involves a shift in mode of participation, or narrator role, from observer to witness. Interestingly, the italicized segment in the discourse of the main narrator also shows a similar ‘slip’ on his behalf. At other times, a narrator may change roles in order to better represent the axioms of the epistemic aspect of his/her narrative configuration. This is what happens in Phenomenology of Perception, for





example, which values meaning that comes from personal experience rather than objective fact. A common technique in this text is a change in narrator role from observer to actor, with the sequences presented in actor mode legitimizing or authenticating the knowledge presented in observer mode. Here is an example of this: In dreams as in myths, we learn where the phenomenon is by experiencing where our desire goes, what our heart fears, what our life depends on. Even in wakefulness it is not different. I arrive in a village for a vacation, happy to leave my work and my usual surroundings. I settle in the village. It becomes the centre of my life. The water in the river, the harvest of wheat and of nuts are for me events. But if a friend comes to see me and brings me news from Paris, or if the radio and the newspapers inform me that there have been threats of war, I feel exiled in the village, excluded from real life, confined away from everything. Our body and our perception compel us always to take as centre of the world the landscape they offer us (p. 330, my emphasis). The sentences framing the italicized segment are presented in observer mode. However, the italicized segment changes to actor mode, with the narrator acting out the knowledge presented in the rest of the extract, so as to communicate it more effectively in a ‘human interaction’ – i.e., from one human to another. Note also that the change in narrator role brings with it also a change in textual dimension from the noetic (the ‘interpreting observer’ sentences) to the paratactic (the ‘physical’ actor sentences). Keeping all this in mind, the semiotic square of distance versus immersion now takes the form presented in figure 3.3.

Narrator roles in Phenomenology of Perception and Either/Or Phenomenology is written in actor, observer and witness modes, with each mode constituting a different strategy and serving a different function. These modes are represented pronominally, in witness and in actor mode, by the first person, singular and plural (I, we), in observer mode, by the impersonal third person one, used in particular instances as an alternative to we,and by the absence of referents to the speaker on certain occasions. Moreover, the presence of a particular



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Observer----------------vs---------------Actor valorization of immersion subject-orientation temporal action

Judge------------------------------------Witness valorization of non-immersion subject-object split

valorization of non-distance subject-object merge

Figure 3.3 Semiotic square of enunciator roles

mode of participation is associated with its function in the epistemic aspect (that is, with its semantic and pragmatic appropriateness in conveying a specific type of knowledge), and not with a certain stage of the narrative development. The observer role is the least prominent in Phenomenology. It is present when the narrator places himself and the audience in a position from which they both observe the recounted segment as well as when a piece of information is presented without incorporating indices of its enunciator. Pronominally, it is manifest in we, the impersonal one, or of course, the absence altogether of any deictic marker indicating the subject of enunciation. This, like the other narrator roles, is distributed throughout the text and is not associated with a particular segment or developmental stage. The following examples, therefore, are chosen from different points in the story. The narration begins in observer mode with the narrator and the audience placing themselves at the beginning of the world of the text. They observe what is already there, what was selected to function in the story when the delimiting rupture with the pre-narrative space took place: the notion of sensation. This notion constituted the result of other narratives whose epistemic aspect Phenomenology is questioning. As the narrator says later on in the text, ‘sensing has become once again for us a question’ (p. 64). The ending of the other stories becomes, therefore, the beginning of this one and their



valorization of distance object-orientation a-temporal action

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Beginning the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation, which seems immediate and clear: I sense red, blue, hot, cold. It will be seen, however, that it is the most confused that could be and that by having admitted it, classical analyses have missed the phenomenon of perception (p. 9). The main verbs find and seem exemplify the mode of observation adopted by the narrator in introducing his role. The role changes to actor in the sentence ‘I sense red, blue, hot, cold’, where the narrator ‘acts out’ the qualities of sensation in his capacity as a human. Observer mode resumes in the last sentence, where the narrator continues his ‘stage directions’. As for observer mode with no deictic markers of enunciation, this exists in Phenomenology only as part of a larger sequence which has been introduced by a marked participation of the narrator, or which leads to such participation. In other words, there is no objective presentation of a particular piece of information or event without its being shown to be integrated in narratorial discourse and, in some way, relevant to the narrator as actor or as witness. This is a very significant factor in the world of Phenomenology because it points to the fact that its discursive construction reflects its epistemic aspect: as all knowledge is necessarily seen by a consciousness in a particular manner of being, so all uttered knowledge is part of someone’s speech and functions as a comment on an aspect of the world. It would have been contradictory for the narrator of Phenomenology to communicate his knowledge by hiding behind impersonal or objective language, when his aim is precisely to put into question the possibility of such knowledge. For example, when the narrator describes sense in the empiricist and the intellectualist worlds (Part Two, Chapter One), he presents certain observed facts (i.e., what these two approaches do). Within this description, however, is integrated the narrator’s world, which goes against the other worlds, and in which the narrator participates as a human being (we in this case referring to all humans as perceiving subjects). The discourse of the narrator-observer is, therefore, subordinated to that of the narrator-witness – we cannot



resolution constitutes its initial situation and the establishment of ambiguity that the narrative aims to clarify:


Objective thought overlooks the subject of perception. It assumes the world as complete, as the setting for any possible event, and treats perception as one of these events. For example, the empiricist philosopher considers a subject X perceiving, and attempts to describe what is happening: there are sensations that are states or manners of being of the subject and thus are true mental things. The perceiving subject is the locus of these things and the philosopher describes sensations and their substructure as one describes the fauna of a distant land – without noticing that he himself perceives, that he is a perceiving subject and that perception as he lives it belies all that he says about perception in general. For, seen internally, perception owes nothing to what we know of the world by other means, of stimuli as they are described by physics, and of sense organs as they are described by biology. It does not give itself at first as an event in the world on which one can apply, for example, the category of causality, but as a recreation or a reconstitution of the world at each moment. If we believe in a past of the world, in the physical world, in ‘stimuli’, in the organism as it is represented by our books, it is firstly because we have a perceptive and actual field, a surface of contact with the world or a perpetual rootedness in it; it is because it endlessly assaults and invests subjectivity as waves surround jetsam and flotsam on the beach (p. 241). Interestingly, the narrator uses observer mode to describe the example of the empiricist philosopher observing the perceiving subject: the narrator not only tells how the empiricist philosopher reaches his conclusions but also shows this by putting himself in the philosopher’s position and constructing his discourse in the same role as the philosopher. This mode of participation is questioned when the narrator points out that the empiricist philosopher fails to perceive himself as perceiving subject. The role changes to witness after this comment: the narrator can only describe a human mental process if he acknowledges himself as a human and, hence, as having direct experience of this process, and also if he adopts a discursive pattern that reflects this identity.



describe perception if we do not first perceive. Consider the beginning of the chapter:


As is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, there is a paradoxical element in the narrator’s rejection of the observer’s knowledge of perception, an element which is evident in the cited extract but which is also characteristic of the text as a whole. If, as the narrator suggests, it is impossible to understand or describe the true nature of perception from an external perspective, without realizing that what is seemingly objectively described is first subjectively perceived, how can the existence and hence the possibility of such an objective description be explained? If the empiricist philosopher can actually describe perception without being aware that he is himself a perceiving subject, what is the status of his account if it is not a true description of perception? After all, the narrator also puts himself in observer mode to describe the philosopher’s actions in considering a subject X and in describing sensations as if they were the wildlife of a distant country. Therefore, he also treats what he observes as an event in the world. The answer to this question could well lie in the nature of language itself: there are things one can do in language that one cannot do in physical life. Even if something cannot be done, it can often be said. By extension, what can be known about physical life through language can only be approximate. A similar subordination of observer mode of participation occurs in cases when the narrator combines actor and observer modes, like in the following extract which describes the perception of the body’s spatiality (Part one, Chapter three): If my arm is placed on the table, I would not dream of saying that it is next to the ashtray as the ashtray is next to the telephone. The shape of my body is a border that ordinary space relations do not transgress. Its parts relate to each other in an original manner; they do not unfold one next to the other, but are enveloped one within the other. For example, my hand is not a collection of points. In cases of allochiria, where the subject feels in his right hand the stimuli applied to his left hand, it is impossible to assume that each stimulation changes spatial value for him, and that the different points of his left hand are transported to the right, being as they are related to a total organ, to a hand without parts that has been all of a sudden displaced. They form thus a system, and the space of my hand is not a mosaic of spatial values. The same way my whole body is not for me a collection of organs



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The extract begins in witness mode, in which the narrator describes the way he perceives his arm in relation to other objects with which it is juxtaposed. It then shifts to observer mode with the sentence beginning ‘in cases of allochiria’, which also includes a shift from ‘I’ as the agent to ‘subject’. The following sentence presents the conclusion of the sequence, which reverts to witness mode, showing how the observed facts affect the narrator’s own experience as a human. The observer mode is adopted only insofar as it lends support to or clarifies the epistemic aspect, constructed in actor or witness mode. If what is observed cannot be linked to what is subjectively perceived by the observer’s consciousness, or cannot be acted out by the observer and turned into knowledge, it is unacceptable in the narrator’s world. The epistemic aspect of Phenomenology does not recognize observation without witnessing or acting in what is observed. A light form of witness mode of narratorial participation is the most common in Phenomenology. In general, the epistemic aspect connected with this mode involves the communication of the result of perceiving, thinking and reasoning of the narrator, who assumes the form of an individual consciousness. Knowledge produced by the experience of the individual speaking subject and narration as testament – characteristics of the witness mode – are associated with narrative worlds which have personal, corporeal experience as the main agent in the quest for knowledge or meaning and which take elements of individual experience as typical of the human condition in general. Consequently, the witness mode tends to be preferred by philosophic narrators whose epistemic aspect integrates signs of their ideological and/or spatio-temporal position and has no existence independent of their status as speaking subjects. Furthermore, this dependence of the narrated on the identity of the narrator may be one reason that witness mode narration often turns into actor mode. It is these characteristics of the witness role that favour it in existential-phenomenological texts. If the epistemic aspect of phenomenology is re-constructed as one populated with individual consciousnesses perceiving reality through subjective experience,



juxtaposed in space. I possess it indivisible, and I know the position of each of my members by a corporal schema where they are all enveloped (p. 114).


the capacity of the first person pronoun to be used by all speaking subjects indeterminately signifies this process. The witness narrator may be manifest in varying degrees of independence: at one extreme s/he may designate an independent consciousness and at the other extreme s/he may include signs of identification with the other. In the former case, the relation with the audience would be one of ‘I’ and ‘you’ (or ‘I’ against ‘you’) with a possible mediation by ‘they’. In the latter case, the relation would be one of ‘I’ as including ‘you’, and potentially ‘I’ as ‘you’ and ‘they’ – ‘I’ as everybody. An example of the first type subjectivity in witness mode of participation is provided in the following utterance from Either/Or: For me nothing is more dangerous than to recollect. As soon as I have recollected a life relationship, the relationship has ceased to exist. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That is very true, but it becomes fonder in a purely poetic way. To live in recollection is the most perfect life imaginable; recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality, and it has a security that no actuality possesses. A recollected life relationship has already passed into eternity and has no temporal interest anymore (p. 32). The first two sentences are constructed in the noetic dimension establishing the boundaries in which the information presented in this utterance should be interpreted. The personal pronouns and the subjective specification, ‘for me’, indicate that the epistemic aspect attains its meaning and truth-value as the testament of the narrator. The information presented in the paratactic dimension (that absence makes the heart grow fonder and that ‘a recollected life relationship passes into eternity and loses its temporal interest’) as well as the information presented in the onomastic dimension (what living in recollection is: perfect life, satisfying and secure) constitute knowledge witnessed by the narrator in his individual existence; an existence which is not presented as necessarily shared by any other agents or potential narrators. As opposed to actor mode, which includes specifications of the narrator’s identity, extreme forms of witness mode of participation ‘de-locate’ narratorial identity and this is most clearly evident in the use to which this mode puts signs denoting the narrator. In fact, it is



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in the ambivalence of deixis (and, in particular, the narrating ‘I’) that the nature of the witness mode should be sought. A discussion on this would, therefore, be useful. According to Benveniste’s (1966) pioneer work on deictic analysis, personal pronouns actualize instances of discourse, which are the individual manifestations of speech in particular contexts of enunciation. This is when langue, as a system of signs, becomes parole, the particular selection from and combination of these signs by the individual enunciator. The ‘I’, then, instead of being merely a grammatical category becomes both signified and referent through its use in an utterance. More analytically, its specificity lies in two attributes: (a)

(b)

In its deictic characteristic, which makes its referent wholly dependent upon its context of enunciation. In the words of Benveniste (1966), ‘I is the individual who utters the particular instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I’ (Benveniste, 1966: 252). In its self-referential characteristic or rather, to be more accurate, in its potential to be both the subject of the utterance and the subject of the enunciation. This, however, should not overshadow the fact – and Benveniste duly points this out – that the ‘I’ as subject of both the utterance and the enunciation can never actually coincide insofar as the utterance represents one instance of discourse carrying within it the indices of its particular context of enunciation: the referred ‘I’ cannot be merged with the referring ‘I’ because it constitutes the latter’s object of discourse. In other terms, the ‘I’ of the utterance is what is talked about by the enunciating ‘I’, creating thereby an inevitable distance between the two. It is in this sense also that, according to Benveniste, the second person pronoun ‘you’ is in a similar situation due to its participation in the act of enunciation, as opposed to ‘s/he’ – the ‘non-person pronoun’ – which constitutes a unit of the utterance external to the act and context that brought it about.

These semantic-pragmatic characteristics of deferral and selfreferentiality pertaining to the first and second person pronouns are associated with the space-time dimensions implied in all discursive acts. They constitute the disengagement (debrayage, Courtés,





1991: 255–256) that occurs when language is put into discourse and the act of enunciation becomes part of the utterance. Disengagement denotes the negation of the ‘I-here-now’, the ‘creative schism’ (schizie créatrice, Greimas and Courtés, 1977: 79) entailed in the act of discourse production, which ‘throws’ the subject of enunciation out of his material, spatio-temporal existence and into the world of his discourse. This is the phenomenon that Georges Poulet (1969) describes when he says: Whatever I think is part of my mental world. And yet here I am thinking a thought which manifestly belongs to another mental world [...] since every thought must have a subject to think it, this thought which is alien to me and yet in me, must also have a subject which is alien to me [...] Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself (Poulet, 1969: 56). Characteristic of the ‘I’ in witness role is its ability to refer to the properties of ‘I’ as a potential subject of enunciation whose spatiotemporal existence remains undetermined. This way, the witness narrator thematizes his own disengagement: he is someone because his utterance presupposes his existence, and at the same time, he is no one because, although he is affected by the events he describes, he remains outside their spatio-temporal boundaries. The witness narrator is suspended at a space between the enunciation and the utterance, in which he is faced with multiple unrealized potentialities, like an actor without a role. The witness narrator of Either/Or I thematizes his own situation very accurately: What am I good for? For nothing or for anything whatever. It is a rare ability; I wonder if it will be appreciated in life? God knows whether places are found by girls looking for a job as a general servant or, for want of that, as anything whatever (p. 26). The actual process of world creation in witness mode, however, differs according to its degree of distance from the recounted events. In the case of farther distance, the witness mode is formed by focusing on subjective experience and then universalizing it (‘zooming out’ to use a photographic metaphor), so that the experience of the narrator



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may signify the experience of humanity as a whole. In the case of close distance, where the narrator cannot quite detach herself emotionally to see the universal in her experience, the witness mode is formed by focusing on the specificity of subjective experience, assuming neither finitude (as would be the case with actor mode) nor universality. Instances of close-distance witness narration do not occur in Phenomenology, as the world constructed there involves the human subject, and any manifestations of an individual consciousness exist as examples of the phenomenon of human consciousness. The ‘I’ in this narrative world designates one particular agent only in cases of actor role. However, the other extreme has a very strong presence in the text. If the human subject cannot perceive, or know, outside a particular field of existence, then neither can the narrator present his information on perception and on knowledge without acknowledging he is himself a perceiving and knowing subject. The referent of the personal pronouns (I, me) is the perceiving human subject of which the narrator presents himself as one representative. The ‘universal I’ establishes a link of identification between the narrator or speaker and audience by underlining that they both qualify as potential actantial Subjects: if I can perceive and act through my capacity to be an I, then so can you in your capacity to be an I. It casts subjectivity in objective terms, or it could be said, it objectivizes subjectivity, thereby rendering the knowledge presented valid for both the narrator and his audience. This technique of the subjective seen in objective terms is also present in the many occasions in Phenomenology when the observer narrator describes a proposition made by psychology and then witnesses the effects of this proposition on human life with himself as representative. Consider the following example: Modern psychology has shown clearly that the spectator does not look in himself and in his intimate experience for the meaning of the gestures to which he is a witness. In a gesture of anger or threat, I do not need, in order to understand it, to remember the feelings I experienced when I myself performed the same gestures (p. 215). The first sentence presented in observer mode designates the observed object, the human subject, with the lexemes /spectator/ and /witness/.





This semantic choice shows that the narrator takes the point of view of psychology and, therefore, the narrator sees the human subject from its viewpoint. Given that according to the epistemic aspect of Phenomenology, knowledge and human existence are inseparable, the observation of psychology has to be legitimized by making its relevance to a human subject explicit. The universal ‘I’ serves the dual purpose of allowing the narrator to create a human subject of enunciation without totally surrendering his observer’s distance. Finally, numerous embedded sequences exist in Phenomenology in which the narrator participates in actor mode. These constitute metanarratives serving to decode the information presented in the main narrative by lowering the level of abstraction of the signs. Their links with the thematic narrative (the world of ideas) are of an analogic nature and they function by de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing the epistemic aspect in order to show its inherent, that is, unchanging elements and thereby to reduce noise and communicate the message more clearly: I am thinking of the Cartesian cogito, I want to end this book, I feel the freshness of the paper under my hand, I perceive the trees of the avenue through the window. My life jumps at each moment into transcendental things; it passes entirely on the outside. The cogito is either this thought that was formed three centuries ago in Descartes’ mind, or the meaning of the texts that he left us, or finally an eternal truth that transpires through them. In any case, it is a cultural being towards which my thought inclines rather than embraces it, as, in a familiar setting, my body directs itself and walks among objects without my having to deliberately represent them. This book begun is not a certain collection of ideas; it constitutes for me an open situation of which I would not know to give the complex formula, and with which I struggle blindly until, as if by miracle, thoughts and words organize themselves. By the same token, the sensory beings that surround me, the paper under my hand, the trees under my eyes, do not give away their secret; my consciousness escapes and becomes unaware of itself in them. This is the initial situation that realism tries to account for by asserting the effective transcendence and the existence within oneself of the world and of ideas (p. 423).



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The utterance, presented mostly in actor role (the last sentence changing to observer), describes the process of enunciation that brought it about. Nevertheless, given that the world of the text is one where the agent creates his act as much as the acts create the agent and where the dichotomy between object and subject is refuted, the distinction between the process of enunciation and the uttered product is also put into question. What is described as the situation in which enunciation takes place, therefore, parallels the message constructed in this situation. Thus, what the narrator does in this sequence reflects the way the human subject perceives according to the world of the text. The paratactic dimension of the sequence, manifest in the verbs /think/, /want/, /feel/, /perceive/, is reflexive of the paratactic dimension of the whole narrative where the subject acts in the world by thinking, intending, feeling and perceiving. Moreover, the signs functioning in the onomastic dimension, the agents, are also representative of the objects which are constructed in different instances in the text: Descartes, cogito, sensory beings are metonymic signs of philosophy and the objects with which it deals. Hence, the narrator acts in the world which his own discourse has created and it is significant that this extract introduces the last part of the text, the segment in which the subject acts in a phenomenological existence, equipped with the knowledge he has gained in the previous stages of himself as consciousness and as being in the world. Transcendence is refuted by pointing out that it presupposes a living being’s experience for its existence. The image of a transcendental world or sphere is constructed by someone at a particular time and space; therefore, it does not describe anything – it must itself be described. The actor role constructs a narrative sequence in which the narrator acts out thinking, and involves the objects of his environment in this act. Subsequently, the function of the observer role in the last sentence is to observe an action performed in a specific setting. A comparison of observer with witness roles also brings interesting results as regards the construction of the epistemic aspect. Observer narration has a more physical aspect than witness narration, since it can be traced in signs indicating the spatial and temporal position of the observer. In fictional narrative, the camera-like narration associated with Hemingway’s novels and that of some nouveau roman writers would constitute examples where knowledge is constructed from





the viewpoint of an impartial spectator. In addition, indices of the audience, such as questions, show a change in the speaker’s position with regard to the knowledge offered. Phenomenology provides several examples where the narrator assumes the position of the narrator and asks questions on the information he has presented or disagrees with a possible interpretation of events. In these cases, he leaves his place on the stage, so to speak, in order to take a seat among the audience and, from there, observe the events of the drama. A juxtaposition of observer and witness roles may also function strategically in the formation of the epistemic aspect. In Either/Or, for instance, the favoured witness mode describes events or objects observed from a particular spatio-temporal position but interspersed with the narrator’s comments from another position; narratorial intervention is constantly taking place and the narrated events constitute multiple reflexive segments of the enunciation. What the narrator recounts bounces back to him, so to speak, and reflects his own situation (a technique involving an incomplete process of disengagement, a topic which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6). Information presented from the perspective of a spectator is subordinated to, or framed by, the pre-established configuration of the world of the uttered enunciation, which means that the narrator observes particular settings or events without yielding his spatio-temporal or evaluative position. This technique gives rise to what may be called a false observation – the narrator observes without actually being there – and the participation does not succeed in leaving witness mode. This is what occurs, for example, in the following extract: Matting woven of a special kind of willow covers the floor; in front of the sofa stands a small tea table with a lamp upon it; the mate to the one there at home. Everything is the same, only more sumptuous. This change I think I can permit myself to make in the room. In the large room there is a piano, a very plain one, but it brings to mind the piano at the Jansens. It is open. On the music holder, the little Swedish melody lies open. The door to the hall is slightly ajar. She comes in through the door in the back [...] Then her eyes simultaneously take in the private room and the piano; recollection is aroused in her soul, and at that moment Johan opens the door. – The illusion is perfect (p. 443, my emphasis).



