Mimesis and Motivation: The Two Faces of Fictional Coherence

Mimesis and Motivation: The Two Faces of Fictional Coherence
Meir Sternberg
Tel Aviv University, Literature
Abstract This paper deals with motivation as ctions twofold logic of patterning and relates it to other concepts or lines of sense-making (e.g., integration, naturalization). The argument is best summarized through the papers headings.
1. Why Is the Discourse Like That? Motivation as Twofold Reason-Giving 2. Reality, Artice, and Motivation: Doctrinal Biases, Variable Products, Universal Modes; 2.1 Aristotles Mimesis of Nature by Art; or, Why Plot above Character?; 2.2 Viktor Shklovsky and Mimesis Fallen below Art 3. How the Extremes Compare: Toward an Alternative Theory 4. Conceptualizing Motivation: Basic Requirements 5. Motivation and Integration: The Concept of Functional Mediacy; 5.1 Motivation in Tomashevskys Thematics: The Shift from Cover to Coherence; 5.2 From Polarity to Threefold: The Typology of Motivation; 5.3 Motivating and Integrating Distinguished in Face of Persistent Mix-Up; 5.4 Naturalization 6. Integral and Differential Motivation: The Mimetic Function 7. Motivation and Communicative Structure: Point of View as Sense-Making Construct; 7.1 Who Motivates, and from Whose Standpoint?; 7.2 Motivating Fictional as against Factual Discourse: The Difference Made by Quotation; 7.3 Appeal to Existence or to Perspective? Unrealistic World and/or Unreliable Subject?; 7.4 Fictional Motivation under the Proteus Principle; 7.5 Sibling Rivalry and Contingent Resolution within the Family of Mimesis
This article is an expanded and updated version of Sternberg 1983c; see note 3 below for details. Poetics Today 33:3 4 (Fall Winter 2012) DOI 10.1215/03335372-1812153 q 2013 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
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I am an art theoretician. . . . I know what motivation is! Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey
1. Why Is the Discourse Like That? Motivation as Twofold Reason-Giving
Fiction nds itself caught between the contending demands of what is traditionally (though not always unambiguously) designated as life and art. From one it derives its very capability of representation, from the other its distinctive logic and internal coherence; one provides the basis, and the other the terms, of reference. As I will argue, it is precisely this uneasy coexistence (with its tensions, duplicities, imbalances, and compromises) that the concept of motivation embraces. Or embraces, more exactly, when oriented, or reoriented, away from what drives agents in the world (motives, that is) to what explains discourse, ction in particular, and ctional narrative, above all. Whatever the discourse in question, motivating it then comes to involve, as the analysis ahead will show, a twofold reason-giving: a sense-making with two distinct yet as distinctively associated faces, which correspond to those built into the discourse motivated. The concept moves between the world and the teleology of art, explaining facts, effects, and choices in relation to the ctive reality that objecties them (in the shape of action, character, dialogue, thought, spatiotemporal contiguity, narrative viewpoint) and/or to the aesthetic strategy that underlies, designs, receives, or transcends such objectications. What must rst be got out of the way is the inessential, though nonetheless troublesome, part of the problem, regarding the old sense and the new doctrinal associations of the key term. Traditionally, to cite Terence Mitchells (1982: 81) classic denition, motivation involves the psychological processes (within human agents, but extendible to literary and other characters) that cause the arousal, direction, and persistence of voluntary actions that are goal-directed. As in its more customary use, motivation in my usage still denotes an explanatory procedure, but one accounting for the artists rather than the characters activity and for discoursive, (con)textual rather than psychological features. Character psychology then turns from primary object into possible means of explanation. The characters very motives for acting in a certain way (e.g., for Hamlets belated revenge) will then serve, or double, as the authors motivation for doing something else, possibly quite unlike it, and on another level than agency within the storyworld (e.g., for Shakespeares revenge tragedy). The agentive choice, itself explained by reference to its own object and ground and drive all involving the human mind bent on action explains here the authorial choice in turn. But then, the author can
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dispense with the agent as motivated doer altogether and turn elsewhere within or without the agents (story)world for a reason that will justify how the author does what. A reason is denitionally wanted in authorial motivation, as in any sense-making, but here it can assume forms and invoke whylogics other than those of a motive.1 So drastic is this possible turn away from the usually explained object, that the motivated entity (and the motivators concern) neednt be a fellow human at all, any more than the motivating rationale needs to be lifelike. That motivated entity can equally involve a theme, an allusion, a sound pattern, a piece of language as well as an extrahuman world-item, down to the inanimate order in need of a reason: one that will justify, or eliminate, that entitys apparent strangeness, for example. Think of how we seek to explain a misquotation, an ungrammatical sentence, an eerie landscape, a clue in a mystery. Similarly even with the reason that we gure out behind these disturbing givens or various other data and trouble