Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction

Home , John Banville, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood

By Ana-Karina Schneider

Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction

By Ana-Karina Schneider

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7713-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7713-8 To M & M

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ...... ix

Acknowledgements ...... xxii

Chapter One ...... 1 London, Time and the Times in English Fiction

Chapter Two ...... 18 Ian McEwan’s Atonement: A Case of Traumatic Authorship

Chapter Three ...... 36 Competing Narratives in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George

Chapter Four ...... 45 Julian Barnes’s Fiction: A History of Englishness in 10 ½ Pages

Chapter Five ...... 58 “Oh! It Is Only a Novel!”: Apologetic Reading, a Postmodern Avatar of the Enlightenment

Chapter Six ...... 77 How to Read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Chapter Seven ...... 87 “The Past Is a Foreign Country”: Regression, Dislocation and Chronotopical Fluidity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels

Chapter Eight ...... 109 Clone Narratives and the Control of Discourse in Contemporary Fiction

Chapter Nine ...... 121 “Time to Call an End to Romance”: Anti-Romance in the Contemporary British Novel

viii Table of Contents

Chapter Ten ...... 143 On Musicality: John Banville’s The Sea and Beethoven’s “Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt”

Conclusions ...... 154

Notes ...... 158

Bibliography ...... 166

Index ...... 178

PREFACE

This collection of essays investigates the contemporary novel’s relation to its forerunners, the picaresques, romances and sentimental novels of the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne are therefore stable landmarks and reference points; Jane Austen is postulated as something of a turning point in the development of the genre; and of the contemporary practitioners, a handful recur from one chapter to the next, particularly Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Most of the novelists discussed here are British, but the works of Irish (Anne Enright, John Banville), Canadian (Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje) and American (Herman Melville, Stacey Richter) writers are also occasionally referred to in order to shed light on and broaden the picture of the current state of the genre, as are media and genres other than the novelistic. The chapters share an interest in the rhetoric of fiction— broadly understood as the way in which fictional works achieve their effects on readers, whether by directly addressing a hypothetical reader, using irony and parody, orchestrating competitions between divergent or intertwining narratives, inviting intertextual readings or openly taking issue with traditional conventions and the readers’ expectations. The book however does not aim to propose a consistent theory of the rhetoric of fiction; nor does it claim any generalisable validity for its findings. Rather, it consists of a series of readings that address various aspects of the novels they focus on, attempting to tease out the subtle means by which texts work on their readers. Moreover, there is no consistent use of rhetorical jargon, although some of the terminology does inevitably crop up whenever distinctions need to be drawn and the more technical aspects of novels are interrogated. Like Northrop Frye, Wayne C. Booth, R.S. Crane and other early rhetoricians, I think of rhetorical persuasion primarily in the sense of the stylistic devices and narrative strategies deployed by fiction writers to establish and control the relationship between their subject matters and/or characters and the reader. I am, in other words, interested in how specific novels achieve rhetorical effects by playing with the means and conventions made available to them by the genre. In his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, Frye is explicit about the relationship between style and persuasion: “Rhetoric has from the beginning meant two things: x Preface ornamental speech and persuasive speech” (1990, 245). Whether or not one agrees with his distinction according to which

Ornamental rhetoric acts on its hearers statically, leading them to admire its own beauty or wit; persuasive rhetoric tries to lead them kinetically toward a course of action. One articulates emotion; the other manipulates it. (Frye 1990, 245), it seems irrefutable that the persuasiveness of fiction is inseparable from its style and tropes.i I further endorse the dialectics suggested by Frye’s definition of literature as “the rhetorical organization of grammar and logic,” while “[p]ersuasive rhetoric is applied literature, or the use of literary art to reinforce the power of argument” (1990, 245). Not only is the reference to the trivium productive and therefore worth returning to, but this equation of literature and rhetoric, as Paul de Man also knew well, is at the very heart of literariness, that complex and often misunderstood concept that distinguishes the literary text from any other kind by foregrounding that which is in excess of grammar and logic (de Man in Rice and Waugh 1998, 207-214). Moreover, Frye draws on Aristotle’s discussion in his Poetics of the six elements of poetry (mythos, ethos, dianoia; melos, lexis, opsis) and usefully precedes the statement quoted above by showing how, within the second series of elements, the middle one, lexis, or verbal texture, is connected to the other two:

Considered as a verbal structure, literature presents a lexis which combines two other elements: melos, an element analogous to or otherwise connected with music, and opsis, which has a similar connection with the plastic arts. (Frye 1990, 244), as well as the stage. Lexis, as Aristotle acknowledges, is the proper subject of rhetoric (qtd. in Frye 1990, 245). I find these associations very helpful: On the one hand, many of the novels discussed here have lent themselves to interesting screen adaptations which are resonant of the spectacle quality of narrative, of that which appeals to the eye as both visual imagery and performance. On the other, Frye’s point enables me to internalise a conception of musicality as a formal property of fiction, both in the sense that the structure of a novel can sometimes be described in musical terms, as I do in the last chapter with John Banville’s The Sea, and in the sense that the euphonic quality of language persuades by seduction. More recent narratologists such as James Phelan, David Herman and Mark Currie point out that there is much to be learned from Frye’s and Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction xi

