James Phelan
Contemporary narrative theory is a robust and diverse enterprise, one characterized by multiple theoretical approaches (cognitive, rhetorical, feminist, anti‐mimetic, postcolonial, and more) to an ever‐expanding set of objects of study. Originally oriented toward literary print narrative, especially the novel, contemporary narrative theory now pays much greater attention to nonfictional narrative of all kinds, to narrative in poetry, and to narrative in media other than print: in film, television, comics, and in digital environments, including social media. In addition, contemporary narrative theory examines narrative across disciplines, with special attention to medicine, business, and law. Rather than offer what would inevitably be only a cursory look at all these developments, and aware that this volume is concerned with “literary theory,” I have chosen to give more detailed attention to five significant developments that are important for the study of literary narrative, and to construct this as a companion piece to my chapter, “Narrative Theory, 1966–2006: A Narrative,” in the 2006 edition of The Nature of Narrative.1 Although I remain aware that the two studies together still fall short of a comprehensive survey of the field, I hope they provide a good basecamp from which the interested explorer can launch additional investigations.2
The first two developments discussed here are related to “instabilities.” I noted at the end of “Narrative Theory, 1966–2006”: (1) “narrative theory and the tradition of nonmimetic narrative,” and (2) “narrative theory, the borders between fiction and nonfiction, and cross‐border traffic” (2006: 334–5). The other three developments are related to the three approaches I feature in that account: (3) from the cognitive approach, work on mind‐reading or Theory of Mind; (4) from the feminist approach, work on the concept of intersectionality; and (5) from the rhetorical approach, work on the narrative communication model. To illustrate practical consequences of this work, I turn, as in 2006, to analyses of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices (2006) is a seminal text for those interested in what he refers to as anti‐mimetic or unnatural narrative (the term “unnatural” plays off Monika Fludernik’s proposals for a “natural” narratology [1996]). Richardson has remained a major contributor to this work, as evident in his collaborations with others (detailed in the Works Cited), and his 2015 book, Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice). Other important voices include Jan Alber—who has also written a book entitled Unnatural Narrative (2016)—Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Stefan Iversen. The key contention underlying the approach is that mainstream narrative theory has been built on mimetic narratives (that is, those that are constrained by what is actual or possible in the extratextual world) and therefore has a mimetic bias that limits its explanatory power. For example, Richardson argues that the rhetorical definition of narrative as “someone telling someone else that something significant has happened within a recognizable storyworld” reflects this bias (Phelan 2006: 22). To account properly for unnatural narratives, Richardson contends, the definition would need to acknowledge that each of its elements has been problematized by practices in the anti‐mimetic tradition. Not every narrator or narratee is a “someone”—some are nonhuman, some are collective. Some occasions are mimetically impossible, as the technique of first‐person present tense narration indicates. And so on. One of the pleasures of engaging with the work of the unnatural narratologists is learning about the long tradition of anti‐mimetic narratives and the varieties of unnaturalness they exhibit.
Unnatural narratologists also contend that there is often more unnaturalness in the mimetic tradition than narrative theorists have noticed.3 Indeed, when one reads mimetic fiction through the lens of unnatural narratology, one’s perceptions of anti‐mimetic elements become more acute, as the following discussion of Atonement suggests.
It is possible to read McEwan’s novel, for all its meta‐fictional hi‐jinks, as ultimately committed to mimesis. Looking at the major elements of narrative, we see that the characters are well‐drawn possible people; that the settings—an upper‐class estate in mid‐1930s England, the French countryside during the British retreat from Dunkirk; and multiple sites in London—are all either plausible imitations (the country estate) or historical realities (Clapham Common); and that the events not only all conform to the constraints governing human behavior in the actual world but are also caught up in the grim realities of the Second World War. Looking at the narrative discourse, we do see something far less straightforward, as McEwan delays the disclosure that Parts I, II, and III are a novel existing within the storyworld, written by its protagonist, Briony Tallis, and thus that he has constructed a novel within a novel. That is, Briony’s Atonement is contained within McEwan’s Atonement, which continues on for the final section called “London, 1999.” But though this novel‐within‐a‐novel structure adds the meta‐fictional dimension, it does not make Atonement anti‐mimetic. Indeed, one could argue that this structure is, in part, mimetically motivated by Briony’s ambition to be a novelist. Furthermore, although McEwan’s novel contains information that contradicts information in Briony’s novel (most notably, its disclosure that Briony never met with her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner in 1940), mimetically oriented readers can easily keep the novel “natural” by emphasizing the distinction between what happens in Briony’s novel and what happens in McEwan’s.