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The italicized segments in this extract, in which the narrator is comparing two rooms that he plans to use in his seduction, shift the narration from observer to witness, since the setting observed at the level of the utterance is seen with regard to its relevance for the context of the enunciation. The noetic dimension is mapped onto the paratactic, and restricts the uttered events to the circumstances and boundaries of the enunciation. The narrator is giving directions on how the observed object should look; spontaneity of perception yields to the control of interpretation. In addition, the fact that the narrator is comparing two objects that are not simultaneously present in his vision shows that his observation is actually false: it is more a case of remembering than seeing. He is therefore transposing one image, the ‘remembered room’, onto another, the ‘seen room’. These factors arising from the juxtaposition of observer and witness narration in Either/Or, in the above extract as well as in the narrative as a whole, help to illuminate two aspects of its world construction, which in turn, clarify the epistemic aspect. One is that, although he does present some information as observer, the narrator does not surrender his witness mode of participation, which means that the perceived object is repeatedly interpreted and evaluated. To put it differently, he is constantly putting himself in a position from where he can observe his own observation and attribute to it a role in his narrator’s story (as opposed to the narrated story which becomes a reflection of the narrator’s situation). As will be seen in Chapter 6, this aspect of world construction limits considerably the freedom that the narrator is seeking in his quest. The other aspect concerns the temporal dimension. Given that witness mode favours the enunciation and is therefore outside the time of the narrated events, the control of these events by the context of enunciation creates a text in which the time of the enunciation permeates the temporal structure of the whole story. As a result, an effect of static movement is produced. The narrator is stuck in one place in time but he nevertheless knows what will happen in the future and is living in what happened in the past. Novelty and the past are permanently witnessed by the narrator in his atemporal present leading to textual themes and signs of recollection and repetition. As opposed to actor mode, which sees the narrated events from another point within the utterance, witness role is associated with





the act of enunciation since it signifies the ideological position of the speaker; events are seen through a particular mental frame or ‘space’ (Fauconnier, 1984) that is not specific to an agent in the story but forms part of the creating and organizing power of the narrator. Therefore, witness role involves more the knower’s world than the world of the known and is associated with the noetic dimension. The predominance of this type of narration in a text has significant consequences for the epistemic aspect because it is usually a sign of strong narratorial control which subordinates all possible interpretations, pertaining to different actors’ worlds, to one source of evaluation. It is the kind of narration used, for example, when a narrator describes an event as surprising, interesting or strange. It is the kind of narration used by the narrator of Phenomenology when he describes Hume’s approach to the experience of phenomena as a mutilation and a dissociation of this experience (p. 255), and it is by means of this narrator role that Hume is configured as a villain in the story of Phenomenology, that is, as an agent aiming to prevent the hero from achieving his aim by inducing forms of physical deformity (the lexemes /mutilate/ and /dissociate/ being characteristically metaphoric and significantly reminiscent of Propp’s functions of the Villain). Like witness mode, judge mode shows a certain degree of involvement in the utterance. Unlike witness mode, however, the judgenarrator maintains an evaluative distance from the narrated information, a distance that allows the judge-narrator to criticize, or in some way, pass an authoritative judgment on the information. The judge-narrator does not express an emotive identification with the phenomena or events that make up his/her utterance, but at the same time, does not describe these objectively, as would an observernarrator. Instead, s/he defines the significance of these phenomena and events, and may construct knowledge in the didactic imperative mood. Consider this extract from Either/Or II: [...] you practice the art of being mysterious to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who cared to guess your riddle – what joy would you have in it then? But above all for your own sake, for the sake of your salvation [...] halt this wild flight, this passion for annihilation that rages within you, for that is what you want: you want to annihilate everything; you want to satisfy the hunger of your doubt by consuming existence (p. 160).



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Three aspects characteristic of judge mode are prominent here: the use of the second personal pronoun, ‘you’, which situates narrator and narratee at opposite sides of the same setting, the imperative mood through which the narrator dictates actions (‘halt this ...’), and, the most significant aspect of all, the attribution of mentalemotive states to another agent (‘for that is what you want ... you want ... you want’). The strong noetic focus of the judge narrator enables him to construct the identity and motivation of other agents within his utterance, without needing to share the assigned traits. The judge narrator enforces subjectivity on the other of the communicative interaction, without acknowledging his/her own. As opposed to the witness narrator, who either talks about him/herself as an experiencing being or identifies with the universal ‘I’ in that the narrator’s experience could be everyone’s, judge narrators place others at a near distance from where they can comment on, criticize (or admire) and judge perceived qualities. As can be imagined, narrative worlds that contain all types of narration seem to be more dialogic (Bakhtin, 1973, 1981) than those where only one type is present. The fact that different perspectives are taken in the creation of knowledge demonstrates flow or movement leading to epistemic aspects for which knowledge is flexible and open ended: the notions of certainty and definite truth prevalent in some epistemic aspects are, in such cases, mitigated and the possibility of multiple contrasting worlds comes to the fore. In the world of Phenomenology, for example, the narrator has an actantial position through his identification with the human being as an actantial Subject: when the Subject is said to do something or to possess certain capacities, it is the narrator himself who also carries out the same actions and shares the same capacities. As such he projects himself into his utterance and functions as an element within it. At the same time, however, he is also a detached source of discourse whose narrating act creates agents, actions and an evaluation of performance. This ability of the narrator, as creator of knowledge, to identify with an element of his created world and thus to renounce authorial power and ‘step down’ from his enunciating position into the world of the utterance, emerges in the use of both actor and witness roles, and constructs an epistemic aspect in which knowledge needs to be ratified through its adoption by a specific agent acting in a specific way.





One could parallel the changes in narrator’s mode with the other voices, quoted or reported, used in the utterance. The distribution of different enunciators within the utterance can be seen not only to follow similar lines in all narrative configurations, regardless of text type or level of semantic abstraction, but also to play a strategically instrumental role in the construction of the epistemic aspect. For example, what Genette (1972) called the ‘story of words’ (récit de paroles), the part of narrative discourse which is constructed as someone’s utterance, can easily complement the strategic use of narrator roles. Consider the following extract from Phenomenology that describes the acts and words of a subject under the influence of a drug: [...] he knocks on the window seal and “here is magic” he says: the trees become more green [...] Everything occurs as if one witnessed “the boundaries between senses established in the course of evolution fall” (p. 264). In this sequence the narrator describes some ways in which an object appears to a subject by involving more than one sense, even if the inherent properties of the object are considered to activate one sense only – a phenomenon which he considers indicative of the intercommunication of the senses and of the fundamental integration and cooperation of the actantial Subject’s Helpers in attaining the goal of perception. In order to communicate this message, the narrator uses both his ‘narrative of events’ (Genette’s récit d’événements), and an incorporation of other speakers. The segment then continues with the description of another event of a similar nature, this time with the narrator presenting it in his own words, and finally, with the direct words of another speaker (the writers Mayer-Gross and Stein, named in a footnote), which are reported as meta-discursive commentary on such events. The last sentence, which is constructed in the noetic dimension, is composed thematically while the previous two are figural mini meta-narratives, representing the characteristic strategy of Phenomenology to provide analogic links between its conceptual world and the world of experiential reality. The reported discourse has the effect of taking the enunciation back to the time the event took place, an effect legitimizing the epistemic aspect of the book, which supports that knowledge is dependent on immediate perception of the



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external world: one has to ‘be there’ to perceive and consequently to know, and the use of reported discourse on this occasion represents this presence. The reported discourse, therefore, cuts across the thematic-figural distinction (as well as the implied distinction between main and embedded narrative) and is shown to be a technique of narration uninfluenced by the figuration (one could say ‘fictionalization’) or thematization of the epistemic aspect. As a final point, I suggest that the use of abstract speakers, that is, unidentified representatives of a different discourse than that of the narrator, could be seen as an instance of witness narration. These abstract speakers offer knowledge that is attributed by the narrator to other sources of enunciation, but they are not named or specified and therefore do not attain the status of speakers. They indicate the status and value of generally accepted, universal and unquestioned knowledge (or what the narrator presents as such): the personal speech of they or one (which would include some uses of the passive voice in English) – what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘impersonal individuations’ and ‘preindividual singularities’ (Deleuze, 1968: 355). This appropriation or owning of the world of abstract speakers may carry the function of legitimation (I say because they say – the presuppositions of the other’s knowledge are accepted), or conversely, that of opposition (they say but I say – presuppositions of the other’s knowledge are rejected). In the first case, the narrator may be objectifying her knowledge by taking it beyond the boundaries of subjective or personal experience and presenting it either as general, i.e., commonly accepted knowledge or as the knowledge of a voice whose authority is not, or should not be questioned. In this case, objective knowledge is favoured at the expense of knowledge that is explicitly linked with its enunciating source. Legitimation of the knowledge of an abstract speaker is very rare in Phenomenology. This is consistent with the epistemic aspect of the text for which knowledge emerges in the individual consciousness after objects have been perceived by the senses. The corporeal existence of the perceiving subject in a particular spatio-temporal position is, therefore, a prerequisite for the authentication of a particular piece of knowledge. Objective knowledge existing independent of the meaning given to it by a subject in accordance with the requirements of a specific narrative sequence in his/her life is not recognized by the





epistemic aspect of Phenomenology and so, the technique of presenting legitimate, universal knowledge emanating from an abstract source is not favoured. It should be noted, however, that the aspirations of the text to remain within the bounds of personal knowledge determined by the links between subjective existence and an objective world often fall short due to the nature of the linguistic signs that the narrator is forced to use and also, due to the narrative organization needed for these signs to construct an epistemically coherent world. This will be developed in more detail in the next chapter. The second manifestation of the abstract speaker distinguished above is much more common in Phenomenology. Through this technique, the narrator may be subjectifying his knowledge by emphasizing personal meaning as a source of authentication or may be re-organizing an accepted paradigm by introducing a new textual dimension (noetic, paratactic or onomastic) to the existing organization of information. In such instances, subjective knowledge whose source is specified is favoured. As an example of this, consider the end of the section on the body, where the narrator points out: It has always been noted that movement and speech transformed the body, but it was generally accepted that that they developed or manifested another force, thought or soul. It was not recognized that, in order to express them, the body must, in the final analysis, become the thought or intention that it signifies. It is the body that shows, the body that speaks; this is what we have learned in this chapter (p. 230, my emphasis). Here the narrator’s knowledge is contrasted with a previously accepted order of things based on the axiom that the mind is distinct from the body. This order is what existed in general, uttered by unidentified speakers. The shift from the abstract to the particular, from they to we, is accompanied by a change in time and truth, a transition from a past state of untrue knowledge to the learning of true knowledge in the present. Witness narrators, who favour subjective legitimization of information, sometimes paradoxically accept the knowledge of abstract speakers, when, in fact, it is clearly unacceptable by the epistemic aspect of such narrators. The inclusion of such universally valid knowledge in narrative configurations whose epistemic aspect



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supports knowledge based on personal aesthetic experience often produces an ironic effect, highlighting the impertinence or even absurdity of a truth that is irrelevant to the particular circumstances. This technique is common in Either/Or and can be seen, for example, in the beginning of ‘The Unhappiest One’: As is well known, there is said to be a grave somewhere in England that is distinguished not by a magnificent monument or a mournful setting but by a short inscription – “The Unhappiest One.” It is said that the grave was opened, but no trace of a corpse was found (p. 219, my emphasis). In this case, the knowledge of the unidentified speaker is accepted and it is against this background that the narrator creates his story. A closer look, however, reveals a curious picture. By introducing the story, these opening words also bring into play a prominent element of the epistemic aspect of the text as a whole – negativity. The location where events unfold is a grave, death as non-life inhabited by ‘the unhappiest one’, an unnamed someone qualified by a negative state, non-happiness. This someone, the best representative of his kind, since no one is unhappier, is further presented as not existing; he has no body, no corporeal presence and remains a signifier without a signified, a word that denotes nothing. Thus, the discourse of ‘they’ tells about someone somewhere with no life, no happiness and no existence. Knowledge offered by an impersonal source not only indicates nothing about its emitter, who cannot own this knowledge because of his undefined personal existence, but also indicates nothing about its content, which remains indeterminate, shapeless and vague. It is a non-knowledge about nothing and it acts as a warning of what happens if a knowing subject sees his/her existence from the point of view of an undefined other. Given that this other does not exist as a being with a personal life, the knower, by following the dictates of a Sender without identity, also sacrifices her own personal existence and the right to give meaning to the knowledge that enters this existence. It is against this background knowledge that the remainder of the story unfolds, attempting to attach a signified and a referent to the sign of its title by describing the quest for the identity of the unhappiest one.





This attitude of the narrator to narrate his story through the implied discourse of everybody (and, by extension, its correlative, nobody) determines to a large extent the development of events and the knowledge constructed. However, this knowledge has a dysphoric aspect, the establishment of the identity of the unhappiest one, and also the quest is unsuccessful as the unhappiest one cannot be determined. This implies that the objectification of mental states for purposes of quantification and classification remains elusive due to the subjective nature of these states. Unhappiness assumes a meaning only as part of an agent’s story and is dependent on the structures of the noetic and onomastic dimensions of that particular story – there are no objective criteria that determine happiness. Because of these factors, the witness narration framing the story of ‘The Unhappiest One’ produces the ironic effect mentioned above: it puts the narrator in a no-win situation, since the knowledge he presupposes as true prevents him from fulfilling his quest. For the context of this study, this is a significant point since it shows that texts can provide indications on their process of knowledge construction, even on an ironic level. In the final analysis, whether what was known is true or false, positive or negative, cannot be known before the event, but depends on what finally happens.



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The Meaning in Existence: Freedom through Action in Merleau-Ponty’s World

There is nowhere a truth that would teach me who I have to be – a truth I would not understand if I had not already become who I have to be. —Vincent Descombes

Overview This chapter analyses Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Phenomenology, 1945) as a narrative. I aim to discern the relations and meanings that emerge from the text when it is seen as a story with an actantial positioning of agents and a set of transformational stages. I trace two intersecting levels in the book. The first involves the narrative trajectory of the actantial Subject, which in this case is the human being in search of knowledge about the process of perceiving and understanding. It encompasses the ways textual signs are onomastically constructed in order to attain agenthood and the ability to perform their roles, and the paratactic development of the narrative, that is, the way the signs are combined and act in the transformational sequences. The second level involves the discursive strategies of the narrator to construct his narrative by taking into account both the intertextual sphere, the philosophical systems and expectations present in the context of production, and the intratextual demands, the ways in which the narrator engages with agents and events in the narrative in order to produce new knowledge within this context. 95



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The world of Phenomenology consists of a main narrative whose paratactic continuity lies in a number of co-ordinated and subordinated sequences in which the Human Being (as actantial Subject) undertakes the various stages of transformation towards the fulfillment of her quest, which is an understanding of the process of knowing. This main narrative is interspersed with numerous embedded narrative sequences which exemplify or decode, through the establishment of metaphoric and indexical links between a world of concepts and a world of perceptible experience, the different manifestations of the epistemic aspect. The main theme running through the epistemic aspect of Phenomenology configures knowledge in association with meaning (i.e., there is no meaningless knowledge), and defines both as having their origins in the individual Human Subject’s perceptive faculties. An attempt at a definition of knowledge and the cognitive process, therefore, may be reached only through an understanding of human existence in the world and of aesthetic experience. In light of the implications of this epistemic theme, the narrator is confronted with a double quest: first, he aims to create a world which will convey knowledge and establish an interactive contact with an audience – the narrative contract; second, in the configuration of the narrative world, he is himself in search of this knowledge since he must define his own identity as human in order to present it. For Phenomenology, knowledge about the acquisition of knowledge (philosophy) is impossible without a human knowing subject: the narrator and the hero in search for knowledge must coincide. It is the discursive ramifications of this double quest that the text dramatizes. The Actors The principal agents of the story include the human subject, the perceived object, perception, phenomenon, consciousness and existence. Hence, Phenomenology is a thematic narrative and its signs, due to their level of abstraction, have either a wide range of referents, such as human subject, whose function can be taken by any actor who fulfills the onomastic requirements, or a conceptual representation, such as perception, which is a thematic sign denoting an abstract process. Throughout this chapter, italicized words denote concepts that function as agents in the world of Phenomenology.



The narrative configuration

In the world of Phenomenology, meaning does not designate what happens but what is. It is found by the subject in a particular perceiving sequence. A fundamental theme of the epistemic aspect is that the way meaning is created, or the causes of its existence, remains ambiguous or enigmatic: it is not configured in the quest for knowledge because it is indeterminate; it cannot be given a role in the configuration, but forms part of the unknown and unknowable, of what exists prior to the demarcation that begins the narrative and what must remain outside the limits of the textual world. This is of great importance for the actantial model that is derived from the epistemic organization of the narrative. Since meaning can only be known as it emerges in particular instances, it is always created by the subject anew and cannot be the effect of an unchanging anterior situation. The position of Sender is occupied by a question mark and causality is absent. A source of knowledge situated externally to the subject or of which the subject is not aware (manifest in such agents as the genetic code, the subconscious or God in other words) is not recognized in Phenomenology. In addition to meaning, perception and object, the agent who is re-defined and re-configured is, of course, the human subject (who is also the actantial Subject). The subject is defined onomastically as comprising a consciousness and a body and paratactically as acting in various fields of existence that determine his being-in-the world, or the different ways he is configured in the multiple narrative stages which make up his story. As an attribute of the subject, consciousness is the agent that transforms the subject into a perceiver and endows him with the power to know. Given the aesthetic nature of knowledge in this world, knowing becomes an obligatory or unavoidable process: the subject knows by existing and perceiving. Hence, the acts of the consciousness merge the three modalities /ability/, /obligation/ and /volition/. Through the functions of his consciousness, the subject becomes equipped with the inseparable forces of ability, will and necessity to know. The Opponents In order to describe the stages and transformations of the quest, the narrator of Phenomenology describes two alternative worlds created by other discursive sources and revolving around the same epistemic theme; that is, two worlds which propose another configuration and a different development of the same narrative quest leading from a state



The Meaning in Existence 97


of non-knowledge to a state of knowledge. These are the worlds of empiricism and the world of intellectualism with which the narrator enters a dialogic process which assists him to create his own phenomenological world as a reform of the other two. Consequently, they are actantially configured as Opponents in the narrative, obstacles that need to be overcome for ‘true’ knowledge to be discovered. Empiricism and intellectualism are presented as existing prior to the narrator’s modifications: they are already there when the narrator begins his story, and their figural representatives (writers who espouse the tenets of those worlds) are integrated into the narrator’s discourse as speaking sources. Furthermore, empiricism and intellectualism are sub-divided into the less abstract agents, science, philosophy and psychology, whose activities are described in the narrator’s discourse. The narrative configurations that can be derived from the worlds of empiricism and intellectualism may be outlined as follows. All worlds include the perceived object, the human subject, perception and meaning in actantial roles but the way these are positioned with regard to each other and with regard to the development of events differs in each case. These agents are re-defined and re-shuffled, forming other combinations that give them different functions and situate them in different stages. Onomastically, empiricism constructs the object as consisting of atoms and, therefore, as having inherent qualities capable of being perceived by the, also inherent, faculties of the subject. Hence, the subject perceives the properties carried by the object, which activate the senses of the perceiver. Meaning is not part of the constitution of the object but the result of two sequences. In one, human mental capacity creates analogic links among different objects by juxtaposing them in space; this sequence is helped by the agent association. In the other, human mental capacity recognizes properties of perceived objects by placing them in past situations of the subject’s life and thus juxtaposing them in time; this sequence is helped by the agent memory. Therefore, meaning is given to the object by the perceiving individual who interprets it through association with other elements of which she is aware and by comparing it with other objects stored in her memory. Actantially, perception is the Sender of the Subject in a quest for attributing meaning to the perceived object, while memory and association are Helpers of the Subject (methods he has to undertake) in this quest. Temporally, perception is the result of a prior sequence, in which the senses act as Helper of the Subject, and which is independent



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of the sequence leading to the act of interpretation. An important theme in the epistemic aspect of empiricism, therefore, is that the perceiving subject is transformed into an interpreting subject at a subsequent stage of narrative development. In intellectualism, on the other hand, the object cannot be known other than through the individual perceiver’s interpretation, which constructs it. In contrast to both the world of empiricism and of phenomenology, perception is onomastically constructed as a mental process rather than as an aesthetic one. The perceiving subject has the active role in perception, which becomes a subjective process, since she can find in the perceived object only what she has put in it: the object, therefore, is configured as a passive agent. Although the role of the senses is not omitted, it becomes subordinate to the subject’s mental constitution, which acts as causal agent in the act of perception, and is in fact, positioned in the role of instrument. The Subject, sent on a trajectory by the mind, interprets the Object with the assistance of attention and senses, sub-divisions of her main Helper, judgment. This presupposes a distance between subject and object and activates the order of space. Perception merges with interpretation as the result of this narrative sequence, unifying the duality of empiricism. Finally, in the world of phenomenology, the object is onomastically constructed to denote things, actions, relationships or situations, since they are all capable of being perceived. Objects have immanent properties that appear to the perceiving subject’s consciousness, and perception emerges when these properties interact with particular states of consciousness. The narrative sequence in which the consciousness becomes aware of the properties of the object leads to meaning after having transformed the point of contact between perceiver (subject) and perceived (object) into a phenomenon. The role of perception Perception is configured as a Helper of the Subject in his trajectory, and its onomastic attributes are defined as belonging partly to the constitution of the subject and partly to the constitution of the object. As the narrator points out, his world is opposed to those constructed by empiricism and intellectualism: One and the other take as their object of analysis the objective world, which is primary neither according to time nor according





to meaning; one and the other are incapable of expressing the particular way in which perceptive consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance with respect to perception instead of attaching themselves to it. What was missing from empiricism was the internal connection of the object and of the act that triggers it. What is missing from intellectualism is the contingency of occasions to think. In the first case, consciousness is too poor, and in the second too rich for a phenomenon to solicit it. Empiricism does not see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it; and intellectualism does not see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, otherwise, again, we would not be looking for it (pp. 34–36). In the world of Phenomenology, quality is no longer situated in the object, as is the case of empiricism, nor in the subject’s mind, as happens in intellectualism, but in a narrative sequence in which the subject grasps properties inherent to the object with the help of perception and his senses, which make these properties appear to the consciousness and meaning to emerge. Both subject and object are active agents, since the former needs to activate his consciousness (or to be there, which is a more accurate expression given that perception is not configured as voluntary), and the latter emits its essence in order to solicit a response (once again involuntarily). In addition, in Phenomenology, all actions, both dynamic and static, are either directed towards an object or are themselves objects of perception of the agent. An act, therefore, has no existence in isolation: its meaning emerges for an individual acting and perceiving subject through his relations with the other elements in the situation or circumstances in which perception takes place. In order to support the definition of the act of perception, the narrator onomastically re-defines its main agents and introduces some others needed to fill the roles which emerge from this re-ordering, and which enable the paratactic development of events. Thus, the perceived object is described no longer merely as an agglomerate of atoms or as a mental construct, but as a phenomenon. It appears to the subject during the course of her quest (or life) and is appropriated by her as it is, grasped in its immediacy, and used to populate her consciousness, which in turn, will help her on her way to the fulfillment of her existence. An important theme in the epistemic aspect of the



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narrative is precisely that an object, prior to its transformation into a phenomenon in the sequence of perception, cannot be known. Consequently, any empirical proof of its existence is meaningless and irrelevant to the knowing process. All objects, thus, are Helpers of the subject in the world of Phenomenology. Even if attributes of an object are proven false in a subsequent stage, or their meaning changes or is abandoned because it fails to satisfy the requirements of the narrative sequence, the object has fulfilled its function of revealing to the subject certain meaningful possibilities for action and has, in fact, helped the Subject in the quest towards understanding his existence, or being-in-the-world. As a result, what appears is real in the world of Phenomenology and /seeming-to-be/ and /being/ are equivalent, and not opposing categories. Inasmuch as consciousness is real, what appears to consciousness assumes a reality as well. As the narrator says for the acts of love and will: Love and will are internal operations; they forge their objects, and this includes that, by doing this, they can turn away from the real, and so deceive us. But it seems impossible that they would deceive us in themselves: from the moment that I experience love, joy, sorrow, it is true that I love, that I am happy or sad, even if the object does not in fact have for others or for myself at another time, the value that I confer on it at the moment. Appearance is reality for me; the being of consciousness is to appear (p. 432). In this case, the fact that the (immanent) being of the object does not coincide with its being as it appears to the subject’s consciousness does not invalidate the reality or value of the latter. Since the Subject’s quest is to understand her existence in the world, and since understanding comes from action (whether dynamic or static), any action, regardless of the reality of its object, will lead to an understanding. Thus, the epistemic aspect of Phenomenology proposes that a qualifying test does not need to bring a positive result in order to be considered successful and to demarcate the turning point of one transformational stage to another. The fact that the subject is placed in a position of aiming and acting motivates narrative development and the quest for knowledge. One final difference in the way perception is configured in the worlds of empiricism, of intellectualism and in the world of the





narrator is that for the first two it is meaningless, or impossible in the case of intellectualism, without an intermediate process of interpretation or analysis. These worlds, therefore, include a sequence in which the subject acts on the perceived object in order to give it meaning. In the world of Phenomenology, however, this sequence is omitted because meaning does not designate the result of a process independent of or simultaneous with the act of perception, but qualities of the object and of the subject’s consciousness. The object has an immanent meaning that appears to the subject and is merged with the meaning given to it by consciousness; the final result of this action is the meaning of the object for a particular subject in one field of existence.

