Overhearing Narrative more

jose Angel Garcia land a (Zaragoza) Overhearing Narrative Narratives can be heard, or read. They can also be overheard (I will not use a corresponding term "overread" in this sense), and sometimes they are both read and overheard. A special sense of "overhearing" will have to be defined to account for such complex effects and for even more complex ones, if the need should arise, for if we grant that one can interact with oneself, is it possible, for instance, to overhear oneself? And how is it in writing? An analysis of such phenomena will require an approach through the pragmatic specificity of narrative and of the modes of address involved in it. Attention will have to be paid, too, to the specific conventions of literary communication, and of fic- tion, if this is to be our main focus. Literary narratives are display texts, texts meant to be preserved and reproduced literally in a variety of circumstances. They are—typically—written texts. The specificity of display texts and writ- ten texts lies in their relative "decontextualisability," which means, paradoxically, that they provide ready-made communicative contexts, carrying (or doing their best to carry) their context along, so to speak, and providing indications for their favoured contextual use. Such con- textual autonomy has important consequences for the nature of the in- teractive textual processes involved in reading narrative. Linguistic pragmaticists have analysed the ways in which language users interact and cooperate in the production of meaning. Most typi- cally, they have focused on conversational interaction between speak- ers. The following account by Jenny Thomas is representative in this sense: in producing an utterance a speaker takes account of the social, psychological and cognitive limitations of the hearer; while the hearer, in interpreting an utterance, necessarily takes account of the social constraints leading a speaker to formulate the utterance in a particular way. The process of making meaning is a joint accom- 192 Jose Angel Garcia Landa plishment between speaker and hearer, and that is what I mean by 'meaning in in- teraction'1. An account of interaction through written texts would need to em- phasize that the "hearer" (reader) is not present and therefore can be taken into account only in a certain sense—as an intended, ideal or im- plied addressee. Interaction with this implied addressee does take place (and has in fact been described in some detail2). But the readers' "making of meaning" does not stop at this point, since unintended readers, whom I shall style "over-hearers," also respond to texts and make meaning with them. Reading narrative involves interpreting and articulating a number of complex hierarchical structures of communicative address. Some of these interactive processes may be further examined on the basis of an analogy with oral or conversational narrative. Conversational narrative often necessitates a long stretch of discourse in which one speaker re- lies on other speakers' willingness to give him or her the floor for an extended period of time. Furthermore, even in the case of face-to-face oral narratives, a narrative refers the speaker and hearer to a narrated world or situation beyond the immediate communicative situation. The extension, coherence and referential autonomy of narratives make possible and favour the generation of elaborate textual images of sender and addressee. Thus, images of listeners and speakers are at least potentially well defined and relevant to the communicative dy- namics of narrative. The textual subjects of written narratives are built on potentialities which are already present in oral narrative, whereas the specific constraints and possibilities of written language and of literary conventions make possible the development of more complex forms3. 1 Thomas (1995: 208). 2 See Hoey (2001). To this extent, I could subscribe to the claim put forth by Monika Fludernik (1996: 19) that "spontaneous forms of storytelling can be imaged as natural and proto- typical since they provide a generic and typological resource for more subtly and complexly textured artefacts of creative structuration", although my analytical con- cerns and my understanding of many narratological concepts differ considerably from Fludernik's. One might argue, indeed, that Fludernik's "natural narratology" does not extract the full theoretical consequences of this continuity between liter- ary narratives and everyday communicative interaction. Overhearing Narrative 193 In narratological analysis, a familiar model shows the way these textual images of sender and receiver inherent in any communicative process may be duplicated or multiplied en abyme: author [implied author (narrator <story/characters> narratee) implied reader] reader It is perhaps worth noting that in a given narrative event, each of these "subject positions" can be occupied by one or more individuals, and that for some practical purposes the brackets may themselves be "bracketed" in order to fuse, for instance, the implied reader and the narratee into one, or the author and the implied author (this "bracket- ing" depends at least as much on the perspective being brought to the narrative as it does on narrative structure in sef. Written fictional genres, and especially the novel, being literary gen- res which draw on an extensive tradition of previous literary perform- ance, have shown an outstanding ability to incorporate conventions from other genres and to explore new dimensions of communicative complexity through embedding, parody and contrasting discourses. The novel was defined as a melting pot of other genres well before Bakhtin, but the Bakhtinian characterization of the novel as a dialogic and multivocal genre has given a particularly felicitous formulation to this notion5. This is all the more so in that Bakhtin's perspective brings along with it a general theory of speech and language which ties