Looking at Atonement through the lens of unnatural narratology, however, we are likely to experience considerable difficulty in preserving the mimetic. Consider the consequences of McEwan’s delayed disclosure that Parts I, II, and III are Briony’s novel. This disclosure means that McEwan engages in an act of what Richardson has identified as “denarration” (Richardson 2001). McEwan tells his audience that certain events happened and then he subsequently tells his audience that these events did not happen. Preserving the mimetic by invoking the ontological difference between Briony’s novel and McEwan’s novel comes at the price of ignoring the experiential quality of the denarration. McEwan makes his readers go from believing in Briony’s meeting with Cecilia and Robbie to no longer believing.
McEwan’s delayed disclosure also adds another layer to the novel’s narration. Before that disclosure, Parts I, II, and III have all the marks of a modernist novel deploying an overarching non‐character narrator exercising the epistemological privileges of variable focalization. In Part I, that narrator focalizes through Briony, Cecilia, Robbie, and even Briony and Cecilia’s mother Emily. Part II is a tour de force of internal focalization as it traces Robbie’s consciousness through his participation in the retreat from Dunkirk. Part III returns us to Briony’s focalization. Once McEwan uses “London, 1999” to definitively reveal that Briony is the author of Parts I, II, and III, he also signals that we should attribute the handling of the narration in those parts to Briony. But McEwan’s revelation also means that the non‐character narration of Briony’s Atonement is simultaneously character narration within his Atonement. Consequently, Briony’s decision to offer internal focalization from the perspectives of characters other than herself functions simultaneously as conventional and authoritative within her novel and as unnatural within McEwan’s—indeed, the tour de force of Part II is one long violation of the mimetic code governing Briony’s character narration, since she could not know what Robbie was thinking during the retreat.
Unnatural narratology has amply demonstrated the value of attending to the anti‐mimetic tradition and of re‐reading allegedly mimetic fictions through its lens. In addition, it has not only added concepts such as “denarration” to narratology’s analytical repertoire but it has also done valuable work on “unnatural” techniques such as second‐person narration and “we” narration. Nevertheless, the extent to which it is a genuinely new theoretical paradigm remains an open question. As Peter J. Rabinowitz and I note in Narrative Theory (Herman et al. 2012), unnatural narratology takes as its project developing a theory of X (where X is anti‐mimetic narrative) rather than developing a theory rooted in a view of narrative as Y (e.g., a rhetorical action, or a site for the exploration of intersections of identity). Perhaps constructing a theory primarily on the basis of paying attention to previously neglected kinds of narrative is more likely to result in extensions and revisions to existing narrative theory than in a new paradigm for the field. Settling this issue is one important task for the unnatural narratologists.
The most significant complication of this instability has come from studies of fictionality, with Richard Walsh’s Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007) functioning as an especially important statement. Walsh’s key move is to separate fictionality from generic fictions such as the novel, the short story, and the fiction film:
Not that fictionality should be equated simply with “fiction,” as a category or genre of narrative: it is a communicative strategy, and as such it is apparent on some scale within many nonfictional narratives, in forms ranging from something like an ironic aside, through various forms of conjecture or imaginative supplementation, to full‐blown counterfactual narrative examples.
(Walsh 2007: 7)
This separation leads Walsh to regard fictionality as a rhetorical resource (“a communicative strategy”) whose uses are best explained by relevance theory rather than by ontological distinctions between “truth” and “non‐truth” that end up making fictionality derivative of, or in other ways inferior to, non‐fictionality. Shifting to relevance theory allows Walsh to contend that fictionality is a way not of escaping from the actual world but of engaging with it in a distinct way. As he puts it, “[f]ictionality is a rhetorical resource integral to the direct and serious use of language within a real‐world communicative framework” (2007: 15–16).
