Jane Austen's Narrative Techniques

A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Massimiliano Morini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317111337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Combining linguistic theory with analytical concepts and literary interpretation and appreciation, Jane Austen's Narrative Techniques traces the creation and development of Austen's narrative techniques. Massimiliano Morini employs the tools developed by post-war linguistics and above all pragmatics, the study of the ways in which speakers communicate meaning, since Austen's 'wordings' can only be interpreted within the fictional context of character-character, narrator-character, narrator-reader interaction. Examining a wide range of Austen texts, from her unpublished works through masterpieces like Mansfield Park and Emma, Morini discusses familiar Austen themes, using linguistic means to shed fresh light on the question of point of view in Austen and on Austen's much-admired brilliance in creating lively and plausible dialogue. Accessibly written and informed by the latest work in linguistic and literary studies, Jane Austen's Narrative Techniques offers Austen specialists a new avenue for understanding her narrative techniques and serves as a case study for scholars and students of pragmatics and applied linguistics.

PART 1
Narrative

Chapter 1
Jane Austen’s Narrators

The Point of Fiction

Many commentators of Jane Austen’s fiction have commented upon the difficulty of her narrative game. As Virginia Woolf famously had it, ‘of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’ (Southam 1987: 301). Speaking of E, almost universally held to be the most complex and the most elusive of her novels, Reginald Farrer wrote that if you read it twelve times over, ‘at every fresh reading you feel anew that you never understood anything like the widening sum of its delights’ (Southam 1987: 266). Lionel Trilling added that ‘the difficulty of Emma is never overcome. We never know where to have it. If we finish it at night and think we know what it is up to, we wake the next morning to believe it is up to something else; it has become a different book’ (Trilling 1957/1991: 122). More recently and more generally, Irvin Ehrenpreis has expressed the bafflement of all those who try to establish what Austen (or, her narrator) is ‘up to’ in her novels:

So the explicitness of the novelist is sometimes only apparent, and at other times is a game played with the audience. By sounding blunt and outspoken in many of her judgments, Austen entices unwary readers into assuming that she is straightforward …

But it remains true that when Austen does plainly set forth her judgment, it is – as I have said – quite reliable. (Ehrenpreis 1991: 118)

However, while certain commentators have put their fingers on Austen’s invisibility (for a recent example, cf. Miller 2003), others have seen her novels as mirroring a definite world view – a world view which has been interpreted in diametrically opposing ways. A traditional reading of Austen as an upholder of the patriarchal values of her society has been challenged by ‘revolutionary’ and/or feminist readings of the novels as subtle critiques of the same values. S&S has been interpreted as a satire on (excessive) sensibility, but some readers have observed that Marianne/sensibility is shown to be much more fascinating than Elinor/sense (Nardin 1973: 10). MP – the litmus test of Austen studies in terms of this argument – has been read as an evangelical plea for old gentrified England and as a covert manifesto against the moral and social strictness of Austen’s time.1 How can these positions be reconciled with Farrer’s (1917) image of the author as a joycean divinity, indifferently paring her fingernails elsewhere?

… impersonality comes as the first ingredient in the specific for immortality. The self-revelation of the writer must be as severely implicit as it is universally pervasive; it must never be conscious or obtruded … She is there all the time, indeed, but never in propria persona, except when she gaily smiles through the opener texture of ‘Northanger Abbey’, or, with her consummate sense of art, mitigates for us the transition out of her paradises back into the grey light of ordinary life, by letting the word ‘I’ demurely peer forth at last, as the fantasmagoria in ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’ or ‘Northanger Abbey’ begins to thin out to its final pages. (Southam 1987: 248)

It comes as no surprise, of course, that Austen’s novels generate opposing interpretations: all great literature is supposed to do so. Conversely, the ability to instigate different readings has long been identified as a stigma of literary greatness.2 What is at once interesting and baffling is that these opposing readings appear to be equally justified, that there is ample textual material in Austen’s novels to support them both. At the same time, there seems to be uncertainty as to whether Jane Austen watches over her novels as a Victorian commentator or as a modernist detached observer. Is there a ‘point’ to her depiction of English gentry between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, or is there not? And if that ‘point’ is there, what is it exactly?

From our postmodern position in history, we might dismiss all the business of finding a ‘point’ in Austen’s fiction – in all fiction – as self-evidently irrelevant. Have we not been taught that novels are not pamphlets? That the point of any narrative is the telling of a story? On the most basic level, these axioms are certainly valid: novels are not pamphlets – and narrators, in written fiction, are not authors. Yet any story, besides telling itself, expresses, is ‘symptomatic of’, a ‘world-view’, in Roger Fowler’s terms.3 And in Austen’s case, this world-view seems to be, at one and the same time, contradictory and elusive. And while we might, once again, conclude that the ‘point’ of (great) literature always eludes us, there may be a lesson to be learnt about how Austen’s particular elusiveness is constructed – how readers4 are enticed into looking for a point which consistently evades their grasp.