up with some of our concerns here. In Bakhtinian poetics and linguistics, the word or discourse is always addressed to an other, it is intrinsically dialogic. An utterance responds to previous utterances which are im- plicitly contained in its shape, and it also prepares the ground for the addressee's reaction, offering him or her a possible role to play—a notion which is Bakhtin's version of the implied reader/hearer or of Walker Gibson's "mock reader." As Gibson emphasized more than fifty years ago, actual receivers may or may not feel comfortable with the position the text has designed for them. There may be a lack of fit between the intended and the actual audience. Actually, there always exists some lack of fit, since the text's audience is multiple, divided and frequently "oppositional"6. I expound at length my understanding of the theoretical foundations of this model in Garcia Landa (1998). 5 Bakhtin (1981). 6 Brian Richardson (1997). 194 Jose Angel Garcia Landa So we might modify the previous scheme to include "unaddressed" readers: author [implied author (narrator <story/characters> narratee) implied reader)-* addressed reader —> unaddressed readeF" If this extra figure somewhat distorts the neat straight line of the initial scheme, introducing someone who is not supposed to be there, that is just as it should be. In analysing discourse, systemic-functional linguists differentiate "tenor" (the addressee relationship of discourse) and "mode" (or medium relationship7). In practice, issues of tenor and issues of mode intersect, as different media impose specific address requirements. For instance, one of the dimensions of mode is privateness, which is a matter of "the number of recipients intended for a particular text: the more addressees the less private"8. The diagram in the Appendix showing the medium relationship of discourse accordingly hints at some of the address relationships involved in the use of specific media. Plato lived long before the printing press became, to use a common expression, the first of the mass media, but his observations on writing already bring out the potential difference" in address between speech and writing, or the multiple address inherent in written discourse. With multiple and anonymous address, the issues raised by the existence of unintended and unwanted addressees become more prominent: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You'd think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse rolls about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn't know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support9. Unintended addressees are here both unwelcome and inevitably present. Plato's conception is, of course, a strongly intentionalist one. According to him, the author's intention is crucial to communication, 7 See the definitions in Leech/Deucher/Hoogenraad (1984: 9, 133). 8 Roger Bell (1991: 84-96). 9 Plato (2001: 82). Overhearing Narrative 195 and it is insufficiently explicit in written texts. In his view, we cannot interact with the text (hence, his choice to write dialogues—texts which explicitly contain their own built-in interaction). Modern theorists ar- gue7^perhaps"with greater justice, that readers do interact with texts (Hoey maintains a weak version of this claim) and that no text ever tells its reader—even the same reader—the same thing twice10). One necessary consequence of the written medium, therefore, is that a text has to face the possibility of meeting unintended addressees. In most literature, as in several other kinds of public writing and display texts, there is usually not one single addressee or a number of specifi- cally intended addressees. Even in a genre such as the poetic epistle, addressed by the author to a specific addressee (e.g. a particular friend or a patron), the address mode is public insofar as the text is written as literature, as potentially readable by a wider public—and written ac- cording to a number of conventions applying to literary texts. More generally, one could say that if the text is written and public, anybody can be considered to be its addressee insofar as it is written and public. This condition is of course too general when put in those terms. For one thing, a public text may well use private communication, whether real or fictional, as a motivating device even when its real addressee is the general public. Therefore, both the actual and the motivating or fictionalised interaction have to be described in order to provide an adequate account of the text's tenor (to use a term from systemic functional linguistics). For instance, in Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste (1902), the author's text (a novel addressed to the general reading public) takes the form of a private letter addressed by the extradiegetic narrator to his brother, a letter which in turn contains an account of the autobiographical oral narrative in which the novel's protagonist, Michel, addresses three friends, one of whom is the extradiegetic nar- rator, the author of the letter. The intradiegetic oral account and the extradiegetic epistolary narrative count as non-fiction for the char- acters, but of course in the global economy of the work, they are fic- tional devices subordinated to Gide's narrative, the novel L'Immo- raliste. An account of a text's mode of address must describe such boxing levels because individual differences in the way they are struc- tured and in the way interaction and address are managed are always significant. For this stronger claim, see the essays on rereading in Galef (1998). 