Booth’s insights and distinctions. Others develop those distinctions further, showing how an understanding of narrative as mimetic representation or fictional world differs from narrative viewed as communicative act and how Booth conceived of rhetoric “not primarily as argumentation but as technique or style” (Rodden 2008, 154-155). John Rodden’s description of the working of narrative is minutely technical and, as will be seen, I find it very useful in my analysis of Barnes’s narrative method in Arthur & George. Most of Booth’s followers however would agree that Booth did conceive of narrative as communication between author and reader— whether they understand the author’s role as setting the standards against which the events and characters of the novel are to be judged (Herman 2012, 15), doing the judging himself (Bialostosky 1985, 212), or overcoming the reader’s resistances by controlling narrative distance (Currie 2010, 58)—as well as between narrator and reader. While I find such diverging appropriations of Booth fascinating, rather than follow their lead or analyse them comparatively, I prefer in what follows to simply take from each whatever I find useful and proceed to show how they help interrogate certain aspects of various literary and cultural texts. Thus, rather than theorise rhetoric, this book shows it in action, pointing out the complex ways in which its means and strategies change in time, across media, and in response to the proliferation of media. Essentially, the book analyses the three Aristotelian elements of persuasive and memorable speech, logos, pathos, ethos, revealing time’s imbrication with the activities of both narrating and reading: time and/as history, time and identity, time and change, time and place, etc. Ethos refers to the authority of the value system upheld by the author, foregrounding the rhetorical construction of identity as a central thematic preoccupation, whether it concerns the individual or the community/ nation. Pathos concerns what Booth in his seminal Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) calls “control of distance,” i.e., the ways in which the author controls the reader’s emotional responses to the protagonist and characters. Logos refers to the organisation of the argumentation, the challenging of established conventions, and the orchestration of competing narratives and discourses. The content of novels is thus no less important than the formal aspects, or the lexis, in a rhetorical approach, nor are these separate matters, although the degree to which questions of structure and technique or questions of culture and politics are privileged varies from one chapter to another. By and large, my approach could be described as bringing contextualist narratology to bear on the rhetoric of fiction. As the chapters weave in and out of the same handful of novels, they illustrate the multiple levels of experience that are organised narratively xii Preface and rhetorically, from cultural and personal identity, to the activity of reading and related cognitive processes. In analysing these experiential levels, I find it useful to think of narrative as an enunciative act rather than a structured world, and, moreover, as “purposive communication” (Phelan 2008, 167) which combines narration or statement of the case with argument and narratorial commentary in order to achieve a specific aim that involves the addressee. The novel’s foregrounding of the argumentative mode, couched generically in a proliferation of discursive registers (see Bakhtin), contributes to a displacement of the category of “story” from the realm of representation (both as grand narrative and petite reçue) abstractable from the text, to the etymologically sanctioned concatenation of the legitimating discourse of metafiction and of story as performance (< Gk. theoria, etymologically the root of theatre as well as theory), that is, to telling. This approach to narration as communication, which acknowledges the narrator’s mediation, does not exclude the discussion of showing (cf. Percy Lubbock’s polarisation of showing vs. telling, privileging the former). Rather, along the lines set by Booth and summarised by David Herman, it views showing itself as a

localized effect ... promoted by certain, deliberately structured, kinds of telling, organized in such a way that a narrator’s mediation (though inescapably present) remains more or less covert. (Herman 2012, 15)

As Herman observes, Booth privileged telling over showing because explicit narratorial commentary can achieve

important rhetorical effects ... for example, relating particulars to norms established elsewhere in the text, heightening the significance of events, or manipulating mood. (2012, 15)

These and other rhetorical effects are deployed by novels in the process of proposing to the reader a certain account of an age, an ethos, a cultural identity, or an epistemological enquiry, inviting interpretation and involving him in value judgments. Chapters focusing on narrative strategy and metanarrative comment alternate with chapters interrogating reading practices and readerly participation in the rhetorical interchange. My interest, however, is not in a phenomenology of reading, nor in reception theories, but rather in the many ways in which the reader is implied in the very rhetoric of narrative fiction. In her classic narratology handbook, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan proceeds along similar lines and in the last chapter points out the chief benefit of including the reader in the discussion of narrative form: Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction xiii

The advantage of talking of an implied reader rather than of ‘textual strategies’ pure and simple ... is that it implies a view of the text as a system of reconstruction-inviting structures rather than as an autonomous object. (2002, 120)

In the coda to the second edition of her book she gauges the extent to which approaches to narrative fiction and particularly to its reading had changed in the intervening decades since the first edition, and concludes that they had not changed to such a degree as to invalidate such a procedure (Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 141), although understandings of what the reader brings to the table had indeed evolved under the impact of ideology-aware post-structuralist theories (139). Thus, rather than focus on the reading practices enabled by various novels (as Derek Alsop and Chris Walsh do in their helpful book, The Practice of Reading), I inquire into the ways in which authors invite their readers to reconstruct and participate in the meanings of the texts. Largely, my book aims to restore a sense that whatever old tricks the author or narrator is perceived to be up to, they are an invitation to the reader to take part in the fun. The occasional film adaptation is discussed along with the novel it was based on, and the impact of mass media—from the periodicals of the eighteenth century to the television and internet of our days—on discursive practices is also noted. The ways in which various media modify reading practices help to explain how authors and narrators seek to adapt their voices to the communicative habits of audiences inured to a diversity of semiotic systems and speeds of delivery. The many dramatisations of the activities of writing and reading in novels point precisely to this participative dimension of the text and thus constitute a compelling rhetorical strategy. The book therefore addresses students and scholars in the early stages of their research, encouraging readings that identify rhetorical strategies that challenge conventional forms and expectations. This kind of exchange between narrator and audience is enabled by narratives, as explained by Rodden:

the listeners are always ‘measuring the speaker up,’ bending toward him or resisting him. He projects a certain image to them, and as his discourse proceeds, they reconsider their impressions of him, filling in the missing links of his argument, placing it within the context of their own experience and relating to it in their own idiosyncratic way. (2008, 154)

