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Neverending Stories
Toward a Critical Narratology
By Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, Maria Tatar PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06895-4
CHAPTER 1
BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION: ON DORRIT COHN'S POETICS OF PROSE
Thomas Pavel
The distinction between history and fiction is once again stirring the interest of critics. The question seemed settled in premodern times, when history was assumed to narrate the particular and poetry the general. Tree, until the nineteenth century, history was counted among the belles lettres, but that was a matter of stylistic kinship rather than of epistemological classification. Later, the practitioners of modem historiography became confident that their trade was more scientific than literary; therefore, the attempts to find new criteria for distinguishing history from poetry were welcomed. By then, fiction, or at least some of it, had ceased to aim at the general: its avowed purpose was, like that of history, to narrate things "as they were." The general remained the object of science and philosophy, while history and fiction struggled with the particular. In his foreword to the Comédie humaine, Balzac remarks that "reading these dry and disheartening lists of facts called histories, everyone can notice that the writers have always forgotten ... to give us the history of customs." In other words, the realist project saw fiction as a complement to political history, comprising those aspects of the cultural texture that history was bound to miss.
For Balzac, however, these were, above all, practical concerns. French realism felt the need to legitimize its incursions into the realm of everyday life not so much because it had to distinguish itself from history as because it had to justify a novel approach to fiction. It had to explain to its readers why, following the example of Walter Scott, novelists had begun to devote so much energy and space to the careful description of characters and their environment, and how the then-fashionable accumulation of details was designed to capture the history of customs truthfully. In order to describe the essence of the human condition, the classicists omitted as much detail as possible from their fiction. On the contrary, for both the Romantics and the realists, fiction had to map out human contingency. "Le hasard est le plus grand romancier du monde: pour être fécond, il n'y a qu'à l'étudier" ("Chance is the greatest novelist in the world: in order to be productive, it is enough to study it").
From the point of view of historians, the nineteenth century was a long period of struggle against the influence of idealist philosophy. Historians discovered the scientific vocation of their discipline in opposition to Hegel's system, yet resisted the identification with experimental sciences. The double struggle against lofty speculation and scientific positivism led theoreticians of history (Ranke, Guizot, and Burkhardt, for instance) toward realist convictions, and then, when the threat was perceived to come from positivism, toward a hermeneutic view of history (Dilthey, Croce, and Collingwood). Both directions have important consequences for the matter at hand: while realist theoreticians of history insist on truth, thus making fiction writers responsible for differences between history and fiction, hermeneuticians tend to stress the resemblance between the methods used by historians and novelists.
The distinction between history and fiction is thus itself historical to a large extent, and thereby subject to considerable variation. It depends on various writing practices rooted in more or less explicit epistemological and aesthetic choices. To find a definitive criterion that will clearly distinguish between the two kinds of writing may prove impossible. Semantic criteria are the least reliable here, since the nature of the field of reference cannot reliably determine the genre of writing: there are novels that record true states of affairs and there are conspicuously false treatises of history. Stalin's portrayal in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle undoubtedly is closer to truth than the character depicted in the official Short History of the Communist Bolshevik Party, published in the late forties. Yet the latter is not a work of fiction. "Fictional" is not synonymous with "fictitious."
Given the inadequacy of truth-value semantics, pragmatic criteria of various sorts have been proposed. The writer's intention, for instance, is often expected to explain why Rousseau's Confessions qualifies as an autobiography, while Proust's Remembrance of Things Past does not. But outside the narrow stretch of time of the last few centuries, authorial intention is difficult to check. What were Homer's or Hesiod's intentions? Since, some say, we can read Homer and the Bible either as history or as fiction, the reader's intention should count more than that of the author. This proposal does not provide a valid answer either, for even if, someday, every reader of Gibbon's Decline and Fall took it as fiction, it would not be less true that it is a book of history. To read as fiction here merely means to read for pleasure. Although some of us read mathematical treatises for pleasure, they never quite turn into fiction.