196 Jose Angel Garcia Lancia Fictional narratees, then, must be taken into account, as they are used to orchestrate and orientate the reception of the narrative. But most crucially for our purposes here, a text projects the image of an overall intended addressee or implied reader. As I shall soon be argu- ing, the figure of the implied reader is structurally related to the "rati- fied interactant" in an oral encounter. But there may well be at this level too a structural split in address: a text which is public, insofar it is published and marketed, may still restrict ratified address linguistically or ideologically, using the implied reader as a filter. Even when this reader image is not explicit and clear cut, there are always elements which allow us, to some extent, to define an intended audience, as -well as an unintended one. For instance, a text, however brief, is written in a given language, and this provides a minimal definition of the linguistic competence of its intended addressee which is already significant. Peritextual elements such as cover illustrations and design, titles, blurbs, etc., also signal favoured addressees through a number of historically changing conventions. Thus, a continuum of address protocols, rang- ing from text-internal to text-external (such as advertising, distribution networks or classifications in bookstores), help ensure that a book should not address."those who have no business with it." To return to the modulation of address at the level of ideology: most texts will be analysable in ideological terms as presupposing a certain world-view, a constructed view of reality, a set of ethical or po- litical priorities, group allegiances, etc. The most significant materials for the construction of the implied receiver, as of the implied author, are those available through critical ideological analysis. While literary authors or writers of narrative fiction rarely address a predetermined set of individuals, they do try to establish a communicative interaction with an implied audience with whom they share (or may not share) a number of ideological assumptions and values. As this is an interpre- tive issue, the image of the implied author and of the implied reader will be a function, too, of the critical approach we adopt to analyse the text. A given critical approach can dig out ideological presuppositions which are quite irrelevant from the point of view (and for the purposes) of an alternative critical project. It can also dig out ideological presup- positions which are quite "irrelevant" to the text's implied authorial stance. It is in this sense that I will be arguing that a text's ideology may be "overheard" by a reader or critic who does not accept the text's implied receiver position. Overhearing Narrative 197 While written works can be misunderstood on the one hand and an- alysed on the other, or both analysed and misunderstood, they are not as helpless as Plato thought. They can at least try to defend themselves ivithou1ran~appeal to the author-father. (It should be emphasized that the implied author doesn't qualify as Plato's author-father, as it is con- structed on the basis of the text. I take it that only the real author's ad- ditional discursive interventions, whether in speech or in writing, should qualify as "the father's protection.") As we have seen, a text may fictionalise, represent or dramatise the lack of fit between intended and actual reception, making a virtue of necessity. So, actual lack of ideo- logical fit may give rise to fictionalised and narrativised lack of fit in the form of unreliable narrators, unresponsive narratees, and so on. These act as so many buffers between the text's complex ideological stance and the reader's projected (and actual) response. Inaugural moments in fiction are especially interesting in this re- spect. For instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in two parts. The second part dramatises the reading public's response to the first part, with Don Quixote meeting several readers of his earlier adventures who are forced to correct their earlier impressions of Don Quixote when they meet him in the flesh. Here, of course, the author-father (or adop- tive father, as he styles himself in the prologue) can be said to have stepped in to protect his child, his "hijo del entendimiento"11, as well as his own reputation, a protection specifically aimed at countering the unwelcome "misreading" which gave rise to the apocryphal Second Part of Don Quixote published by Avellaneda in 1614 (see esp. Don Quixote, second part, chapter LIX). Another author to use unintended audiences to great effect is Samuel Richardson, as I shall be arguing in a moment. In order to deal further with the question of intended versus actual receivers in narrative, we might adapt some of the terms devised by Erving Goffman for interaction analysis. These terms focus on conver- sation and other forms of face-to-face interaction, but they also shed light on written fiction: for one thing, written fiction absorbs and ex- tends the conventions of narrative conversational interaction. Goff- man's analysis decentres and dissolves the intuitive notions of the sim- ple speaker-hearer model of linguistic interaction. In his model of communicative interaction, there is a whole gamut of participation 11 Cervantes (1966: 37). 198 Jose Angel Garcia Landa statuses for the hearer, just as there are different formats of speech pro- duction which are insufficiently described by the term "speaker." First, hearers. Hearers may be official or unofficial, direct address- ees or mere hearers: "among official hearers one must distinguish the addressed recipient from 'unaddressed' ones"12. Then, too, the pres- ence of receivers or readers may or may not be known to the speaker. Allan Bell also provides a useful model of audience roles much along the lines of Goffman's interactional analysis: Not all audience members are equally important. We can distinguish and rank their roles according to whether or not they are known, ratified or addressed by the speaker. We can picture them as occupying concentric circles, each one more dis- tant from the speaker [...]