The story The story of Phenomenology involves a number of episodes recounting the acts of agents who are onomastically constructed as incomplete or defective. It provides descriptions of acts of perception and of reasoning of mentally ill people, using psychology as one of the main sources of legitimation. The choice of incomplete agents, in fact, functions strategically, and aims to dissociate the world of the narrator from those of empiricism and of intellectualism. Given that in the narrator’s world there is as much reality in the external world as in the subjective perception by the consciousness of this world, and that meaning appears in the meeting point of subjective and objective realities, a subject whose mental capacities are impaired cannot grasp the essence of the objects he perceives or situations he is put in and is actually wrong in his assessment and reaction. In this way, intellectualism, which proposes that reality is essentially subjective and that it depends on the subject to give meaning to his surroundings, is contradicted. The subject, according to the narrator of Phenomenology, cannot comprehend what, in fact, is already there before any act of interpretation takes place, if the functions of his brain are defective. Similarly, the world of empiricism is negated because, although the mentally ill subject cannot perceive the objective properties of the external world, his actions and reactions indicate an intentionality and a power towards meaning which emanate from the consciousness: the modality of /volition/ is there despite the concurrent presence of the modality /non-ability/. As will be discussed more in the next section, this is a fundamental message in Phenomenology, and it is



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towards the communication of this message that mental disease, as actantially functional, and psychological explanation, as narratorial strategy, assume their particular roles in the narrative configuration. Moreover, since the world of Phenomenology attributes reality both to the external object and to the consciousness, it needs to deal with questions of non-coincidence of these two sources. In other words, if the realities of object and subject do not causally determine each other, how are links of correspondence formed between them? This issue is acknowledged by dividing the subject’s behaviour into different manners of being-in-the-world (manières d’être au monde), and his sphere of action, his existence, into a number of fields (champs), which have an inherent aspect, or essence, independent of their relations with the subject. For example, there is an inherent meaning in the field of sexuality which affects the meaning given to it in particular instances and by specific agents, and the ways individual subjects act within this field. Therefore, the different situations in which the subject is put, and the objects with which he is confronted activate aspects of consciousness and manners of being capable of accommodating the essence of the particular situation. This is why illusion is formed when the subject grasps only certain aspects of the object and only certain manners of being in the world become involved in the process of perception. To take one example from the field of relations with the other, the narrator says that there are cases when the subject believes he loves someone but it is revealed to him that this love was false because it satisfied only some aspects of his being and that only some qualities of the beloved were involved: Then, one will say, either I did not know and in this case it is not a matter of illusory love, it is a matter of true love that ends – or else, I knew, and in this case there had never been any love, even ‘false’. It is, however, neither one nor the other. It cannot be said that this love, while it existed, had been indistinguishable from true love and that it became ‘false love’ when I denounced it … True love conjures all the resources of the subject and involves him as a whole; false love concerns only one of his personae, ‘the forty year old man’, if it is a case of a late love, ‘the traveler’ if it is a case of an exotic love, ‘the widower’, if the false love is carried by a memory, ‘the child’, if it is carried by the memory of the




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The truth of the object, in this case, does not coincide with the truth of the consciousness to which this object is revealed. Nevertheless, the intrinsic reality of the feeling of love in both ‘true’ and ‘false’ instances is not questioned. ‘False’ love is distinguished with a knowledge of oneself that comes precisely when manners of existence that were not at first involved come to the fore and induce disillusionment to emerge. Without the experience of falsity, truth can have no meaning.

The narrative trajectory Phenomenology is divided into three main narrative stages. The first stage sets the initial situation and introduces the agent perception, delimiting its role in the narrative action. Here, the narrator describes and ‘directs’ the main actors: the human subject, perception, the perceived object, phenomenon and consciousness. The second stage focuses on the body, which is the physical manifestation of the subject and the meeting place of consciousness and objects. Here the subject learns how life, meaning and knowledge come to being through the possibilities engendered by the fact that she has a body. The third stage takes the subject, equipped with the knowledge of perception and the body, into the world. Here the subject learns how it is possible to interact with things and others, and what it means to be free. In the narrative trajectory, two main levels may be distinguished which intersect the narrative stages and represent the two spheres of action of the subject as well as the two only methods of attaining knowledge. One level comprises a series of sequences where the subject acts on objects, remembering that an object is defined both as definite and as abstract, such as a relationship or a situation; in other words, as what is perceived. The other level consists of sequences where the subject acts in the world, that is, where her actions involve interrelations and communicative links between herself and other humans. These two levels are mediated by the body, in that by acting on her body (and this, of course, includes static actions such as thinking, perceiving, understanding, feeling, etc.), the Subject transforms it into an actantial Helper which she may appeal to for help in acting in the world.



mother. True love ends when I change, or the beloved has changed; false love reveals itself when I return to myself (p. 434).


The initial situation of the narrative involves a lack in the state of knowledge that exists when the story begins. This lack takes the form of a misleading or inadequate attitude on the part of empiricism and of intellectualism in dealing with the issue of perception and its relations with the perceiving subject. The reason given by the narrator for this lack is the absence of the concept of phenomenon in psychology and the story of Phenomenology aims to redress this. As will be seen, the agent phenomenon has a ‘purifying’ function, since it becomes the Subject’s main Helper (as a tool of perception) in his trajectory and the main ingredient of the true knowledge. Thus, the initial situation of the narrative is activated by a lack brought about by a prior non-voluntary act of deception. The rest of the narrative is constructed around correcting this condition, and the method used consists of onomastically redefining already existing agents (for example, perception, meaning, object, etc.), paratactically juxtaposing them in a new way, and noetically creating a new configuration in which these agents exist and act. By setting the situation, introducing the agents and establishing their configurational position, the first stage constitutes a self-reflexive segment of the utterance, a ‘mirror’ reflecting the rest of the narrative, and the subsequent stages unfold as an exemplification of the epistemic aspect formed in the introduction. Furthermore, the selfreflexivity of the preparatory section is also manifest in its sequential organization, which parallels that of the narrative as a whole. The developmental stages begin with the action of the subject with his consciousness and body and proceed with transformations extending the scope to include the actions of the subject in the world. The progress is from the order of the internal to the order of the external, representing the main epistemic theme of Phenomenology, which emanates from the primacy of the seeking self. The first stage begins with the description of the agent sensation, which according to the old system of knowledge is almost synonymous with perception. For the narrator, this apparent clarity of the concept is deceptive because by focusing on the innate faculties of the subject (the senses of touch, hearing, etc.), it fails to take into account the role of the perceived object. The introduction of the object makes sensation one of the qualities of perception rather than its equivalent. It also introduces the concepts of space and time, since



Stage one: Perception


it is no longer a case of the subject acting on his own, in his consciousness, but of the subject acting with an object he is in direct contact on a particular occasion and at a particular time. This first correction of a traditional error comes by creating a situation which recurs repeatedly in the narrative configuration: existence does not designate a definite object (as the narrator points out, a person’s birth and death cannot be known by him and so his whole existence can never be perceived from its beginning to its end), but is an abstract term denoting a series of contexts in which the subject acts and which are governed by the requirements of their spatio-temporal circumstances and the relations they entail. Perception takes place in a horizon (a commonly used expression in Phenomenology indicating spatial dimension) and the meaning of the phenomena it gives rise to is connected with this horizon. This stage continues with a description of actions entailed in association, memory, attention and judgment, all considered by the old system of knowledge as metonymic representations of perception. These introduce another temporal dimension as well as another context than the one in which the subject perceives: memory entails past time; judgment entails tracing universal qualities in the episodic, and therefore extracting it from its temporal frame, while attention brings into play a stage of reflection prior to perception; and association entails the juxtaposition of two temporal contexts in which a certain action is perceived to be carried out. Once again the narrator corrects the deceptive belief that these agents form part of perception by describing cases where perception acts alone and these agents appear at subsequent stages. Therefore, these agents are re-constructed and re-configured to function as instruments of perception leading to knowledge or understanding, rather than qualities of its own onomastic constitution or independent Helpers of the Subject. In all cases, this transformation of the agents that are to act in the subsequent events takes place with the use of phenomenon which functions as a catalyst. Facticity, order and perception are not dissolved or negated but seen as things in themselves, irreducible and unsubordinated to other elements. In an order of exposition similar to that of the preparatory section, the remainder of the narrative stages progress from sequences where the subject acts with objects with which he is in direct contact to sequences where he is positioned in situations involving a more



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complex set of agents and relations and a wider horizon of perception. Hence, the structure of Phenomenology is concentrically constructed with the subject as centre. Any action on the external world is reflected in an action on oneself and vice versa, as any knowledge one has of the world is filtered by a knowledge of oneself in the world. Stage two: The body In the second stage of narrative development, the body, the physical manifestation of the subject and the sign where consciousness and physical reality converge, is constructed as an instrument of the perceiver as well as an object of perception, both for oneself and for others. Given that in the epistemic aspect of Phenomenology existence is divided into situations which manifest two forms of action, being in itself (être en soi) and being for itself (être pour soi), the body assumes a very important strategic role as it enables the subject to participate in both forms of action. It can never be an object like all the others, and the space it occupies is of a different nature than that of other objects because it is the home of the consciousness through which others are understood. However, it is also an object, since it exists in the world and its objectivity allows consciousness to act. As a result, the body is a magical agent, whose abilities are indispensable for the successful completion of the subject’s quest and whose relations with consciousness and with existence in the world are mysterious and outside the domain of scientific explanation: The relations of my decision and of my body in motion are magic relations […]. The senses and the body in general offer the mystery of a whole that, without leaving its presence and its particularity, emits beyond itself significations capable of providing a casing to a whole series of thoughts and experiences (pp. 110, 147). It is also in these mysterious relations that imagination and reality interact, which is why subjects whose body is impaired have no or limited access to its magical abilities. The narrative sequence in the trajectory which is forever out of their reach involves understanding the rules of the situation in which they find themselves and producing signs that indicate their intended course of action. The body is configured through various episodes in which its aspects are thematized. It is first presented as a perceived object,





focusing thus on the relation between acting agent and mediating agent; then the focus moves from the body as actor to the body as an experience, a shift which entails also a change in narrator role from observer (how the body is seen from the outside) to actor (how the subject sees his body) and then to three manifestations of the body as instrument (i.e., the subject acting with the body in order to accomplish certain aims). First, the body may be used to occupy a spatial dimension and, therefore, to create a situation anchored in a particular place and time; second, it may be used for sexual expression; and third, it may be used for linguistic expression. Thus, the concentric stages through which the story of Phenomenology unfolds go from existing in the world, to perceiving the world, then to knowing the world and finally, to (the potential of) narrating the world. Stage three: The world In the next narrative stage, the subject, having acquired his main helper, the body, uses it together with the phenomenon of perception to go into the external world in order to continue his quest for knowledge. Once again, the tests he has to undergo begin with understanding his own existence and identity (consciousness), a task effected by experiencing his ability to sense. The tests then expand to the relations entertained between perceiver and space. It is here that the narrator describes the agent space as the omnipresent mediator of the subject in his dealings with objects, a role that is as much benevolent (since it is necessary for perception) as it is hostile (since it is a symbol of incarnate, finite existence): Space and perception in general mark the heart of the subject with the fact of his birth, the perpetual carrying of his corporeality, a communication with the world older than thought. This is why they obstruct consciousness and are opaque to reflection. The weakening of levels gives not only the intellectual experience of disorder, but also the vital experience of vertigo and of nausea that is the consciousness and the vertigo of our contingency. The positioning of a level means forgetting this contingency, and space rests on our facticity. It is neither an object, nor an act of linking of a subject; it can be neither observed, since it is supposed in any observation, nor seen as the result of a constituting operation, since it is essential that it be already constituted, and in this way



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As long as the subject obeys the contractual rules and remains within one level, space has a euphoric function; if the agreement is transgressed, the identity of the subject will be adversely affected. The next sequence involves the relations between perceiver and things and once more describes the mystery of their coexistence, which defies objective explanation: the natural world has to be accepted as it is, affected by time and indeterminate, before it can be assimilated into experience as reflection. The subject, therefore, both perceives it as an object and exists in it as one of its objects, and the merging of subjectivity and objectivity that the epistemic aspect espouses unfolds in the events that take place in this sequence also. Finally, in the last sequence of this narrative stage, the subject interacts with other humans. To succeed in seeing the other as a perceiving subject with a similar role to herself without, however, yielding her own individuality or the capacity to see the world from her unique perspective is the main test that the subject has to undergo in this sequence. In the last stage of the narrative, the subject is emancipated from the previous worlds in which he existed (those of empiricism and of intellectualism) and can act freely in the narrator’s world, the world of phenomenology. The ‘enthronement’ of the agent phenomenon leads to the liquidation of the initial lack of knowledge by a demonstration of actions which exemplify the subject’s relations with perception: by having revealed the truth about perception, the subject may use it to act and, thus, find knowledge through his experience as an active agent in the world. This stage encompasses the nature of existence in the world (illustrated in the reversal of the Cartesian cogito, from ‘I think, therefore I am’ to ‘I am, therefore I think’), time (the nature of the episodic in relation to the infinite) and the sign which contains the greatest number of possibilities of action, experience and knowledge in the whole text, the field where the subject is the freest to act, freedom itself.

Strategies of interpretation Having described the configuration in which the agents are defined and perform their roles, and the stages of the narrative trajectory,



that it can give to the landscape its spatial determinations without ever appearing itself (p. 294).


I now return to the narrator as actantial Subject and his quest to present his knowledge on the process of knowing. My task in this section is to describe some major strategies of interpretation, by examining how the noetic dimension of the text is connected with the paratactic dimension, or in other words, how the recounted events are interpreted. The role of psychology and philosophy The narrator begins his introduction by placing himself in a world governed by the epistemic aspect of psychology. This is divided into two groups, with one group, classical psychology denoting a past time of non-knowledge and the other, modern psychology denoting a present time closer to the acquisition of phenomenological knowledge but still needing to be reinforced by the epistemic aspect of philosophy. When philosophy merges with modern psychology, the latter has to be abandoned, transcended, since the transformation that takes place gives rise to a new Helper – phenomenological philosophy. Modern psychology (henceforth psychology), therefore, initially functions as helper of the narrator in his quest to create a world, by providing him with its concepts. However, this function is only provisional and must be abandoned as soon as psychology has performed its role and set the narrator-Subject on his way. If it is maintained in the function of helper longer than is needed, its value will be reversed and it will turn into a hindrance that obstructs the quest for knowledge, since it may then give the illusion that it itself is knowledge, and not just a catalyst in one stage of transformation. Keeping this in mind, the choice of psychology appears to be more strategic than functional and should be seen as an intertextually authenticating element in the epistemic aspect, pertaining to the noetic dimension, and less so an independent agent in the paratactic development. It is, one could say, a device intended to ‘lure’ the reader, with recourse to intertextual authority, into giving truth value to the statements presented. A look at the epistemological scene in France at the time Phenomenology was written would reveal that Psychology enjoyed a privileged position as the system of knowledge best suited for the study of subject-object relations and of human consciousness with regard to nature; a position, furthermore, which has a long history, rooted in Descartes’ dual model of body and mind. The academic discipline of Philosophy tended to be reserved



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for systems of knowledge which focused on thought processes, their interconnections and the mental conditions that make science possible (Descombes, 1979; for Merleau-Ponty’s own views on the dominant discourses of his time, see Merleau-Ponty, 1960). It could be said, therefore, that a narrative world based on the interaction between human subjects and things in the natural world would gain more legitimation if it gave a role in its configuration to the traditional authority on the topic, and would more likely be accepted as an equal participant in the intertextual exchange and communication among the epistemological schools. By providing a culturally legitimating acknowledgement, Psychology, besides its helper function, also acts as a pre-narrative space that is implicitly accepted by both the narrator and his cultural context and which is used for the creative impetus marking the difference or discontinuity that begins the story. In fact, the initial situation of Phenomenology, as posited in the opening lines, brings into play the psychology-derived agents senses and perception, which the narrator says he has ‘found’ (i.e., at the beginning of the story they pre-existed). As was noted earlier, the ambiguity or lack in the understanding of knowledge which the narrative aims to fill lies in the inadequacy of the existing epistemic worlds to onomastically construct these agents and, correlatively, to assign roles to them in their configuration. The authority of psychology is, hence, both accepted and questioned, and this ambivalence unfolds in the first two stages of the text, while the final synthesis, the transcendence of the epistemic aspect of psychology and its implied rejection, which leads to the transformation of the Helper into phenomenological philosophy is effected in the third stage. The narrator states, in his introduction, that he wants to undertake his quest for the understanding of knowing by describing lived experience, how people act in specific circumstances, as opposed to the reasons for their acts or the abstract conditions which make these acts possible – and psychology offers him the apparatus and methods he needs to proceed. For example, after criticizing the philosophical presumption of the primacy of mental, reflexive or rational, faculties, he observes: This is why we must begin a study on perception with psychology. If we had not done this, we would not have followed methodically





the approaches that lead to it, starting from the natural attitude. We had to frequent the phenomenal field and get to know the subject of phenomena through psychological descriptions, if we did not want to place ourselves wholly, like reflexive philosophy, in a transcendental dimension that we would have supposed to be eternally given, and thus fail to see the true problem of constitution (p. 77, my emphasis). In this utterance, the narrator states clearly that his quest is aimed towards an understanding of meaning, which can be achieved by following descriptions of the phenomenal. He therefore places himself as inquirer, within the field of vision of what he seeks to understand rather than at a point outside it. The italicized lexemes signify movement, spatiality and temporality, and are metonymic representations of the chosen procedure: the eternal and the immobile are not accepted, as they would lead to missing out on true understanding, or ‘failing to be there’ when it happens. A ‘movement of presence’ is favoured where the inquirer ‘follows around’, so to speak, the subject of his inquiry, and it is by ‘following methodically the approach’ of psychology that this can be achieved. Allegiance to this ally, however, is ambivalent because the epistemic aspect that the narrator attributes to psychology does not, in the final analysis, coincide with that of the world created in the text. This ambivalence in the configured position of psychology gives it a dual, or one could say, duplicitous, role as either Helper or Opponent (False Helper). The narrator continues the above-quoted segment: However, we must not begin a psychological description without making it clear that once purified of all psychologism, it can become a philosophical method. In order to awaken perceptive experience enshrouded in its own results, it would not have been enough to present descriptions that may not have been understood; it was necessary to fix by philosophical references and expectations the point of view from where they would seem true. Thus, we could not begin without psychology and we could not begin with psychology alone. Experience expects a philosophy, since philosophy is an enlightened experience (p. 77). Interestingly, the process of adopting psychology as a Helper involves an implied narrative sequence in which the narrator ‘distills’ the



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paratactic dimension of psychological description from its interpretative, meta-discursive coating and transforms it into a helper of philosophy. The noetic dimension of psychology is metaphorically compared to death, burying ‘lived experience’ under ‘results’. The function of philosophy is to revive or ‘awaken’ this lived experience by interpreting the paratactic events according to their own ‘reality’ or, perhaps a more accurate expression would be according to their ‘phenomenality’. The praxis of psychology needs to be supplemented with the theoria of philosophy for a true comprehension of human knowledge to emerge. Besides the textually strategic roles allocated to psychology and philosophy, these systems of knowledge have cultural connotations which reflect themes of the story of Phenomenology. Both systems have a tradition in Western thought of providing knowledge on human life, and both are associated with therapeutic elements, the revelation of truth and ‘setting things straight’. In Hellenic times, for example, doctors and philosophers played major roles in initiation ceremonies and mystical cults. Thus, it could be said that these systems constitute cultural symbols of the themes of human knowledge, destiny and the relations between mind and body, on which the epistemic aspect of Phenomenology is based. In fact, it is interesting to see that signs denoting birth, bringing to being, sudden appearance and finding one’s way abound in Phenomenology: state of birth (l’état de naissance), evoke (évoquer), appear (apparaitre), reveal (reveler), mystery (mystère), magic (magie), penetrate (pénétrer), lead (amener), search (chercher), awaken (réveiller) and enlighten (éclairer) are the most common signs the narrator uses to describe the acts of being shown and learning ‘the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason’ (p. xvi). Furthermore, the frequent use of ‘explode’ (faire éclater) for past methods and beliefs brings into play the element of abrupt, complete and spectacular destruction, and of the subsequent potential for regeneration and rebirth consistent with the text’s anti-methodical and anti-objectivist epistemic aspect. To illustrate these remarks, I present a characteristic segment taken from a central point in the narrative. This is the story of the aphonic girl, which is located in the chapter on ‘The Body as Sexed Being’, approximately in the middle of the narrative. As was noted in the first section, the body plays a pivotal role in the world of Phenomenology as a Helper of the subject in his search for knowledge. In addition, a





subject’s experience through the sexual functions of his body dramatizes being for itself (perceiving oneself) and being-in-the-world (perceiving oneself with others) and brings into play the immanent links between the subject and the object, which the epistemic aspect of the text aims to reinforce. Thus, it is a privileged field of existence in the world of the text. The girl with no voice The story of the aphonic girl is a characteristic example of the relations between noetic and paratactic dimensions and between the world of phenomenology and the world of psychology. It has a double function, since it presents both a manner of being in the field of sexuality and a manner of being in the field of language: language and sexuality being the two main fields where the body can act in the world. It may be seen, therefore, to represent a centre of gravity in the text and to reflect the epistemic aspect and the structure of the text in its composition. In addition, it is the only story in the text where an agent with a physical lack actually succeeds in liquidating this lack and becomes re-integrated into a normal role: this way, she constitutes a mediation between the sick (le malade) and the healthy (le normal). I italicize the paratactic segment: A young girl whose mother has forbidden her to see the young man she loves, loses her sleep, her appetite and finally the use of speech. During childhood, there was a first manifestation of aphonia after an earthquake, then a return to aphonia following a fit of violent fear. A strictly Freudian interpretation would implicate the oral phase of sexual development. But what is ‘fixed’ in the mouth is not only sexual existence, but also, more generally, relations with the other for which speech is the vehicle. If feeling chooses to express itself by aphonia, it is that speech is from all the bodily functions the most closely linked with common existence, or, as we will say, with coexistence. Aphonia represents then a refusal of co-existence as, in other subjects, a nervous breakdown is the means to escape the situation. The sick girl ruptures the life of relationships within the family environment (p. 187). By presenting the events in such a manner, the narrator accepts the authority of psychology as source of interpretation. Part of psychology’s



