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Narrative As Rhetoric Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology James Phelan

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Narrative As Rhetoric Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology James Phelan Narrative as Rhetoric Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology James Phelan In Narrative as Rhetoric, James Phelan explores the consequences for narrative theory of two signifi­ cant principles: (1) narrative is rhetoric because narrative occurs when someone tells a particular story for a particular audience in a particular situ­ ation for some particular purpose (s); (2) the read­ ing of narrative is a multidimensional activity, simultaneously engaging our intellects, emotions, ideologies, and ethics. Narrative as Rhetoric consists often essays, each of which explores these principles in connection with interpretative problems posed by one of the following narratives: William Makepeace Thack­ eray's Vanity Fair, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and "My Old Man," F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer, Lorrie Moore's "How," Dinesh D'Souza's/ZZifcera/ Education, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The rhetorical theory of narrative that emerges from these investigations emphasizes the recur­ sive relationships between authorial agency, text­ ual phenomena, and reader response, even as it remains open to insights from a range of critical approaches—including feminism, psychoanalysis, Bakhtinian linguistics, and cultural studies. The rhetorical criticism Phelan advocates and employs seeks, above all, to attend carefully to the multiple demands of reading sophisticated narrative; for that reason, his rhetorical theory moves less to­ ward predictions about the relationships between techniques, ethics, and ideologies and more to­ ward developing some principles and concepts that allow us to recognize the complex diversity of narrative art. Written with clarity and flair and experiment­ ing at times with the conventions of critical writ­ ing, this collection, which includes some of Phelan's best work, is itself audience oriented. The book includes an appendix that is in part an experiment with voice, and it ends with a helpful glossary of the technical vocabulary of narrative theory. The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series Narrative as Rhetoric Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology James Phelan Ohio State University Press Columbus Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the College of Humanities at The Ohio State University "Magic" from Flowermgjudas and Other Stories, © 1930 and renewed 1958 by Katherine Anne Porter, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company Copyright © 1996 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phelan, James, 1951­ Narrative as rhetoric technique, audiences, ethics, ideology /James Phelan. p. cm. — (The theory and interpretation of narrative series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-0688-3 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8142-0689-1 (pbk. alk. paper) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) 2. Fiction—Technique. 3. Ideology and literature I. Title II. Series PN212.P485 1996 808—dc20 95-50365 CIP Text design by Hunter Design Associates Type set in Monotype Bembo Printed by Bookcrafters, Inc., Chelsea , MI. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. 987654321 For Betty, Katie, and Mike, with hue and gratitude for our vital rhetorical community Contents Preface Introduction Narrative as Rhetoric: Reading the Spells of Porter's "Magic" 1 Part One Narrative Progression and Narrative Discourse: Lyric, Voice, and Readerly Judgments 25 1 Character and Judgment in Narrative and in Lyric: Toward an Understanding of Audience Engagement in The Waves 27 Gender Politics in the Showman's Discourse; or, Listening to Vanity Fair 43 Voice, Distance, Temporal Perspective, and the Dynamics of A Farewell to Arms 59 viii Contents Part Two Mimetic Conventions, Ethics, and Homodiegetic Narration 85 What Hemingway and a Rhetorical Theory of Narrative Can Do for Each Other: The Example of "My Old Man" 87 Reexamining Reliability: The Multiple Functions of Nick Carraway 105 Sharing Secrets 119 Part Three Audiences and Ideology 133 Narratee, Narrative Audience, and Second-Person Narration: How I—and You?