. The main character in the audience is the second person, the addressee, who is known, ratified and addressed. Among the other, third per- sons who may be present, the auditors are known and ratified interlocutors within the group. Third parties whom the speaker knows to be there, but who are not rati- fied as part of the group, are overhearers. And other parties whose presence the speaker does not even know about are eavesdroppers . These are relatively clear-cut positions. But actual interaction may become far more complex, involving ritualised versions of these posi- tions. For Goffman, there is a crucial difference between socially ritu- alised and actual communicative processes. The process of auditing what a speaker says and following the gist of his re- marks—hearing in the communication-system sense—is from the start to be dis- tinguished from the social slot in which this activity usually occurs, namely, official status as a ratified participant in the encounter. For plainly, we might not be listening when indeed we have a ratified social place in the talk, and this in spite of normative expectations on the part of the speaker. Correspondingly, it is evident that when we are not an official participant in the encounter, we might still be following the talk closely, in one of two socially different ways: either we have purposely engineered this, resulting in 'eavesdropping', or the opportunity has unintentionally and inadvertently come about, as in 'overhearing'. In brief, a rati- fied particirjant may not be listening, and someone listening may not be a ratified participant . The gap between the ritually symbolised position and actual prac- tice is known and exploited by language users in a process of symbolic reappropriation. Through speech, we modulate role positions which acknowledge the actually perceived interactional process of communi- Goffman (1981: 133). Allan Bell (1997: 246). Goffman (1981: 131-132). Overhearing Narrative 199 cation. At the same time, the officially sanctioned communicative posi- tions are upheld and distinguished from these interactively appropri- ated roles. Such is the case, for instance, when we choose not to hear what we should not hear, as Goffman explains in a parenthesis (paren- theses, incidentally, we can let pass or choose to listen to): (Much of the etiquette of bystanders can be generated from the basic understanding that they should act so as to maximally encourage the fiction that they aren't pre- sent; in brief, that the assumptions of the conversational paradigm are being real- ized.)'5. Nevertheless, this "acting as if they were not present" may leave traces in the actual discourse being produced. Goffman examines a variety of complex forms of communicative interaction, such as overhearing, collusion or innuendo16. Some of these may be compared to equivalent structures in literary communica- tion. We may argue, for example, that "eavesdropping" in a sense extended to written communication is essential to Samuel Richardson's fiction, which establishes a gap between the fictionally intended and the actually intended receiver. Many of the refinements in narrative sub- tlety we find in Clarissa (1747/48) are. generated out of the structural lack of fit resulting from the use of the epistolary convention: to begin with, the implied reader is never the narratee here (Richardson's fiction thus adopts from the start a greater level of address complexity than Defoe's). The reader intrudes on the characters' private corre- spondence, but any qualms that might be felt at this intrusion are de- fused by the implicit contract with the implied author: the reader re- sponds to the characters' interaction in the morally satisfactory way which is often absent from the fictional interaction itself, and Clarissa finds her ideal interlocutor in the implied reader, who, paradoxically enough, is an eavesdropper she cannot address directly. Fictional unreliability is another related phenomenon which might be explained from the perspective of interaction analysis. A fictional unreliable voice is not necessarily associated with eavesdropping or overhearing. But it may achieve some of its effects on the basis of in- teractive situations structurally derived from collusion or innuendo (e.g. Wayne Booth's account of the solidarity between the implied author and readers at the expense of an unreliable narrator). Fictional Ibid.: 132. Ibid.: 134. 200 Jose Angel Garcia Landa discourse may proceed, for example, along lines of multidimensional communication: narratees may be characterized as the narrator's con- sonant addressees while the implied author and the implied readers are cast as engaging in collusive sideplay17. The narrative situation in Adam Thorpe's story "Improvements: 1712" (chapter 3 of Ulverton [1992]) affords a fine example: a stolid and obsessive husbandsman, the narrator, takes smug-sounding notes (for his own benefit) about the improvements in his farm and his dealings with his wife and servant girl, while the implied reader, not addressed by the unscrupulous nar- rator, weighs nonetheless his shortcomings on the balance provided by the author. Note that Wayne Booth himself, to whom we owe the classic de- scription of unreliable narrative, uses face-to-face interaction and pos- tural proxemics as an image to describe this narrative mode: "The author and reader are secretly in collusion, behind the speaker's back, agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting"18. Here, we should read of course "implied author" and "implied reader" for "author" and "reader"—and "implied back" in lieu of "back." There is, then, a continuum of interactional modes linking face-to- face communication and the more complex literary works. The terms used by the theorists (such as Booth) are as good a clue as any other to the common root of these communicative phenomena. As a further example, let us consider John Stuart Mill's definition of poetry as a genre which is overheard, a genre which places us in a peculiar audit- ing position vis-a-vis the speaker. For Mill, poetry is different in this respect from eloquence, or rhetoric. Here, Mill elaborates on Shelley's definition of the poet as a solitary singer: Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the pe- culiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a lis- tener [. . .]