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noetic dimension is integrated in the course of events, especially through the implicit causality that manifests in the temporal succession. A further acknowledgement of psychology’s authority comes in the first sentence after the paratactic segment, which also introduces the noetic dimension in which the events are to be interpreted: a psychological (Freudian) explanation is described. However, the trust in psychology here begins to waver in the use of the conditional /would/, which introduces a hypothesis, and thus a doubt, in the statement. The allegiance is definitely broken in the subsequent transition sign /but/ – a commonly used device in Phenomenology, representing conflict between the narrator’s world and those of his opponents. This transition foregrounds the narrator’s interpretation as contrary to the one offered by psychology and introduces language, configured as a sign of existence with others, as the point of divergence of the epistemic aspect of phenomenology from that of psychology. The information presented in the subsequent sentences is constructed in the noetic dimension of the narrator’s own world, the world of phenomenological philosophy, and it sketches a different causal order. In this difference lies the fundamental and ultimately unbridgeable rift between the epistemic aspect of phenomenology and that of its equivocal helper, psychology. For the latter, the reason or cause of a phenomenon, in this case aphonia, is to be sought in narratives that are temporally prior to the actual event and, therefore, external to it; they constitute, in fact, other stories with a different set of agents. Thus, for psychology, the role of mouth reflects metonymically the oral phase of sexual development. Hence, it is governed by the rules of the narrative situation encompassing that phase and has no existence without it, in the same way that the reflected is bound to the reality of the one it reflects. For phenomenology, however, a sign is an object with an immanent essence which must be perceived by a subject’s consciousness at a particular time in order to have a meaning, and as such it cannot be reduced to anything else. It is, therefore, a sign of itself and can be grasped by the perceiver as a potential source of action. This way, the temporal order of psychology is dissolved in favour of a synchronous present which functions in the narrative according to its own causality. If the other, the past or the future are conjured in a narrative it is because they have a meaning created by the state of consciousness of the perceiver at one particular time. The meaning





of an agent in a particular narrative is determined by the context and circumstances which the utterance creates, and by the intentions of the participants – rather than by the role allocated to this agent in other narratives. In light of this epistemic theme, the use of the present tense to describe the story of the aphonic girl (and, indeed, the other stories of figural agents in the text) assumes a strategic function which draws attention to the immediacy of action in which the narrator wants to understand perception. So, he continues the above-cited segment by pointing out that even if it were accepted that the girl’s sensitization of the oral zone in cases where conditions lead her to an awareness of her subjectivity, or personal fate, and consequently, to a rupture with her coexistence is linked with the oral phase of sexuality, this would not account for the way the girl’s body perceives her situation as a phenomenon, the meaning she extracts from it and to which, in her physical and subjective existence, she responds. Recognition of psychology as an ally is once more conditional. Looked at actantially, we could apply two models on the paratactic events as interpreted by psychology. In one, the girl’s mother as Subject succeeds in her Aim to prevent her daughter from seeing the man she loves; the daughter is here a passive agent on which the Subject acts to fulfill her Aim (Figure 4.1). In the second, aphonia becomes the Subject (or, perhaps it might be more accurate to say the girl, constructed onomastically solely by her attribute of aphonia, is the Subject, a form of personified aphonia) acting in three stages temporally situated in the girl’s childhood in order to realize its own condition as Aim (Figure 4.2). The Sender is here fear, and the girl is once again a passive agent transformed by aphonia.

Conservatism

Status Quo

or...? Mother

Parental authority

Prevent daughter

daughter’s will

from seeing her love Figure 4.1 Aphonic girl model one



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Fear

Psychology Aphonia

Neurophysiological

the power of the body to heal

apparatus Figure 4.2 Aphonic girl model two

In the model derived from the noetic dimension of the narrator’s world, the picture that emerges is quite different. The shift in the epistemic aspect takes place when the narrator questions the identification of the agent mouth with sexuality and introduces the communicative, intersubjective aspect of speech in the configuration, by actually considering mouth semiotically, that is as a sign. This automatically re-positions the girl in a social (externally oriented), as opposed to an instinctual (internally oriented), existence. Henceforth, acts performed by her can be viewed metaphorically as statements since they function to communicate her perspective on the world to others, and to provide an answer to the questions posed by her milieu. Here, the girl becomes the actantial Subject and her love is the Sender. Loss of speech becomes her Helper in attaining her Aim, the establishment of social relations on her terms. In this way, the causal factor is on the side of the Subject who, although passive agent in the other models, assumes an active role in this and brings about the effect (loss of speech) as part of her own narrative trajectory (Figure 4.3).

Love

Girl (and loved one) Girl Join with loved one

Power of the body to signify

Mother

Figure 4.3 Aphonic girl model three



Take girl’s voice


Note that the girl’s act of loss of speech is not considered to be voluntary by the narrator. Intentionality, the immanent and active power of the subject to attribute meaning, is not a voluntary act, while at the same time, nor is it unconscious (which would necessitate the creation of another Sender, thereby altering narrative configuration and, by extension, epistemic aspect drastically): it is just there, inexplicable by means of object-centered scientific causality. It is what must be accepted for the story to continue, and has to remain ambiguous, mysterious or enigmatic in order to fulfill its function. In the creation of the agent intentionality, the narrator combines the modalities of /obligation/ and /volition/, and brings the modality of /ability/ into play: consciousness is originally not an ‘I think’ but an ‘I can’ (p. 160). The mentally defective subject must and wants (has the intention) to know by understanding the meaning of his world, but is not able to because he cannot see things as they are due to mental disfunction. On another level, the story of the aphonic girl also represents four characteristic themes of the epistemic aspect of Phenomenology: First, as noted above, it illustrates the strategic and equivocal role of psychology and the conflicts that exist between its noetic dimension built on causes, and the noetic dimension of phenomenological philosophy built on phenomena or signs. Second, it highlights the main epistemic theme of the book, the dissolution of the rigid boundary between object and subject imposed by other epistemic worlds, and the construction of an alternative configuration with a more fluid interaction and interdependence between the one who knows and what is known, mediated by the process of knowing by existing in the world. Third, it exemplifies the emphasis of the epistemic aspect on synchronicity: meaning emerges in particular situations according to the immanent features of the participants in these situations and is not an effect of other prior situations. Placing a series of events along a temporal continuum would be acting upon these events (as ‘explanation’ or ‘analysis’), rather than knowing them, and would miss the phenomenon of perception. Also, temporal or causal subordination would necessitate that the perceiver place herself at a point outside the situation she perceives in order to be in a position to observe the causal links between events. This would entail that the perceiver presupposes what she intends to explain, that she knows in advance what she, in fact, seeks to know, a process which would place her in an infinite regress of argumentation facing away from knowledge.



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Fourth, this example demonstrates the epistemic aspect’s emphasis on a plurality of discursive sources in the perceptive and knowing process. Given the primacy of being over knowing that the epistemic aspect supports, it follows that the source of knowledge, the ‘absolute source’ (p. iii), is the knowing subject in his existence and not an abstract observer situated externally. The pronouncements of science cannot, according to this line of reasoning, be deemed to explain the human condition since the scientist’s perspective is itself part of this condition.

The narrative lesson At the end of the story of Phenomenology, having fulfilled its duty of guiding the narrator through the mysteries of perception and of knowledge, philosophy in its turn, has to be abandoned. With its help, the Subject has learnt that, before becoming an intellectual process, knowledge has to come into being through aesthetic experience; it has to be an object of perception before it can be an object of reflection. He has also learnt that perception is not caused by the senses nor is it subordinated to association and judgment, both of which, in fact, come at later stages in the story of perception. Instead, it happens when the subject acts in a story which comprises a more complex set of actors and relations than was proposed by the deceptive instructions of empiricism and intellectualism. Space, time and the inherent qualities of the object play major roles in this story. The Subject cannot learn how to perceive through a set of standard or rationalized directions because no such directions exist and he would be duped if he believed the scientists, psychologists and philosophers who tell him that they do. Knowledge comes from revelation of phenomena in existence, and its ultimate source or cause is magical or mysterious. Space and time may be trusted as Helpers by the Subject provided he accepts their invisibility and does not try to perceive them. If he transgresses this interdiction and tries to unmask their identity as otherness, vertigo, alienation and despair are some of the results of their revenge. The Subject learned these facts about knowledge by being shown examples of their possible manifestations, which were acted out both by the narrator-philosopher in his capacity as mentor or teacher of the Subject, and following the narrator’s directions by other actors similar to the Subject in many respects, as they too were human, but





different in others as they lacked the integration of their onomastic identity necessary to complete successfully their acts of perception and proceed to action and knowledge. These other actors exhibited conspicuously grotesque characteristics which rendered them impotent and incomplete, either through absence of an element vital to the action prescribed by the narrative configuration (lacking a part of their body or having their brain functions impaired) or through the introduction of an element hostile and obstructive to this action (distortion of vision by hallucinogenic drugs). As a result, because of suppressed or exaggerated sensitivity, they were permanently unable to progress in the narrative quest, and thus had the pivotal function of drawing the Subject’s attention to what action is necessary in order to pass the tests enabling transformation from one stage to another. The Subject has completed his quest in the realization that the nature of knowledge lies in his decisions to act in the world. The mentoring role of philosophy is now taken by freedom, which will help the Subject to act on condition, once again, that the power of space and time is respected and no attempt is made to transgress their authority. In the last page of the text, the quest of the narrator also comes to an end; his mentoring role as philosopher is no longer necessary and he can talk to the narratee directly: this is the only time in the narrative where the second person pronoun, you, is used. The identification between narrator-narratee and philosopher-human is revealed; the one who gives knowledge and the one who receives it merge and are transfigured into the hero acting in the world. Although the philosopher has to be silent at this stage and yield his narratorial authority to the hero, the distinction between the two is illusory, because as potential sources of knowledge and of discourse they are actually the same. The final words of the text are those of another speaker, of a poetic and not of an epistemic story-teller, who, through his experience, has attained similar knowledge to that of the narrator. It is not only with the hero that the philosopher may be identified but also with the poet: the epistemic and the poetic imagination converge in knowledge that concerns matters of life and of death: Would I make this promise? Would I risk my life for so little? Would I give my freedom to save freedom? There is no theoretical



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reply to these questions. But there are these things that present themselves, irrefutable; there is this beloved person in front of you, there are these people that exist as slaves around you, and your freedom cannot want itself without coming out if its singularity and without wanting freedom for all. Whether it be about things or about historical situations, philosophy has no other function but to teach us to see them well, and it is true to say that it realizes itself by destroying itself as a separate philosophy. But it is here that one must be silent, for only the hero lives to the full his relations with others and with the world, and it is not appropriate that another speaks in his name. Your son is caught in the fire you will save him […]. You reside in your act itself. Your act is you … You exchange yourself … Your significance shows itself, dazzling. It’s your duty, it’s your hatred, it’s your love, it’s your faithfulness, it’s your invention. Man is nothing but a network of relations, and relations only matter for man (p. 520).

The relations of the narrator with his narrative As a conclusion to this chapter, some comments should be made regarding the use of a narrative semiotic method of analysis on a textual world whose epistemic aspect is expressly non-constructivist. It might be said that the imposition of a rationalist model and the compartmentalization of the text that this entails, distorts the constituted wholeness and immediacy that Phenomenology proposes as necessary for the acquisition of knowledge. For instance, the narrator maintains that an analysis of an object produces another object that depends on the original, and cannot be used to understand the latter, because it fails to grasp its essence as it appears. Therefore, he proposes an interpretation based on description rather than on analysis or explanation (p. ii). However, he overlooks that even the choice of these particular signs itself constitutes a rational delimitation of the signifier since it entails an operation transforming aesthetically perceptible elements into abstract, linguistic signs. Referring to something perceived as /essence/ would in this sense, unavoidably impose an external order on it, given that the act of perception, the spurting (jaillissement) of a phenomenon and the act of narration, or in other words, its aesthetic understanding and its





putting into discourse, constitute separate processes. It is the latter, the process of representation through text, that the narrator of Phenomenology fails to acknowledge. A narrator is not just pointing to objects lying outside his narrative but is also creating these objects, since it is only through his discourse, which configures them narratively, that we can have access to them. Writing about perception and knowledge is not the same as perceiving or knowing, since the former involves a process of expressive transposition of signs into forms of written discourse. Thus, it could be said that Phenomenology does not acknowledge what may be called the semiotic essence of discourse. In a similar fashion, the division of the subject into consciousness and body and their positioning in different roles in the narrative configuration, which is what I proposed here, should not be seen to distort the intrinsic unity of the human being supported by the epistemic aspect of Phenomenology, because in order to describe this unity the narrator himself had to divide the subject. His choice of the lexeme /consciousness/, for example, not only connotes the discursive world with which it is associated, in opposition to, say, /soul/ or /karma/ which would activate the epistemic aspects of different worlds, but also creates an agent with a prescribed role in the unfolding of narrated events. Henceforth, when it is said that consciousness acts in a certain way, it cannot be anything else but consciousness (as it has been defined onomastically) that acts. So, when the narrator says that erotic perception ‘takes place in the world but not in a consciousness’ (p. 183), he is positioning consciousness in a narrative role of potential spatial setting or location for the performance of an act. Similarly, when the narrator gives himself the task of understanding ‘the relations between consciousness and nature’ (p. 489), he positions consciousness in the role of active agent independent of the agent subject (which, as was seen, is composed of more onomastic attributes than consciousness). As was seen in the previous chapter, signs of subjectivity are found in the links between the narration and the story, as these are marked by textual indices. Because of this textual function, and in many ways paradoxically, the narrative stages are the parts that make up the whole and without them the message that the whole is greater than the totality of its parts could not be communicated.



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Presupposed Worlds

Behind this story there is another one. —Nikolai Gogol

Overview Language specialists know that information given outside a specific contextual framework is meaningless. Whether context is created in the utterance or by the utterance, however, is contested, as is the issue of how much meaning we draw from an utterance and how much we attribute to it through interpretation. For example, a written text, although just a two-dimensional object, has the power to affect perceptions, regulate social relationships and implement changes in the material world. Much of this power comes from the function of the linguistic sign, which is to represent intended forms of interaction between the text as a structural system and the world outside that system. It is true that this interaction is largely due to the interpretative process of decoding that takes place in the act of reading, when the reader attaches meaning to the text through his/her understanding of the denotative and connotative aspects of the linguistic signs. At the same time, however, there are compositional elements through which writers, and speakers, intentionally or unintentionally, use lexical choice to craft the images that are created in the communicative act and to influence audience response. In this chapter, I suggest that this process of ‘meaning manipulation’ is possible because of the inherent function of language to ‘lock’ meaning in its signs. I approach issues of implicit meaning by revisiting 123



5


the semantic-philosophical concepts of presupposition and implication from a narrative-semiotic perspective. I aim to explore two observations: first, that knowledge is not only conveyed in a series of statements which present a certain type and amount of information, but also depends on what needs to be known or what is believed to be true for this information to be understood, and second, that this assumed, or believed, knowledge may be traced in the discursive structure. The first observation is consistent with much contemporary research in pragmatics. The second observation is more contentious, as it emphasizes utterance composition at the expense of enunciation context and speaker intention. In the words of Algirdas-Julien Greimas, ‘the structure of the message imposes a certain vision of the world’ (1966: 133).

Presupposition and implication The fact that statements and assertions are based on underlying assumptions and premises is widely recognized in discourse analysis, pragmatics and argument theory (Van Dijk, 1997; Yule, 1996; Toulmin, 2003). What seems to be undeveloped to any significant extent, however, is a systematic and principled method for analysing this dimension of discourse. It was this concern that led me to a search in the theoretical literature on the role of assumptions in discourse, and encouraged me to revive the controversial concept of presupposition. The last hundred years or so has seen a proliferation of linguistic and philosophical research on the vast and quite heterogeneous field of language phenomena classified under the category of presupposition (Keenan, 1971; Zuber, 1972; Ducrot, 1973; Stalnaker, 1974; Atlas, 1975, 1977; Wilson, 1975; Gazdar, 1979; Lewis, 1979; Grice, 1981; Oh and Dineen, 1979; Dinsmore, 1981; Burton-Roberts, 1989; Wilson and Sperber, 1995; Gauker, 1998). For example, the pragmatist Levinson lists thirteen categories of ‘presupposition triggers’, but warns that ‘it is important to bear in mind that any such list is crucially dependent on one’s definition of presupposition’ (Levinson, 1983: 184), and also points out that ‘there is more literature on presupposition than on almost any other topic in pragmatics’ (Levinson, 1983: 167). In a similar vein, the semiotician Eco limits the list of presuppositional structures to nine and also stresses that ‘any delimitation of the domain of presuppositional phenomena



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depends strictly on the definition of presupposition one uses’ (1990: 223–224). Finally, from a philosopher’s perspective, Palmer emphasizes that presupposition is ‘a relation more relied upon than understood’ (1985: 1). One reason for this confusion in defining presupposition could be that the term has been saturated through its use in everyday language where it is synonymous with such terms as ‘prejudgment’, ‘assumption’ and, often, ‘ungrounded belief’ and even ‘implication’. Although these everyday language definitions share common characteristics, in semantics and philosophy ‘presupposition’ has a strict definition as meaning that is inscribed in the formal structure of language. Stated simply, a presupposition is the meaning component of an utterance that remains unchanged when the utterance is converted to negative form. Presuppositions are significant in pragmatics because they constitute a significant strategy of meaning manipulation. For instance, the question ‘have you stopped smoking?’ presupposes that the addressee used to smoke, and this presupposition remains valid regardless of whether the question is negated or affirmed. The only way that the addressee can reject this presupposition is by refuting the question altogether and not simply by answering it. As Oswald Ducrot notes, ‘the dialogue that, materially, continues after the contestation of presuppositions is no longer the same dialogue that the speaker had planned and offered’ (Ducrot, 1973: 92). In fact, for many scholars, the truth value of an utterance is located in its presuppositions, because it is there that the link language-world, as well as the link I-you, is made. For Ducrot, for example, presuppositions constitute ‘truth intrinsic to language’ (Ducrot, 1973: 49). The pragmatic analysis of discourse distinguishes three levels of communication in an utterance: the assertion, which is what the enunciator tells the addressee, the presupposition, which is what the enunciator expects the addressee to know and the implication, which is what the enunciator expects the addressee to understand. Using a pronominal analogy, Ducrot (1984: 20–21) links the assertion with the ‘I’ (equivalent to Austin’s locution), the presupposition with the ‘we’ (Austin’s illocution) and the implication with the ‘you’ (Austin’s perlocution). In a temporal perspective, the assertion is simultaneous with the enunciative act, the presupposition is anchored in the past of this act, as assumed knowledge of a state of



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things that is expected to be shared by enunciator and addressee, and the implication is added as an expected response of the addressee to the enunciator’s tone and lexical choice. Currently, as a tool of pragmatics and text analysis, the concept of presupposition is restricted, because of its close association with formal logic at the expense of everyday language use. A brief overview of the history of the concept should shed some light on why this is so. As is known, presupposition was first introduced to modern thought by Gottlob Frege in his seminal 1892 essay ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1952). Despite the fact that Frege approaches presupposition on the level of formal logic without following through its ramifications and consequences for argument structure and reasoning, he does present in basic form all the elements that have been developed on the subject by subsequent theorists. What is important in Frege’s theory is that he recognized the significance of presupposition for communication by considering it a constitutive element of the sign itself. Frege divides the sign into three parts: • the sense: the inherent meaning of the sign produced by its semantic and syntactic structures and comprehensible to all who have knowledge of the language; • the reference: the designation of definite objects by proper names (the latter defined by Frege as words denoting objects as well as deictic markers denoting location and temporal instances); • the idea: the individual interpretation of the sign by the perceiver, without which the two main components, sense and reference, are incomplete. In this tripartite division, presupposition forms part of the sign’s reference, and involves the assumption that the object referred to actually exists. According to this approach, although the sense of a sentence is different in negative and affirmative transformations, the reference remains the same and forms the basis from which presuppositions can be traced. Frege’s famous example is the sentence ‘Kepler died in misery’, which presupposes the existence of someone to whom the name Kepler refers: it is this designation of the object that is maintained in the negation of the statement, ‘Kepler did not die in misery’, while the sense is altered.



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• proper names designating definite objects carry presuppositions in the existence of the referent, • the sense and idea of a sign do not carry presuppositions, • presuppositions can be established through what remains constant in both the affirmative and negative transformations of a sentence and • sentences carry truth value in their presuppositions. These propositions show the foundations of presupposition in formal logic, where it is a trace of cognitive elements within the constitution of the linguistic sign. The link of reference to presupposition is itself based on the presupposition that no matter what is said of an object, the identity of the object remains unaffected, even though the meaning attributed to this identity changes. The distinction between sense and reference suggests that identity is defined regardless of the circumstances and settings in which the object exists. This is an approach that defines meaning according to the rules of formal logic, leaving out considerations of subjective perception, aesthetic experience, moral definition and social performance. Taking a narrative-semiotic perspective, this approach seems problematic. Although narrative semiotics shares with presupposition theory the axiom that discourse has an embedded structure formed by the nature of the linguistic sign, as has been shown in previous chapters, for narrative semiotics, this structure has a narrative, as opposed to logical, organization. The identity of a narrative agent is constructed by the actions that tell his/her story and not according to his/her materially verifiable physicality in the extra-textual world (even in non-fictional and in non-figural narratives). Accordingly, signs denoting objects of the material world (both those with anthropomorphic signifieds and those with non-anthropomorphic signifieds) have a semiotic identity constructed by their textual positioning and their interrelationships with other signs within a narrated world. From this perspective, therefore, I suggest there is a need for the scope of presupposition to be enlarged in order to take into account the representational functions of language and not only the referential.