Although Walsh offers a clear view of what he means by fictionality, he does not offer a straightforward definition of it. In “Ten Theses about Fictionality” (Nielsen et al. 2015a), Walsh, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and I define it in relation to non‐fictionality and highlight its use of invention. Where non‐fictionality is a mode in which a speaker’s discourse is constrained by their effort to reflect actual states, fictionality is a mode in which a speaker invents non‐actual states. Nielsen and Simona Gjerlevsen Zetterberg (forthcoming) propose a more succinct definition: fictionality is intentionally signaled invention in communication. “Intentionally” reflects the rhetorical orientation toward a speaker’s purpose; “signaled” distinguishes fictionality from lying, which implicitly or explicitly claims to refer to actual states, thus deceptively hiding from the audience its departure from those states; “invention” indicates the discourse’s concern with non‐actual states; and “in communication” specifies the broad domain in which fictionality occurs.
This conception of fictionality has several important consequences. (1) It calls attention to the pervasiveness of fictionality throughout discourse: we pepper our conversations with it—think of all the times we say “I wish that” or “what if that?”—and it is a key tool in multiple disciplines—via thought experiments, simulations, hypotheses, and so on. (2) It allows us to recognize that fictionality is not primarily an escape from the actual world but rather an indirect way of engaging with it. The most common reason we shift from non‐fictive to fictive discourse is to get a better purchase on aspects of the actual. (3) It re‐situates generic fictions such as the novel and the fiction film as one kind of fictionality rather than as either fictionality tout court or the epitome of fictionality. (4) It both highlights the utility of the fiction/non‐fiction distinction and provides a fresh approach to “cross‐border traffic.” It opens the door to attention to the deployment of fictionality within global non‐fiction and of non‐fictionality within global fiction.
Looking at Briony’s focalization of Robbie’s consciousness in Part II through this lens, we can transcend the choice of viewing it as mimetic (of Briony’s character and her desires) or unnatural (a case of Briony’s knowing more than she can plausibly know). Instead, we can understand it as (a) Briony’s opting for invention in order to capture key aspects of Robbie’s experience and (b) McEwan’s implicit endorsement of that move because it is an example of what he—and any fiction writer— does, that is, use invention as a way to engage with the actual.
In addition, this approach to fictionality sheds light on some of McEwan’s meta‐fictional moves. When McEwan includes Cyril Connolly’s letter rejecting Briony’s “Two Figures by a Fountain,” McEwan complicates the relation between Briony’s novel and his novel. Within her novel, the episode is a significant complication, one that further spurs her interest in doing something more direct to atone for her misdeed. Within McEwan’s novel, it is a crucial contribution to the story of Briony’s development as a writer, a story that continues until the very end of “London, 1999” with its reflections on Briony’s novelistic choices. In addition, the meta‐fictional move can be understood as McEwan’s thought experiment: given the aesthetics of late modernism in general and those of Horizon magazine and Cyril Connolly in particular, what would be the most plausible response to a short narrative built on variable focalization in which no judgment of the focalizing characters can be detected? McEwan’s invention conveys his actual view of Connolly’s aesthetic judgment.
Most significantly, McEwan is concerned with cross‐border traffic in the central ethical‐aesthetic issue foregrounded by the delayed disclosure of the novel‐within‐a‐novel structure. Is Briony justified in departing from what actually happened to Robbie and Cecilia in her novel, given that its purpose is to atone for her misidentification of Robbie as Lola’s assailant? Briony defends her turn to invention this way: “I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end” (McEwan 2001: 351). Briony sees herself atoning through her fictionalizing by giving Robbie and Cecilia the kind of happiness that her transgression prevented them from having. In Experiencing Fiction I argue that McEwan guides his audience to regard Briony’s choice as ethically and aesthetically flawed by linking her invention to the juvenile ethics and aesthetics underlying the play she wrote at age 13, “The Trials of Arabella.” Revisiting the issue through the lens of fictionality reinforces this view: Briony’s move comes across as “weakness” and “evasion” precisely because, within the world of her narrative, there is no return to the actual. Briony’s fictionalizing is not a way to engage with the actual but an effort to deny it.