. All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy19. On byplay, crossplay, sideplay, whether collusive or not, on innuendo and ambiva- lent states between ratified and non-ratified interaction, see Goffrnan (1981: 133ff.) before you read this: otherwise you are not a ratified addressee of this paper. As can be seen, Goffrnan's concepts offer an interesting alternative and complement for the analysis of what is sometimes described in Bakhtinian terms as textual polyph- ony. Booth (1987: 304). Mill (1971: 539-540). Overhearing Narrative 201 This is because poetry must be directed towards itself, not to any extrinsic aim: "when the act of utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an end, [...] then it ceases to be poetry, and becomes elo- _q"u~en"ce"2CrOf course, poetry isTTot to be confused, Mill argues, with a real soliloquy: it is only an as if. A similar generic difference (actually a more complex one: poetry / oratory / narrative / description) is to be found in all arts, according to Mill. An interactive mode, the soliloquy, can be "keyed"21 to add a transformed layer of interaction to the ac- tual communicative encounter taking place. In Mill's definition, the difference between the socially ritualised communicative processes and the actual ones, a difference theorised at length in Goffrnan's Frame Analysis, can be clearly grasped. A typical lyrical poem (if there is such a thing—but take Keats's "Why Did I Laugh Tonight?" as a convenient example) presents itself to its intended addressees as an instance of socially ritualised overhearing, but in principle it is not actually overheard, even though it may end up being overheard as well by an unintended hearer or reader. Where does the distinctiveness of narrative lie, as far as these inter- actional matters are concerned? Interactional modes can be re- transformed and used as convenient reference frames to articulate more complex representations of communicative behaviour, that is, representations of communicative behaviour which rely on the exis- tence of the transformed interactional layers carried along and com- municated by such behaviour (together with what is at issue in any given encounter: over and above the story it tells, a narrative com- municates its narrative mode). The conventions of narrative fiction make possible the formation of complex semiotic structures that reuse or absorb more basic communicative strategies or that then contribute to more complex derivative structures. Narrative structure provides a framework on which complex layers of address and interaction are built up. Conversational narrative, due to its extensive floor space, is a speech mode especially given to side reactions on the part of the audience: it takes up the floor for a significant stretch of time, and this favours the appearance of subordinate communication (e.g. open or collusive by- play or sideplay between listeners). This subordinate communication is Ibid.: 540. Goffrnan's term (1986). 202 Jose Angel Garcia Landa tolerated in face-to-face interaction by speakers who in this way pro- vide amends for their inordinate appropriation of floorspace. Oral nar- rative is thus a site in which unofficial interaction is favoured, negoti- ated and symbolically appropriated. Fictionalised oral narratives may use this subordinate communication as a motivating device. Take for instance Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (1915), most of which consists of Granser's intradiegetic narrative to his grandchildren, who have reverted to a primitive tribal life-style and mentality after a world catastrophe. Granser's actual narratees are not in fact his ideal address- ees (a mismatch from which the overhearing reader benefits), and they often lose the thread of his nostalgic narrative. This narrative situation gives rise to much sideplay and subordinate interaction between these narratees. The subordinate interaction is used by the author to show additional consequences of the disaster which is told by Granser. "Red is red, ain't it?" Hare-Lip grumbled. "Then what's the good of gettin' cocky and calling it scarlet?" "Granser, what for do you always say so much what nobody knows?" he asked. "Scarlet ain't anything, but red is red, Why don't you say red, then?" Additional instances of negotiation with unofficial interaction may be pointed out in the realm of written narrative proper, at the level of communication between authors and readers. Dissonant reception, the gap between the actual reader and the implied reader, places the actual reader in the position of an eavesdropper on a discourse which is ad- dressed to the implied reader. The communicative context, including presupposition and shared knowledge, is "seen from the outside" when we overhear. Overhearing thus acts as an embedding of contexts. More specifically (for the purposes of narrative analysis), its exploita- tion in narrative art amounts to the establishment of a complex inter- pretive relationship between contexts. Literary narratives often develop the conventions of art by making explicit the unofficial response to previous narratives on the part of their readers. Don Quixote is again a case in point. The gap between romance and everyday life experience gave rise to frequent mismatches between the response intended by the authors of romances and the response of many actual readers who, instead of feeling addressed by the text, must London (1997: 491). Overhearing Narrative 203 have found themselves overhearing a discourse intended for others23. This kind of mismatch in response was a natural subject for conversa- tion, jokes, debate and criticism before it could feed back on narrative - practice-and—give rise to an "unconventional hero, Don Quixote, who embodied