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8SECTION 5
CRITICAL TERMS AND HOW TO USE THEM
We have established this section in response to requests from teachers who would like definitions and discussions of some of the critical terms used in analysing literature. We provide a few defintions of key terms (provided by Sandie Byrne) and a longer discussion of one key term (by Catherine Brown). In future issues of Footpath we hope to add some more definitions.
Criticism: Writing about the context and/or form of texts which does not simply describe, summarise or offer a guide or 'appreciation' but which analyses the texts or their context in some way. Both reviewers and critics may criticise, judge or evaluate the texts they are writing about.
Ambiguity: Ambiguous words or phrases can mean one or other of two things. The meaning of ambivalent words or phrases is harder to determine; they could have either interpretation. Polysemous words can hold many meanings simultaneously.
Metonymy: A device in which an action, effect or attribute of a thing is substituted for the thing itself. Examples: ‘the turf (grass is part of the racing and betting industry); ‘the White House’ (the building is part of the Presidency and political life of the United States of ■ America); ‘the crown’ (the jewelled metal headdress stands for the monarchy and the present royal family). Metonymy is different from synecdoche, in which part of a thing is used to denote the whole thing. Examples: ‘the hands’ (factory workers); ‘the feet’ (colloquialism for police officers on the beat).
Narrator
(Footpath 1 and Footpath 2 each had an article reflecting on the role of the narrator in specific works. Catherine Brown's discussion of the narrator continues the exploration of this necessary term.)
Every narrative has at least one narrator. Narrators come in different kinds. Some are external to the action which they describe - as for example in Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Lodge’s Nice Work. Others are characters within the narrative - as for example in Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata and the first chapter (‘The Stowaway’) of Barnes’s A History of the World in IOV2 Chapters. Sometimes these two types are respectively called ‘third person’ and ‘first person’ narrators, but this is not a clear distinction since even a character will often be narrating about other people - particularly if they are not themselves protagonists but observers. For example, the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby plays very little part in the action, and more often refers to ‘he’ or ‘she’ than ‘I’. Similarly, external narrators can use the pronoun ‘I’ whilst they are commenting on the events they describe; George Eliot’s narrators sometimes do this.
Most narration is in the past tense, but some is in the present. The latter is more usual with an external narrator. For example, in Dickens’s Bleak House there are two alternating narrators: an external narrator which uses the present tense, and a character-narrator which uses the past tense. Narrative tone can vary widely; some narrators more than others express or imply their feelings about or judgments of the events which they describe. However, tone can also vary within one novel. For example, in a multi-plotted novel each plot may be narrated using a slightly different narrative voice. Narrators can be nested inside each other, like matrioshki. Both an external and a character-narrator could quote a character who describes their life, and in doing so quotes other characters, who quote others, and so on.
The relation of narration to characters can be described using the term ‘focalization’ (which was proposed by the French narratologist Gerard Genette). Narration with ‘internal focalization’ describes the consciousness of a character - for example, ‘Franklin felt himself a little carried away by his self-appointed role.’ The second chapter of A
History of the World, ‘The Visitors’, is internally focalized mainly through Franklin, although occasionally the internal focalization passes to other characters, such as his girlfriend Tricia. External focalization has no access to the consciousness of characters, but describes them from the outside, thus resembling the perspective which humans have of each other. For example, a small proportion of Barnes’s chapter is externally focalized on the ship’s passengers, both individually and collectively. Some narrators, such as that of War and Peace, seem to have unrestricted access to the characters’ consciousnesses, and unrestricted understanding of the events: they are called ‘omniscient’.
Sometimes narration is externally focalized in structure (that is, without any such marker as ‘she thought’ or ‘he felt’), but nonetheless expresses a character’s consciousness. This is called ‘free indirect speech’. It is used in a particularly complex way in this passage from McEwan’s Atonement:
Briony studied her mother’s face for every trace of j shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks * of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful ,■ smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap - ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not j gone from her, not quite yet - and said that the play \ was ‘stupendous’, and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl’s ear, that this word : could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an ' easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.