spots to be explained: it neednt involve humans at all, either, let alone narrative agents, least of all goal-driven. In this case, we reason out a motivation without a motive. By this compounded shift, even the explainers appeal to psychology itself becomes one of many motivational resources, as with Hamlet and Hamlet above. Or take a setup that looks very different Iagos machinations against Othello and the playwrights for Othello. Here, the villains possibly motiveless malignity makes sense by appeal not (or not only) to some conception of character but also to the generic need for catastrophe, which such a villainous type can help to realize (motivate). In a sense akin to this, at least in the negative respect of detachment from psychological integration per se, the term was applied to literary study by the Russian Formalists, shortly after having made its controversial appearance in Saussurean linguistics.2 But the notion itself has a history almost as long, eventful, and discordant as that of its protean relative, mimesis. The wider ones net is cast, the more time-honored and variegated the catch. Notable examples include Aristotles Poetics, Lessings illusionist aesthetics in Laocoon, Poes Philosophy of Composition, the tradition of Romantic Irony that has bequeathed its anti-dissimulatory bias to the Formalists and their progeny, Sheridans The Critic, Drydens Essay of Dramatic Poesy, the trafc between
1. For how this nds a reex in conceptions of narrative, or narrativity, see Sternberg 2010: 523 31. 2. In Formalism, though, and more often in later work ostensibly based on it, the term occasionally reverts to its standard psychological meaning, not always innocently. Some analysts knowledgeable about Formalism have even gone into psychological motivation-as-motive: e.g., el 1998: 63 73 or, inconsistently, Genette 2001 [1968] in section 5.3 below. Dolez
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nature and convention in French neoclassicism, Henry Jamess modernism, and not least Longinuss On the Sublime, with its insistence on the need for art to conceal its artfulness. The conceptual twists and turns of the issue, like its normative ups and downs, make a story well worth telling and not for antiquarian reasons alone. But since historical evolution is only incidental to the present argument, it needs to be stressed in advance that my choice to refer to the twofold intelligibility of ctive structure as motivation implies no commitment to the restrictive, overspecic, often even unreasonable usages, much less to the doctrines and value frames, with which that term has come to be associated. A central example, just brought, is the widespread connement of its application to world-items, or mimetic features, or more restrictively yet, to narrative, and even without regard to the genres paradigmatic value. Indeed, the term is much happier than its apparent parallels, or than its (narrow and at that divergent) uses at the hands of the Formalists and their more recent followers. Motivation is applicable (1) to both author and reader as fellow motivators, patterning agents from different sides (unlike the sheer authorial dissimulation or mediation and the readerly recuperation or naturalization); (2) to both mimetic or referential and nonmimetic elements (unlike illusion), since either element lends itself to an explanatory treatment; (3) to both operation and result (unlike coherence or overdetermination); it is also (4) normatively neutral and semantically open, yet (unlike integration as well as the earlier alternatives) suggestive of a reasoning and, above all, reason-giving activity. Still, though logomachy has its allurements, my quarrel with various other uses of motivation will be far less concerned with establishing the proper meaning of the word than with distinguishing the ill-assorted approaches to literary structure and coherence and sense-making that are bundled into it and, above all, with exploring the nexus of ction and function in the literary text. As with terminological, so with expository choice. If the argument starts by juxtaposing philosophies of composition located at opposite ends of the historical continuum, with some emphasis on modern developments, this largely derives from the need to disentangle and articulate an explanatory, sense-making tool of great power and relevance.3
3. The following argument brings into focus my work over the years on the titular set of issues, with particular reference to narrative, where they and their interactions appear in their most complex form. This programmatic overview draws on a variety of generally more specic concepts, theories, analyses, and readings that I have presented elsewhere, starting with the
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2. Reality, Artice, and Motivation: Doctrinal Biases, Variable Products, Universal Modes
2.1. Aristotles Mimesis of Nature by Art; or, Why Plot above Character?
One line of motivational reasoning can be traced all the way back to Aristotles Poetics, where it rst links up with a whole philosophical system and informs the very distinction between Art and Nature. This lines earliest is also its most remarkable occurrence there. It coincides not just with a notorious crux, still debated in literary theory, but with what looks like a curious piece of self-contradiction and turns out to be a distinctive, if to many unpalatable, feature of narrative art. No sooner has Aristotle established the vital role played by the element of character (ethos) in determining action,
Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought. . . . These character and thought are the two natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure depends. . . .