this gap between the ideal and the real. Ironically, Don Qui- xote is a reader himself (both an ideal reader, from the supposed view- point of the satirized romance writers, and a misreader for the author Cervantes). Don Quixote is therefore an incarnation of the implied reader of the romances Cervantes rejects, the author's projection of an abject alter ego "hyding" inside him—in the author's outgrown past, since Cervantes must have responded to those romances as a naive reader and then as an ironic overhearer before he did so as a writer. Can readers and critics be described, in any given instance, as ex- plicit or as implicit addressees, or again as ratified unaddressed hear- ers—or as overhearers? Bearing in mind that these concepts were originally developed for the analysis of conversation, we must not ex- pect to establish one-to-one correlations with written narratives; even so, useful analogies and divergences may crop up as we analyse spe- cific cases of communicative interaction. I have been arguing that the implied reader might in principle be conceived as an official or ratified addressee in narrative interaction. Still, an apparent overlap or mismatch arises here, as noted before: (1) Institutionally, any actual reader would seem to be a ratified ad- dressee insofar as she or he participates as part of the readership in the institution of the literary marketplace. One would have to specify, nonetheless, whether the works have been written with the literary mar- ketplace in mind, and which kind of marketplace (and of readership). Here a narratological approach to a given work would have to be com- plemented with studies of actual receptions of the work. In any case, to the extent that "ratification" in address means ratification for com- municative interactants, it would have to be redefined to refer primarily to the actual interaction between present-day audiences who use the literary texts (that is, who interact through them) and, secondarily, to the text's built-in interaction between implied authors and implied We would need to address at this point in greater detail the issue of publication, circulation and intended audience of specific narratives—a task beyond the limits of this paper. Still, oneTnay suggest that Maurice Couturier's (1995) study of author figures in print communication would tie in nicely with this approach. 204 Jose Angel Garcia Landa addressees. Both the actual interaction and the built-in one are well worth studying24. (2) Nonetheless, an additional level of ratification is established through the text's ideological stance: insofar as we actual readers iden- tify with the implied reader, we are ratified as addressees, while other responses to the text tend to place us in the position of mere auditors, overhearers, or even eavesdroppers. Note that this process of ratifica- tion takes place to begin with in our self interaction as we read, al- though it is also an issue in communicative-interaction with other readers—in written criticism, for instance. I use here the concept of self interaction, and more generally - the notion that meanings emerge through an interactive process, in the sense defined by Herbert Blumer as "symbolic interactionism"25. For Blumer, the meaning of an object is not in the object itself, nor is it a psychical accretion brought to the object by the interpreter. Instead, meaning arises "in the process of interaction between people"26. The first step in the interpretive process involves a person's communication with him- or herself: In being aware of another, in interpreting and judging his action and in identifying him in a given way, one is making indications to oneself. Indeed, it seems that only by virtue of making an indication to oneself can one take account of some- thing as distinguished from merely responding to that thing . The processes noted here by Blumer refer to any kind of social in- teraction. I would like to point out their significance for a theory of reading which avoids the pitfalls of both objectivism and subjectivism in interpretation. Symbolic interactionism would seem to provide a convenient theoretical grounding for the study of reader response. Textual interaction, although it may seem "deferred" or "delayed," And they should be distinguished from a third type of interaction which is described thus by Hoey (2001: 131): "text is the site of an interaction between writer and reader. The Question-Answer and Claim-Denial/Affirmation patterns seem to point to a further form of textual interaction, that between the author and someone other than the reader." This kind of interaction has been sufficiently theorized by Bak- thin's notion of dialogism (e.g. Bakhtin 1980: 180). I want to emphasize here an- other dialogic dimension which appears when the actual reader is neither the intended addressee nor the previous speaker being answered through what Bakhtin terms a "hidden polemic." Blumer (1986: 4, 62). Ibid.: 4. Ibid.: 111. Overhearing Narrative 205 does share with general human interaction the participants' mutual awareness, mutual identification, and the reciprocal interpretation of mental representations and intentions28. —-€>f"CouTse,"the deferral involved in writing brings along with it a number of specific modalities of interaction. Narratologists have often addressed some of these, such as the aforementioned creation of tex- tual roles and persona?. I want to emphasize at this point the way in which these protocols of textual interaction involve a measure of role- playing in which the readers' involvement in the text necessitates some detachment from their own immediate concerns and ideological pri- orities: paradoxically, involvement in the text may require a split of attitudes in the reader which is also a prerequisite for detachment. In assuming the implied reading position, the reader assumes it as an im- plied reader, not as a reader. This self-allotment of roles requires a self-interactive process of