Before embarking on a linguistic investigation of how Austen’s elusiveness is created, it may be useful to remind ourselves of two cultural facts. The first one is contemporary: in our time, we have come to accept that the text does not contain its author – it contains a narrator, and can at most presuppose an ‘implied author’ with whom all readers ideally wish to be acquainted. The second one is contemporary with Austen: in her time, it was customary to think of novels as ethical/ideological mirrors, and she would have expected at least certain categories of readers to deduce the author’s opinions from her writings – to conflate narrator with author, ‘the implied author’ with ‘the real Jane Austen’.

Settling the Point: Evaluation

In his seminal study of oral narratives told by young black Americans, William Labov wrote that a story, in its minimal form, consists of two temporally ordered clauses (Labov 1972: 360). Besides this basic definition, however, he also provided a more detailed pattern, in order to account for the higher degree of complexity to be found in some of the stories he analyzed. The six parts or stages of this pattern can be and have been used to examine and dissect written as well as oral narratives (cf. Pratt 1977; Fleischman 1997; Black 2006):

1. Abstract

2. Orientation

3. Complicating action

4. Evaluation

5. Result or resolution

6. Coda (Labov 1972: 363)

Some of these parts or stages may be present or not, in written as well as in oral narratives. In written fiction, the ‘abstract’ is usually provided by the title; the ‘orientation’, if it is to be found at all, is most often found at the start (it is the ‘who, what, where, when’, of the story); the ‘complicating action’ unsettles the initial balance and prepares the ‘resolution’; the ‘coda’, usually placed at the end of the narrative, is where things are rounded off – where the ‘(implied) author’, or the ‘narrator’, parts company with the ‘reader’. ‘Evaluation’ is the most difficult ‘part’ or ‘stage’ to locate, because though it tends to cluster in certain areas of a text (traditionally, at the beginning and end; but there is variation along the genre and period axes), it can be found anywhere, and evaluative elements are hard to identify with any certainty.5 ‘Evaluation’, as Labov himself defined it, is the ‘point’ of a story: it can be a moral, a religious, or a didactic point; more generally, it is what demonstrates that the story is worth telling.6

In a novel, as well as in any other kind of story, evaluation is endemic, and no two readers will exactly agree as to which stretches of text are evaluative and which are not – though certain passages are quite unequivocally evaluative. Evaluative elements can be found, to begin with, in dialogue as well as in narrative, in the characters’ as well as in the narrator’s discourse. Some of Jane Austen’s novels (P&P, E, the unfinished TW) are mostly made up of dialogue, and when this is the case much of the evaluative work is as it were ‘embedded’ in direct (or indirect) speech.7 In P&P, we learn something about Mr and Mrs Bennet before the narrator tells us ‘who and what they are’:

‘My dear Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield is let at last?’

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

‘But it is,’ returned she; ‘for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.’

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

‘Do not you want to know who has taken it?’ cried his wife impatiently.

‘You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.’ (P&P 1)

The narrator, however, is always instinctively held to be a more reliable evaluator than any single character. As Michael Toolan puts it, ‘narrators are typically trusted by their addressees … To narrate is to bid for a kind of power’ (Toolan 1988/2001: 3). Even first-person ‘homodiegetic’ narrators, who take part in the story and can therefore be suspected of having a personal interest in directing audience reactions, are considered more ‘authoritative’ than any other character, and can be confused with the ‘author’ to a lesser or greater degree. Modernist writers such as Conrad and James, and latter-day followers like Ishiguro, have deliberately played with readers’ expectations by exploiting this ‘authoritativeness’ (cf. Morini 2002). Third-person ‘heterodiegetic’ narrators acquire an extra degree of authoritativeness by being impersonal (if that is the case) and situating themselves out of the action: within the space of their fictional world, they are like gods, and readers will tend to treat them as such – i.e., they will tend to believe all they say.8

All of Austen’s narrators are third-person heterodiegetic narrators, and as such command the reader’s blind faith (or his/her gullibility, if we believe in the author mocking her audience). These narrators never take part in the action, and only rarely come out of hiding to speak in the first person. Therefore, their evaluative comments tend to have a ponderous weight on our interpretation of the novels – of what is going on, who are the good guys and the villains, what is likely to happen, etc. It is my point, though, that these narratorial figures variously undermine their own authoritativeness and leave readers more or less stranded between the waves of conflicting interpretations.