A theory of discursive genres is therefore needed that enjoys some independence from authors' and readers' intentions. Based on such an approach, Remembrance of Things Past would be labeled fiction and The Confessions autobiography to the extent to which each belongs to a different cultural genre and, as such, obeys specific textual constraints. Semiotic contracts that bind writers and readers specify these constraints, together with the range of possible exceptions, so that, in examining a text, the critic's task amounts to discovering the textual marks of the cultural contract.
Over the past decades, the "textual genre" approach revolutionized literary theory by changing the locus of critical attention from content and intention to formal conventions. Dorrit Cohn's own work is among the most illuminating and durable within this critical paradigm. While it shares with formalism the confidence in stylistic analysis, it never reduces literary artifacts to their textual appearance. Exemplary in Cohn's approach is her unparalleled skill in merging textual, intentional, and historical arguments, always producing complex descriptions from which easy schematisms have been carefully eliminated. Her recent article "Fictional versus Historical Lives: Borderlines and Borderline Cases" demonstrates the strength of her method of argumentation, and the relevance of stylistic analysis.
The critics who wrote on historical versus fictional discourse, Cohn shows, failed to notice an essential element of discursive encoding, namely the regime of person. Third-person and first-person discourse, Cohn claims, serve divergent purposes and are bound by separate constraints. Consequently, no single general criterion for the demarcation of history from fiction can be proposed, since each regime of person narrates the world in a radically different way: by the self, in the case of first-person narratives, and by the other, in the case of third-person discourse.
Rejecting the speech-act definitions of fiction as representations of natural varieties of discourse (a pragmatic approach stressing authorial intention), Cohn presents a counterexample: third-person narratives of death that involve the presentation of the character's thoughts in either direct or indirect style. Cohn submits that, since there is no direct access to life as experienced in the privacy of another being's consciousness, no natural kind of discourse serves as a model for such fictional narratives. Looking for an alternative explanation, Cohn turns to Kate Hamburger's phenomenological theory, according to which epic fiction "is the only instance in which the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third-person qua third person can be portrayed." "Now was his last chance to see her: his plane left tomorrow," is Cohn's example of a sentence that makes grammatical sense only in fiction, where it can be construed as the representation of a character's inner thoughts. When such sentences occur in fiction, they meet our normal expectations; when, however, historians use them to reconstruct the thoughts of historical characters, they "strike us as somewhat illegitimate" (Cohn, 9). If historians make use of free indirect style—Cohn's example is Emil Ludwig's biography of Napoleon—they can be said to have overborrowed from literary techniques. Free indirect style becomes the demarcation criterion for third-person narrative. A text ceases to be historical and turns into fiction when its author claims to have direct access to a character's thoughts.
First-person narratives, by contrast, whether fictional narratives or genuine autobiographies, are all based on direct knowledge of the narrator's thoughts; hence the lack of formal marks to distinguish the genres. Acknowledging the difficulty, Cohn avoids reverting to truth-value semantic criteria. That Proust presumably narrated his own experiences in Remembrance of Things Past does not make the text a genuine autobiography. Conversely, it could be added, for all their exaggerations and distortions, Charles de Gaulle's memoirs do not qualify as a novel. There are no clear-cut textual marks of fictionality for first-person narratives. Turning to narratology for help, Cohn notices that the main difference between autobiography and fiction lies in the relationship between the author and the narrator: the author of an autobiography is identical with its narrator, while this is not the case for first-person fictional texts. Accordingly, these two families of texts also differ as to the potential reliability of their narrators. While fictional narrators (Michel in Gide's Immoralist) can be, and in our century are expected to be, unreliable, the narrator of a genuine autobiography is, in principle, reliable. Thus, a narratological feature allows Cohn to generalize for first-person narratives the clear-cut distinction between fiction and history that prevails in third-person narratives. Fictionality being a yes or no property, we read texts "in one key or the other." Fiction is never a matter of degree; it is a matter of kind.