the kind alluded to by Blumer. A de- tachment from oneself in reading is presupposed in the very notion of implied reader. There is always, then, some degree of reader-exclusion (even in any one reader's experience), and some forms of reading actually thrive on their distance from the authorially sanctioned position. It could be argued, for instance, that readers who drastically recontextualise the text away from its original intended use (e.g. New Historicist critics) are acting as eaves-droppers, or overhearers29. This is simply an ex- tension of a more general principle of communication which Jenny Thomas formulates thus (in its application to conversational inter- action): "context cannot be seen only as a 'given', as something im- posed from the outside. The participants, by their use of language, also contribute to making and changing their context"30. Eavesdropping critics are participants, too, even if they have gatecrashed into the tex- tual party. H. Porter Abbott has drawn a useful distinction between "inten- tional" and "symptomatic" modes of interpretation31. In the "inten- tional" mode, as I see it, the reader or critic accepts the communicative Cf. ibid.: 109. Of course I am not claiming that authors are aware of all their possi- ^ ble readers, etc. Mutual awareness takes place through medium-specific protocols. As a matter of fact, the difference between overhearers and eavesdroppers fades somewhat in the case of written literary communication. 30 Thomas (1995: 194). - 31 Abbott (2002: 95ff.). 206 Jose Angel Garcia Landa appeal of the text and, so to speak, plays the game the text invites him or her to play. The critic accepts the rules of textual interaction as laid down by the author and can therefore claim to be the author's ad- dressee, the one who receives the work the way it was intended to be received. A "symptomatic" critic (e.g. a psychoanalytic critic) does otherwise. Symptomatic critics have their own communicative agenda, which makes them analyse the text behind the author's back (to reuse a phrase) as an object which can be dissected for the benefit of an audience32. Symptomatic critics still have to "listen" to the communi- cative interaction between the author and the intended addressee, but without sharing the position of the intended addressee—acting, in- ef- fect, as overhearers of the textual communication, and engaging meanwhile, of course, in another textual-communicative process, an interactive process with other critics or an audience of their own. This is a process to which the symptomatic critic's communication with the author is subordinated. I am perhaps emphasizing the differences, and there is no doubt much middle ground between the ideal poles of intentional and symp- tomatic criticism—but they do seem to exist as the outer extremes of a gamut. This distinction overlaps with what I sometimes call "friendly" versus "unfriendly" criticism (or critical criticism) as well as with Paul Ricceur's notion of a hermeneutics of the restoration of meaning ver- sus a hermeneutics of suspicion33. At their most characteristic, then, "unfriendly," "symptomatic" or "resisting" critics are by definition overhearers34. A special brand of overhearers, though, as they choose to place themselves in that position, beyond the role of addressee solicited by the text. Overhearing can place us in the position of overstanding, not just MHcferstanding35. This means that significant literary criticism on a work is not usually written from the stance of the implied reader of a work. Symptomatic criticism is left, then, in a curious position as far as interactive address is con- cerned: by definition, no work addresses its symptomatic critics, who For instance, Judith Fetterley's "resisting reader" is distanced from the text by a po- litical agenda—feminist resistance to patriarchal ideology. The notion of resisting reading, minus the term itself, is already sketched out in Walker Gibson's 1950 ar- ticle. Ricosur (1970: 32); see also Garcia Landa (2004). Although of course not all overhearers are resisting readers! I use here Booth's term (1979: 242). Overhearing Narrative 207 are therefore professional intruders on other people's communicative interaction. Hence, in part, no doubt, the proverbial antipathy between "strong" writers and "strong" critics, to use Harold Bloom's terms. Bnt~these~are all very tentative guidelines, as any text may modulate its address in a variety of ways. For instance, we should keep in mind the possible germination of the structural subject positions mentioned above (p. 195)—texts with two or more authors instead of one, two or more narrators, narratees, etc. There has been some emphasis recently on texts with a double implied address. Roger Sell notes that there may actually be more than one implied reader. Sometimes in children's litera- ture, for instance, the appeal to an implied child listener can be perhaps overheard, so to speak, by an implied adult reader (Wall [1991]). Love poems, similarly, may be addressed, not only to the loved one but [...] to another readership as well, es- pecially when they are published or otherwise circulated36. Another example: a novel may be dismissed by a reviewer as being written with academic critics in mind, while pretending to address the general reader (this was one reviewer's contention concerning Marilyn French's The Women's Room). Or again, one particular work may devote much rhetorical energy to disavow what has been called its "antireaders"37: Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is one such text—a work in which the narrator, a fictional editor and the author in propria persona try to ward off possible misinterpretations. Other works will sidestep the issue of antireaders or use more indirect methods. So, analysis of the exceptions to the rule that no text anticipates its symptomatic critics would no doubt provide interesting case studies of multilevel address. Utterances convey presuppositions about the speaker and the hearer. The nature of those authorial projections, however, is not a given. These presuppositions are effectively present in the sender and inferred by the receiver, but the full significance of these phenomena emerges only retrospectively, through interpretive work or critical analysis involving a linguistic formulation which is both explicit and selective. Thus, characterising the implied authorial attitude or the im- plied reader of a text is a complex hermeneutic process. The mode of address of a text may not be as neatly set out as it appears in many a narratological scheme. Narratological schemes are the result of an in- terpretive process which, in representing the mode of address, also re- Sell (2000: 171). See also Sell (2002: 8); Nikolajeva (2002: 131). Brian Richardson (1997: 46). 