Narratives invite such evaluations, as another leading rhetorician, James Phelan, points out, by being themselves “a way of interpreting and xiv Preface evaluating” experience, of endowing that experience with “shape and meaning by setting it off from other experiences, placing it in the grooves of an intelligible plot, and judging its agents and events” (2008, 167). What is more, implicit in each narrative are competing alternatives which may take the same experience and shape and interpret it differently, for different purposes. These potential alternatives, Phelan shows, both encourage contrastive analyses of the selections and features of the narrative and sometimes may even shape the telling itself, as “tellers are likely to construct their tales at least partly in response to or anticipation of one or more possible alternatives” (2008, 168). I am particularly fascinated by two kinds of alternatives whose germs are anticipated in every narrative: the ones that sometimes coexist explicitly within the covers of a novel, as when competing versions of a story are told by several narrators or characters; and the analytical kind of counter-narratives that critical readers devise. Yet if we accept—as any rhetorical approach must—that authors write their novels having in mind a specific audience (typified by what Booth called the implied reader) and even anticipating their readers’ resistance to various aspects of the novel—whether pertaining to its logos, ethos or pathos—then a number of questions arise. The most glaring of these is probably, how far can an eighteenth-century novelist’s imagination be trusted to anticipate the readers of the twenty-first century? What does it mean to say that there is a little bit of us in the reader imagined and addressed by Henry Fielding in his metanarrative chapters and prefaces or by Laurence Sterne in his narrator’s digressions? Yet plainly there is, for the novels continue to be read and to be influential. Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy clearly addressed contemporary readers and explicitly portrayed the implied readers that they were addressing. As their audience’s place is gradually taken by a different typology, how do these new readers fit into the places designed for them almost three centuries ago? How does the female academic take to the role of Madam, one of the intradiegetic readers of Tristram Shandy? Very well, critic Helen Ostovich demonstrates, for Sterne designs for Madam, as for his Mrs Shandy, a critical and often subversive stance, which foregrounds the blind spots and shortcomings of the male characters who stand for reason and intelligence in the novel, Tristram included (in Keymer 2006, 184). The next inevitable question pertains to the phenomenology of reading and will therefore remain unanswered in this volume, but it is worth formulating as it points to those aspects of reading which authors cannot anticipate: what does it take for the twenty-first-century reader to be able to read these novels in a context in which many of the frameworks for Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction xv understanding them have changed? How much book learning is needed to compensate for the knowledge that can no longer be taken for granted in the dialogue between author and reader, and how does that book learning modify what we see in the novel? Does this need for book learning explain the proliferation of contextualising narratological readings? As the question devolves into an attempt to account for current developments in rhetorical and narratological studies, it also points to the existence of certain conventions, codes and frameworks which are the very conditions of intelligibility of novels. The first chapter of this book focuses precisely on such frames of reference, showing how their being shared by authors and audiences could be deployed, sometimes simultaneously, as shortcuts to specific meanings—particularly for didactic, moralising purposes—and, parodically, as a means of unsettling preconceived notions. Such questions are openly invited by the novels discussed here as they share a preoccupation with “addressivity,” to use Steven Connor’s term (2001, 8 pass), and acknowledge their indebtedness to similarly oriented previous novels. Critic Thomas Keymer, for instance, investigates Sterne’s debt to Fielding and Richardson:

Tristram Shandy absorbs and resumes the most vexed topics of experimentation and debate in novels such as Clarissa and Tom Jones, notably the mimetic efficacy (or otherwise) of narrative language, the dynamics of communication between narrator and reader, and the openness of narrative meaning to plural construction. (in Keymer 2006, 52)

Melvyn New, on the other hand, assigns somewhat similar effects to the influence of the Augustan satirists on Sterne’s prose (in Keymer 2006, 191-204, in Poole 2009, 66-77). Austen is likewise indebted to her predecessors for the questions concerning the representability of virtue and self-knowledge that she raises. Evidence of her extensive reading is rife, even when, as in Northanger Abbey, she mentions “a chapter from Sterne” only to deride publishers who lump it together with “some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, [and] a paper from the Spectator” in order to produce fashionable yet irrelevant anthologies (Austen 1968, 867), or when she lists Tom Jones along with The Monk as rather risqué novels that some young men might prefer to the romances read by young women (873). Critics such as Jocelyn Harris (in Poole 2009, 98-112) and Isobel Grundy (in Copeland and McMaster 1997, 189-210) have investigated the various uses Austen makes of her sources, from appropriation to parody. Yet her highest tribute to her predecessors is her departure from the established novelistic genres towards the hybridisation of the comedy of manners with social realism, resulting in what I describe in the last-but- xvi Preface one chapter as anti-romance, a form and a mode rather than a genre, and a staple of contemporary British literature. In their turn, both McEwan and Ishiguro are explicit about the influence of Austen’s style and narrative pace as much as her preoccupation with the representation of consciousness in action. Like their contemporary, Julian Barnes, they are as aware as Richardson, Fielding and Sterne were in their time of the audience they are addressing and of the ways in which they are shaping that audience’s literary sensibilities and expectations. Implicit—and sometimes explicit—in their works are always questions concerning “the mimetic efficacy of narrative language, the dynamics of communication between narrator and reader, and the openness of narrative meaning to plural construction.” My interest in the ways in which novels persuade their readers leads me to inquire into how novels work and ultimately into what constitutes a novel. In his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Herman synthesises an entire narratological tradition as he draws up a prototype of narrative in contrast to descriptive modes such as the scientific and the merely factual:

...core or prototypical instances of narrative represent or simulate

(i) a structured time-course of particularized events which introduces (ii) disruption or disequilibrium into storytellers’ and interpreters’ mental model of the world evoked by the narrative (whether that world is presented as actual, imagined, dreamed, etc.), conveying (iii) what it’s like to live through that disruption, that is, the “qualia” (or felt, subjective awareness) of real or imagined consciousnesses undergoing the disruptive experience. (2012, 9)

In other words, as Herman explains, the “particularised temporal sequence” of the events must convey a sense of causality, if not, indeed, inevitability, and it is typically driven by a disruption, disequilibrium, conflict, or breach of some “implicit canonical script” (Bruner qtd. in Herman 2012, 10) which needs to be resolved. These two conditions however are insufficient in the absence of an account of the “experiencing human or at least human-like consciousness” (Herman 2012, 11). This sine qua non of the experiencing human consciousness, emphasised by theoreticians such as Monika Fludernik, was intuited, early on, by the founders of the genre as they devised divergent, internal (Richardson) and external (Fielding) ways of rendering the impact of experience on their characters’ consciousnesses. It also determines me to ask, as Mark Currie does in the introductory Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction xvii chapter of his book About Time,

what domain of understanding or knowledge might be occupied by the contemporary novel on the subject of time, or what effects these structures might exert in the world. (2010, 1)

Concerned with the philosophy of time, Currie shows that fiction and narrative theory could teach philosophers a thing or two on the issue of distance, particularly the self-distance that is essential to the understanding of Being as theorised by Heidegger (Currie 2010, 57). But he also emphasises that fiction in particular teaches us not only to interpret causality and motivation but to look upon the present with an awareness that it will be recounted and interpreted in the future (2010, 6, 33). Similarly, the polymathic propensity of novels enables their participation in many other types of knowledge, particularly historical, sociological and psychological. With its roots in the rationalism and nationalism of the eighteenth century, the genre typically accommodates diverse frames of reference, ranging from medieval chivalry to modern complacency, the ethos of the empire and its practices, private self-images and civic nationalism, the personal and civic concatenations of love and hate, guilt and innocence, humility and pride, to name only the most widespread. The novel further enables a sophisticated understanding of the many ways in which such knowledge is couched in discourse, whether at the intentional level of rhetoric or the inherent level of language itself. Currie concludes that if one were to find a narratological answer to the question, “What does this novel know about time?” (2010, 109-111), it would be insufficient to look at thematisations of time within that novel, or at what the novel says about time. It is much more productive to make

a serious effort to understand the temporal structures of its discourses rather than ... the citation and paraphrase of its statements by a content- based criticism. (Currie 2010, 140)

Such an analysis of temporal structures includes reflection on the distinction between time and tense and on what Currie calls the “tense conditions of fiction,” that is, verb tense as well as other “aspects of tense that are not encoded in the verb” (2010, 144). A tense-based narratology, Currie proposes, would offer “a framework for the analysis of temporal structure and temporal reference in narrative which [would] go beyond the idea of time as thematic content” (2010, 150) to reflect on the “ability of narrative to produce or transform the human experience of time” (151). To extrapolate, attention to the working of the language reveals how novels xviii Preface communicate their knowledge in ways that are capable of effecting actual change in the ‘real world.’ Neither Currie’s ambitious project of “inferring a metaphysics of time from the temporal structures of narrative” (2010, 151), nor the definition of the novel receive theoretical treatment in what follows. The definition of the novel, for instance, is only addressed to the extent that it sheds light on certain contemporary evolutions, such as what I regard as the current revival of the anti-romance, treated in one of the last chapters. However, the recognition of the centrality of certain features to any understanding of the novel as a genre informs all the chapters. To be recognised as a novel, a long prose fiction must narrate not only a sequence of events, but their impact on an experiential consciousness, and in doing so it conveys certain kinds of knowledge for specific purposes which may or may not be explicit in the novel itself. The very intelligibility of the novel depends on its foregrounding of one or sometimes several experiencing consciousnesses and on the epistemological frames on which it draws in organising and interpreting the events which it narrates. The centrality of these content elements was predetermined by the historical circumstances in which the novel emerged, specifically by the almost simultaneous advent of new ways of thinking of the self, commonly referred to as individualism, and the rise of new ways of socialising that accompanied the rise to economic and social prominence of the landed and then the professional middle classes. New insights into and emphases on certain aspects of the way in which the context is transferred into content inform the following chapters and contribute to my understanding of how narratives communicate with their readers. Critic Susan Manning’s synthesis of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century as the outcome of a relational, rather than segregating, conception of the individual sheds light on the novel’s participation in the engineering of a civically-minded, benevolent society. Sensibility, she reminds us quoting the Scottish moral philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames,

functioned as a kind of social cement that holds individuals together in a moralized and emotionalized public sphere, through a ‘language [of] the heart’ that ‘strengthens the bond of society, and attracts individuals from their private system to exert themselves in acts of generosity and benevolence’. (Manning in Keymer and Mee 2004, 83)