As a collaborator with Walsh and Nielsen, I obviously find this approach to fictionality very promising, but many narrative theorists are more skeptical. Paul Dawson, for example, has countered “Ten Theses about Fictionality” with “Ten Theses against Fictionality.” Some find that, in a world that recognizes such matters as the complexity of the psyche and the importance of perspective, the distinction between fictionality and non‐fictionality is far more difficult to sustain than champions of the turn acknowledge. What I regard as an act of invention, you regard as a subjective perception of the actual. Others worry about an impulse to claim too much territory: should all figures of speech be considered instances of fictionality? If so, then how much does this view of fictionality leave to non‐fictionality? Still others contend that the claims for the explanatory power of fictionality are overblown, and that some of those claims are just old wine in new bottles. These challenges provide an agenda for further work on fictionality.
Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction has not only made a major contribution to cognitive narratology but its influence has also extended beyond that subfield of narrative theory.4 Zunshine’s argument is two‐fold. First, she explicates her key cognitive concepts—Theory of Mind (ToM) and meta‐representation or source‐tracking—and demonstrates their relevance to everyday life and to the reading of fiction. Second, she builds on these demonstrations to address the “why” in her title. ToM, Zunshine explains, refers to humans’ “ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” (Zunshine 2006: 6). In reading fiction, we watch characters engaged in reading each other’s minds and simultaneously read those minds ourselves, making further inferences about the implied author’s mental activities. Zunshine notes that in both everyday activities and in fiction mind‐reading often goes awry, but that outcome only makes the phenomenon more fascinating: accurate reading makes life much less difficult, yet it is easy—and, thus common—to read inaccurately.
Zunshine also shows how fiction often challenges our mind‐reading abilities by pushing them to their limits. Zunshine notes, for example, that our minds can typically process up to four levels of embedded intentionality but have trouble with more than four. We can manage this sentence: “I know that Zunshine knows that Steven Pinker thinks that modernist novelists think erroneously about their representations of consciousness.” But we have trouble with this one: “I know that Zunshine knows that Steven Pinker thinks that modernist novelists erroneously assume that readers think that they can keep track of more than four levels of embedded intentionality.”
“Meta‐representation” is the cognitive ability to keep track of the source of information and to judge its quality in relation to one’s knowledge of the source. As you read the previous paragraph, for example, you were not just taking away the information that “Zunshine shows human minds can readily handle four levels of embedded intentionality” but also adding the tag “Phelan says” to that information.
In addressing the “why” of her title, Zunshine contends that because mind‐reading is so important and yet can so easily go awry, we find value in activities that sharpen our skills. We read fiction precisely because it has the potential to fully engage and challenge our mind‐reading capacity. “Theory of Mind is a cluster of cognitive adaptations that allows us to navigate our social world and also structures that world. Intensely social species that we are, we thus read fiction because it engages, in a variety of particularly focused ways, our Theory of Mind” (Zunshine 2006: 162).
In subsequent work, Zunshine has thickened her description of the cognitive operations involved in reading literary fiction, but the core of her argument remains the same: literary fiction provides the human mind with valuable exercise in handling socio‐cognitive complexity, exercise that makes us better equipped to handle the challenges of everyday life.5
Atonement can be productively understood as a novel that exercises our mind‐reading skills in the service of a narrative exploring the powers and especially the limitations of mind‐reading. As a novel about the problem of other minds, Atonement explores that problem in multiple ways. First, Cecilia and Robbie misread each other’s mental states—and indeed their own—until Robbie makes the Freudian slip of giving her his profane note: “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long” (McEwan 2001: 80). And then suddenly they are able to connect both mentally and physically: they become what Alan Palmer has labeled a social mind.6 Second, Briony’s misidentification of Robbie as Lola’s assailant stems from her attribution to him of a permanent mental state based on her having read his profane expression of desire for Cecilia. Because Briony concludes that Robbie is a “maniac” (2001: 112), she confidently fills in the gap in her perceptions when she finds Lola in the dark. She perceives only “a figure, a person … backing away from her and beginning to fade into the darker background of the trees” (2001: 154). But her inference about Robbie’s mind leads her to misidentify him. Third, the delayed disclosure adds another layer to the mind‐reading because it requires McEwan’s audience to reconfigure the source‐tracking. What we thought was only McEwan’s novel is actually Briony’s novel contained within McEwan’s novel. Thus, what we thought came directly from McEwan (or his narrator) we have to reinterpret as from Briony. Thus, every act of mind‐reading in Parts I, II, and III has another layer.