Briefly, Frege’s model of presupposition can be summarized in four propositions all of which have had an impact on subsequent re-formulations of the concept:

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As the analyses of the previous chapters have shown, an utterance carries more than a set of propositional statements; it actually contains the rudiments of a narrative world, on asserted, presupposed and implied levels. Along these lines, a presupposed world may be defined as the epistemic pre-conditions of the construction of a narrative, manifest in the signs and devices used to link sequences and to describe attributes of actants as well as to structure information. The presupposed world consists of the beliefs that a narrator shows about causality and identity, as these manifest in the lexical and syntactic choices that form the utterance. It should be further emphasized that these beliefs do not point to the narrator’s psychological constitution. Rather, they indicate a form of linguistic competence that draws on the function of the linguistic sign to create representations through which one can talk about the world. As Stalnaker explains, presupposing is ‘not a mental attitude like believing, but it is rather a linguistic disposition – a disposition to behave in one’s use of language as if one had certain beliefs, or were making certain assumptions’ (Stalnaker, 1974: 198). An implied world may be defined as the expected consequence of the presupposed knowledge manifest in the context that is created by the narrative. As opposed to presupposed worlds, their implied counterparts are not concerned with information content but with the expected relations between participants. Implications have a strong power basis. In the words of Horst Ruthrof, ‘when a person is asked again and again to open the window, the information content begins to pale before the political modality of oppression’ (1995: 36). Thus although the utterance ‘open the window’ carries the presupposition that the window is closed, its implications are more political. Consider an extract from a fictional narrative, Joris-Karl Huysman’s Against Nature (A Rebours, Huysmans, 1977 [1884]), as an illustration of the above discussion. In one episode, the protagonist, des Esseintes, decides to try out an experiment on a young man from the lower social classes. He plans to introduce this young man, Auguste, to the world of luxury by leading him to a brothel and paying for the provision of services to him on the particular occasion as well as on a regular basis for the following three months. Des Esseintes’ reasoning in acting this way is that an innocent



Narrative semiotics and presupposed worlds

nature induced to the pleasures of life will on no account permit these pleasures to be taken from him and will indeed be ready to commit a crime in order to maintain the ability to indulge in such pleasurable activities. Therefore, he plans to withdraw his financial support after three months and observe his young ‘guinea pig’ be transformed into a criminal. Here is what he confides to the madam of the brothel: This boy is pure and has reached the age when blood boils. He could run after the young girls of his neighbourhood, indulge in honest amusement and have, in sum, his little piece of the happiness reserved for the poor. On the other hand, by bringing him here in the midst of a luxury he didn’t even suspect, which will definitely become engraved in his memory, by offering him every two weeks such an indulgence, he’ll get used to these pleasures that he has no means of procuring for himself. Let’s allow three months for them to become absolutely necessary to him […] well then, at the end of these three months, I stop the small payment that I’m going to give you in advance for this good deed, and he’ll steal so as to be able to come here, he’ll move heaven and earth to roll on this couch and in this heat! In an extreme case, he’ll kill, I hope, the gentleman who will appear unexpectedly while he is trying to break into his desk. Then my aim will have been accomplished; I will have contributed, as much as my resources will allow, in creating a scoundrel, one more enemy for this filthy society that keeps us all in chains (Huysmans, 1977: 152, my translation). This extract presents a clear example of knowledge that can be considered ‘true’ if what the enunciator assumes is ‘true’. Des Esseintes’ plans can have the outcomes he desires only if human nature is what he believes it is. Looking at his words more closely, we can distinguish six propositions that present des Esseintes’ expectations, and the intended understanding of his interlocutor (i.e., the implied world that is constructed by his discourse): • Auguste is a member of ‘the poor’. • Auguste will find his experience at the brothel pleasurable (‘an indulgence he’ll get used to’, ‘pleasures […] to become absolutely necessary to him’).





• His experience will, with conditioning, have a permanent effect on his acts (‘he’ll steal so as to be able to come here, he’ll move heaven and earth’). • He will be happy to leave the surroundings in which he was brought up for an alternative situation based on more wealth (‘his little piece of the happiness reserved for the poor’ ‘bringing him here in the midst of a luxury he didn’t even suspect’). • His urge for sensual satisfaction will surpass any ethical considerations (‘he’ll steal […] he’ll move heaven and earth to roll on this couch and in this heat […] he’ll kill’). • He will see himself in conflict with society (‘one more enemy for this filthy society’). These implied sequences that can be inferred from des Esseintes’ discourse depend on certain unquestioned knowledge, which is assumed to be true and without which the implied world outlined above would be meaningless. Thus, in the presupposed world, this reasoning reflects three beliefs characteristic of much modernist thought: • Humans are governed by instinct and impulse (‘has reached the age when blood boils’). • Human behaviour is predictable and determined by mechanistic laws of cause and effect, and deductible from a constant system of rules (I stop the small payment […] and he’ll steal’). • Self is in conflict with ‘other’, represented by ‘society’ (‘society’ is qualified by the adjective ‘filthy’). These assumptions identify ‘instinct’ and ‘biological constitution’ as the basic motivation for behaviour, and eliminate other possibilities, such as ‘choice’, ‘chance’, etc. The definition of the acting subject as an aggregate of impulses and instincts determines the course of action. At the same time, described events are interpreted and evaluated according to a pre-established system of knowledge that exists independently of the potential meanings generated by the events themselves. In other words, what happens in one case is an example or reflection of how things always happen – the particular or personal is overshadowed by the universal. Auguste’s story, as created by des Esseintes, is one instance of certain relations that the enunciator assumes to be generally true of the world where enunciation takes place.



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Interestingly, the realization or not of the expected development of a situation does not necessarily affect the presupposed world. The frustration of the expectation can be interpreted or rationalized without invalidating the premises on which this expectation is based. So, the fact that Auguste’s name never eventually figured in any of the newspapers or legal notices on which des Esseintes kept a close watch did not induce the latter to question his presupposed knowledge. Instead he proposed other solutions that were consistent with his conception of human nature. Auguste might not have needed to commit a crime because his three month conditioning may not have been carried out, or he may not have had to abandon his pleasures as one of Madame Laure’s girls might have taken a liking to him: It is true that I could not have been too careful, that I could foresee but not prevent some eventualities, such as the tricks of Madame Laure who could have pocketed the money without delivering the services, the infatuation of one of these women for Auguste, who could have given herself, at the end of three months, for nothing; even the fancy whims of the beautiful Jew that could have frightened this kid, too impatient and too young to enjoy the slow beginnings and tempestuous endings of artifice (Huysmans, 1977: 170–171, my translation).

Presupposed worlds and textual dimensions The presupposed world is where the enunciation resides before it becomes an utterance and is situated in the noetic dimension of the epistemic aspect. However, within the utterance, presuppositions can also be traced in the three dimensions. In fact, the epistemic aspect seems to be heavily influenced by the centre of gravity of presuppositional knowledge, that is, by whether the knowledge presented in an utterance is located in onomastic, paratactic or noetic dimensions. The following sections describe the function of presupposition in each dimension. Onomastic presupposition As far as the onomastic elements are concerned, presuppositions can be traced in the semantic composition of lexemes. Accordingly, by placing one or more adjectives in front of a noun the semantic





identity of the object referred to can change drastically. By qualifying an agent X as ‘abominable’, ‘beautiful’, ‘deceitful’ or ‘resourceful’ we attribute to this agent certain qualities that become part of his/her linguistically constructed identity, assign to him/her a narrative position, and delimit the actions that are available to him/her from this position – a deceitful person acts deceitfully, for example. Along the same lines, naming an agent a ‘freedom fighter’ as opposed to a ‘terrorist’ would seem to do more than just attach a different sense to the same referent. These definitions assume an interpretation of the agent’s actions that is based on a particular value system, and describe the agent’s identity accordingly. In the first case, the agent is constructed from an internal point of view, and positioned to act on behalf of interests with which s/he identifies in a personal manner. In the second case, the agent is constructed from an external point of view and positioned to act against the interests of the implied narrative’s central subject. The same situation would be observed in describing a population as ‘poor and starving’ or as ‘oppressed and disadvantaged’. In the first case, the population is defined in terms of its objective condition seen from an external perspective with no indication of agency. In the second case, the population is defined more dynamically in terms of its condition as it has evolved through the actions of others. The implied narrative in which each population would be an agent would necessarily be different since elements of agent construction, such as identity and motivation, are set up along different lines. In addition, the choice of one lexeme from a reciprocally presupposed pair (where the other lexeme in the pair is also narratively possible) reveals the enunciator’s attitude towards the values or accepted usage of this lexeme. For example, selecting the pronoun /she/ instead of /he/ to refer to the generic subject identifies the female gender with the subject as an abstract position (the position that denotes ‘everybody’), and could imply a reaction to the extensive use of /he/ in this capacity in the English textual tradition. Similarly, describing a human agent in a narrative sequence as /black/ or /male/, or /young/ or /poor/ (as opposed to /white/ or /female/, or /old/ or /rich/ – the reciprocally presupposed signs) implies an association between these signs of identity and the actions that are ascribed to the agent. As anyone who has tried to re-tell a story after changing the inscribed identity of the agents



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knows, the transformation to the narrative, that such a change would entail can be quite profound. Reciprocal presupposition is also traced in onomastic elements of the noetic dimension. This involves signs that assume meaning only in relation to other signs with which they are juxtaposed and contrasted. In this case the presuppositional link can be reversed in a system of exchange (as in binary oppositions). For example, life presupposes death and vice versa, love presupposes hatred and vice versa and the signifier of a sign presupposes its signified and vice versa. In a relation of reciprocal presupposition, the existence of one sign posits the existence of the other, like the two sides of a coin. Another location of onomastic presuppositions is the choice of agents. This indicates the sources of authentication of a piece of information and designates the discourses which are used in the construction of the particular narrative world. For example, consider the following from Pensées Philosophiques by Diderot: Lost in an immense forest during the night, I have nothing but a small light to guide me. A stranger comes along and tells me: My friend, blow out your candle so that you can find your way more easily. This stranger is a theologian (Diderot, 1972: 64, emphasis in text my translation). The metaphoric structure of this extract becomes evident in the naming of the source of the utterance, which constitutes the transformational stage or complication. The discourse of religion presupposed by the identity of this agent is configured against the search for knowledge of the narrator, which it is implied to hinder: the reason of the individual is pitted against the knowledge of religious doctrine. Thus, meaning in this narrative program is constructed by the presuppositions brought into play by the onomastic choice of theologian as the performer of an action. A similar situation occurs when meaning is generated on the connotative layer of the lexeme. For example, selecting the lexeme /dog/ to denote a particular animal in the material world constructs the object in objective or neutral terms; correlatively, if the selection was /puppy/, the affective connotations of the lexeme would indicate that the object is constructed along more emotional lines, whereas if the selection was /cur/ the connotations of repulsion would allocate a negative position to the object in the implied narrative. In all these





cases, the reference would remain the same, but the narrative positioning of the agents would be different. For an illustration of a presupposed world constructed in the onomastic dimension, consider this extract on the concealment of ‘true’ identity from Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1958): […] while we may take a harsh view of performers such as confidence men who knowingly misrepresent every fact about their lives, we may have some sympathy for those who have but one fatal flaw and who attempt to conceal the fact that they are, for example, ex-convicts, deflowered, epileptic or racially impure, instead of admitting their fault and making an honourable attempt to live it down (Goffman, 1958: 39, my emphasis). The narrator semantically connects signs of civil (/ex-convicts/) and physical (/deflowered/, /epileptic/, /racially impure/) states of being, by using them to define the category of /fault/ and /flaw/. This semantic classification is further modified by the adjective /fatal/, which presupposes an inevitable progression of events. Therefore, this utterance presupposes a world where the states of being denoted by the italicized adjectives consist of negatively evaluated actions, which define personal identity inexorably. The use of /attempt to conceal/ and /admit/ further reinforce the presupposed negative values attached to these states of being. Such examples indicate that the process of signification from word to object is mediated by a layer of implied meaning constructed from a value and belief system, and that the process of communication would be ineffective if both enunciator and addressee did not recognize this layer. They also indicate that the value and belief system that generates presupposed and implied meanings tends to be related more closely with the enunciator than with the addressee. As Van der Awera notes, ‘that speaker and hearer would have some shared beliefs would be of no use if the speaker did not know that they are shared. So these “shared” beliefs are really some beliefs of the speaker’ (Van der Awera, 1979: 254). Writers of scientific, theoretical and technical texts, motivated by the need to reduce noise and be as transparent as possible, conventionally attempt to control the polysemy and connotative layer of



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lexemes by explicitly acknowledging the assumptions that led them to chose particular lexemes and by actually defining these lexemes. This attempt functions to delineate the attributes of the signifiers and delimit their connotative aspects, thus providing directions for the way they are ‘staged’ in the world of the text. The definitions sections, glossaries and, of course, the assumptions sections of reports are examples of this attempt. This deliberate control over semantics is recognized and supported by many philosophers who are friendly to a constructivist approach to meaning. For example, Hume acknowledges this ‘staging’ element of reasoning in his Treatise of Human Nature (first published in 1740), when he points out: I dare be positive no one will ever endeavour to refute these reasonings otherwise than by altering my definitions, and assigning a different meaning to the terms of cause and effect, and necessity and liberty, and chance. According to my definitions, necessity makes an essential part of causation; and consequently liberty, by removing necessity, removes also causes, and is the very same thing with chance. As chance is commonly thought to imply a contradiction, and is at least directly contrary to experience, there are always the same arguments against liberty or free-will. If any one alters the definitions, I cannot pretend to argue with him, ‘till I know the meaning he assigns to these terms (Hume, 1967: 407, my emphasis). Finally, the lexemes denoting a narrative agent’s emotive state often presuppose previous states in the agent’s onomastic construction. For example, in their book on the semiotics of passions, Greimas and Fontanille (1991) analyse the state of /jealousy/ as presupposing the states of /attachment/ and /nervousness/. By describing an agent as /jealous/, therefore, the narrator would presuppose that this agent is also /attached/ and /nervous/, even though the latter two attributes are not asserted. Paratactic presupposition The second main way in which presupposition and implication affect meaning is situated on the paratactic dimension – the sequence, or linear ordering, of actions. Returning to the original example offered by Frege, the utterance ‘Kepler died in misery’, assigns to the subject an event, /died in misery/, whose negation





cannot but affect the semantic nature of the signifier /Kepler/. Looked at from a narrative-semiotic perspective, the referent of /Kepler/ in ‘Kepler died in misery’ cannot in any way other than logic be the same as the referent of /Kepler/ in the utterance ‘Kepler did not die in misery’. Taking the sign /Kepler/ to denote a human, the experience assigned to him in the affirmative utterance is diametrically opposed to the experience assigned to him in the negative utterance, and implies a different set of actions. Simply put, a story in which Kepler dies in misery is not the same story as one in which Kepler does not die in misery, unless the agent denoted by the signifier /Kepler/ is different, or the narrative consists of alternative versions narrated by different narrators. A previous action in the syntagmatic chain can also be presupposed in the choice of lexemes. Unilateral presuppositions semantically carry logically prior signs, which may denote or connote actions. For example, saying that something has /stopped/ presupposes that it was happening at some previous time, and saying that someone has /returned/ presupposes that s/he was there before. Describing a certain activity as /compassionate/ indicates that the narrator presupposes a previous condition as /suffering/. Describing a condition as /suffering/, however, may imply the need for a subsequent action of /compassion/ in certain contexts, but it does not presuppose it. Similarly, a /performance/ of activities presupposes the agent has the required /competence/, and asserting that a plan was /executed/ presupposes that an agent took a prior decision. Other examples include describing a behaviour as /tolerated/ by a community, which would presuppose that this behaviour is negatively evaluated within the value system of that community. Also, saying that an object was /corrected/ presupposes that its previous state was /faulty/. Unilateral presupposition needs careful consideration in narrative analysis, so as to prevent its logical nature from shadowing the temporal aspects of narrative. Thus, although carrying out a plan presupposed logically that a decision was taken, whether the process of making the decision and the rationale behind it are included in the narrative (that is, whether they form a separate sequence or are left up to the reader to infer them), whether the time and setting of decision making are immediately prior to the execution or whether they are separated, whether the one taking the decision and the one executing it are the same actor (or they occupy the same actantial position)



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or different actors, etc., are of vital importance to the analysis of the narrative and to its epistemic aspect. After all, the fact that the outcome of an action may not have been part of the decision or, conversely, that it was, would affect the positioning of agents in the narrative configuration and the epistemic aspect significantly. Finally, a way in which presupposed worlds may be traced in paratactic elements involves the choice of function or sequence in the development of the narrative. As was noted in Chapter 2, a narrative sequence or stage develops logically from the previous stage but it is by no means necessitated by it. Thus, a particular situation does not have only one possible outcome but a great range of alternatives that are logically connected with the situation but are not caused by it. The alternative actually selected may be seen to indicate in various ways the narrative’s ‘reaction’ or ‘attitude’ to its presupposed world. For example, whether a certain action is followed by a reward or a punishment or whether the actantial Subject finally manages to obtain the desired Object or not, are not arbitrary decisions but act as commentaries on the initial situation and previous stages and, by extension, on the presupposed world of the text. This way they play a major role in the construction of the epistemic aspect. For instance, Phenomenology presupposes a world where knowledge comes from agents associated with science, and where these agents use causal reasoning to communicate this knowledge. The narrator’s world introduces noise in this communicative model by substituting reasoning governed by signs of ambiguity, a substitution that brings into play the inexplicable, the indeterminate and the mystical. By means of these signs, the human being is released from the causal chain of inevitability and from her onomastic definition as a ‘bundle of instincts’ (p. 194), and given freedom, which enables her to attain true knowledge about her existence in the world. Thus, by means of ambiguity, the narrator subverts the presupposed privileged system of knowledge which is prominent in his context of enunciation and which, at first, he accepts in his world and replaces it with his own. However, and in some ways paradoxically, because of the inevitable restrictions placed by presuppositional relations on narrative worlds, the human being is liberated from the bonds of science only if he accepts his onomastic construction as a conscious self. If this element of the presupposed world of Phenomenology is rejected, the whole epistemic aspect becomes meaningless.





Finally, as with the textual dimensions, the distinction between onomastic and paratactic presuppositions is heuristic, as both axes act in a parallel way in narrative structure. Generally, the way that an agent is constructed determines the objects of value that s/he is positioned to pursue and the kind of actions through which s/he is described to pursue them. Consider this extract from a profile of the astronomer who discovered longitude, Maskelyne: The fourth in a long line of Nevils, Maskelyne was born on October 5, 1732. This made him about forty years younger than John Harrison, although he seemed never to have been young. Described by a biographer early on as “rather a swot” and “a bit of a prig,” he threw himself into the study of astronomy and optics with every intention of becoming an important scientist. Family letters refer to his older brothers, William and Edmund, as “Billy” and “Mun,” and call his younger sister, Margaret, “Peggy,” but Nevil was always and only Nevil (Sobel, 1995: 113, emphasis in text). The emphasized /young/ implies that the lexeme is used in a nonliteral or connotative way. The other specifications in the utterance explain the meaning attributed to /young/. The participial phrase that follows immediately includes the descriptions /swot/ and prig/, while the main clause describes the subject’s action (‘he threw himself ...’). This presupposes an association between the personality qualifiers of the Subject and the Subject’s actions. At the same time, both are implied to explain /young/ because of sequential positioning. Interestingly, the use of the proper name /Nevil/ here does more than presuppose the existence of someone in the physical world that carries this name; actually, it presupposes that the fact that this someone was called /Nevil/ is significant and meaningful. It is more a case, therefore, of the physical existence presupposing the name rather than the other way round: Nevil exists (in a certain way) because he is called Nevil. Noetic presupposition In the noetic dimension, presuppositions exist in the deictic framework of the text – in the signs that show (or conceal) the identity and spatio-temporal position of the narrator. As was explained in the discussion on narrator roles in Chapter 3, the ways in which the



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narrator presents him/herself reflect a belief, a set of assumptions or ‘image of reality’ that the narrator presupposes. In many ways, therefore, reference can be said to presuppose deixis; it is not so much the sign that refers as the narrator who uses the sign to refer. As was illustrated in the extract from Diderot’s philosophical aphorism above, the selection of speaking and acting agents in a narrative produces as much signification as the discourse in which the narrative is created. At the same time, the ‘other’ or the ‘you’ of the communicative interaction is also presupposed in an utterance. In fact, besides the ‘implied reader’ (Iser, 1974), a place should be given in textual theory to the ‘presupposed reader’ – the one whose existence is presupposed by the mere presence of the utterance. As described here, presupposed worlds are part of the heteroglossia of language and its dialogic function (Bakhtin, 1981), and act as a metadiscursive comment through which the narrative reflects certain aspects of its own ideological pre-conditions. Thus, an utterance presupposes an audience and implies that this audience will understand certain things. A monologic utterance is as impossible as a private language. As van Fraassen points out ‘there cannot be such a thing as a private language: you have a language only if you are a member of a language-endowed community. That is therefore a precondition of the very possibility of self-expression’ (van Fraassen, 2004: 465). In fact, the enunciator’s reputation plays a vital role in assessing the epistemic status of an utterance. As was mentioned in Chapter 3, the onomastic identity, and by extension the reliability, of the narrator influences to a very significant degree the way the information transmitted is accepted: the epistemic aspect of a discourse would be assessed and classified differently if its enunciating source were a culturally recognized expert, an agent perceived as mentally unstable, a child, etc. The function of legitimation of an epistemic aspect is performed by the authority, or lack thereof, of its emanating and constructing source within the framework of a discursive context, and by the criteria which the narrative configuration specifies as authenticating and validating information. An utterance is considered as epistemically legitimate, that is, as presenting a viable piece of information, if the addressee accepts the authority of the enunciator and if his presupposed world shares the epistemic aspect manifest in the given utterance.