One of the most interesting features of Cohn's argument is its unusual combination of various pragmatic features. The distinction between first-person and third-person narratives, which is here taken as primitive, is, of course, a pragmatic one, since it belongs to the deictic system that relates the message to the conditions of its production. Equally pragmatic is the selection of free indirect discourse as one of the marks of fictionality for third-person narratives. Free indirect discourse belongs, indeed, like verb tenses, pronouns, articles, and demonstratives, to the linguistic devices that offer information about the user and the context of the utterance. But since first-person discourse lacks definite linguistic marks of fictionality, here Cohn is interested in differentiating the reading of fiction from the reading of nonfiction. The distinction between reliable and unreliable narrators, while still belonging to the pragmatic sphere, is less related to observable linguistic features than it is to cultural behavior, in particular to its intentional aspects. Indeed, narratorial reliability is a notion that depends equally on the intention of the author and the suspicions of the reader. But the option to diagnose unreliability is, at best, available to the intelligent reader, without being compelling. In other words, we witness a switch from overt stylistic traits to covert narratological properties, and, accordingly, from the observational method proper to linguistics to a hermeneutical approach. Yet this switch does not affect Cohn's consistency, for when she opposes other intentional approaches (speech-act theories, for instance), it is less for their dependence on interpretative practice than for their narratological vagueness. As for semantic criteria, they remain resolutely excluded.
From here on, I will use the notion of "narratorial reliability" in a sense slightly more general than that of Dorrit Cohn. While in her work this notion simply indicates the difference between real-life autobiographers who write about themselves and fictional narrators, I would like to comment on reliability as a more general discursive property, shared by genuine autobiographers and imaginary first-person narrators. That first-person narratorial reliability, as a general discursive property, lies in the eye of the beholder is beautifully exemplified by Paul de Man's suspicious reading of Rousseau's Confessions, an autobiography as genuine as any, which, nonetheless, the critic finds utterly unreliable, in spite of the author's professed transparency. A post-Freudian critic who understands something about self-deception cannot help mistrusting Rousseau's explicit intentions. In an age that assumes the subject to have lost the mastery of its speech and to share the responsibility for its language with uncontrollable forces (the unconscious, social background, perhaps gender and race), critics are only too eager to "debunk" their narrators, in fiction as in nonfictional discourse. But a disturbing anachronism is at work in such attempts. Clever as it may seem, critical debunking of Rousseau's sincerity depends, in fact, on twentieth-century standards of discourse scrutiny. For some of us, Rousseau sounds unreliable (in the Jamesian sense of "inconscient") insofar as our ears have been trained by writers and psychologists to detect every ruse and faltering of the ego's voice. It is not less true that, according to prevalent eighteenth-century standards, Rousseau was perfectly transparent. Even today, most readers find him quite reliable.
It is equally indisputable that the narrators of eighteenth-century fictional autobiographies are designed to sound reliable, at least in factual matters. Consider Defoe's Moll Flanders. The narrator may be confused as to the overall moral interpretation of her misdeeds, but as a witness of her own fall, she is meant to sound trustworthy. Details that might look suspicious to us had a different function in the eyes of the original audience. That Moll Flanders, for example, avoids mentioning the names of most other characters, and that she fails to narrate every little event of her adventurous life, is a sign of her discretion, and therefore of her reliability. Names and missing facts could have easily been filled in, but the narrator seems to hesitate before implicating other people. At no point does one need to suspect the dependability of her deposition, which, significantly, includes all the damaging facts about herself. And when, in epistolary novels, characters like Clarissa or Valmont (in Les liaisons dangereuses) do indeed, for a while, delude themselves about matters as simple as whether they are in love, in the end they always recognize the true nature of their feelings.
Until quite recently in history, the subject did not have trouble speaking about itself in the language of the community, nor did it hesitate to espouse the common moral values even when its own behavior contradicted them. For a long time, self-delusion was not assumed to be a pervasive feature of all discourse, and a tortured confession such as Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground did not yet spell out the norms for self-narration. It is only when the self gradually gained a relative autonomy with respect to language and values that the subtle divergence between language and consciousness came to be noticed—first deplored, later exalted, and finally increasingly thematized.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Neverending Stories by Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, Maria Tatar. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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