However, before looking at how Austen’s narrators evaluate their fictional worlds (and at how they undermine their own evaluative work), some preliminary definitions of ‘evaluation’ are needed in order to define the range of textual data we are looking for. Evaluation is very difficult to locate, because it is not necessarily linked to any particular linguistic items, and it is not consistently signalled by any linguistic or metalinguistic means (at least in literary texts: other textual types, e.g. manuals or academic articles, can display specifically signalled evaluative techniques). Linguistic studies of evaluation have worked with different definitions of a very elusive quality, and have attributed that quality to words, sentences/utterances, text/discourse, speakers/writers, etc.: some terms of art are ‘connotation’, ‘affective meaning’, ‘attitude’. Scholars belonging to the field of stylistics have preferred to speak of the evaluative, attitudinal force of language as ‘modality’ (cf. Fowler 1986/1990: 131–2; Simpson 1993: 46–55), but they too have had to admit that modal elements are only the tip of the iceberg of attitude (cf. Chapter 3). More recently, a very promising new field of research on ‘evaluation’ as such has opened: the linguists working in this field are trying to unify the terminology and to build a general evaluative theory – and though the concept of ‘evaluation’ still seems ultimately irreducible to any satisfying unity, some interesting results have been obtained in the analysis of literary texts (Cortazzi and Jin 2000), argumentative prose (Hoey 2000), written and oral academic discourse (Anderson and Bamford 2004).

Textual (or discursive) evaluation is not simply a question of assessing what is good and what is bad, what is important and what is not (though both axes are relevant). Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston, editors of a volume on Evaluation in Text, have identified three main functions of evaluation, which are respectively expressive, interpersonal, and textual.9

1. to express the speaker’s or writer’s opinion, and in doing so to reflect the value system of that person and their community;

2. to construct and maintain relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader;

3. to organize the discourse.

(Thompson and Hunston 2000: 6)

If one thinks of evaluation in a novel, and conveniently substitutes ‘narrator’ for ‘writer’, one immediately sees the cogency of this tripartite definition. The narrator, overtly or covertly, offers his/her point of view on the fictional world he presents, and in so doing reflects (directly or indirectly) the value system of the community which has spawned him/her, or of a part of that community.10 By telling his/her novelistic story, the narrator maintains certain kinds of relations with his/her readers, and/or, within the space of the text, with the shadowy figure of the narratee (if given). Finally, even dispositio is a form of evaluation, and a certain kind of ideological slant (using ‘ideological’ in the widest possible sense) brings about certain forms of textual organization. To give one very straightforward example, the modernists’ sense that the world could no longer be described from an external point of view, within the four walls of unified personality, sequential chronology, narrative reliability and providential finality led to the freer structures employed by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford.

Though they insist that evaluation is essentially a unified phenomenon, Thompson and Hunston identify four main parameters: ‘good-bad, certainty, expectedness, and importance’ (Thompson and Hunston 2000: 25). While it is important to insist on the interpenetration of these axes (judging the importance of an event can also imply gauging its expectedness and goodness), and though ‘expectedness’ and ‘certainty’ can certainly be conflated, there is no doubt that the three remaining parameters sum up the evaluative work performed by the authority (or authorities) in charge of a text.11 In a novel, events are arranged, facts and characters are judged along those three axes, as shown in the incipit of Dickens’s David Copperfield (expectedness/certainty) and at the start of the second chapter of William McIlvanney’s Docherty (good-bad, importance):

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. (Dickens 1849–1850/1994: 13)

High Street was the capital of Conn’s childhood and boyhood. The rest of Graithnock was just the provinces. High Street, both as a terrain and as a population, was special. Everyone whom circumstances had herded into its hundred-and-so yards had failed in the same way. It was a penal colony for those who had committed poverty, a vice which was usually hereditary. (McIlvanney 1975/1996: 24)

As shown by these textual sketches, however, though it is sometimes very evident that one is faced with an evaluative passage, it is by no means easy to determine the linguistic means by which evaluation is effected. In a novel, the most evident cases of evaluation are those in which the narrator commits him/herself to a categorical assertion along the good-bad, important-unimportant axes, or reflects on the probability of an event taking place (all of Austen’s narrators do all of these things). On other, subtler, occasions, an event or a character may be compared to another, a single modal expression used to determine probability or desirability (‘must’, ‘may’, ‘certainly’, ‘luckily’). Even more trickily, evaluation may be hidden in lexical choice, collocation, or co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Narrative
• Part 2 Dialogue
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index