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As a final point, I would like to briefly explore the value of adopting a presuppositional approach for narrative-semiotic analysis of philosophical texts (and not only these). I distinguish two areas that highlight the use of presupposition as an analytical tool. One is the significant effect that presuppositions have on persuasion or manipulation of belief. Because of the fact that it is a conceptual construct of a higher level of abstraction than the narrated world, the presupposed world is not easily invalidated, or even contested, by the disproof of information presented on the plane of the narrated – in the same way that a theory is not invalidated if one of its examples proves inaccurate. The converse is, however, true: the invalidation or non-acceptance of the presupposed world would bring about the rejection of the narrated, which becomes meaningless or unacceptable without the support of the presuppositions on which it is based. As is aptly pointed out by Deirdre Wilson, ‘what stronger proof could there be that I did not stop playing chess with Spassky than that I have never played chess in my life, and so am not in a position either to stop or go on?’ (1975: 32). Interestingly, what usually occurs in the phenomenon referred to as ‘conversion’ or in more psychological terms, ‘cognitive dissonance’, is a refutation of the enunciator’s presupposed world in a way that his/her beliefs have been shattered and s/he no longer believes in the conditions that made the initial discourse possible. In fact, Huysman’s novel A Rebours cited above is a classic tale of spiritual conversion. The second reason that the method of analysis proposed here would be valuable for textual analysis lies in what we might call the ‘semantic necessity’ or ‘ubiquity’ of presupposition – in other words, the fact that meaning is constructed to a large extent on a presuppositional level because of the inherent semantic structures of language. Presuppositions can be traced even in cases where no comments or specifications are provided by the utterance, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions from the series of events recounted. For instance, Wayne Booth (1989), in a paper on ethical criticism, notes that many texts deemed open-ended in fact contain many specifications which guide the reader towards an interpretation. In contrast,



The value of presupposed world analysis


There once was a girl whose parents began to think that it might be time for her to leave home. So they asked her whether she thought that it was time for her to leave, and she thought about it a lot and couldn’t make up her mind. And to this day she cannot make up her mind. And, as a matter of fact, neither can they (Booth, 1989: 66). Now, while this story may not contain reader-guiding specifications, it does contain a presupposed world. Thus, it can be inferred that in the presupposed world, girls live at home, that a specific time comes when girls are expected to leave home and that parents decide when girls can leave home. It can also be inferred that this home leaving time is a subjective decision not dependent on material factors (indicated by the prevalence of signs belonging to the semantic category of /opinion/, namely, ‘thought’, ‘make up her-their mind’). These presuppositions have to be accepted by the readers before they can fill the gaps of indeterminacy with their interpretation. Presupposed worlds are the image of the thought that creates a story. In the presupposed world, the narrator has given form to an idea of what an agent and an action are, and of what an expected succession of events is. The narrated performs the presupposed in its allocation of roles and its outcome of events. That something is worth saying, that certain actions can or cannot be carried out by certain agents, and that certain discourses have powers of legitimization constitute the conditions of existence of a particular textual construction. If a piece of knowledge can be seen as an answer to a question, then it depends upon the question – the recognition that such a question is possible – for its meaning. It depends upon the structuring and reasoning aspects of the imagination, the aspects of thought that give, through images and words, form and meaning to experience. Any piece of knowledge, therefore, shows the narrator’s enunciative (both ideological and spatio-temporal) position. A piece of knowledge that effaces the narrator’s physical existence in favour of abstract linguistic signs that could have been uttered by anyone (as happens in the technique of abstract speakers identified in Chapter 3) is an image of narratorial belief as much as a piece of



he gives his own example of what an open-ended story with no specifications would be like. The story is:


knowledge that draws its legitimation from signs of subjective, personal, experience. Both presuppose the existence of an order of things and perform, or act out, this presupposed order in the world that they create with their discourse. As a final remark, it may be worth pointing out that the relations between presupposition and reality described here reflect the phenomenon that has been noted by a number of researchers in the philosophy of science (Feyerabend, 1975; Chalmers, 1982; Latour and Woolgar, 1986), who point out that the formulation of a hypothesis is prior to and independent of observed facts, which actually come into the picture after the hypothesis and a course of action for its verification have been constructed. Thus, it would be justified to say that the creation of a hypothesis depends much more on a presupposed world inhabited by the beliefs and prior knowledge of its creator than on objects existing in an observable reality. In this respect, it is similar to the narrative text, which sets the scene for the action in its initial situation and becomes accountable, in different ways and to various degrees, for the coherence of its subsequent development, but which is not expected to provide evidence or justifications for its actual existence.



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The Return of the Hero: Embodied Identity in Kierkegaard’s World

What is visible hides something else that is visible. —René Magritte

Overview The points that emerged in the discussion of the previous chapters concerning the narrator’s role and the presuppositional aspects of discursive world construction are here used to examine the epistemic aspect and narrative configuration of a particular philosophical text, Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (Parts I and II) (1987) [1843], with special reference to Part I. The discussion in Chapter 3 on narrator roles demonstrated the significance of ‘attitude’ and ‘belief’, as these are reflected in textual indices, for the presentation of knowledge. Tracing the presence of a narrator’s image, or persona, in the utterance reveals the lens through which the narrative world is created. In terms of this approach, the narrator not only describes different possibilities of life; he also incarnates different possibilities of life, seeks the freedom to incarnate them or seeks ways to abandon them. By tracing the mode in which the narrator is physically and emotionally involved in his story, the reader is invited to construct his identity through mood and attitude more than through information or event – the emphasis shifts from who the narrator is to how he is. Applying this method to an interpretation of Either/Or I, I will attempt to show how Kierkegaard’s writing strategy creates a narratorial presence that reflects symbolically his approach to 143



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knowledge and meaning. I propose that the narrator of Either/Or communicates his criticism of analytical, rationalist philosophy through a verbal performance of the physical and emotional effects that this philosophy has on everyday reality as this is experienced by a living, embodied, individual. By participating mostly in witness mode, and thereby creating a narratorial role or persona that indirectly negates its own conditions, the narrator of Either/Or demonstrates the power that the written text has to induce awareness of how beliefs on identity and meaning are constructed and socially imposed. His creatively strategic use of discourse shows how elements of intersubjectivity flavour the rational system of language, and reveal traces of physicality and consciousness built in linguistic semiosis (Ruthrof, 2000).

Being-there in absentia Either/Or is a collection of writings on personal identity as this is formed through individual reactions to social institutions, in particular, ownership, gender and marriage. In a variety of written genres, from aphorisms to epistolary addresses, the text thematizes the conflicts between the individual as subjective perceiver and as citizen, i.e., as socially perceived, and reality as it is grasped by the senses and as it is learned through culture. The different situations that the text describes repeatedly figure themes of interpersonal relationship: choice, commitment, responsibility and trust. Either/Or is a found manuscript with no indication of author or date of composition. The finder, aptly named Victor Eremita, assumes the responsibility of sequencing and titling the writings and of naming the authors. This he professes to do according to the style and content of the writings, which give the impression that there are two authors with contrary attitudes towards living. In accordance with this, the manuscript is divided into two randomly sequenced parts (Part I could be Part II and vice versa) that mirror, that is, invert, each other and that, therefore, exist in relation to each other. As the narrator of Part I, in one of his identities, remarks aptly, ‘in the positing of something, the other that is excluded is indirectly posited’ (p. 61). The correlative of exclusion /either-or/ denotes a separation between the two texts, Parts I and II of Eremita’s division, as well as



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being reflected in the composition of the diverse segments that make up each part. This makes the text highly self-reflexive, with its supplements and multiple cross references pointing to each other in a crisscross of self paraphrase. In both form and content, Either/Or dramatizes the paradox of representations as these are created by the signifying process: each part reflects the whole, but, although the whole is made up of its parts, it is still more than their sum – it is both itself and something else. Either/Or Part I, (henceforth Either/Or) narrated by the enigmatic ‘A’, is a collection of different written genres: expository essays, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages’, ‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama’; a didactic essay, ‘The Rotation of Crops’; aphorisms, ‘Diapsalmata’; and a journal, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’. Although different in style and content, all writings are united by the narrator’s mood, the searing of speech by a witness narration, a detachment without distance, which prevents the narrator from emotionally separating himself from the recounted information in order to ‘emplot’ it and turn it into a series of narrated events (Ricoeur, 1983). The narrative configuration of Either/Or dramatizes the conflict between the quest for knowledge, as a method of rationalization learnt through the unchanging formulae of formal logic and mathematical principles (as in certain philosophical and scientific systems), and the quest of the individual human subject to understand the meaning of existence and to create a personal life. Through the recurrent use of negative conditional statements and the imperative mood, and therefore by playing with concepts of time (condition implies a temporal gap between the act and the thinking about the act, while the imperative constructs propositions that are true irrespective of tense), the narrator of Either/Or uses rational methods of deduction to draw general conclusions from particular events, while retaining the enunciative position of a being whose temporal existence follows a linear development. As a result, the actions that are measured and classified according to rational systematization pertain to the realm of personal everyday life and relationships. This produces the powerful ironic effect that permeates the whole text and that may be read as parodying various epistemic worlds, in particular philosophical-scientific rationalism, which privileges formal over natural language, romantic idealism, which privileges intellectual attributes of subjectivity – the self as



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thinker – and evangelical didacticism, which privileges universal moral principles over subjective meaning. ‘A’ recounts fragments of life – not of a life, but of life in general. These are fragments that were written in specific moments with certain personal intentions in mind, but which come out as disembodied utterances whose source of authentication is the universal discourses to which they lay claim. This is figured in images of self doubt that ironically, perversely even, value the negative perceptions that lead to an indeterminate being and to suffering: I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything (p. 23). As should be evident from previous examples taken from this text, the narration in Either/Or constitutes a characteristic instance of witness mode of participation. The narrator retains the negation involved in disengagement, the not I – not here – not now that distinguishes the uttered subject of enunciation from the physical subject of enunciation, and takes this negation into his utterance. The utterance consequently includes in reflexive segments the process of discursive world construction, the rupture and discontinuity of narrative creativity and marking of the initial situation of a story. Interestingly, it remains at this stage of narrative development: the numerous sequences that make up the utterance are constructed with different combinations of signs reflecting the initial state of disengagement, negative being. The state of undetermined, lacking or ambiguous Being signalling the beginning of a story remains still, and does not lead into Doing, which would transform the initial state and set the narrator/Subject on his quest: he remains ‘especially good at the principles of beginnings’ (p. 410). Witness narration is occult (Greimas and Courtés, 1979; Greimas and Fontanille, 1991). Occultation is the superimposition of an alien voice on the images of the world as they are seen by a perceiving being. It forms the discourse of possession – a split between the one who senses and the one who speaks. In occultation, the witness narrator, abstracted from all circumstance but still perceiving as an incarnate being, thinks in one world and lives in another. He cannot



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possess the meaning of the world (reality), because he is himself possessed by an alien system of signification that comes from the world (actuality). In Either/Or, witness narration makes use of occultation to dramatize the conflicts that emerge from a division between positions of knowing and positions of being. The questions that have occupied a great part of Western epistemology concerning the nature of self, subject-object relations and reality emerge here as catalysing forces in ‘A’s quest for narratorial power. ‘A’ believes that it is by answering such questions that he can tell a story and, thus, he accepts them as his initial lack and attempts to construct his story by providing answers to them. This proves to be a tortuous attempt that remains unsuccessful as long as he is unable to get rid of the corporeal existence that urges him to secretly seek satisfaction for another lack which, although not overtly stated, constantly surfaces as the genuine motivation for the narrating act: the desire to live. The quest for universal truth is shadowed by ‘A’s’ occult self who repeatedly obstructs this quest by secretly posing another question that evades the order of law and generality: ‘what is it to me?’. Thus the text unfolds through the occult speech of a narrator’s multiple personae who reflect the unintegrated fragmentation of Being struggling to forge an identity and a personal existence through language alone. The narrator of Either/Or is schizoid: there is one who speaks and one who suffers – because it is the other who speaks. Consequently, the story cannot be about anything else but the narrator himself, or more accurately, the narrator’s self. A self, furthermore, that cannot be presented as an actor in recounted events (as would be the case if the narration was in actor mode of participation), given that he is not in his utterance but remains suspended above it, nor be dissolved into an enunciative position whose existence is unmarked and solely presupposed by the utterance and by the choice of particular discursive signs (as would be the case if participation were in observer mode). Therefore, the narrator finds it difficult to participate in his utterance in any way other than in witness mode. He is not a detached observer of events that do not affect his personal existence, while at the same time he has not let go of the position that keeps him at an indeterminate space and time, immersed in the feelings that are aroused by scattered images of incomplete acts and enigmatic





desires. The concealed identity of the narrator comes out only through absence: the absence of a co-ordinator of isolated and disconnected fragments of existence who could be held accountable for their emplotment. Although numerous narrative sequences are juxtaposed in the text, they are not positioned in developmental stages, so the transformational momentum of the narrative is absent; a technique which has the effect of rapid movement, constant change of setting, action and agents, without, however, moving at all. The narrator is moving along with his utterance, witnessing and being affected by everything that he recounts, without indicating his identity or his location. This is reflected in the only object of value that can be traced in the quest of the main narrative: the desire to die or to live, to end the story or to proceed with its development.

Narrator without a story Either/Or can be read as the text of a narrator without a story. ‘A’ struggles between the urge to recount a story of events, and the belief that he should first know how events occur in order to be able to legitimize his narratorial choices. This way, the focus of his non-narration is on the noetic dimension of the epistemic aspect. Any recounted act first needs to be subsumed in a system of rational thought that will give it the authenticity necessary for it to become an act. A powerful suppression of emotive and perceptual signs occurs, which renders the narrated a potential but not actualized story. The text of ‘A’ is an attempt to narrate in discourse alone, without the content that would transform discourse into story. It is a story about nothing. Therefore, it can only dramatize its own conditions of existence. The narrator’s acts of describing, promising, wishing, deceiving, etc., are empty, that is, they are verbs that do not denote actions in a world, but only evoke them through their absence. Since deixis is constructed by occultation, they always refer to something else. In fact, the narrator can only act in a world if he creates one, a world to which, subsequently, his acts could refer. If not, any attempt to ‘kidnap’ objects or acts from other worlds would fail since he would have nowhere to take them. The only thing narrator and objects could do in that case would be to ‘cling to each other, floating in the harmony of the spheres’ (p. 396).



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It is perhaps in this respect that the relations between the epistemic aspect of Either/Or and its presupposed world can be seen most clearly. Given that the presupposed world is what a narrative assumes to be true and reflects this in its configuration, a narrative that presupposes truth to come from a rational perception of the world would privilege a thematic semiosis, manifest in a predominance of signifiers with abstract signifieds. Consequently, in Either/Or action remains a noetic evaluation, a rational analysis, which never leads to the paratactic dimension where it would be merged with signs of the physical world of human existence. It is a negative or inverted story since it draws its conclusions before it begins its development. The narrator has to know the end before he begins – he thus assumes authorial power and will not act before knowing: When a spider flings itself from a fixed point down into its consequences, it continually sees before it an empty space in which it can find no foothold, however much it stretches. So it is with me; before me is continually an empty space, and I am propelled by a consequence that lies behind me (p. 24). In this sense, the ambiguity produced by witness mode stems to a large extent from the narrator’s inability to fill any subject positions in his reality. His presence is ‘flexible, supple, impersonal, almost like a mood’ (p. 380). Thus, the possession by the other also acts as a form of censorship by bringing about a restriction on the freedom to identify with desired subject positions. In such cases, one cannot become self by becoming other (losing oneself in the other), but is, as it were, trapped or imprisoned in an externally imposed self: self-in-censorship. This is how we could interpret the relations between ‘A’ and ‘B’, the narrator of Part II. ‘B’ (who is, we are told, a judge, and therefore embodies the word of law) addresses ‘A’ from the position of the censored and the censoring. ‘B’s is the writing of a mind that has accepted to live in a world where the body feels no pain. His words, however, are as much someone else’s as ‘A’s are. He preaches the word of a greater, moral, other that supplies him with the security of certainty through ideological legitimation. His admonitions to ‘A’, constructed through the characteristically didactic-accusative judge




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Accept now in well-prepared anticipation what is here offered to you as well tested. If you find it far too trivial to satisfy you, then see if it is not possible to prepare yourself better, see if you have not forgotten some precautionary measure (Either/Or II, p. 153). The fact that ‘A’ does not leave the domain of the figural but remains, through his witness mode of participation, anchored in it produces an effect where the process of creating knowledge is ironized by a continuous negation of its own presupposed world. The meta-discursive comment or interpretation of narrated events which denotes the noetic dimension actually constitutes the negation of these events. This ironic effect is produced as ‘A’ does not accept his presupposed world and develop his story accordingly, but structures his narration counter to it: the one who does (or attempts to do) is not the same as the one who knows. This is illustrated by the definition of the Unhappiest One, which, significantly, is located very near the centre of the text and can be said to constitute the segment that reflects the whole most characteristically: Abandoned to himself, he stands alone in the wide world; he has no contemporaries to whom he can attach himself, no past he can long for, because his past has not yet come, no future he can hope for, because his future is already past. All alone, he faces the whole world as the “you” with whom he is in conflict, for all the rest of the world is for him only one person, and this person, this inseparable bothersome friend, is misunderstanding. He cannot grow old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he has already grown old; in a sense he cannot die; for indeed he has not lived; in a sense he cannot live, for indeed he is already dead. He cannot love, for love is always present tense, and he has no present time, no future, no past, and yet he has a sympathetic nature, and he hates the world only because he loves it; he has no passion, not because he lacks it, but because at the same moment he has the opposite passion; he does not have time for anything, not because his time is filled with something else, but because he has no time at all; he is powerless, not because he lacks energy, but because his own energy makes him powerless (p. 226).



mode reflect the selling out of personal intention in return for the false security of a stable identity:

As witness (significantly the Greek word for witness is ‘martyr’) one does not communicate; one is forced to testify to those that either eavesdrop or judge. The witness narrator tells the suffering of having to recount an experience that he did not choose or create but for which he is held responsible. Under such circumstances, he does not move or act out of fear that he will be filling an already determined role that directs him to experience more suffering: ‘Or have you become afraid of me? What have I done? Have I done more than you can forgive, than what you dare to remember – in order to forgive?’ (p. 386). Could it be, then, that they – the ‘others’ – have forgotten that their truth too was constructed sometime before? That it too formed the object of a wish? Could it be that this is what he must remember? Interestingly, by negating the presupposed world of his story, ‘A’ also negates the presuppositions of story-telling itself. His unhappiest man is actually the man without a story, who remains constantly with an indeterminate identity and at an indeterminate position. The effect that this utterance has of a lack of a noetic dimension (as interpretation negates itself) is, in fact, brought about by a very strong noetic dimension where the narrative development of a configuration is stifled by its repetitive juxtaposition with a converse development. The inability to act and the urge to know emanate from a common source: a certain conception of time – time represented, not time experienced. This manifests in sorrow of not being able to live outside the confines of memory, which storms in to prevent the fulfillment of wish by restricting the imagination, and in a story with no surprises, no unexpected developments, where experience comes from memory and has happened, as it were, before. Given the narrator’s incomplete disengagement, the time of the enunciation merges with the time of the utterance, not in the zero degree of scientific discourse where the enunciation is an act located in the world of events described, but in an eternal present where actions lack a temporal dimension and are perceived only through their abstract properties – the forms and qualities that make them fit into a picture. Once again, it is not sorrow felt, but sorrow imagined; the image of sorrow that is transposed into words: My sorrow is my baronial castle, which lies like an eagle’s nest high up on the mountain peak among the clouds. No one can take it by storm. From it I swoop down into actuality and snatch my prey, but





I do not stay down there. I bring my booty home, and this booty is a picture I weave into the tapestries at my castle. Then I live as one already dead. Everything I have experienced I immerse in a baptism of oblivion unto an eternity of recollection. Everything temporal and fortuitous is forgotten and blotted out. Then I sit like an old gray-haired man, pensive, and explain the pictures in a soft voice, almost whispering, and beside me sits a child, listening, although he remembers everything before I tell it (p. 42). In the absence of personal intention, witness mode signals the absence of story, since a fundamental element is missing: transformation. By presenting a series of disconnected images that figure in different ways the theme of abstract representation, Either/Or posits what it negates and affirms what is absent. The specific event that transforms one sequence into another, that turns trust into betrayal, belief into doubt and commitment into loss, is not there. The narrator is left with beginnings and endings, causes and effects and actions in relation to consequences. The universal voice that he serves seeks to place blame and responsibility, and it is this that the witness narrator perceives acutely and that constitutes his sole experience. The framing of exclusion (either-or) and witness mode place the narrator in an inverted, negative position – beside himself – from where he is forced to perceive and interpret simultaneously, but not to act. Either/Or is a narrative of absence, marked compositionally by deictic manipulation (Duchan, Bruder and Hewitt, 1995). An absence of referents exists because there is no one to articulate their existence: pronominal, spatial and temporal signs refer to each other in a repetitive circularity that lacks the organizing touch of a speaking body; ‘he’ can only be ‘he’ and ‘I’ can only be ‘I’ – and nothing more. The witness role of the narrator creates a discourse that attempts to be disembodied but cannot succeed as long as its presence presupposes its enunciator. The existence of this enunciator, while he does not ‘own’ the knowledge he presents, becomes manifest only in absence represented by recurrent signs of dysphoria that reflect suppression and secrecy: sorrow (absence of personal time), anxiety (absence of freedom) and deception (absence of trust). Obsessed with outcomes of acts, their quantification and classification, the narrator uses language at their service. Consequently, as was noted above, there is also



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another absence, perhaps the most conspicuous of all: the absence of articulated intention or wish.

Given the narrator’s mode of participation, the identity of the narrating ‘I’ fluctuates between that of a poetic persona, someone who feels the moods of his surrounding environment and creates metaphoric images of these moods without giving spatio-temporal specifications of his location, and that of a pronoun, a syntagmatic sign functioning as the subject of a sentence. As the knowledge presented is not owned by the narrator as part of his story, the first person singular pronoun is often substituted by impersonal pronouns, such as /someone/, /one/, /no one/, as well as second and third person singular pronouns, /you/, /he/, /she/ – although it is he who is telling, it could also have been someone else. Deictic non-reference is also represented by the dispersion throughout the text of myth and legend as the falsely authenticating power of discourse that does not depend on a deictic bounding but signifies the speech of they who know, outside time and place. The myth is equivalent to the cliché as the term that carries universal recognition because of repetition. It is the unindividuated word, the word of everyone addressed to everyone. The ritual repetition that comes from collective mythical time (the eternal return) is not a knowledge that is owned by an individual body. It is passed on repetitively in stylized formulae that underlie culture. In this respect, it is knowledge that comes from death and belongs to the dead (suggested in ‘A’s’ choice of audience: the symparanekromenoi, the society of the fellow dead). The temporal schism of the narrator’s position is also reflected in his two parallel trajectories that never meet. The secret trajectory of an incarnate being to achieve a personal identity through which he can tell a story unfolds alongside the quest of a mind to understand causality. The conditional and imperative signs of the narrator’s discourse lead him away from the articulation of wish and intention to the perpetual affirmation of certainty – a certainty that can only produce itself as a result. Consequently, experience and knowledge play conflicting roles in the epistemic aspect of Either/Or: I feel that … but I know (they have told me) that….



