The Rules and Politics of Storyworlds: Fictionalizing the Everyday in E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia Novels James Phillips Philosophy and Literature, Volume 44, Number 1, April 2020, pp. 52-65 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2020.0003 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754508 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] James Phillips THE RULES AND POLITICS OF STORYWORLDS: FICTIONALIZING THE EVERYDAY IN E. F. BENSON’S MAPP AND LUCIA NOVELS Abstract. E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels are often read as noth- ing more than comedies of manners. Yet this interpretation risks miss- ing their collective commitment to make-believe and the prioritizing of performance over being: Benson’s characters move in the realm of appearances by which Hannah Arendt defines the political. Contending that the novels dwell on how and where politics merges with storytelling, this article examines the freedom with which these willfully frivolous characters reinvent the everyday and turn the facts of their existence into props in a communal game. Benson’s characters, like his readers, play without concern for correction from outside. story is an instruction manual of sorts, containing rules for the A manufacture of fictional objects. Consider the opening sentence from E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia: “Though it was nearly a year since her husband’s death, Emmeline Lucas (universally known to her friends as Lucia) still wore the deepest and most uncompromising mourning.”1 As the sentence does not describe someone who exists, it does not press a truth claim that could be substantiated by observing the person in ques- tion. Instead, it is an invitation to construction: the reader is presented with guidelines for what he or she is to imagine. These guidelines do not fully determine what is imagined, since the exact shape and consti- tution of what a reader thinks, feels, and perceives in response to the words on the page necessarily draw on a living history that overwhelms and frames the moment of the act of reading. Philosophy and Literature, 2020, 44: 52–65. © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press. James Phillips 53 The rules of the story do not implement themselves: they require the agency or medium of the reader to put them into effect. This is not the privilege of the ambiguous formulation or the emotional con- fession (the Benson quotation is characteristically neither), for every sentence lies dormant until it is brought to life by sharing in the life of the reader. The locus classicus of the denial of the reader’s passivity is arguably to be found in Proust and, indeed, over the last fifty years the denial has even become a recurring trope of the middle-brow novel.2 Yet affirming the agency of the reader should not and cannot entail disputing that reading is a rule-informed, if not rule-determined, activ- ity. What is distinctive about reading fiction is the adventure on which it embarks with rules. The reader attends to a story, receptive to its cues for how its situa- tions are to be conceived: in following a story, we run with what it pro- vides us to fabricate the fiction we take it to be prescribing. There is a resemblance here to how speech more broadly operates among people when it coordinates perceptions and organizes actions, when it comes up with a model that in its difference from the given state of affairs directs our assessments and reactions. With language there is from the outset among the action-oriented the possibility of storytelling inasmuch as the spell of the given, the currently actual, is disrupted: to speak to one another about what is to be done is already, in its divergence from what is presently the case, to engage in the fantasy of imagining other worlds. The resemblance between rule following in the reading of fiction and rule following in other interpersonal interactions does not extend as far, however, as identity. The evolutionary test to which language as a collective enterprise has been subject in norm formation does not apply to the former. When human beings fashion rules, whether along the lines of drafting a constitution, settling on the division of labor, or devising guidelines for the preferred execution of a given task, feedback is received from the larger world in which the community of language users finds itself. As components in a solution to an identified problem, such rules— along with their performance—admit evaluation (not intrinsically comprehensive) against the criterion of their fitness to the relevant environment. The rule that underwrites a judgment of the given and the actual is judged in its turn when the positive thus discovers its own normative dimension. The ongoing contestational dialogue between the positive and the normative amounts, from a certain perspective, to a story repeatedly initiated only to be once again aborted, since 54 Philosophy and Literature the constructivism of language is never allowed fully to take wing (the moralist and the inventor are halfhearted storytellers). Fiction, in giving itself over to the constructionist powers of language, hits upon a new relation to rules in the act of reading, even as it turns away from the friction between the normative and the positive that otherwise characterizes rules. If it is defensible to speak of rules within the unfettered constructivism of fiction, it is because whatever construc- tion is credited to a story depends on the reader’s implementation of its rules. Every work of fiction is composed, as it were, in the imperative mood. Every utterance is a call to the reader to bring its object imagi- natively into being: even when an individual statement within a fiction is factually accurate, a reader is to hear an injunction to claim the fact for the storyworld. In reading we do not so much acquire the license to dream (we already have this and do not have to wait to receive it from a storyteller’s hands) as the opportunity to play unsupervised with an instruction manual. While a dream can indulge our fantasies of invulnerability, it does so by withdrawing us from the feedback of the world at large: irrespec- tive of the contents of a dream, there is an essential solitariness to the dreamer. With the reader, by contrast, sociability enters, but the interpersonal element of the linguistic acknowledgment of norms is set adrift from its pragmatic moorings. The reader of fiction occupies the space of human coordination and nonetheless behaves like a recluse, injecting diffidence into the human interconnectedness that normative language establishes and facilitates. The reader implements rules in solitude, without risk of correction from outside the storyworld (where correction nonetheless occurs, such as when a reader is caught out in an alleged misconstruction of the storyworld and admonished to pay closer attention to the rules, the reader has always had to stop reading in order to speak or write to other readers). Storytelling is not then what binds a community together, but nor does it disperse a community. Its condition of possibility as a form of collective existence is the cohesiveness that comes from language and that language also presupposes. While a community with a wealth of stories is generally held to be a community richer in its conception of its own identity, this stands in need of qualification. The more detailed the imaginative terrain that a given community inhabits does not of itself indicate a community that is more closely knit together, at least not in the sense that the community in question will more readily rally for a common task or shrink back from outsiders. James Phillips 55 For literature to be serviceable for nationalism, the act of reading has to be policed to the point where what is being read can scarcely count as literature. Compounded of personal associations, anticipations, and borrowings, of lexical and affective resonances, the object of fiction that the reader brings into (imaginary) being through implementing a story’s rules is a phenomenon of such idiosyncratic density that it attests more to a reader’s singularity than to his or her affinity with fellow readers.3 This idiosyncratic density is indispensable for the traction and viabil- ity of the storyworld, whereas individual citizens can differ from one another in the connotations, poetic allusions, and reminiscences that a given article or section of the Constitution, for instance, suggests to them, without these differences having a bearing on the predictability that constitutions are designed to lend to interpersonal interactions. Literature gets by without the agreement on meaning crucial to other rules. The community that pretends to itself that it can discern its own unity reflected in the object of fiction must first pare the liter- ary text down to a meaning whose decidability costs it the very capacity to evoke the openness of a storyworld. What bond there is that can be attributed to storytelling is at one and the same time the diaspora immanent to language in the incommunicability of the object of fiction in its phenomenological thickness. The perversity of readers is that they congregate around a text in order to experience how they cannot fully meet one another. The complementary perversity of the storyteller is to address readers without expecting a reply, to issue orders concerning the imaginative construction of the fictional object without ever getting around to inspect the result in readers’ minds. The storyteller invades the personal space, so to speak, of the reader, intent on mobilizing the latter’s memories, habits, attitudes, passions, and the like with an eye to the expressiveness and solidity of the fictional object.