Two questions are essential to the sentimental novels that thematise this relational concept of the individual, postulated on a shared sensibility and humanity: The first is whether the “spontaneous, wayward and Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction xix unpredictable nature” of sensibility “could be harnessed” to its use-value as cultural capital by instruction, “whether physiology and imagination could be taught universally to respond responsibly, sociably, predictably” (Manning in Keymer and Mee 2004, 92). The second had to do with the feasibility of a narrative representation of sensibility. At the heart of sentimental novels, Manning shows, “is a formal investigation into the viability of narrative itself, in relation to the expression of emotion” (85). Sentimental fiction, unlike melodrama, stages the impossibility of finding verbal expression for the excesses of sentiment and is therefore characterised by fragmentariness:

Typically invested in ‘scenes’ rather than continuous stories, its narrative signature was (both structurally and syntactically) disjunctive, fragmentary. The fictional experience was simultaneously a connecting and a disconnected one. (Manning in Keymer and Mee 2004, 86)

This correlation between the sentimental novel’s social role and its interrogation of the viability of its own form is explored in the first chapter of this book in relation to standard representations of time and place and similar insights inform further investigations of the way in which narrative form participates in the communicative act the novel engages in. The rest of the chapters focus primarily on contemporary fiction, but these two types of questions, concerning what novels can teach us and the kinds of formal means they deploy in order to convey their knowledge, underlie all my analyses. Manning herself suggests the connection between the novels of the eighteenth century and those of our days when she points out that the “revival of interest in Sensibility as a literary mode coincides with postmodern recognition of the artifice in all aesthetic and ethical systems” (in Keymer and Mee 2004, 96). The “generically unstable modes of Sensibility,” she proposes (in Keymer and Mee 2004, 97), signalled the precarity of narrative expression and normative response in the cultural climate of postmodern concern over authenticity and the relativity of value. Manning’s point is well taken and productive, as will be seen. As narrative forms become deliberately unstable and hybridised in the late twentieth century, it becomes imperative to look into the rhetorical implications, and this is what I propose to do, particularly in Chapters Three, Four, Seven, Eight and Nine. The novels I dwell on measure the precarity of narratives against the truth claims of other modes of knowledge, from the empirical to the speculative, and the outcomes are thought-provoking. Thus, knowledge about time is only one of many kinds of knowledge that novels communicate, and interrogating them in terms of what they can xx Preface contribute to a philosophy of time only one of the many ways of acknowledging their role in shaping our understanding of experience. Analysing the grammatical level of texts is, moreover, a necessary step in a rhetorical analysis. My intention is to reconcile such a rhetorical view of narrative with a wider understanding of discourse as a category that is fundamentally relevant to the constructions of reality that we operate in our effort to structure the world of experience in such a way as to make it containable, psychologically manageable, as it were. To put it differently, I put a humanist twist on Rodden’s eponymous question, “How do stories persuade audiences?,” and reword it as “How do stories edify audiences?,” where to edify has a triple meaning: (1) “to inform or instruct (someone) with a view to improving his or her morals or understanding” (Free Dictionary 2003-2015, online)—i.e., convince audiences to pursue knowledge of the world as a means to self-betterment; (2) the word comes into English via French, where it also means to clarify or explain and is synonymous with to elucidate, thus resonating with Quintillian’s prescription “that the narratio be brief, plausible, and lucid” (qtd. in Rodden 2008, 160), but also with George Edalji’s understanding of legal process in Barnes’s Arthur & George as “a journey from confusion to clarity” (Barnes 2006, 90); and (3) the etymological “to build” (< Lat. aedificare) an audience in the sense of generating an enabling understanding of the centrality of rhetoric to narratives and, correspondingly, of performance to identity formation. In his 2008 article quoted above, Rodden builds on Frye’s Fourth Essay in The Anatomy of Criticism as he points out the advantages of investigating narrative as rhetoric and moreover of thinking of narrative as persuasion. More than a chain of enthymemes, the view of narrative as persuasion is based on an understanding of narrative as a chain of symbols and/or motifs, for “persuasion may follow rational, emotional or ethical patterns” (Rodden 2008, 165-166). In other words, unlike formalist and structuralist accounts which stop at describing narrative as a chain of events (grammar) or syllogisms (logic), to think of narrative as persuasion is to appeal to logos, pathos or ethos, and more to the latter two than the former. On this view, narrative movement is primarily “ana-logical” and “psycho-logical,” i.e., it appeals to imagination rather than reason and it “fosters author-reader (-auditor) identification through aesthetic form” (Rodden 2008, 167). There is a specific kind of story which progresses primarily “by motifs carrying ideas” (2008, 169) which is particularly amenable to the kind of approach to narrative cumulatively and dissociatively described by Rodden here and whose paradigm is Orwell’s 1984, although Manning would probably agree that sentimental novels are Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction xxi equally open to such an approach (in Keymer and Mee 2004, 88).ii Yet to invest imagination with a role in the analysis of narrative as persuasion is to account for a psychological or affective dimension of the communication between author and reader which is not otherwise accounted for by more rationalist or structuralist approaches to narrative. Rodden follows Wolfgang Iser in this, although he also diverges significantly from the German phenomenologist; as we have seen, Frye and de Man also admit the inevitability of a kind of appeal that is unquantifiable, whether they call it “ornamental rhetoric” or “persuasion by seduction.” Moreover, the acknowledgement of the interpretive role of imagination opens the door to the broader philosophical issues of imagination as conduit for the aesthetic and even, to the extent that fiction addresses ethical questions, of imagination as moral agent. To put it simply, one might start asking, “What does the novel know about imagination?” or “What does it know about empathy?” and what kinds of knowledge does it contribute to the philosophical fields of aesthetics or ethics? But these are perhaps questions for another volume.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As many of these chapters were originally published, in a more or less different form, in a variety of journals and volumes, I wish to thank those publications for permission to include the revised texts in this volume. Over the years I have received guidance, feedback and encouragement from a number of distinguished colleagues, particularly Adriana Neagu, Peter Childs and Merritt Moseley. To them all, my heartfelt gratitude.