Deixis in witness mode


Under such circumstances, the only avenue left open for ‘A’ to articulate personal need and intention is to show how this universal discourse reflects the environment in which he is immersed. This way, in Either/Or, the master narratives that are immediately recognized in the Western cultural context – Don Juan, ancient and Shakespearean tragedy, myth – are all in one way or another about deception and betrayal. Their truth comes not from their legislating power over how things should be, but from the ways that they reflect the narrator’s situation. Understanding of this, however, relies on a form of misrecognition, and it is in this respect that, in witness narration, ambiguity is surpassed (as opposed to resolved) only with audience interaction. If I am to see these master narratives as relevant to the specific circumstances that the narrator is expressing, I must cease to see them in stereotype, as cultural constructs, and instead, read creatively the narrator’s presence in them.

Witnessing presupposition From the epistemic aspect of the text the following propositions may be derived, all of which are evoked in the noetic dimension as a rationalization of events: 1. I am unhappy because I lack the knowledge necessary to succeed in my aims. 2. I am unhappy because I am the type of person who is unhappy. 3. I am unhappy because certain events took place in my childhood. 4. I am unhappy because I am pursued by bad luck. 5. I am unhappy because I was born with an evil fate. These epistemic propositions can only be true if certain narrative configurations are active. The narrator is not only stuck with an unanswerable question; he is also stuck in a particular relational position. The knowledge he seeks is in a relation of reciprocal presupposition with the position he occupies. Therefore, it is not so much a case of answering the question, or solving the riddle, as moving position so that the question disappears from view. The story cannot go on as it is; it has to end and another to begin. Consider these propositions more closely. Presupposed worlds exist in the noetic dimension, so it is in the causal structures of the subordinate clauses in the above propositions



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that presupposed elements can be traced. All five propositions, therefore, presuppose a self-definition based on lack (‘I am not what I have to be’; ‘I do not have what I have to have’). The main clause presents a lack that could be filled by a narrative trajectory if it were transformed into a desire (‘I want’) that the narrator assumed as his own. In that case the narrator would be articulating the situation that he imagines when he says ‘unhappy’. His identity would be revealed not through the referent that remains after the negation – who, in any case, could only be someone – but through the articulation of a wishful intention. Narrative could rescue the narrator where logic has failed. This is not what happens here, however. The asserted knowledge (‘I want’) is overshadowed by the presupposed knowledge (‘we know’): the knowledge of me as other – me infected by the other – is more important than the knowledge of me as Being. The secret self cannot emerge, suppressed as he is by others in whose voices he hears the telling of a story that seems, but does not feel, to be his own. Therefore, the secret self is condemned to suffer and not to narrate, to be affected by situations but not to tell them as events. The inverted story of Either/Or is based on lack and not on wish or will. The narrator does not allow himself to want because he knows that he lacks. One knows that the other lacks. Following the terminology of narrative semiotics, narratives of lack are centred on the relations between the Sender and the Subject, the narrative contract. Given that the position of Sender designates motivations and causes of actions, the trajectory in such cases revolves around discovering who or what is responsible for the Subject’s situation. The Subject does not look forward to the fulfillment of an aim by the accomplishment of certain deeds, but backwards to the causes of his existence. Looking again at the propositions set out above, at first sight it would seem that what they all have in common is a rupture between Sender-Subject (that is, the two positions are not occupied by the same agents), which constructs them with conflictual attributes and, therefore, alienates them from each other. This way, proposition 1 positions ignorance as the Sender, proposition 2 positions genetic make-up, proposition 3 positions past events, proposition 4 positions chance and proposition 5 positions divine will. Looking at them more closely, however, a different picture emerges. By making use of formal concepts, narrative semioticians avoid the pitfalls of reference. The position of Sender remains a formal category with no content or reference: it is up to individual stories to





configure agents in that position. Nevertheless, they do not avoid the traps set by deixis. Stories are told by narrators, and the positions and identity of the agents show the attitude or beliefs of the narrator – the presupposed world in which the story resides. Although the actantial positions can be occupied by any sign, the actual choice of sign in a particular discursive world has immense value as far as the epistemic aspect is concerned. Reference, therefore, can be said to presuppose deixis: it is not the sign that refers; it is someone who refers through signs in his utterance. Deixis may be marked, as in personal pronouns and emotive signs, or unmarked, as in ‘zero degree’ spatio-temporal signs, but it cannot be said to be absent. If, for example, I take /senses/ in Either/Or to refer intertextually to a Hegelian concept, I am tracing not only a reference but also a deictic element (an indication of the narrator’s ideological standpoint) – an element that is constructed as much by my own presupposed knowledge as by the actantial positioning of /senses/ in the text. This way, deixis is linked with the narrator’s mode of participation and pertains to the noetic dimension of the narrative configuration – it becomes active in the narrator’s strategies of self-presentation. Narrative signs refer to an order of things that is constructed by the reader through his/her interpretation of the text, and also indicate the choices the narrator has made to show (or conceal) his location, time and attitude. Furthermore, this narratorial choice reflects a belief (real or pretended), a set of assumptions or ‘image of reality’ that the narrator accepts axiomatically when creating his story. It is because the narrator believes that some things may or may not happen, that some events may or may not take place in a story. Deixis, on the other hand, is the discursive bounding of language. When a linguistic structure becomes an utterance, that is, when it is instantiated by an act of enunciation and becomes someone’s speech, it relates through deictic links to the enunciation that brought it about. Thus, an expanded definition of deixis would include not only spatio-temporal markers and personal pronouns but also the modalities which denote a knowing and narrating subject. In this respect, marked deixis in an utterance includes signs that manifest the affective existence of the narrator. The propositions derived from the epistemic aspect of Either/Or configure different Senders but they all presuppose that the narrator



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is a definite and determined self not created by his own act. His (ignorant, biological, psychological, unlucky or cursed – according to each of the five propositions respectively) self precedes his story. He is, in fact, someone with whom he has to live. According to this presupposed knowledge, actions are either initiated by this image of the self or happen to him because of this image. Thus, the epistemic aspect is concentrated in the onomastic dimension: the narrator believes that knowing what (who) one is determines Doing. The text dramatizes the suffering resulting from this belief. Staticity (a lack that can never be filled) and repetition (the boredom of a being whose senses and feelings do not participate in his acts) are the resulting themes: If a person possessed a letter that he knew or believed contained information about what he had to consider his life’s happiness, but the characters were thin and faint and the handwriting almost illegible, then, presumably with anxiety and agitation, he would read it most passionately again and again and at one moment derive one meaning, at the next moment another, according to how he would explain everything by a word he believed that he had deciphered with certainty, but he would never progress beyond the same uncertainty with which he had begun. He would stare, more and more anxiously, but the more he stared, the less he would see. His eyes would sometimes be filled with tears, but the more frequently this happened to him, the less he would see. In the course of time, the writing would become fainter and less legible; finally the paper itself would crumble away, and he would have nothing left but tear-filled eyes (p. 190, my emphasis). Curiously, although time erodes the paper, the ‘person’ seems to remain unchanged and motionless. He is a feeling being but his feelings are limited to anxiety and sorrow. He is not an acting being, his acts limited to trying to solve a riddle. Above all, he is not a telling being: he is limited to trying to decipher the secret knowledge of another. He does succeed at decoding the meaning of words but he does not acknowledge that he has succeeded. Doing so would entail recognizing that the meaning he attributes is his own personal meaning. But then it would not be the true meaning, it would not be the meaning of those who know there is uniformity in nature, those




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Witnessing seduction Intentional action presupposes the perception of difference, an awareness of the body’s existence in the phenomenal world. In the highly self-reflexive world of Either/Or that emphasizes similarity and association (re-cognition), language is used for a mind and not for a body. It is also through unsurpassed semantic ambiguity that the most sustained effort at narrative in Either/Or, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, does not escape the traps of over reflexive representation. ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ is re-framed within the text, with ‘A’ professing to have surreptitiously got hold of someone else’s document in a way that parallels Eremita’s discovery of the whole manuscript. The writer of this diary, Johannes, documents his exploits at seduction through specific actions, and thereby makes an attempt at becoming an agent in the narrated events. However, the immersion in absolute self-focus that persists in witness narration does not allow affirming the object and self-as-body-object in the world that characterizes seduction as an act. In this situation, Johannes cannot even imagine his object of desire; he can only conceptualize it in abstract, since his witness mode continues to signify physical being separated from action by language and reason. Following Aristotelian logic, Johannes, by making his object of desire a tragic heroine – Cordelia – attempts to grasp irony in a personal way in order to make it work in his favour and lead to redemption. Alas, his attempts backfire as his object turns in his overdetermined, witnessed narrative into a sign that signifies its own constitution. ‘Cordelia’ becomes the name of a flower, the name of a heroine from another story, and finally a noun. Ultimately, Johannes is left with nothing but a name: ‘It is a beautiful name, and that, too, is important, since it can often be very disturbing to have to name an ugly name together with the most tender adjectives’ (p. 336). Perceiving and narrating in witness mode do not permit seduction, the same way that they do not permit negotiation. Negotiation is the ability to appropriate or possess signs that do not originate with the



who can trace universal patterns and define what happiness is for everybody, assess it and quantify it. His own personal meaning would lack the legitimation of discourses that have the right to speak with certainty.

individual in order to create with them meanings that will empower the individual to dwell in the world euphorically, i.e., in a desire fulfilling way. The witness narrator, in his positioning as hostage of externally imposed representations, is deprived of the self-assertive power of negotiation. Similarly, he cannot seduce. The seductive solicits a physical response of attraction. It constructs an identity that can act to fascinate by affirming the physicality of both subject and object, and, therefore, it is inextricably linked with performance. The ironic, on the other hand, cancels out its own performance, parodies it as happens in bad acting and warns against itself. In the disembodied perception of witness mode, the body is negated like the narrative in which it could act. ‘A’/Johannes’ discourse reminds that the self is produced by the performances it enacts. When these performances are forced, externally induced by a legitimating authority (the experts), the result is a thematics of restriction and suffering. The self that cannot create itself through desired performance is petrified (in the dual sense of rendered immobile and filled with fear) into an abstractly reified entity that forever talks to itself about itself as an enigmatic alien – that which it seeks perpetually to understand. Seduction, as desire enacted, presupposes the perception of difference, an awareness of the body’s existence in the phenomenal world. Johannes’ seduction, on the other hand, does not take place through libidinal investment but through an aesthetically motivated intention to classify and know. His relations with the desired object are similar to the relations between a butterfly collector and a butterfly. In this situation, the kiss cannot be a physical act of involvement in the world, an act of affirming the self by affirming the other, but a sign that is ‘supposed to signify’ a feeling (p. 417). The narrator’s senses become involved in the kiss only insofar as they can help his mind classify it according to the abstract principles that govern it. Thus, a kiss can be ‘a smacking sound, sometimes whistling, sometimes slushy, sometimes explosive, sometimes booming, sometimes full, sometimes hollow, sometimes like calico’ (p. 417). It is actually nobody’s kiss – it could always be something else. Accordingly, Johannes speaks the eroticism he observes: ‘all night through, one hears a sound as if someone were going around with a fly swatter – it is the lovers kissing’ (p. 380). This way, Johannes’ narration shows that a sign’s reference or denotation is filtered through its textual position. A similar situation occurs, for example, with the act to which the sign /marriage/ refers.





This cannot be determined without recourse to a set of described (narrated) circumstances which will assist the reader to attribute meaning to the sign, and thereby re-construct or trace reference to an act. That is, /marriage/ does not refer to anything in particular; and this is why there is no right or wrong definition of the term per se (and why writers can be infinitely creative with how they use it). Instead it has to be given particularity or definition by its adoption in an act of enunciation that configures it in a specific way and gives it a role in a story. A sign refers to its relational positioning with other signs the same way that it means what it does.

Fulfillment through self-annihilation From a speech act theory perspective, Either/Or performs the act of warning. The narrator shows the effects that language – or better, language taken as reality – can have on the repression of the body and on the body’s trajectory through life. ‘A’ explains that language is ‘the medium absolutely qualified by spirit’, and ‘the authentic medium of the idea’. In language, ‘[t]he sensuous is reduced to a mere instrument and is thus annulled’ (p. 67). By evoking images of Being against a background of abstraction and certainty, he stages the relationship between thinking, doing, feeling and speaking as acts which have no meaning unless they are ‘owned’ by a thinking, acting, feeling and speaking agent in response to the existential situations of his/her life story. In its liberating effect, the discourse of Either/Or is profoundly artistic: it performs the role of art to show cultural and epistemological presuppositions and thereby to defy authority (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). This way it offers the audience the opportunity to assimilate and transcend these presuppositions, leading to a more authentic existence based on an experience of Being that can come only through creativity (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 251). Witness narration has the cathartic effect of salvaging narrative from the illusion of memory (remembered/learned representation). It transports the narrator to what he was when he was formed as narrator in the process of disengagement, thereby allowing him to incarnate a different possibility of life, and offer himself as an example for the reader to follow. In its artistry, Either/Or leads the reader into a journey through hell and, if its warning is heeded, to resurrection in a renewed perceptive/experiential position. This can either give rise to frustration and pessimism in the reader, or to a subtly liberating effect produced



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by an identification with a self that one then has to abandon. In Part I, this is staged by the suffering living body that is exiled into a private self, perceiving an alien reality. In Part II, it is staged by the knowing mind that has accepted the socially constructed ethical assumptions that secure life in legitimate banality. ‘A’ narrates from a position of predetermination and helplessness. ‘B’ narrates from a position of free will and enforced choice. In their ironic reflexivity, each part negates the other, inviting the reader to accept the assertive, creative task of negating both into a ‘neither-nor’. Either/Or holds up a mirror to its own functioning and shows what it does, what it presupposes to construct a world through its words and its movement. It is by showing itself in a mirror, presence inverted, transposed and intersemiotized, that it can act as a warning. The narrator cannot warn with words, because it is against words that he warns. Yet words are all he has to warn. So, he creates with his words images and lets them warn. It is what happens to the narrator because of his mode of participation, the mode his (our) presuppositions force him to experience, that brings awareness of Being severed from the limits of personal, corporeal existence and that leads to a recognition of meaning as creative representation and not as rational epistemology. Awareness of the warning is conditional, however. I must accept to see also myself reflected in the mirror, to feel my absence from the story the same way that I feel the absence of the narrator. I can then heed the warning and turn it into advice, affirming my presence in the world at the same time that I affirm that of the narrator. Confronted with an empty signifier, I am compelled to recognize myself as subject. In this sense, reading Either/Or paradoxically is not reading the irony in the text. It is reading the text in irony, by noting an absence, or disembodiment, that is never directly acknowledged in the text. In his occult, witness mode ‘A’ does not talk about semiosis, in the line of theoretical and philosophical texts. He becomes the story of semiosis, through a ‘tongue-in-cheek’ narration that means what it does not say, and does not mean what it says – a discourse that must be read in laughter, in aesthetic appreciation rather than theoretical criticism, celebrating the non-identity of signs with things, and the creative powers of misrecognition: Something marvelous has happened to me. I was transported to the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation, I was granted the favor of making a wish. ‘What do





you want?’ asked Mercury […]. For a moment I was bewildered; then I addressed the gods, saying: My esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing – that I may always have the laughter on my side. Not one of the gods said a word; instead, all of them began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish was granted and decided that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste, for it would indeed have been inappropriate to reply solemnly: It is granted to you (p. 43).

The return of the hero If all one can do is remember, then it is time for one to die. Let the self as image die, then, in order for the self as agent to live. Let the fantasizer yield to the hero, the slave of memory to the conqueror of experience. Let the narrative of remembering be replaced with a narrative of conquest, knowledge and certainty by exploration and experimentation, guided by faith in the act and commitment to feeling. When all is said and done, ‘A’/Johannes/‘B’/Victor Eremita do converge in an act of creative identity – in silence, in the act of writing. Significantly, the text is framed by a master metonymy of writing: the desk, in which both Eremita and ‘A’ find the written knowledge of another. The narrator of Either/Or, in his different personae, shows that writing, as creation, can articulate zones of action that are opposed to inherited cultural representations. Thereby it becomes the witness narrator’s ‘heroic act’, his only means of assertion and access to the power that can affect and transform reality. By writing, the otherwise nonactive witness narrator performs – and surpasses himself. Perhaps now, having heeded the warning of experiencing life in witness mode, the narrator-as-agent can tell stories, rather than repeat The Story. Maybe his ascetic training in a witnessed world has taught him the value of sacrificing biography – the definition of identity by past events – and personality – the definition of identity by a psychological self that secures continuity. In return, he will gain the world, the power to turn environment into territory, where wish and intention can be expressed in ‘magnificent demanding’, and in the right to insist rather than to inform (p. 22). For, ultimately, it is not the self that has many dimensions – it is the world.



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The Winner’s Game: Out and About in Austin’s World

The performance is itself the play. —‘A’ in Either/Or

Overview This chapter explores John Austin’s How to Do Things with Words using the method outlined in previous chapters, and also compares the world created in this text with that of the other texts discussed here. The chapter ends with a summary of the main points raised and conclusions reached in the course of this study.

Acting ‘as if’ In the world created by Merleau-Ponty’s narrator, the Subject does not know and needs to learn in order to understand that she has come to be in a world that both pre-exists and contains her. By attaining this awareness of being in relation to her body and the space it occupies and in relation to other consciousnesses, both human and nonhuman, with which she, as embodied consciousness, interacts, she becomes able to act with intention. In this world, the agent is onomastically constructed so as to reveal the internal constitution that motivates being. The narrative is focused on the constitutive elements with which the agent is defined in order to be a human, with emphasis on the roles of perception and phenomenon. By understanding the nature of these elements, the Subject becomes aware of both her power and her limitations in enacting a meaningful existence in the world. 163



7


In the world constructed by Kierkegaard’s narrator, the Subject is captured in a space that he has not created and whose boundaries he cannot see. In that world, the agent is inverted, projecting onto the external reality of the reader’s vision an unformed and enigmatic identity which reflects the conditions of its incompleteness through repetitive allusion to the systems of signification of inherited cultural representations, such as master narratives and myths. The Subjectnarrator’s form is sketched through the verbal depiction of acts that model, mimic, represent or parody the process of becoming agent. Here the Subject is not positioned so as to carry out a set of actions that will enable him to become aware and learn, as in Merleau-Ponty’s world, but so as to image and show what he is doing in the process of attempting to determine what this set of actions would be. Both Merleau-Ponty and Kierkegaard create worlds that appear, in some way, to be frozen in time, characteristically reminiscent of theatrical time, the ‘once upon a time’ of a story, which unfolds in a parallel dimension to real time. In both worlds, action and movement are represented but not described as performed by agents with specific identities. In Merleau-Ponty’s world, where many agents have what Possible Worlds theorists would call an extra-textual referent in the actual world, the ‘reality’ of these agents is mitigated in the sections where the narration reflects the legitimizing signs of the discourse of psychology. In these sections, the agents, seen through the lens of psychology, are described in abstract, defined by objectifiable criteria and their actions are presented according to their finality, i.e., according to how they ‘prove’ a theory that surpasses their own physical boundaries. This approach is negated in the sections where the narrator’s phenomenological world takes over, and the agents’ actions are interpreted according to their personal experience in making sense of the world. These sections come the closest to conferring ‘reality’ to the agents. In Kierkegaard’s world, this ‘reality’ can only be attributed to the narrator by the reader, who is compelled to identify with the empty signifier presented by an ambiguous narrating self, and thereby give something of herself to seal the duality of signification (signifier-signified, I-you and word-world), becoming in the process aware of how she too is (or can become) ‘real’. The agents in Kierkegaard’s world are constructed as extensions of the narrator’s imagination, or as the narrator’s different



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personae, and can only be assimilated and transcended rather than become ‘real’. Since both writers create worlds that stage embodied consciousness acting in physical reality and interacting with others, the theatrical analogy could be developed further to assist in propelling the discussion. According to acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky (1988), for example, performing a role entails a two layered approach: the ‘as if’ and the ‘given circumstances’. The ‘as if’ describes the physical and emotive state in which the actor needs to put himself in order to perform the actions that define his role. The ‘given circumstances’ describes the situational elements in which this role assumes meaning, and may indeed be performed – including settings, background events and knowledge, and other actors’ roles. Although the ‘as if’ is vital in re-creating the belief and attitude that underlie action, without the ‘given circumstances’ this belief and attitude remain an unrealized possibility. In fact, according to this approach, one cannot learn how to act; one must be given the circumstances in which one can act. The static and abstract worlds of Merleau-Ponty and Kierkegaard describe action as constitutive of the universal human perceptual apparatus and motivational structure. They trace the prerequisites for intent to be conceptualized by individual consciousness and emerge as perceptible physical action. Acting (in both the sense of being and seeming to be) remains, in these worlds on the level of ‘as if’. This does not mean to say, however, that the concept of ‘situation’ is absent in these worlds. Merleau-Ponty’s agents field of existence and essence are clearly situational factors in deciding and acting. Meaning changes according to the particular field of existence in which the Subject acts and it also changes in relation to the essence, or inherent sense-creating properties, of the objects (including other humans) with which he interacts. Also, Kierkegaard’s concept of the occasion designates the situational parameters in which, and through which, sensation, thought and feeling can be actualized. The narrator of Either/Or I, ‘A’, with his usual dexterity with words, puts this succinctly: Without the occasion, nothing at all actually occurs, and yet the occasion has no part at all in what occurs. The occasion is the final category, the essential category of transition from the sphere of



The Winner’s Game: Out and About in Austin’s World 165


the idea to actuality. Logic should bear this in mind. It can immerse itself as it wishes in immanental thinking, plunge from nothing down to the most concrete form; it never reaches the occasion and therefore never reaches actuality, either. In the idea, all actuality can be in readiness – without the occasion, it never becomes the actual (p. 238). However, the ‘given circumstances’ as an active agent in narrative world construction emerges most clearly in Austin’s world. How to Do Things with Words, (1962) [1955] (henceforth Words) is a manual of how to use language as a resource while living in the world (as evidenced, of course, by the procedural structure of the title). Austin’s narrator creates agents who are already formed and could legitimately be called individuals. In this world, language is not an element by means of which the agent assumes consciousness of the external world and of his sense of being in it. Rather, language becomes a helper of the agent, a sort of ‘magic wand’, with which the agent attempts to change the external world so that he can act euphorically in it. This use of language constructs action as a conscious strategy of the agent aimed at externalizing, and realizing, his intention in everyday interaction with others.