—Read Lorrie Moore's "How" 135 Narrating the PC Controversies: Thoughts on Dinesh D'Souza s Illiberal Education 154 Contents ix Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved 173 Appendix Why Wayne Booth Can't Get with the Program; or, The Nintentional Fallacy 191 Notes 199 Glossary 215 Works Cited 221 Index 229 Preface This book did me the great favor of sneaking up on me. I wrote it while procrastinating on a different, seemingly more daunting project. I'd get to that large body of work, I told myself many times over the last few years, right after scratching this itch, massaging that cramp, scrubbing away this dirt. After a while, I realized that I'd done so much scratching and scrubbing that I'd managed to create something with a discernible identity of its own. Whether the coherence and magnitude of this creature is sufficient—or sufficiently attractive—for anyone to want to spend much time in its company remains to be seen. But it is worth noticing here that the coherence derives from my consistent attempt to think through what it means to say that narrative is rhetoric, even as I've worked on the range of issues that give the book its first claim to magnitude: voice, progression, mimesis, the eth­ ics of reading, kinds of textual recalcitrance, the paradoxes of first-per­ son (or homodiegetic) narration, the role of ideology in telling and interpreting nonfictional narratives. At the same time, the thinking through occurs very much in connection with the practical work of interpreting particular narratives, and the range of these texts consti­ tutes the other claim to magnitude: short stories by Joseph Conrad, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, and Lome Moore; nov­ els by William Makepeace Thackeray, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison; nonfictional accounts of contem­ porary campus life by Dinesh D'Souza. The progression of chapters here does show some shifts in my thinking about narrative as rhetoric: in particular, I start with but gradually move away from a model in which rhetoric consists of an author, through the narrative text, extending a multidimensional (aes­ thetic, emotive, ideational, ethical, political) invitation to a reader who, in turn, seeks to do justice to the complexity of the invitation and then responds. In the model I move to, the multidimensional XI xii Preface quality of reading is retained, but the lines between author, reader, and text become blurred. In the revised model, rhetoric is the synergy oc­ curring between authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader re­ sponse. Despite this shift, I don't regard the book as implicitly con­ structing a metanarrative, a Bildungsroman in which the initially flawed but sympathetic critic moves, with each succeeding chapter, nearer and nearer to the Great Enlightenment. If, as I maintain, au­ thor, text, and reader are in an endlessly recursive relationship, then any one essay will necessarily emphasize some features of that relation­ ship more than others—and it will have been written at some particu­ lar moment in my ongoing relationship to the narrative. Conse­ quently, the particular work of any essay here should remain both potentially useful and presumptively less than definitive regardless of when in the last few years I composed it. To help indicate some of the connections between the essays, I have written headnotes to each. To help the reader with the terminology of narrative theory I employ in the book, I have included a glossary of terms after the appendix. While the book was sneaking up on me, I was getting help from many people. I owe thanks to Debra Moddelmog for introducing me to "Magic"; to Paul Smith, Scott Donaldson, and Mike Reynolds for en­ couraging me to think some more about Hemingway, and to Jackson Breyer and Jerry Kennedy for an inducement to do something with Fitzgerald; to Elizabeth Langland and Laura Claridge for the invitation to write about Thackeray and to Susan Griffin and Sandy Morey Norton for complicating my first conclusions; to Dan Schwarz for asking me to write about Conrad; to Monika Fludemik for prodding me to think about second-person narration; to Dinesh D'Souza for agreeing to participate in a dialogue about Illiberal Education. I am also indebted to a large group of students and colleagues who have over the years patiently listened to me go on about these texts and these is­ sues (in one seminar, my worrying over "My Old Man," I later dis­ covered, almost transformed the twelve vigorous participants into "My Prematurely Aged Grad Students"). I have named some of these people in notes to specific chapters, but here I want to acknowledge my deep and enduring appreciation for the help of four research assis­ tants, Elizabeth Patnoe, Jane Greer, Susan Swinford, and Elizabeth Preface xiii Preston. These people have each provided crucial material support and invaluable criticism and advice; without them, this book would be a lesser thing. To Peter J. Rabinowitz, I owe a special thanks: he read it all—much of it more than once—with a wonderful combina­ tion of generosity and rigor, and then took the time to walk me through his responses. In short, he exemplified what it means to enter into an authorial audience without losing oneself in the process. Fi­ nally, I am thankful for the rhetorical community in which I find most favor, that provided by my wife, Betty Menaghan, and our two chil­ dren, Katie and Mike; this one is for all of you. Different versions of the following chapters have appeared, in whole or in part, in the following publications. I thank all of them for permis­ sion to reprint. Chapter 1 as "Character and Judgment in Narrative and in Lyric: Toward an Understanding of Audience Engagement in The Waves." In Style 24 (1990): 408-21.
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