than he as emphatically demotes it in favor of plot (mythos):

For tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines mens qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot
earliest publications listed in References (e.g., Sternberg 1977, 1978, 1981a, 1981b, 1982a, 1982b, 1983b). The original version of this overview was presented at the rst Porter Institute conference on narrative theory (Synopsis 1, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, June 1979), known as a landmark in the elds development (see the triple special issue on narratology in Poetics Today 1:3, 1:4, 2:2). It then appeared, under the same title, as Sternberg 1983c. Three decades later, the article reappears here in an expanded version, for two main reasons. Both have to do with the scope of the argument. Over the years, quite a few readers, including students, have complained of the originals elliptic style, especially considering the range of the overview, whether as a critical survey of the persistent approaches and difculties involved or as a new departure. Thus, a favorable review by the philosopher John Hospers (1984:462) ended with a double-edged comment: many of the observations are so subtle as to defy any brief summary, and some are so subtle as to have escaped at least one reader. In response, this version puts more esh on the argument throughout; it often supplies, in addition, references to work done meanwhile on the central issues by myself and others, which the interested reader may want to consult for still further details. The more so because the various references added here also serve another end pursued throughout this expanded version: they help to update as well as articulate or develop the argument, and again, regarding its constructive, or indeed constructivist, along with its critical side. The updating, nally, includes rejoinders and references to the responses elicited by my original account from misunderstanding to support and extension.
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are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. (Aristotle 1961: chap. 6)
Tragedy (and presumably comedy, epic, narrative at large) enacted without character?4 If the agents necessarily possess character and if, moreover, character operates as the natural cause of doing, how can it be divorced or even altogether eliminated from action? Thus posed, the question is hardly answered by the common charge that Aristotle conceives of action in terms of external incidents, to the exclusion of the secret life of the self.5 Such a view might at best account for the slighting of character, but it would not warrant characters sudden fall from necessary to dispensable status. This qualitative downgrading looks inconsistent. The point is, however, that the two excerpts do not relate to the same context but draw a basic distinction between life and art.6 The qualier natural in natural causes does not mean anything like common or ordinary. Rather, it occurs in its strict Aristotelian sense, preserving its reference to nature vis` -vis art, the imitator of nature, especially concerning dynamics. There, in a the physical world, things move and develop according to inherent (as opposed to the storyworlds fabricated or imitative) principles of motion. For existents to change from one state or phase (e.g., birth, sunrise, happiness) to another, even to its opposite (death, sunset, unhappiness), nature doesnt require any external mover so-called efcient cause the way literary art requires a maker: one who imitates lifes natural kinetic actions, above all, in order to create plot. Therefore, the two complementary excerpts quoted from the Poetics about ` -vis action have general, or representative, as well as intrinsic character vis-a value. Twinned, they doubtless assume high importance even on their own, owing to their original, clear-eyed, radical-looking, easy-to-misread, and so, or also, long unpopular bearing on the character/action/plot tangle. But they also encode a special case of a principled and much larger nature/culture, life/art opposition that lurks in mimesis as a whole. Subsequent poetic, especially narrative, theory cannot afford to go on operating without, and most often against, this foundational insight. Reconsider rst the special case, then, by the rationale implied here, which I would spell out as follows. In life, the agents character (ethos), itself the stable,
4. Sic, categorically, rather than in any softer, relativized version, as if, say, it were just a matter of degree: not all plots require character to the same extent (Lord 1969: 60). 5. A limitation emphasized, for instance, in E. M. Forster 1962 [1927]: 91 92, Robert Langbaum 1963: chap. 5, Chatman 1978: 108 13. 6. For some pros and cons of such a reading, see the comments ad loc in Telford 1961, Else 1957, Lord 1969, or the unlikely attempted compromise in Halliwell 1987: 94 95, and further references there.