From ‘Briony’ to ‘ah’ this narrative is free indirect speech for Briony. Emily Tallis’s ‘nods’ at her daughter’s play are not necessarily wise and affirming, but this is how Briony wants to interpret them. The narrator of the passage does not say ‘Briony felt that her mother was reading her play with wise, affirming nods’, but this is implied by the fact that the style and content of the narration differ from what the
reader has already come to expect of the narrator of Atonement. Between the two hyphens (from ‘ah, that hot’ to ‘not quite yet’), the narration is free indirect speech for Emily Tallis; the repetition in ‘not gone from her, not quite yet’ mimics her own plaintiveness. The rest of the passage is free indirect speech for both characters; Briony is being told what she wants to hear concerning the advertisement of her play; Emily is telling her daughter what she knows she wants to hear; only the phrase ‘tight whorl of the girl’s ear’ belongs more to Emily’s consciousness than Briony’s.
Free indirect speech is one form of ‘unreliable narration’. In unreliable narration there is a divergence between the narrator and the ‘implied author’ of the text. The implied author holds the perspective which the reader understands to emerge from the work as a whole, rather than from any of its parts. This author may or may not resemble the actual author in its views and intentions, and, since the latter is difficult to know at any point in time, and changes by the minute, it is best to refer to the implied author. Free indirect speech is an example of temporary unreliable narration; some works, however, have an unreliable narrator throughout. Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby is narrated by its protagonist, whom the reader finally understands to be highly disturbed and dangerous and to have omitted the narration of a crucial event. Readers will vary greatly in the speed with which they work this out. A narrator can be unreliable in the narration of facts (through omission or distortion), and in attitudes to those facts. Engleby eventually gives the reader enough evidence to know that the narrator has omitted facts, and has an attitude towards the facts which differ both from moral norms in modem British society, and from the attitude which the novel as a whole is promoting. (This attitude is less damning of Engleby than that of the real author, however, who described his character as ‘a bastard’).
It is not necessary that the attitudes of the implied author, and of the reader, coincide, however. It would be possible to have, for example, an anti-racist narrator in a text which promoted racism, who was exposed as morally and factually unreliable. There is much debate over the extent to which Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata is an
unreliable narrator - that is, over whether his own views, and those of the story, are the same. With regard to not providing information, there are many degrees possible. The narrator of Engleby is at one extreme, yet any narrative which does not state the ending at the beginning, withholds information from the reader. Detective stories deliberately withhold information in order to allow the reader to share the detective’s limited perspective. Certain narrators reveal their identity only at the end of their narration - for example the woodworm in ‘The Stowaway’ or Briony Tallis in Atonement - yet apart from this withholding, we may not find their narration ‘unreliable’.
Most narration moves forwards in time. ‘Analepsis’ (Genette’s term) is a leap backwards in time, which in the context of film is referred to as a ‘flashback’. For example, in Atonement we are told how the uncle obtained the vase during the First World War. Since this is outside of the time frame of most of the narration it is ‘external’ analepsis. ‘Prolepsis’ is a leap forwards in time. For example, after the passage quoted above, ‘Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project’s highest point of fulfilment.’ Since we soon read how and why this was the case, it is ‘internal prolepsis’. ‘External prolepsis’ concerns a time period after that of the main body of the narrative, as for example in epilogues.
In the case of external narrators, many problems arise in attempting to describe them as though they were people. Authors are real people; characters are fictional people; external narrators do not always feel like people at all. Assuming that it is a person, is it speaking to us or has it written for us? When the narrator addresses the reader directly we are particularly inclined to think of the narrator as speaking to us. But in what voice? Answering that leads to the issue of gender. Do we implicitly assume that the narrator of a book written by a woman is female, and that of a book written by a man is male? Many people, when they think about it, say that they do. But if the author is known to have an American, or a Scottish, accent, do we ‘hear’ the narrative spoken in that voice? Or do we not hear all prose (and indeed, all writing) in our own English accent, except when characters speak with an obvious dialect? When narrators have questionable substantiality,
this may not be inappropriate. We should guard against anthropomorphizing the narrator beyond what a text seems to warrant - it is after all a construct, just as the ‘implied author’ is. This may help in the case of narratives in which, for example, the narrative tone changes frequently. Rather than inducing a schizophrenic narrator, or multiple narrators, we can dispense with the term ‘narrator’ altogether, and refer simply to ‘narration’ of varying tone. Yet in most cases ‘narrator’ is a construct which the narrative itself invites us to create. The terms which appear in this note may be helpful both in creating, and in describing it.
