Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics The Rhetoric of Difficult Fiction: Cortázar's "Blow-Up" Author(s): Seymour Chatman Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 1, No. 4, Narratology II: The Fictional Text and the Reader (Summer, 1980), pp. 23-66 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771886 . Accessed: 05/11/2013 16:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Duke University Press and Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Poetics Today. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 206.87.122.163 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 16:44:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE RHETORIC OF DIFFICULT FICTION Cortaizar's"Blow-Up" SEYMOUR CHATMAN Rhetoric,Berkeley "... I who am dead." Thus the narrator of Julio Cortaizar's "Blow-Up," but adds, immediately,"and I'm alive, I'm not tryingto fool anybody."How we understandthe bizarrecontradictions of modernfiction is, I argue,a rhetorical question. Since the world invoked by a fictionis not real, what are we (per)suaded to do? We can do nothingin thatworld, but we can do something withit, namely,accept or reject it. The suasion urged by a fictionaltext is an imaginativeaccommodation of the premises,the (fictional)assertions, the representations,in short,the autonomyof its world.In Madame Bovary,the impliedauthor invites the impliedreader to accept the plausibilitythat a given bourgeoiseliving in a Frenchprovincial town in the nineteenthcentury would feel the feelingsand do the doings ascribedto Emma. To the extentthat we readersare suaded of thatplausibility through our entranceinto and willingness to staybound by thefictional contract, the novel is a rhetoricalsuccess. A text may be suasive in two main ways, accordingto the directionof its reference:whether to the worldor to itself,whether extra- or intratextually.A texturging an audience to takeaction in thereal world (an advertisement,a legal brief,a speechin Congress,a publicencomium), insofar as itsappeal is current,is extratextuallysuasive, though, if well done, ithas intratextualvalues. It reaches out of itself,to get people to take a stand,to change(or to reaffirm)their views about real issues,to act or at least to feeldifferently about them. Of courseit will utilize a textualform to do so, whethera minister'ssolemn enunciationof a carefullyprepared sermon or the excited "improvised"speech of a political candidatewhose rhetoricis preciselyhis claimto have "thrownaway rhetoric" by throwingaway his prepared text. But here the textualform is secondary, transparentor invisible,not itself the focus. Indeed, it should not call attentionto itself.A juryso fullof wonderat the beautyof a lawyer'sdisplay of logic might well forgetor suspectthe object ofhis plea. He wantsto soundlogical only to the extentthat that will help his case. He may do so, forexample, if by a kindof metonymiccontagion he can make his client'sbehavior sound morelogical. On ? PoeticsToday, Vol. 1:4(1980), 23-66 This content downloaded from 206.87.122.163 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 16:44:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 24 SEYMOUR CHATMAN the other hand, if evidence is slenderand his witnesspitiable, he will utilizea more purelyemotional appeal. A fictionaltext can onlybe intratextuallyor form-suasive."Form" I meanin a broad sense: not only surfaceproperties like diction,meter, rhyme, but also broaderdiscoursive ones - narrativevoice, point of view, even theselection and arrangementof contentualelements. The essentialform-suasiveness of any text depends on a certainintegrity, a recognizable consistency of intentthroughout. Fictional texts make claims to autonomy,that is, to acceptabilityas single, homogeneous (howevercomplex) thingsin themselves.For all its bizarreness, Emma Bovary'sgruesome death is appropriateand plausible.Suicide by other means would somewhatweaken thenovel's autonomy. Accidental death would considerablyweaken it. Livinghappily ever after would destroy it. Any modernview of the rhetoricof fictionmust resemble an astutereviewer's characterizationof WayneBooth's use of theword: 'Rhetoric'is ProfessorBooth's term for the means by which the writer makes knownhis vision to the reader and persuades him of its validity.' By "vision" is meant not "that whichmight be" but "that whichholds forthe particularworld invoked by thistext," and by "validity,"not scientific or other truth-valuebut simply esthetic coherence or self-consistency. (I would also argue that rhetoric- Plato and Booth to the