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even static product and legacy of past actions, determines his action and accordingly produces by nature success or failure, happiness or unhappiness. From an observers standpoint, making sense of a real-life success or failure thus consists in placing it as effect within a causal chain where the agents character gures as pre-existent natural cause. Winston Churchills indomitable spirit led Britain to victory against heavy odds, Julius Caesars ambition got him killed by fellow senators. Or so an observer may reasonably infer, always in (early-to-late, antecedent-to-consequent, portrait-to-process, being-to-doing) chrono-logical order. Given such-and-such a character, we reason, its understandable (or, prospectively, expectable) that such-and-such a development should ensue (spring) from it. But plot (mythos), the counterpart in literature to action in life, is regulated by quite a different logic the (teleo)logic of imitation. Being not an instance but a mimesis of an action, literary plots fundamental obligation is to the lifelike, quasi-natural principle which makes it a mimesis (and hence an artifact) in the rst place: the principle of motion, whose artistic embodiment is the change of fortune from happiness to unhappiness or the reverse. The process of change inherent in nature and the character-to-action process specic to human nature must be fabricated in art. Not at all a bad thing, this, since mimesis, fabrication, artice in Aristotle do not any longer carry the negative value attached to them in Plato, with familiar latter-day echoes; the reverse, if anything. Nor are they any longer subject to any theoretical and evaluative coordinates of a discipline other than their own: poetics as the eld devoted to making imitations of all kinds, in all arts. Positively speaking, they have their own teleology, subgrouping, criteria, hierarchies, hence reference point for execution, inquiry, and judgment. All this autonomy leads ineluctably to an inversion of priori` -vis the rst-order reality of (human) nature. And ties and dependences, vis-a the functional inversion directly affects and explains the status of literary plot relative to character with its difference from their living equivalents in nature as well as a host of less crucial poetic issues. For the artist, as an imitator by denition, cannot escape the need to initiate and sustain what I call the actional dynamics of his plot; and this dynamics must proceed in art along quasi-natural lines that run between extremes of human existence, with the end (un)happy to match. But the same artist enjoys a notable freedom of choice, without parallel, regarding the measures by which the actional dynamics may be actualized and justied (imitated, motivated) in such lifelike terms, character among them. To motivate an unhappy change of fortune, for example, the artist can suddenly crush the protagonist under a falling statue (like that of Mytis, brought down on his murderer); or confront him (as Shakespeare does Caesars assassins)
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with an invasion or a civil war; or, turning from outer to inner propulsion, invest him with such character traits (hybris, blindness, jealousy, ambition) as must sooner or later get him into serious trouble. (In terms of literary critical history, this idea of the various world-items available for embodying any single plot move, a fortiori a whole plot, may ring a bell. Here Aristotle implicitly anticipates Vladimir Propps [1968 {1928}] key concept of narrative function, given to realizing in and through different acts; so would Viktor Shklovsky explicitly do, anticipating the idea afresh within Russian Formalism itself and, again, in regard to motivation. Details below.) Character thus comes in as subsidiary to the plot because, qua static element within the Aristotelian worldview, it ultimately forms no more than a means to (narrative) literatures dynamic end and not the only or perforce the central means at that.7 No longer the preexistent cause of real actions in the natural human arena, character is (teleo)logically demoted here to the position of an optional effect issuing, if chosen at all, from the distinctive and overriding artistic cause. In contrast to the natural reasoning, Given suchand-such a character, such-and-such an action ensues, the poetic reasoning goes, Given such-and-such an action (as literatures [epics or dramas] basic functional exigency), such-and-such a character (as that exigencys representational motivation) ensues or may ensue. Given the need to keep Oedipus Rex going from start to tragic end, for example, Sophocles endows Oedipus with the character that he exhibits in launching, conducting, and, heedless of warnings, pushing forward the detective investigating action. Nevertheless, for all its drasticness, arts inversion of priorities from ethos to mythos neednt spring to the eye: it indeed doesnt always and, in Aristotles judgment, even shouldnt. Here, in my own terms, comes into play the inherent dissymmetry between the two sides of discourse, the producing (or, communicatively, transmitting) and the receiving, artist as against audience (Sternberg 1990c: 50 51); it works, moreover, to complicate that of nature vs. art. How these basic dissymmetries interact is far less arcane than may sound. Reconsider our exemplary issue of how character relates to plot and which comes rst. Leaving aside the accidents of genesis, the contrast between the two lines of determinative reasoning about them natural vs. quasi-natural, artistic shows itself only from the vantage point of the artist, one adopted by
7. Recall the more general argument, developed in the opening pages, concerning the possibility of reasoning out a motivation [for narrative art] without a motive [for some actual, or lifelike, human doing].