What I have identified as the central ethical/aesthetic question is also an issue of mind‐reading, this one focused on McEwan’s mind: Does McEwan think that when Briony decides to alter the historical fates of Robbie and Cecilia in her novel she weakens her novel and paradoxically strengthens his? Or does McEwan think that Briony’s decision strengthens both her novel and his? Finally, does McEwan think how we answer these questions is less important than our engaging the acts of mind‐reading that such questions (including this one) entail? Whatever McEwan’s answer to this last question, Zunshine would, I believe, answer it in the affirmative.
Not surprisingly, not all theorists are satisfied with Zunshine’s argument for why we read fiction, since it puts more emphasis on the exercise of ToM than on, say, the ethics and thematics of fiction. But, thanks to Zunshine, ToM is now an entrenched concept in contemporary narrative theory.
Arguably the most valuable contribution to feminist narratology in the last decade is among the most recent: Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015), co‐edited by the pioneering feminist narratologists of the 1980s, Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. The collection is valuable for multiple reasons.7 It brings together twenty‐two essays by scholars at different stages of their careers with different relationships to feminist and queer theory working on a wide range of issues: empathy, religion, lifewriting, temporality, emplotment, and more. In this way, the collection serves as a reminder that the plural term—“feminist and queer narrative theories”—is more accurate than the singular. At the same time, the collection presents a vision, implicit throughout, and explicit in Warhol and Lanser’s “Introduction” and in Lanser’s individual contribution, “Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology,” of a multifaceted and multidirectional relationship among feminist theory, queer theory, narrative theory, narrative as a form, and individual narratives. Furthermore, the collection identifies the concept central to that vision: intersectionality. Citing its origin in the work of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, Lanser explains the concept this way: “intersectionality argues that multiple aspects of identity—gender, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, global position, age, sexuality, ability, religion, language, historical moment—converge and interact to create actual or perceived social positions, meanings, experiences, and representations in a world patterned by structural inequalities” (Warhol and Lanser 2015: 27).
The collection also shows that attending to intersectionality will have different effects from one inquiry to another, depending on which aspects of identity are put in conversation with which elements of narrative. In addition to Lanser’s illuminating discussion in her essay, the volume includes three other essays that foreground intersectionality: Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Religion, Intersectionality, and Queer/Feminist Narrative Theory: The Bildungsromane of Ahdaf Soueif, Leila Abouelela, and Randa Jarrar”; Suzanne Keen’s “Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy”; and Sue J. Kim’s “Empathy and 1970s Novels by Third World Women.” Keen’s essay is especially noteworthy because it shows how her attention to intersectionality links her excellent work on narrative empathy, work that she has previously described as a contribution to rhetorical narratology, with the project of feminist narrative theory. The work is rhetorical because it focuses on the construction, the communication, and the effects of empathy. When, however, Keen foregrounds intersectionality, she emphasizes that the effects are contingent on the intersectional identities of actual readers.
In her essay, Lanser argues that feminist theories highlight the ways in which a rigorously intersectional approach to form soon becomes indistinguishable from an approach to content. Assessing the politics of McEwan’s representation of himself as author and Briony as author illustrates Lanser’s point.
At the time he finished Atonement Ian McEwan was a 53‐year‐old, white, middle‐class (perhaps upper middle‐class), British, able‐bodied, secular, heterosexual male, living in London just before the historical events we now refer to as 9/11. At the time she finished her “Atonement,” Briony Tallis was a 77‐year‐old, white, middle‐class (perhaps upper middle‐class) British, secular female in the early stages of vascular dementia, living in London two years before 9/11. In the course of the novel, McEwan also represents her as a young, naive, upper‐class girl with grandiose ideas about her abilities and her importance, and later as a less naive, less privileged young woman attempting to come to terms with the terrible mistake her naiveté and grandiosity led her to make. Furthermore, as I have argued, one of the salient features of the relationship between the authors is that McEwan finds fault with Briony the writer’s decisions to write a counterfactual account of the final fates of Robbie, Cecilia, and her younger self.