CHAPTER ONE

LONDON, TIME AND THE TIMES IN ENGLISH FICTIONiii

O, tempora! O, mores! (Cicero)

In a book about structures of time in contemporary fiction, theoretician Mark Currie proposes that it is time we asked:

what domain of understanding or knowledge might be occupied by the contemporary novel on the subject of time, or what effects these structures might exert in the world. (2010, 1)

Currie’s book is concerned with narratives’ contribution to the philosophy of time as well as to the layman’s understanding of time in real life, but his questions could easily be extrapolated to other frameworks, such as the ethical. Although without Currie’s philosophical range, in what follows I raise somewhat similar questions as I show that references to London in classic novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) typify changing attitudes to the didactic function of the genre by concatenating urban and rural life to different types of temporality as well as the conventional distribution of morality to city and country in the eighteenth century. Preoccupied by definition with the realistic representation of individual subjectivity in relation to its environment, the novelistic genre draws on several domains of knowledge, from psychology and moral philosophy to folklore to the hard sciences, and in its turn contributes to their propagation as it develops narrative and rhetorical structures. The pivotal question here concerns the transferability of knowledge from one field to another. As Susan Manning exemplifies,

a moral sentiment as described in a philosophical treatise becomes something quite different when embodied in character, plot and transmitted through the commercial transaction of publication. (in Keymer and Mee 2004, 85) 2 Chapter One

To these modifying factors, one might add authorial intention, as instanced by Sterne’s humorous and parodic engagement with current medical practice or Lockean philosophy. The fact that knowledge is thus mediated is one of the aspects that interest me in what follows; the other is the extent to which current assumptions and precepts of the eighteenth century functioned as a shared code in the transmission of knowledge. Michael McKeon identifies a central concern of the genre when he points out that “the emerging novel”—a category to which he ascribes Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding—“internalized the emergence of the middle class in its preoccupation with the problem of how virtue is signified” (1985, 180). The apparent solution of representing instances of virtue in contrast to instances of vice, which had worked in the stage version of the comedy of manners, was not unproblematically embraced by the early novelists. As McKeon astutely argues, early on writers found ways of suggesting that questions of virtue are analogous to questions of truth:

questions of truth and virtue begin to seem not so much distinct problems, as versions or transformations of each other, distinct ways of formulating and propounding a fundamental problem of what might be called epistemological, sociological, and ethical ‘signification’. (1985, 181)

This problem of signification, variously solved by novels by investing events, times and places with truth value and moral value, is inextricably bound up with the problem of significance: not only how to make things signify but also how to ensure that their meaning achieves the desired effects. Representations of time and place, however vague and marginal to the plot, contribute to a novel’s meanings in several ways. In addition to being the conditions of intelligibility of the plot—where they organise actions both simultaneously, in space, and chronologically, along what in retrospect is usually interpreted as a sequence of causes and effects—, time and place are also the basic coordinates of a shared conceptual framework. The setting in time and space provides a chronotopical and cultural context against which the characters’ actions can be interpreted. The characters’ divergence from the cultural and moral norms of their community is often what motivates and sets in motion the entire narrative. Moreover, specific times and places can be endowed with metaphorical meanings that ensure specific readings, such as the association of rural settings with moral rectitude or even prelapsarian innocence and of London with moral corruption, or of the past with values that are superior to those afforded by the present. All three novels discussed below include London, Time and the Times in English Fiction 3 and challenge such shortcuts. The eighteenth century is widely acknowledged as a century when significant modifications of the understanding of time occurred, not only due to accruing technological progress gradually leading to the standardisation of time,iv but also due to a growing awareness that time can be measured in several ways and that these different senses of time bear different relations to individual and collective life. For one thing, the difference between town and country, once amenable to figurations as the difference between clock time and mechanical rhythms on the one hand, and natural cycles on the other, is challenged as clocks become more widespread in village squares and church steeples as well as middle- and upper-class homes. By the end of the seventeenth century almost every house in England had its clock, and each town or village had its clock tower. These were set by the sun and later by bringing the time down from London, the capital where the time was, at least theoretically, set for the entire country, for all the vital events that make up history itself. Bringing the time to the countryside was arduous business given the comparatively rudimentary means of transport, and it yielded indifferent results, which moreover often differed from the sun dial; hence the importance of preserving the right time, once the tower or grandfather clock was set, by winding them regularly. Inevitably, early and late are relative categories that foreground the precariousness of the present by pointing to its constitutive relations to the past and the future: by the time you say “now,” it is already later, “now” is in the past and you are already living in what at that moment was the future. And as will be seen in what follows, the indeterminacy of the present contaminates the concept of modernity, for modern etymologically means “of the present.” Secondly, as Amit Yahav points out in a groundbreaking narratographic account of representations of “sonorous duration” in Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, “a sense of duration keyed not to clock but pulse and underwritten by both formal precision and experiential effects” emerged in eighteenth-century England in conjunction with the “culture of sensibility” (2013, 872-873). In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke had seminally described the sense of duration that arises from the succession of ideas in the human mind. Shortly thereafter, musicologists, elocutionists and novelists alike sought techniques for representing this “experiential dimension of temporality” that is distinct from clock time, whether they agreed that it was ideational and individual, or perceived it as being organised by the “isochronic beats generated by natural physiological motion,” and therefore “felt and shared” (Yahav 2013, 873-874). Yahav’s 4 Chapter One proposed aim is to show how,

like early musicologists and elocutionists, [Sterne] stresses the way recurring pulses structure a temporal experience that absorbs characters and readers into shared durations. (Yahav 2013, 876)