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the Aristotelian poetic analyst when studying the artwork and its making.8 So the difference between those lines is radicalized in the theoretical model of arts production inevitably, because teleo-logically, subject to the plotrst exigency, as already demonstrated rather than in the nished product that we receivers encounter. On the contrary, when reading the actual narrative (epic, drama), we nd the breach dissimulated, the inverted, art-, hence plot-rst structure of determination more or less plausibly reinverted into a simulacrum of character-rst natural action. It all looks, or feels, so like life realistic, if not real so people have been exclaiming from time immemorial about narratives world-images, across media. The integration of character into the plot, as its cause, gives developments not just unity but also the appearance of a real ow, inviting the reader to perform (where the artist has silently deformed) the kind of causal reconstructions and inferential operations to which we are accustomed in the daily business of living. And the closer we get to the artifact itself as we move from literary plot as such to generic plot (e.g., tragedys) and from bare, generalized argument (outline, logos) to concrete event sequence the tighter the ostensible synthesis.9 But this precisely reects the motivational two-facedness of mimesis as a bridge between art and nature, or, in another sense, between artist and audience. Psychological motive ( just like its exterior fellow motivations, whether the crushing statue or the civil war, as triggers of ill-fortune) does not so much replace as overlie and substantiate artistic motivation. What with the Aristotelian philosophy of man, nature, and science that is so clearly at work here, all this doubtless offers ample ground for objection. In fact, the most serious grounds, real or apparent, have tended to escape the notice of both friend and foe, let alone the possible responses to such complaints. Among other shortfalls, one might object that the Poetics is inapplicable to referentially static literature (like descriptive poetry), on the one hand, and to dynamic character, on the other; that it imposes a xed ranking on components, notoriously but not exclusively on plot as against character; and that, in xing them, it fails to distinguish the genres necessary condition
8. Or at least the true Aristotelian analyst, such as Lessing among neoclassicists and the early Chicago school (Crane 1952) among moderns, from the New Criticism to recent trends. 9. As detailed in Sternberg 1973. See also more in section 6 below, regarding integral vs. differential motivation. Even so, this synthesis is nothing like mutual service or inuence, let alone interdependence, between these components, as if character and plot determined each other (against Halliwell 1987: 94). Aristotle never hints at such reciprocity, in the form of the plots character-shaping operation: it remains at best optional along with the occurrence of ethos itself and only where character manifests itself as an aid to the obligatory plot-making.
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(action imitated, plotted) from a generic works contextual dominant (freely variable, with means/end changing, even reversible, to suit). But whatever its problems, Aristotles implicit view of motivation is remarkably penetrating and systematic, and not just for a disciplinary beginning: if anything, it has suffered hostile or dismissive misunderstandings, rather than served as a foundation, much less a paradigm, even among most successors appearing under the Poeticss name. It likewise shows a consistency that is as sadly lacking in most of its modern counterparts. A notable exception is the poetics of Henry James, as innovator-cum-theorist of the modernist New Novel. His harping on indirection and authorial distancing through mediating ctive views, voices, (auto)biographers, subjects at large exerted a tremendous inuence on the art of the modern novel, especially on its motivational strategies. Witness the multiform shift in focus and value, which runs from the turn inward to the campaign against articial telling to the Ford-Conrad impressionistic method. Its inuence still persists underneath recent narratology, whether in the neomodernist lust rard Genette (1980[1972]) or in Fluderniks for focalization since Ge (1996) neomodernist idea of narrative as denitionally experiential (Sternberg 2007: 707 19, and 2001b, 2010: 576 77, 591, respectively).10 To be sure, various differences lie between the Jamesian art of ction and the original Poetics, with the historic shift of focus from plot to perspective at their head, perspectivized character included. Moreover, his favoring of an overall, continuous explanation of the discourse through a single perspective that refracts and colors it all like Strethers in The Ambassadors compares with a plot that incorporates and mimeticizes all the works elements, down to the language as a series of speech events. Yet there remain Jamess echoing insistence on the mimetic (dramatic, he called it) unity and justication of authorial art even if in perspectival terms and inversely, his horror of the arbitrary stroke, the touch without its reason (1962 [1934]: 89). These rudiments ultimately prove too Aristotelian in spirit to offer the alternative we now require. Another exception better serves our purpose. Im referring to the early Formalist doctrine of motivation as originally adumbrated, now under this name, in Viktor Shklovskys Theory of Prose (1990b [1929]) and other writings.11 The sharpness of this approach to motivation renders it
10. Theoretical validity apart, even some Jamesians would consider these throwbacks too much of a good thing. See now Herman 2009: 137ff for a move toward balancing experientiality with denitional features anchored in action. 11. In his slanted account of Formalism, Victor Erlich (1965: 77n44) attributes the correlative ideas of motivating and laying bare the device to his mentor, Roman Jakobson. But the concept already appears under this name as early as Shklovskys manifesto, Art as Device, in
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clearly denable, at least by an attentive analysis, while its extremism invites a comparison with Aristotles opposed bias. Its inuence has, moreover, persisted unbroken since the early twentieth century, in hundreds of mentions, applications, and follow-ups, even across disciplines. But, no less signicant, this persistence has exhibited (or, often, concealed) itself under a variety of guises, with recurrent misunderstandings, traceable as far back as the Russian Formalist school itself the originators own associates and implying still larger divergences below the apparent common heritage or even label of Shklovskyan motivation. At the same time, we observe a persistent convergence, from still more quarters, if anything, on estrangement: the most widespread notion in latter-day theory and an inseparable correlate of the (un)motivated device. A revisit, with a look backward to Aristotle for comparison and ahead to subsequent developments for the hidden ramied afterlife of motivation, is accordingly full of promise.