contrarynotwithstanding - need only entail self-consistency,not consistencywith the traditionof moral norms.But thatis subjectfor another essay.) So rhetoricis both in the text(put thereby the author) and in thereader. We operate on the assumption that any reader has the potential ability or competenceto recognizewhat is needed to interpreta fictionaltext, to graspthe conditions of its plausibilityand autonomy.And an importantpart of that competencederives from knowledge he has acquired and storedover yearsof readingand living,stored (if we followthe ancients) in topoi,or to use a more modern concept, "codes." The topoi,as Eco says, are nothingother than "overcoded, ready-madepaths for inferential walks" thatthe reader is invitedto take. Where a textis highlyinnovative, or otherwisetroublesome, the reader mustexperiment, try to make new patterns,new codes to accommodateit. How to characterizethis ability is a subjectof some interest. The topoior "places," so the metaphorgoes, occupythe mind's space, a space where information,common and technical,is stored.(The metaphorcontinues in thecircuitry of artificial intelligence, with its "memory banks," "storage," etc.) If we accept the metaphor,we can look at these stockpilesthe way structural linguistshave looked at theircounterparts in language.Each languagepresents reservoirsof forms,or paradigms,visualized traditionallyas vertical bins intersectingthe horizontal stringof an actually constructedsentence, the syntagma.From the paradigm of possibilities,the speaker selects one or a fewto actualize a syntacticand semanticelement. Syntax and semanticsassume that ' David Lodge: theback coverof the paperbackversion of Booth, 1961. This content downloaded from 206.87.122.163 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 16:44:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RHETORIC OF DIFFICULT FICTION: BLOW-UP 25 these elementsoccur in well-formedcomplexes. At the vocabularylevel, for example,there are myriadsets of nounswhose interrelation rests on opposition and mutualexclusion: if we introducethe word"object" intoour sentence,we have consciouslyor unconsciouslyruled out alternativeslike "thing,""item," "entity,""do-hickey" and so on. Semiotics findsthe same kind of meaning-patterningbeyond language, in otherforms of culture,and so borrowsthe notionof paradigmaticstores. But what happens ifone findsno code in his mindto accommodatea giventextual demand,or, thougha familiarcode seemsinvoked, he cannotfind terms in itthat make any sense? As when,in Cortaizar'sstory, we read one momentthat the narratoris dead and the nextthat he is alive? Barthestouches upon theproblem when he discusses modernist(scriptible) texts, but he tells us littleor nothing about how thereader actually achieves a degreeof comprehension.His method would seem to be to workfrom and throughcodes we do have and feelsecure about. We have acquired,through our experiencewith narrative structure, the code of "narrator."We know,for instance, that narrators may (though need not) be fullyestablished human beings in theirown right- charactersor authorial surrogates.Another code, thatof common-sense physiology, tells us thathuman beings are eitherdead or alive but not both. Still anothercode, the code of figures,tells us that"dead" can be used metaphorically.Another, the code ofthe fantastic,tells us that the "living-dead"is conceivable,if we suspend certain rulesof nature.And so on. In short,we have potentialmeans for negotiating the text by pickingand choosing among codes thatwe decide mightbe relevant. Enough has been said in recentyears to lay to restthe notionthat reading is a passive activity.The view of the reader actively ransackinghis codes of verisimilitudeto makesense of a textstrongly reaffirms the argument, though in a differentterminology. But why call them "codes"? For one thing,to insist that (for all their familiarity)these stores of interpretantsare conventional- learned, not "natural" or intuitive.We get betterat interpretationas we acquire new codes, and increase the supply of interpretantsin the old codes. For a second, to emphasizetheir covert character. The textneed not,generally does not,cite the code in termsof whichwe may identifythe voice of the narrator.It simply presupposesan acquaintancewith it. And ifthe readerdraws a blank,he must, by hook or crook (as a good handymanor bricolateur)gather, imagine, project "facts" or even inventcodes to meet thecase. Whetherconsciously or not,he mustask himselfsuch questions as "Under whatset of circumstances can I accept a narratorwho is bothalive