The pulses she analyses organise sentences and paragraphs rather than scene and description (Yahav 2013, 873), but the representations of duration that she historicises in this article are relevant to a more holistic understanding of novelistic narrativisations of the relationship between experience and temporality in the context of the rise of preoccupations with the individual self and the relation between one’s private identity and community. As she shows,

before Henri Bergson’s insistence on duration as the immediate data of consciousness or Virginia Woolf’s renditions of the moment, eighteenth- century writers explored such dimensions of temporality and developed a perspective different from modernist approaches. These writers understood duration not as prelinguistic and solipsistic but as relational and shared. For Sterne, his contemporaries, and their novelistic legacy, experiential duration by no means constituted release from forms and social relations; rather, duration delivered an alternative to objectified notions of time, an alternative that has its own formal and ideological frameworks. (Yahav 2013, 873)

The enduring relevance of social relations to the experience of duration instantiates the inextricability of individuality and community that constitutes not only the justification of the social function of fictions but the very condition of reading, an activity which is impossible in the absence of shared frameworks and codes. In that sense, Yahav follows Thomas Keymer in foregrounding the competition between discourse and action in Tristram Shandy and discusses Sterne’s revision of Locke’s understanding of temporality by adding “the eternal scampering of the discourse” (Sterne 1997, 154) as an instance both of this tension and of conversation as a natural method of computing time (Yahav 2013, 878- 882). The necessary regularity of winding the clock and its significant connections in the optimal functioning of a household like that of the Shandys in Sterne’s novel can thus be read as a representation of modern optimism concerning technological progress and rationality, whereas the constant frustrations of such expectations experienced by the characters are a way of suggesting the insufficiency and inadequateness of abstract measurements imposed on the experiential. It has famously been said that London, Time and the Times in English Fiction 5

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is “the most typical of all novels” (Viktor Shklovsky), and one of the reasons it is so, I argue, is precisely because it centres on a concatenation of domestic circumstances—from a marriage settlement to a false alarm about a pregnancy to someone eloping with the money that should have paid for a midwife’s training to forgetting to wind up the clock—in order to account for the destiny of its protagonist. The stringing together of these disparate mundane circumstances, which take up the better part of the first volume of the novel, is an experiment with modes of representing the personal, epistemological and socio-economic overdetermination of character and is as such a very modern enterprise. The thematisation of the setting of the clock in eighteenth-century fiction is thus metonymic for the attempt to change mores and fashions, and thus of the novel’s educational function, as well as of the questions of representation and signification that constitute the novel as a genre. Journeys to or from London feature heavily in early British novels, and they are similarly metonymic in their frequent association with both time and the times. On the one hand, the time it takes to travel is associated with the time of the narrative—incidents happen en route, people are met, minds are made up or changed—and that of the narration, and implicitly of the reading. Novels narrativise this relationship variously: in Tom Jones, for instance, Tom’s adventures on the way to London are interrupted by the author’s disquisitions on the reading of novels; in Tristram Shandy, the return journey from London is described solely as Walter Shandy’s lament over having had to undertake the journey in the first place; in Mansfield Park, journeys are similarly related in terms of the traveller’s emotions, whether by the narrator, usually through free indirect discourse, or retrospectively by the traveller himself or herself. On the other hand, there is a persistent sense that the present is more present in London, and the future more tangible.v Like the standardisation of time, the ascription of emotional and moral value to places is a narrative convention that facilitates the readers’ recognition of a common horizon. Yet London is typically represented as a place where virtue and authenticity are harder to come by than in the countryside. The world of business, of markets and assizes inured people to clock time, and socialising itself came to observe these new rhythms. By introducing this artificial dimension to time, London foregrounds the artificiality of other aspects of its effervescent, enticing life. The only “season” in London seems to be that of balls, and one that diverges temporally from the natural cycle, at that: while all nature lies dormant, the marriage market is in full swing, and so it continues through spring (Stone 1990, 213). The contrast 6 Chapter One to the natural cyclicity of country life is drawn by eighteenth-century authors in furtherance of the moralising message expected of their novels, although the associations of the “season” with essential personal and communal life events are inescapable. A sense of place is central not only to the polarisation of virtue and vice between town and country but also in terms of the spaces which prove propitious to the development of an authentic self and become figurations of the transition from one stage to another. The eighteenth was the century of what Lionel Trilling and others describe as the emergence of the “new kind of personality ... we call an ‘individual’” (Trilling 1972, 24) and, moreover, of “affective individualism” (Stone 1990, 153), as well as the discovery of the inevitable tension between one’s needs as an individual and the imperatives of social living. As Lawrence Stone reveals, the reconciliation of these divergent needs had lasting effects on marriage, education and family life, but also the structure of houses. The growing awareness of the distinction between the public and the private self led to increasingly more specialised modes of socialising and consequently also to the specialisation of spaces within the house and grounds, for which eighteenth-century architecture and landscape design had to provide: modern facilities such as the corridor, the dumb waiter and the ha-ha were invented (Stone 1990, 245-246). Additionally, Stone shows, a slightly better understanding of the relationship of hygiene to good health, safer living conditions and the decrease in child mortality led to the emergence of the companionate marriage and the tendency to care for and educate children at home (1990, 149-300), as instantiated by the Shandys and particularly by Walter Shandy’s intention of writing “Tristrapaedia,” a tract on the raising of his son Tristram. As these changing attitudes strengthened familial bonds, they also weakened the hold of the patriarchal bias on the individual, an early illustration of which we see in Tom Jones. Augustan prosperity and enthusiasm for moral reform gave way to the civilised and empathetic social relations of the latter half of the long eighteenth century. There was a growing sense that what one owed to society was civility, but what one owed to oneself was self-betterment, which began with soul searching and continued with education. The Enlightenment imperative of self-knowledge led to the discovery not only of “depths in the self” (Armstrong 1987, 114) but also of many different kinds of selves, which found their best expression in non- dramatic literature. Hence the appeal of literary genres which enabled psychological analysis and the narration of formative experience, such as biographies or “lives,” memoirs, and especially novels, as an alternative London, Time and the Times in English Fiction 7 means of meeting the educational needs of an ever increasing, ever more diversified readership which based its sense of self-worth on an ethos of propriety, sensibility and sympathy rather than birth and rank. Critic Steven Connor synthesises, alluding to the etymology of the name of the genre:

as the ‘new’ story, which follows the unprecedented, unpredictable shape of the individual life, the novel embodies the new philosophical preference for the strenuously self-creating individual subject over inherited systems of value and belief. (2001, 6)

The literary scene thus not only mirrors the intersection of social, economic, philosophical, intellectual and affective changes taking place in Britain throughout the eighteenth century: it also participates in it.

***

Such were the times when the emerging genre of the novel found itself under the imperative of justifying its existence by participating in the education of its readers. Evolutions in educational views are therefore reflected in the novel, as are shifts in the relationship between sensibility and propriety, or civilised behaviour. In their concern with the representability of virtue, Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews are typical in describing London as the site of moral corruption and perdition, as is Richardson’s Clarissa; the farther away the protagonists live from it, the more securely lodged in virtue they are, but also, the more authentic the self. Fielding is explicit about this polarisation in his Preface to Tom Jones, or “bill of fare to the feast”:

we shall represent Human Nature at first to the keen appetite of our reader in that more plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country, and shall hereafter hash and ragoo it with all the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and cities afford. (1999, 8)

Tom Jones only comes into his own when the entire countryside moves to London, displacing the metropolitan society in the reader’s interest as it exposes its libertine mores. Austen’s Mansfield Park is equally explicit in associating London with moral corruption (1968, 423), although the characters’ attitudes towards it are more problematic. Austen herself seems particularly aware of the potential of this stereotype as a trope in organising the dynamics of her plot, and less concerned with proving its truth value. That her mind was early on saturated with such received 8 Chapter One simplifications is evidenced by a humorous allusion to her own ostensible contamination upon arrival in London: “Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted,” she writes in the opening of a letter to her sister in August 1796 (Austen 2004-2011, online). Characteristically more ambiguous on the issue of morality and focusing on the individual’s right to be self-centred and respond emotionally to exterior stimuli, rather than on the relation between man and society, Tristram Shandy does nonetheless draw a correlation which is also central to the other novels discussed here, namely between urban and rural spaces, respectively, and different kinds of temporality. Going to London, even for the purpose of giving birth, is dismissed by the head of the family as a whim that must give way to more pressing agricultural concerns (Sterne 1997, 36), and moreover as a “distemper” that can only lead to the ruin of the nation (40). Thus, time in the countryside is the time of natural rhythms, such that characters have to wait, not for so many days or hours, but until horses are no longer needed in the fields, for their whims to be fulfilled. This is a discovery London-raised Mary Crawford makes early on in Mansfield Park (Austen 1968, 406-407), and which sets the tone of her recurring resistance to pastoral temporality. Austen sets up the convention of assigning virtue and vice to country and town respectively, then responds to it by standing the characters’ self-possessed assumptions on their head. Once in the countryside, Mary Crawford learns that not everything can be got with money, and that people are dictated to by greater concerns than pleasing a young lady, such as the crops, for instance. While for Fanny Price there is an hour beyond which she may not stay up, and another before which she may not stir in the morning, and an hour for her exercise, Mary will always transgress such temporal bounds on the smallest whim, and will not be “dictated to by a watch” (Austen 1968, 425). Having become a staple of rational living by the early nineteenth century, watches are assimilated to the rhythmic life of the countryside, otherwise rigorously ordered by the cycles of the sun; when London, in the persons of Mr and Miss Crawford, intrudes, the disruption produced by the irregular rhythm of fashion and self-indulgence has moral undertones. Despite the general didactic drift of the novels, however, for most of the characters London retains a seductive mystique. In Tom Jones we are constantly reminded by Mrs Western that she has “seen the world”—by which she means that she once spent a few years on the skirts of polite society which claimed a distant acquaintance with the court: more of the world, indeed, than any other of the characters has yet seen, or, indeed, will ever see. The same superiority is claimed by her maid (Fielding 1999,