2.2. Viktor Shklovsky and Mimesis Fallen below Art: The Device with Motivation for Lifelike Camouage or without for Poetic Estrangement
But what exactly is this motivation originated by Shklovsky? He never quite dened it himself, or not so as to encompass even the range of his own usage and practice. Therefore, look rst at a miscellaneous series of denitions given by others supposed to know his mind and often presuming to speak in his name, from fellow Formalists to latter-day experts in the school or in literary and narrative theory: ` -vis all (a) Motivation in art is the justication of some single factor vis-a klovskij, the others, the agreement of this factor with all the others (S Eyxenbaum) (Tynjanov 1978c [1924]: 130 31). (b) The network of devices justifying the introduction of individual motifs or groups of motifs [into the narrative] is called motivation (Tomashevsky 1965 [1925]: 78). (c) Motivation as used by the Formalists . . . is the reason governing the use of a particular device and may include everything from the authors desire to shock his readers, to the necessity of including specic props required by the action (Lemon and Reis 1965: 30n9). (d) Motivation is making the relationship between elements explicit (Bal 1985: 132).
1916, and the Formalists indeed credited him with it as a matter of course. See also Erlichs (1976) later and more general attempt to demote Shklovsky, with the rejoinder by Richard Sheldon (1976).
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(e) Motivation, in Shklovskys sense, refers to the justication that a writer provides for a character, action, description or event in the story. For example, if an event in a text is well motivated, the reader accepts it as believable (Gelikman 2004: 132nc). (f) The Formalists . . . called this dependence on external, non-literary assumptions motivation (Selden et al. 2005: 35). One doesnt need any particular expertise, or the light of the foregoing analysis, to conclude that these denitions are miscellaneous, probably incompatible. For example, does motivation bear on irreducible motifs, or on world-items generally (character, action, . . . ), or on any element or factor, or on everything, shock effect included? Does motivating consist in justication, or in dependence on externals, or in relatedness? And if justication, does it involve a link of agreement or plausibility among the motivated units, or just any interrelation? Again, does motivation have to be explicit? Not very surprisingly, therefore, all these denitions prove false to Shklovskys concept, and some ludicrous per se, too, in ways and on grounds that will progressively reveal themselves in what follows. For now, they can serve other, unintended roles, even apart from the obvious highlighting of motivations persistent appeal in different quarters. These denitional failures operate as a measure of the unhappy state of the art, as a warning, or promise, of the issues range and difculty, as a negative conceptual background, and as a pointer to developments since the 1920s. So what is motivation for the originator of the term, to begin with, as established in his narrative poetics? Here is Shklovskys (2008 [1923]: 61) closest approach to a denition: By motivation I mean the common, quotidien (bytovoe) explanation of a plot structure . . . each and every kind of semantic justication for an artistic structure. Still too elliptical, no doubt, but it can be supplemented from his application of it in specic analyses, especially throughout Theory of Prose and other works of the 1920s.12 Descriptively speaking, Shklovskys motivation indicates the reality-like (actional, social, psychological) fac ade that the text may put up to hide or justify the working of its devices and artistic laws. To cite a few examples from the well-known essay on Tristram Shandy: the convention of the discovered
12. Also from the usage of his closest narratological associate among the Russian Formalists, Boris Eichenbaum (e.g., 1965 [1926]). But other Formalists, as has begun to emerge, deviated in various regards from this concept of motivation, silently if at times knowingly. So did the late Shklovsky himself, even to the point of reversal, notably in Bowstring (2011 [1970]), published over forty years later and often sounding like a retrospective counterpoint to Theory of Prose.