208 Jose Angel Garcia Landa constructs it, bringing up for examination certain elements or bracket- ing others as irrelevant for the analytic purpose at hand (that is, for the communicative interaction the analyst is currently engaged in). Part of my contention, then, is that narratology has often disregarded the ana- lyst's intervention on the text. Such disregard may be justifiable in many given cases for specific analytic projects, but both the analyst's role and the sense in which it may be bracketed should have a place in an overall theory of narrative communication. It is not enough to identify a narrative's explicit addressee and 4ts intended addressee: the analyst's own position as overhearer has to be accounted for. As we retroactively bring to light38 the implicit formal and ideological struc- tures of the text through rereading and analysis, our own structural position vis-a-vis the ideological parameters of the text being analysed (and of the current interactive process) is also further defined: we con- struct our (communicated) selves through reading and interpretation as more or less resistant to or more or less consonant with the other tex- tual subjects we interact with. Critics, most particularly those with a critical or even an unfriendly bent, are overhearers who report, inter- pret, reshape and reformulate what they have heard, and what they have overheard. Or, perhaps, "as we retroactively give birth to." The implications of this retroac- tive birth of the interpreted object are often neglected. Here Jonathan Culler's analysis of narrative retroaction (2001) is apposite too—only it should be applied, as well, to the narrative process consisting in the analysis and interpretation of texts. Overhearing Narrative 209 Appendix Medium relationship of discourse (As if) heard (As if) overheard 210 Jose Angel Garcia Landa Notes on the diagram: a) The diagram is derived from a more schematic one in Roger Bell (1991). Only the most relevant possibilities have been represented. b) The difference between one category and the next may be fuzzy (e.g. reading with glances at an outline, etc.). c) If human behaviour, generally speaking, is in a way "scripted" by culture, the borderline between what is spontaneous and what is scripted has to be specified with respect to the purposes of the analysis. d) Specific speech situations or technologies (e.g. face-to-face con- versation, telephone conversations, e-mail) may introduce additional constraints and possibilities. See, for instance, the analysis of radio talk in Goffman (1981). e) Contrary to what the schematic presentation might suggest, these medium modalities do not exclude each other, rather, they may coexist in any given instance as one medium is represented through another: e.g. writing may be read aloud and become speech, and speech repre- sented in writing may likewise be read aloud, but these phenomena are semiotically distinct from speech unmediated by writing. f) An example already used in the text may help clarify the rele- vance of this diagram to narrative analysis. In Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague," the medium of discourse is writing: even though this story may be recorded or listened to, it contains references to reading which, besides any additional historical or stylistic considerations, mark the text as a written one. But this written discourse engages in inter- mediality the moment it attempts to represent spoken discourse within writing: Granser's intradiegetic narrative is a form of (direct) speech, represented in the medium of writing. It is (fictional) spontaneous speech (while London's narrative, being intended as literature and filtered through the editorial protocols, is not spontaneous). But Gran- ser's narrative is scripted (even inside the fiction) to the extent that it is, presumably, a re-enactment of a tale which has been told by Granser a number of times before. Intermediality leaves its mark, though, as the narrative voice is clearly a construction, and only conventionally does it partake of the stylistic properties of oral narrative. This artificiality, in turn, is partly acknowledged, partly motivated, through reflexive commentary: the "cultured" quality of Granser's narrative is explic- itly attributed within the tale to his past experience as a lecturer, and in any case the extradiegetic narrator acknowledges that the characters' speech has been "translated" in order to make it accessible to the Overhearing Narrative 211 reader (London 1997: 492). Granser's address shows likewise several medium-related disjunctions. On the one hand, he strives to address an audience as the sole speaker, but his narratees often invade his floor spacerwithrthe narrative becoming a conversation (1997: 499). On the other hand, this address in prcesentia to the narratees is simultaneously an address in absentia, breaking the narrative frame, to the implied reader, an overhearer whose values and intellect are much closer to Granser's implicit narratee than the values and intellect of the actual narratees he has to make do with. 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