Speaking the performance Words is a collection of twelve lectures delivered by Austin to students at Harvard University, and put together in publishable form by an editor (J.O. Urmson) after the author’s death. The circumstances of the text’s production evoke those of Either/Or, and are significantly reflective of the semiotic processes involved in the transmission of knowledge. The narration takes the form of orally transmitted addresses to a physically present audience – the most universal and basic form of knowledge imparting. In this respect, it parallels the narration of much of Either/Or, whose audience, however, is composed of those who are beyond knowing, being as they are outside life (the ‘symparanekromenoi’ or ‘fellow dead’). The knowledge presented in Either/Or, thus is ‘as-if knowledge’, or in more semiotic terms, seeming-to-be-knowledge. The lecture format of Words, on the other hand, provides the narrator with the given circumstances necessary to actualize his story in performance and to



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In these lectures, then, I have been doing two things which I do not altogether like doing. These are: (1) producing a programme, that is, saying what ought to be done rather than doing something; (2) lecturing (p. 163). The written transposition of Words, as it has reached us in its final form, is constructed from the actual lectures as well as from a broadcast lecture and a tape recording of another, making this text a blend, or convergence, of multimedia sources. The aim of the narrator of Words is clear and explicit: to understand when and how an utterance can become more than a statement describing an aspect of reality and can, in fact, alter this reality. To achieve this aim, he identifies himself (and the audience) as a philosopher seeking to understand how language corresponds to extra-linguistic phenomena in a meaningful way: ‘we, that is, even philosophers, set some limits to the amount of nonsense that we are prepared to admit we talk’ (p. 2). In configuring this as the narrative aim, he identifies as initial lack the philosophical belief that an utterance is equivalent to a statement that can be verified as ‘true’ in relation to the reported reality. This mistaken belief has emphasized the descriptive function of language at the expense of other functions that would foreground the intentional aspects that connect the utterance with the enunciator and the addressee: [...] many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake – the mistake of taking as straightforward statements of fact utterances which are either (in interesting non-grammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as something quite different (p. 3, emphasis in text). The narrative quest thus unfolds in correcting this mistake by assigning rights of agency to the enunciator and to the circumstances in which enunciation takes place. To assist him in this, the narrator distinguishes a type of utterance that lacks a descriptive function, and uses this to undermine the power of the statement and correct this



explicitly articulate the nature of his actions and his attitude towards them:


mistake. He characteristically names this type of utterance ‘masquerade’, thereby emphasizing its similarity but not identity to a statement – its seeming-to-be-statement quality. This type of utterance, the performative, cannot be evaluated as true or false but as ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’, depending on whether it does to reality what the speaker intended it to do or not. In Merleau-Ponty’s world the actantial Subject is the embodied human, and in Kierkegaard’s world it is the impersonalized self. In Words, the actantial Subject becomes the individual speaker, who advances in the narrative trajectory with the help of language. In this world, agents interact with others as persons, rather than as bodies or consciousnesses. Language in its instantiated, or individually appropriated, manifestation as utterance is positioned actantially as Helper or Opponent depending on whether it is correctly uttered in appropriate circumstances. The actantial model that can be extrapolated from the story of Words places the social context and the speaker’s linguistic ability to actualize her intention in a discernible form within this context as both the Sender and the Receiver. Figure 7.1 shows the actantial relations. The main method of the narrator of Words in the progress towards accomplishing his aim is to provide ‘stage directions’ to the SubjectSpeaker on how to use utterance strategically in combination with physical act so as to influence the surrounding reality and contest the mistaken philosophical belief that speakers produce only statements

social context / speaker’s linguistic ability

social context /

to communicate an intention

speaker’s intention speaker

discernible effect on the world / ‘happiness’ correct uses of utterance

incorrect uses of utterance

in appropriate circumstances

in inappropriate circumstances

(felicitous performatives)

(infelicitous performatives)

Figure 7.1 Actantial model of Words



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that describe this reality. This motivational and methodological framework compels the narrator to distinguish categories of utterances, classify them into types and name them, concentrating the epistemic aspect of the text on the onomastic dimension, where identities are constructed and named. Examples of this categorizing strategy include the important distinction among locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary utterances. The speaker’s articulation in factual terms of the intention in her act produces a locutionary utterance – the words transpose the act in linguistic terms; the speaker’s articulation of the implication of his uttered intention or his commitment to this intention produces an illocutionary utterance – the words describe how an uttered intention may or should be interpreted by the addressee; the speaker’s articulation of the effect that another’s uttered intention has on her produces a perlocutionary utterance – the words evaluate another’s uttered intention by showing its consequence. So, following the narrator’s directions, when I say ‘I say (that ...)’, I am carrying out a locutionary act; when I say ‘I advise (you to ...)’, I am producing an illocutionary act, which brings into play the relations with the addressee; and when I say ‘I am convinced (that ...)’, I am producing a perlocutionary act, which implies the act of another and shows my evaluation of it. Furthermore, a locutionary utterance may be constative, that is, it may describe a factual occurrence or phenomenon. Illocutionary and perlocutionary utterances, on the other hand, involve to varying degree the other and, therefore, place the speaker in a position of performance (to an audience) rather than objective description. Making an analogy with the terminology proposed in this study, locution is likely to cast the narrator as observer, while illocutionary acts would tend to cast the narrator as actor. The reflexive or subjective elements in the perlocutionary act could cast the narrator as actor or as witness depending on the degree of emotive involvement. In making these distinctions, the narrator of Words abstracts the formal properties of different utterances, traces recurrent patterns in relation to the ways the utterances correspond to the reported reality and names the resulting categories. This process establishes the prominence of the onomastic dimension in the construction of the epistemic aspect, and actantially positions the formed categories as Helpers or Opponents of the Subject.




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Characteristically, the narrator participates in the text as actor and as judge. Observer and witness modes of narratorial participation are not found in Words. In the instances where the narrator, in his capacity as lecturer and speaker, presents the Subject-Speaker’s acts, he identifies with this position, through the de-locating, deictic function of ‘I’, and performs the utterance that he describes. This is what happens, for example, in the following extract, where the narrator considers a case of performative: To say “you were cowardly” may be to reprimand you or to insult you: and I can make my performance explicit by saying “I reprimand you”, but I cannot do so by saying “I insult you” (p. 30). Here the narrator enacts, by describing, hypothetical speech acts and their results. The ‘I-you’ interaction stages the acts described and contains them within the textual world, exempting them from extratextual reference. ‘To say’ implies the narrator is not actually saying but hypothesizing that he is saying, and the quoted segments are examined as potential and not actual utterances. The narrator here creates circumstances and acts them out as a potential SubjectSpeaker, without the critical distance of an observer. Judge mode enters the scene when the narrator draws general conclusions from his explanations and presents these as rules or universal conditions to be used as a standard measurement scale for evaluating utterances. The following extract is an example of actor mode leading to judge mode: I fear, but at the same time of course hope, that these necessary conditions to be satisfied will strike you as obvious. (A. 1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A. 2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked [...] (p. 14–15).



The narrator’s presence

The first sentence addresses the audience directly, describing the narrator’s emotional condition, and, thereby, accentuating his embodied presence. From this presentation, the narrator stops his direct address and lists a series of non-negotiable, formulaic statements that make explicit a set of constraints external to the act of communication in which they are uttered. In simple terms, he presents general rules valid for all occasions – a typical context for judge mode. The absence of observer and witness modes is, of course, not surprising, but consistent with the epistemic aspect of the text, and strategically chosen. Observer narrators generally describe facts with a degree of objective or critical distance. The narrator of Words has explicitly asserted that his aim is to show how language can be used to perform and not to describe. Adopting an observer mode, therefore, could sabotage this aim and trick the narrator into defeating his own purpose. Similarly, witness mode generally shows the emotional attitude of a narrator towards the events presented. The aim of the narrator of Words is to show effects of speech acts on the physical world, and not on the mental or psychological state of the speaker. Adopting witness mode would introduce a subjective element to the epistemic aspect that would contradict the narrator’s intention.

The rules of the game Three concepts have particular narrative significance in the world construction of Words: circumstances, happiness, and seriousness. All three regulate the classification and positioning of the utterance, and are pivotal in the quest to conjoin the Subject-Speaker with his Object of Value, which is to affect his physical surroundings according to his wish. Briefly, the narratively strategic use of these concepts creates the following prototypical story: I begin my actions with an intention to alter my identity (say, by getting married) or someone else’s (say, by giving him/her a name), or to establish a bond between me and someone else (say, by promising or giving a gift). I then use words, often together with physical actions, within given circumstances, to effect these changes. My speech act is happy if my intention is realized in the physical world without a hitch. In order for this to occur, certain conditions are necessary: convention must qualify the circumstances in which I act as appropriate to my acts, and in





certain cases, I must have the authority to act in this way; also, I must be serious in my act by committing to the ‘truth’ of its value. If these conditions are absent, my speech act is unhappy. An unhappy speech act is not achieved, perhaps because the words or the circumstances were inappropriate, or it is achieved but hollow and void, perhaps because the speaker intended to deceive and was insincere in performing the act. In the first case, the speaker’s act ‘misfires’; in the second case, the speaker ‘abuses’ the act: Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be, in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether ‘physical’ or ‘mental’ actions or even acts of uttering further words [...] Besides the uttering of the words of the so-called performative, a good many other things have as a general rule to be right and to go right if we are to be said to have happily brought off our action (p. 8, 14, emphasis in text). Through his choice of the lexemes /perform-ative/ and /happy/ to qualify the narrative agents speaker and utterance, the narrator introduces the semantic categories of /physicality/ and /emotion/, and establishes a connection, albeit predominantly a metaphorical one, between one’s use of language and one’s emotional well-being. An important role in this connection is played by convention or social expectation. An utterance, and by metonymical extension a speaker, is deemed happy if it contains elements that are validated and legitimized by the context of enunciation through conventional means. The narrator, therefore, emphasizes the criterion of relevance, or appropriateness to circumstances, or what, in the final analysis amounts to social adjustment as a prerequisite for the successful projection of intention onto the world. This being the case, and keeping in mind that the origins or value of social expectation is not one of the narrator’s concerns, the world created in Words expounds the rules of conduct that enable the Subject-Speaker to achieve his Aim by conforming to established practices. This sets certain boundaries to the narrative world construction that prevent the narrator from including narrative programs through which the Subject could achieve the Aim by non-conventional



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means. Hypothetically, these include cases where the paradoxical nature of linguistic communication, centred in the fact that language cannot become material reality in an unmediated way (in other words, it cannot get rid of its representational function) induces the Subject to act paradoxically. This would include instances where one can achieve one’s intention by having no intention, or by actually failing to achieve it as originally envisaged. In the world of Words, such cases of what we may call ‘paradoxical happiness’ are excluded as being ‘parasitical’ (p. 22) and as involving the speaker’s lack of seriousness – both factors being conducive to maladjustment and infelicity. This is how the narrator puts it: a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. [...] Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use [...]. All this we are excluding from consideration (p. 22, emphasis in text). Consistent with its procedural, manual-type style, Words constructs a world of precise generality, where a process of action is established that can be mapped onto actual manifestations; that is, different examples can be given for the processes described without needing to alter the features of these processes. This strategy enables the text to sidestep its self-consciousness as a representation, which would emphasize self-reflexive elements, and to present itself as an interaction with the real world (symbolized by its live-lecture format). Therefore, the knowledge presented in it becomes authenticated, or is actualized as doing-knowledge, rather than seeming-to-do-knowledge, by means of the fact that it affirms the reality it describes and does not question it. The learner has learned how to do things according to rule, and how to assess, more or less objectively, the success of this doing or the reasons for its failure. The learner is now better equipped to win in the game of social interaction using language as a tool. Keeping these points in mind, compared with the other texts explored here, Words is the least fictional or artistic. As Raphael Baroni (2005) explains, fictional narrative emphasizes the novelty of events, whereas procedural texts emphasize repetitiveness and regularity. Fiction tells stories where the outcome of events is, more or





less, unpredictable and not always subject to physical laws as we know them; procedural texts (interestingly, Baroni places analytical philosophy in this category) tell stories based on the premise that we know what the outcome of events will be because we know the rules underlying ‘how things happen’. We are then better able to carry out the instructions and test them, without needing to theorize or question the circumstances in which we act. A more self-reflexively creative approach to ‘how things happen’ would perhaps be more conscious of the gap between the linguistic representation and the physical act, and of the semiotic truth that when one represents a situation, the situation is created through the representation. Such an approach would be urged to abandon accuracy of explanation for a more evocative style creating an image of the situation whose constitutive elements could be improvised by individual input. This type of approach is chosen by ‘A’, narrator of Either/Or, in his own version of what a situation, or the occasion, is – written, significantly, as a review of a play: ... it was on the occasion of the occasion of this little review that I wanted to say something rather general about the occasion or about the occasion in general. Very fortunately, it so happens that I have already said what I wanted to say, for the more I deliberate on this matter, the more I am convinced that there is nothing in general to be said about it, because there is no occasion in general. If so, then I have just come about as far as I was when I began. The reader must not be angry with me – it is not my fault; it is the occasion’s (p. 239). By emphasizing procedure, Words is the most practical of the texts discussed here. Its world emphasizes results, means in relation to specific ends and acts leading to visible outcomes. Its practicality is evidenced by its substitution in the narrative configuration of happiness and unhappiness for what it reports to have been the previously favoured truth and falsity, and of performance for description. This clearly marks its membership in contemporary scientific and philosophical systems of thought for which the concept of truth has become so laden with opposing or ambivalent meanings that it is no longer considered a reliable criterion of evaluation of a theory and has been replaced with the concept of effectiveness



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(Greimas, 1983: 111), changing theoretical concern from what a theory is to how it works – from identity to agencement (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). At the end of our journey through Words we could well come to this realization. We may not be as wise as Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, who has retuned from transcendence to live in the moment of everyday life, humbled by his awareness of how important and powerful he really is in creating signification. However, we may actually be more skilled for success in everyday life, knowing that we can, with some practice, have some valuable control over this signification.

Concluding remarks The journey of exploration in the narrative dimensions of philosophical writing has reached its end. It is now time to consider what knowledge it has produced. First, it illustrated a method of analysis and interpretation of philosophy based on tools provided by semiotics and narratology. These were revised to construct the model of narrative configuration, an interrelational combination of discursive elements whose positioning creates and communicates epistemic, knowledgegenerating, signs. In addition to the narrative configuration, this study introduced some other new analytical concepts in the narrative-semiotic methodology. These were the textual dimensions, noetic, onomastic, paratactic, which contain the different types of knowledge created in a textual world, the narrator roles, observer, actor, witness and judge, which comprise the attitudinal framework in which this knowledge is created and the presupposed world, which includes the beliefs and ideological tenets that ground and legitimize this knowledge. Using this revised and remodelled narrative-semiotic approach on the texts selected here revealed that narrative relations and techniques can indeed be traced in texts not conventionally classified as ‘narrative’, and provided examples of how this can be achieved. Having successfully faced the challenge of sustaining a narrative analysis of philosophical texts, this approach also provided evidence to support the narrative-semiotic tenet that most forms of discourse are constructed on a narrative basis, whether they exhibit explicit forms of story-telling or not.





Second, it demonstrated that knowledge imparting and receiving are based, to a considerable extent, on narrative processes. Knowledge about the world, and about the human position in it, emerges from the patterns that we trace in perceptible phenomena, in what others tell us of these phenomena and in our own reflections on these phenomena, coloured by personal experience. Pattern tracing is fundamentally a story-telling process, and it is in the pattern seeking nature of human mental processing that the links between cognition and narrative can be found. At the same time, pattern seeking is also connected to the semiotic practice of meaning making. I perceive the phenomenal world through signs and I narrate through signs; it is the semiotic systems that differ (visual, auditory, linguistic, etc.) but not their semiotic form. Narration may be seen as the attempt to put into signs the perceived patterns in a manner that is meaningful from a particular, spatio-temporal and ideological, perspective. In this sense, it is the meeting point of different semiotic systems. Third, it indicated points of ideological and methodological convergence between semiotic models of text analysis and existentialphenomenological approaches to text interpretation. The semiotic exploration of two texts from the existential-phenomenological body of knowledge showed that being, existence and the phenomena that guide meaning-making processes may well describe subjective truth and personal interpretations of objective occurrences, but they can only do so through their semiotic manifestations as signs. An object in the physical world designed to be perceived by the senses and manipulated physically becomes a text as soon as it is reflected upon and talked about. Since perception and cognition are closely related processes, as soon as an object is, in some way, represented, it can only be grasped as something else, whose semiotic quality, or to put it simply, the way it means, is affected by the position it occupies in relation to other signs within the text where the representation takes place. At the same time, since it is an object of perception, a text can affect the perceiver and the environment in which it operates in emotive and physical ways. The texts that I explored in this study, Phenomenology of Perception, Either/Or and How to Do Things with Words, have played a role in the story I live as well as in the story I recount. As my narration takes place in the same life as the one I live, telling the stories of these texts has changed my ideas about



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story-telling, my perception of the world and the way I use signs to interact with others. I exist through my narrative as much as I exist through my corporeal life, and I become aware of both through signs. As this book intended to support, knowledge is not just a body of texts; it is also a practice, with participants and situations. The creation and communication of knowledge has a paratactic dimension (in the case of knowledge transmitted through the written text, this would involve the writing and reading process) and a noetic dimension, since it is created or evoked to explain or justify actors and events. In addition, the qualifications and attributes that are made relevant in particular knowledge-exchange (epistemic) environments also give it an onomastic dimension. I suggested that a narratological approach to the text is perhaps unique in its ability to bring out these multiple correspondences between the worlds of abstract signs and the worlds of physical and emotive experience, and thereby to contribute to a unifying or integrationist approach to intersemiosis.




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Action 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 55, 56, 58, 61, 63, 73, 85, 100, 106, 127, 132, 141, 148, 152, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174 Actor role (see narrator roles) Aesthetic 3, 12, 29, 38, 40, 97, 99, 121, 159, 161 aesthetic experience 96, 119, 127 aesthetic value 10 Agent 3, 17, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 45, 46, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 83, 85, 95, 96, 106, 114, 132, 141, 148, 158, 162, 163, 164, 166, 177 Austin 3, 10, 22, 125, 163-177

Epistemology 7, 19, 56, 110, 111, 161 epistemic aspect 52, 53, 64, 65, 84, 89, 93, 97, 101, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 131, 137, 139, 143, 149, 153, 154, 156, 157, 169, 171 epistemic pre-conditions 128 epistemic signs 175 epistemic function 11 epistemic organization 48 epistemic theme 50. 96 Event 10, 14, 15, 24, 25, 26, 27, 35, 45, 51, 53, 60, 63, 64, 69, 73, 86, 90, 94, 95, 114, 141, 145, 148, 152, 158, 177 Existence 14, 15, 16, 37, 56, 69, 80, 84, 85, 93, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 115, 116, 145, 149, 156, 161, 163 Experience 17, 29, 50, 74, 79, 83, 85, 96, 108, 109, 111, 112, 120, 141, 147, 151, 153, 160, 162, 164, 176, 177

Belief 2, 5, 6, 8, 28, 34, 45, 50, 128, 130, 134, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 152, 156, 157, 165, 167, 175 Body 92, 93, 97, 104, 107, 108, 113, 153, 158, 159, 160, 161, 168 embodiment 3, 9, 10, 20, 144, 149, 159, 163, 165, 168, 171 disembodiment 146, 161 Computers 26, 27, 39 Connotation 7, 21, 122, 123, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138 Consciousness 17, 38, 50, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 91, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 115, 122, 163, 165, 166, 168 Culture 5, 10, 19, 29, 30, 38, 39, 43, 62, 111, 113, 139, 144, 153, 154, 162

Fiction 2, 24, 34, Figural (see also thematic) 20, 21, 33, 71, 72, 90, 91, 98, 116, 127, 150 Film 26, 27, 30, 34, 38, 40 Freedom 87, 104, 109, 120, 121, 137, 152 Intention 3, 4, 6, 28, 29, 31, 32, 42, 102, 118, 150, 153, 155, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173 intentional action 158 Judge role (see narrator roles)

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Index

Kierkegaard 22, 33, 47, 143-162, 164, 165, 168, 175 Knowledge 2, 6, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 25, 30, 32, 38, 39, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 60, 83, 84, 91, 94, 108, 109, 113, 119, 120, 137, 153, 173, 175, 176, 177 knowledge through language 1 object of knowledge 20 Merleau-Ponty 22, 33, 38, 95-122, 163, 164, 165, 168 Modality 46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 97, 102, 118 Narrator modes of participation (see narrator roles) Narrator roles 66-74, 107, 138, 143, 144, 161, 175 actor role 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 87, 107, 147, 169, 170, 175 judge role 88, 89, 147, 170, 175 observer role 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 107, 147, 169, 175 witness role 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 144, 147, 150, 151, 161, 162, 175 Noetic (see textual dimensions) Objectivity 11, 33, 36, 39, 72, 74, 78, 83, 91, 92, 99, 102, 107, 109, 133, 171, 176 objective condition 132 objective description 169 objective language 76 objective thought 77 Observer role (see narrator roles) Onomastic (see textual dimensions) Paratactic (see textual dimensions) Phenomenon 26, 33, 40, 49, 53, 76, 83, 88, 96, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 116, 121, 163, 167, 169

Reality 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 13, 17, 24, 25, 30, 34, 40, 90, 101, 113,, 139, 144, 147, 156, 160, 161, 162, 164, 167, 168, 169, 173 Reference 7, 8, 31, 32, 38, 40, 57, 81, 126, 132, 134, 139, 144, 148, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 164 referential function of language 41 Relevance 6, 34, 53, 172 Representation 2, 8, 19, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 40, 60, 67, 122, 128, 144, 151, 152, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 173, 174, 176 representational function of language 41, 127 Semiotic square 70, 72, 74 Sexuality 103, 108, 113, 114, 117 Subjectivity 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 17, 35, 50, 72, 77, 78, 83, 89, 91, 92, 94, 99, 122, 145, 171 subjective perception 102, 127, 144 subjective decision 141 subjective experience 79, 82, 83, 142 subjective meaning 146 subjective truth 7, 176 Textual dimensions 61–65, 74, 92, 175 noetic dimension 63–64, 74, 80, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 105, 110, 113, 114, 115, 117, 131, 133, 138, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156, 175, 177 onomastic dimension 61–63, 80, 84, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 111, 116, 131, 157, 163, 169, 175, 177 paratactic dimension 61, 74, 80, 84, 87, 92, 95, 97, 100, 105, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 131, 135, 149, 175, 177 Thematic (see also figural) 20, 21, 33, 71, 72, 90, 91, 149



Index 191

192

Index

Witness role (see narrator roles) Wittgenstein 2, 10, 16


Value 28, 34, 46, 50, 58, 61, 74, 91, 101, 110, 132, 134, 136, 140, 156, 162, 172 truth value 57, 110


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