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manuscript (a ctive event) makes it possible to incorporate Yoricks sermon (and with it an artistic structure, such as generic variety or discord) into the novel; Bobby Shandys death, like deafness in Russian folk drama, serves to put the characters (the menfolk aware of it, the mother still unaware) at cross-purposes; euphemistic dialogue promotes erotic defamiliarization (Shklovsky 1990b [1929]). Further, in each of these examples, the motivation or camouage of the device is taken to consist in hardly more than the tacking of some represented element (discovery, death, deafness, talk) onto the ctive world. For a yet purer example, look at the reduction of a Chekhov story to an exercise in solving a problem by furnishing the storyworld with an additional item: Given: Both priests and socialists wear their hair long. Task : Confuse their identities. Motivation: The bathhouse. (Ibid:119) But then, a reality-item addable at will (because taken for an isolate, as visibly the case with bathhouse here) is also omissible at pleasure,13 indeed dispensable. Hence the falsity of the claim that the Shklovskyan device needs a motivation (Zoric 2005: 182; Martin 1986: 48; see also note 14). The same device, instead, may allegedly appear either with or without that motivating extra: The interruption of the introduced manuscript [in The Sentimental Journey ] is motivated by the fact that its conclusion has been lost. On the other hand, nothing motivates the conclusion of Tristram Shandy, which ends with a simple cutting off of the narrative (Shklovsky 1965 [1921]: 39; 1990b [1929]: 156). So, as Shklovsky would put it, the device of abrupt cutoff appears in two variants: one motivated, the other unmotivated. What the rst variant has and the second lacks is therefore a very specic material property, namely: a cover for the artistic device and, what is more, a reality-like cover, not even just any cover. This has to be emphasized, because here lies an important and motivation-specic, yet silent and elusive constraint on the normally unlimited range of material in Shklovskys own parlance, adopted by his associates as well. In one characteristic statement, A device is something that transforms non-aesthetic material, imbuing it with form, into a work of art. Such form exhibits itself in various compositional devices: in rhythm, phonetics, syntax, and plot (Shklovsky 2005 [1923]: 86). The device/material relation is thus transformative perceptibly (de)formative, hence estranging not necessarily motivational. Instead, a devices motivation specically comes from the non-aesthetic material that
13. Not to say, as yet, with pleasure, as Shklovsky would.
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goes into the last of these elements, plot, namely: from fabulaic material, encompassing the items and linkages of a storyworld, with events, characters, things, arenas, (inter)actions at their head. Shklovsky never puts this special rule or relation like that, but he practices it nevertheless. It is the fabula that essentially motivates, in reality-like terms, the nished plot (sjuzhet ) as told and read, the artworks sum of devices. Witness all the motivating ploys that have been and will be instanced from the concepts originator. Careless reading apart, though, the Formalist harping on material as opposed and inferior to the device that operates with it has probably misled analysts in this regard. The apparent vagueness and genuine open-endedness of material sound inclusive and permissive about this motivational cover for the device or perhaps just indifferent when Shklovsky himself is, and, for a change, consistently, restrictive about it. His motivational, however lowly and subordinate, does not yet coextend with the entire spectrum of material. An ideological analyst like Fredric Jameson thus not only overextends Shklovskys motivation but gets it and its specicity wrong, in line with his own Marxist bias and priorities. It involves, he asserts,
a certain type of content, either metaphysical or social. For Shklovsky, the latter is merely a pretext for the [estranging] renewal of vision in any way possible: thus Swifts misanthropy is merely the motivation of his concrete technical effects . . . on a sentence-by-sentence basis; so is the social irony of Voltaire . . . so is Sartres ontology. The priorities are reversed; everything personality, social consciousness, philosophy exists to permit the coming into being of the literary work itself. ( Jameson 1972: 57 58; 1971: 11 12)
Everything, ironically, but the one and only true necessity for motivation here a reality-like guise, in the form of dramatized event, character, setting, viewpoint. Or, in Shklovskys (1970 [1923]: 233) livelier catalogue of possible motivating world-items, a story, a manuscript [e.g., found], a reminiscence, a mistake by the bookbinder, the forgetfulness of the [dramatized, narrating] author (Sterne, Pushkin) or a cats coming along and mixing up the pages.14 Having or not having such represented fac ade is what alone separates the motivated from the unmotivated device.15
14. Even the famous motivating ideas that Shklovsky cites (1990b [1929]: 72 100) ofcially belong not to the philosophy of Miguel de Cervantes as Jameson would have it but to Don Quixote himself and so become ctionalized materials, eligible for overlying the authorial devices concerned. 15. Contrast also Medvedev/Bakhtins (1985 [1928]: 107) sweeping generalization of a basic principle of formalism: the material is the motivation of the constructive device. This doesnt