Attending to intersectionality in “a world patterned by structural inequalities,” we may be tempted to begin and end by criticizing the way that this relationship reinforces that patterning: the more culturally powerful McEwan sets up for critique the less culturally powerful Briony. Indeed, it is not a fair contest: a middle‐aged white male at the height of his artistic powers has far more authority than an aging woman losing her cognitive powers. And of course he gets to construct the whole relationship. But to end there is to end too soon. Lanser cautions that, in turning to intersectionality, scholars should not “impose crude categories onto complex characters, or to forge simplistic explanations for narrative events” (Warhol and Lanser 2015: 29)—and I would add “should not be satisfied with simplistic accounts of the relations between authors and their characters.” So let us look a little more closely.
The first place I look—McEwan’s delayed disclosure of the novel‐within‐a‐novel structure—leads me to modify this initial assessment. In order to bring about the multiple effects of that delayed disclosure, McEwan needs to make readers of Parts I, II, and III feel that they is reading an Ian McEwan novel—not the composition of a lesser novelist. Not only is every sentence of the novel both Briony’s and McEwan’s, but McEwan also seeks to make the aesthetic quality of Briony’s sentences in Parts I, II, and III measure up to the aesthetic standards he sets for himself. In this way, the quality of McEwan’s novel depends to a large degree on the quality of Briony’s novel; therefore, in the novel’s very texture, he seeks to make Briony’s performance, if not ultimately equal to his, something that both he and his audience can admire.
The second place I look—the broader challenge McEwan faces in constructing Briony’s character—adds another layer to the assessment. As the two lists of identity markers indicate, McEwan and Briony share more aspects of identity than they don’t. For all the shared aspects (race, nationality, sexuality, ability), McEwan can draw on his own experiences. For the sites of difference—gender, age, historical location, and, during Briony’s childhood, class—McEwan can draw on his education, his research, and his imagination. Gender would seem to require the greatest exercise of imagination. Indeed, representing Briony—from the inside—as a 13‐year‐old, an 18‐year‐old, and a 77‐year‐old and making plausible her evolution over those sixty‐four years requires a remarkable act of what Suzanne Keen would call “authorial empathy” (Keen 2007: 134). Furthermore, this empathetic act extends to his ability to inhabit Briony’s weaknesses as ethical actor and as novelist. Because I find the novel to be so powerful—and because so many others have a similar experience—my concern over the way the novel reinforces the pattern of structural inequalities exists alongside my admiration for McEwan’s extraordinary empathy for Briony.
Attending to intersectionality also leads me to note that its primary concern is with identity markers of culturally mainstream subjects. Readers of Atonement interested in representations of racial and ethnic minorities, disabled characters, LGBTQ identities, and other culturally disempowered subjects will not find their interests rewarded. I hasten to add that this description of McEwan’s subject matter is in no way an indictment of either him or the novel. Instead it is the basis for another observation: as rich as Atonement is, our literary landscape will be far richer if it is built on a principle of diversity, one that finds a place for Atonement amidst a variety of other narratives that explore different kinds of intersectional identities.
Finally, I take another step away from the details of Atonement and acknowledge that my understanding and assessment of its intersectionality is inevitably influenced by the interaction of my own multiple aspects of identity—just as your response to my commentary will inevitably be influenced by yours. This acknowledgment does not mean that such assessments are only matters of opinion about which there is nothing further to be said. It means instead that such assessments are themselves openings for further explorations of the various causes, personal and political, of our agreements and disagreements.
In my recent work (Phelan 2017), I argue that it is high time narrative theorists revised the standard communication model, and I link that argument to the limitations of the story‐discourse distinction as a grounding principle of narrative theory.8
The standard model was first proposed by Seymour Chatman in his aptly titled Story and Discourse (1978). Chatman’s diagram of his model treats narrative communication as a one‐track linear transmission from one agent of the discourse to another (the brackets separate the agents Chatman locates inside the narrative text from those outside):
Actual Author→[Implied Author→Narrator→Narratee→Implied Reader]→Actual Reader
Conspicuous by their absence from the model are characters. They are not present because they are part of story and this model is designed to track discourse. They are implicitly there because the model assumes that their dialogue is part of what narrators report to narratees. But subordinating characters to narrators often misrepresents their functions, as we can see when we try to analyze the communication in the opening passage of the Benjy section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Indeed, the effort will expose other limitations of the standard model.
Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
“Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.
“Listen at you now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning.”
(Faulkner 1929: 3)
Among other things, Faulkner communicates here that the trigger for Benjy’s moaning is the word “caddie” (even if first‐time readers may not recognize the trigger). Chatman’s one‐track model would explain that communication by noting that the golfer’s and Luster’s lines of dialogue are embedded within Benjy’s narration and that this embedding allows Benjy to unknowingly transmit the information about the cause of his moaning. This account, however, radically understates the role of the dialogue, and it obscures our view of Faulkner’s remarkable construction of an interactive effect between Benjy’s narration and the dialogue. Here’s a better account: Faulkner employs three tracks of communication, and he sets up a synergy among those tracks to disclose the trigger for Benjy’s moaning. In addition to the author‐narrator‐audience track identified by Chatman, Faulkner uses two author‐character‐character‐audience tracks that are functionally independent of that first track, since Benjy does not alter or comment on the dialogue. Faulkner deploys the author‐golfer‐caddie‐audience track to introduce the key word, and he deploys the Luster‐Benjy‐audience track to communicate that Benjy moans. The synergy among these two communications and Benjy’s naive reporting prompts the audience’s inference about the trigger. In sum, Faulkner’s communication depends on characters, multiple tracks, and synergy—all of which are absent from Chatman’s model.
Furthermore, doing better justice to this one passage opens our eyes to still other tracks of communication between authors and audiences and to the possibility of synergies among all these tracks. Two of the most prominent additional tracks are author‐structural sequence‐audience (in any narrative with distinct segments such as The Sound and the Fury and Atonement) and author‐occasion of telling‐audience (as in any dramatic monologue).
The larger points are these: we cannot simply revise Chatman’s model by finding a place for characters and their dialogue within it but should discard its linear, one‐way approach altogether. Instead, we should focus on the two constants in the communication (the author, or, if you prefer, as I do, the implied author, and the actual audience) and the multiple potential resources—narration, dialogue, occasion, narratees, paratexts, structure, and so on—that mediate the rhetorical exchange.
With Atonement, the consequences of this view become clear in two main ways. It highlights the importance of the implied author‐structural sequence‐audience track, especially McEwan’s silent juxtaposition of Briony’s novel with “London, 1999.” And it does greater justice to the role of dialogue (the implied author‐character‐character‐audience track) and to synergies between dialogue and narration (the author‐narrator‐audience track) than Chatman’s one‐track model is able to do.
So powerful is the communication via structural sequence that it is easy to overlook the absence of any explicit statement about the novel‐within‐a‐novel structure—or, indeed, any explicit statement that Parts I, II, and III are written by Briony. Instead, the communication arises out of a synergy among signals at the end of Part III (especially the initials “BT”), signals across Parts I and Part III, the ontological break between the first three parts and “London, 1999,” and specific comments that Briony makes in her diary entry. McEwan uses the interplay between Parts I and III both to confirm the communication about the novel‐within‐a‐novel structure and to add another dimension to it, one that also gives more persuasive force to Briony’s comments about her fifty‐nine year effort to write the book. In particular McEwan uses Cyril Connolly’s letter to Briony about “Two Figures by a Fountain” subtly to indicate that Briony’s first draft in 1940 has been revised into the book we are reading. To take just one of many examples, Connolly writes, “There are some good images—I liked ‘the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer,’” (McEwan 2001: 294) and that image has appeared in Part I (2001: 36).
But why should McEwan delay his disclosure and why should it be implicit and subtle, rather than be upfront and explicit? Because in a novel about the problem of other minds, guiding one’s audience through so many reconfigurations, including ones about the relationships among the consciousness of the protagonist‐author and the actual author is a way to have the audience actively grapple with the ethical issues of transgression, atonement, and the role of narrative in both.
Like the other approaches, rhetorical theory remains a work‐in‐progress, because there is so much more to explore about the interactions of authors and readers through the deployment of the diverse resources of narrative. Indeed, narrative itself remains such a rich, diverse, and evolving phenomenon that it will continue to challenge narrative theorists for the foreseeable future.