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Newly coined (or adapted) at the time, these remain strange yet characteristic terms. In their given form, paired and polar, they are still liable nowadays if anything, considering their adventures since, more than ever to produce the wrong impression about further points of contact or contrast. The terms even threaten to mislead the reader about their descriptive load, as though presence were opposed in them to sheer absence, pluswhy to minus-why. Instead, the latter variants negative form (unmotivated) does not mean here a lack of any reason whatever, to arbitrary effect, as unmotivated does in Ferdinand de Saussures theory of the sign. Much less does this negative variant imply, besides, a criticism of such a lack, as a breach of unity or of realistic fac ade: the way that, even within the Formalist circle, it would carry the implication of disunity in Boris Tomashevskys sharply yet silently divergent follow-up. (His usage, well see, has in turn misled echoes or accounts of Formalism to this day.) Shklovskys negative term, unmotivated, only denotes the absence of a certain, reality-like explanation, which overlies and conceals some underlying aesthetic rationale, but not the absence of the aesthetic rationale itself or else the device involved would be pointless, indeed nonexistent. What is a device if not a result and a reex of this rationale, integral and peculiar to art? Why has it been devised, in short, if not for some operational reason: here, that of estrangement, typically? Without the reality-like cover, then, the device is justied as such in terms of art, of its tre yet not strictly motivated. Inversely, the latter estranging raison de positive term enjoys no monopoly on reason-giving, not even for devices, only on (lifelike) motivation proper, which overlies the properly devised (artful) whys. Shklovskys rare deviations from this customary binary usage (followed by the radical shift away from negatives in Tomashevsky et al.) underline its meaning and strangeness alike. Thus, regarding an episode in a folktale plot, Shklovsky comments that one cant possibly infer, let alone establish, why the sea needs the badgers tusks as a form of ransom. However, instead of calling this needless-seeming link in the plot chain unmotivated, as he usually would, he attributes to it a motivation that is artistic, namely: the authors wish to draw out the narratives retardatory plot by interpolating another episode, even at the expense of lifelike, sense-making causality (Shklovsky 1990b [1929]: 31). Similarly, in Oriental storytelling, the motivation behind the interlinkage of parts often operates even in thoroughly
limit the principle to the fabulas reality-like material, either, but overgeneralizes rather than, like Jameson, overspecializes the material/motivation nexus. See also note 32 below.
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untrue-to-life (i.e., existentially, ctively unmotivated) circumstances: it dispenses with any non-compositional laws (ibid.: 42). But the few exceptions only prove the rule. In them, the motivated/ unmotivated dichotomy indeed gives place in text and name to kinds of motivation, which are freely joinable (both/and) or, as here in Shklovsky, disjoinable (either/or). As a rule, however, he adheres to the plus/minus opposition having as against lacking the cover of reality because of a value frame to be discussed. In brief, this objective plus/minus opposition inversely correlates with an evaluative plus/minus, to suggest arts independ` -vis the logic of reality with a view to estrangement, above all. The ence vis-a factual minus (unmotivated) is therefore an artistic plus; and this strange coupling ultimately reects arts allegedly fundamental drive toward making strange.16 Whatever its ground, though, motivated/unmotivated usually recurs in Shklovskys Theory of Prose and other works as a disjunction of alternatives either a reality-like guise or not with the disjuncts sometimes juxtaposed in the analysis to highlight their polarity and separable existence in the narrative discourse itself. There is only motivated art or unmotivated art (1970 [1923]: 233). The choice between the two motivational variants, just exemplied from Laurence Sternes cutoffs, accordingly nds a diversity of parallels. For example, poems introduced into novels as already into the Bibles prose and the Icelandic sagas are either epigraphs or attributed to characters. The rst variant, which lays bare the device, comes without, the second with, a plot motivation. In essence, however, it is one and the same device (ibid.: 201). Elsewhere, the motivated/unmotivated choice becomes art-specic or genre-wide. Among these strategic motivational contrasts found in Shklovsky, the largest sweepingly divides cinematic from literary art: not so much by their relative novelty as by their media.
One curious trait of cinematography is its complete disregard of motivations. . . . Maybe this is simplistic, but it seems to me that in lm nothing is told; everything is shown. We dont require detailed explanations of the exceptionally fortuitous turn of events that made possible someones rescue. The facts speak for themselves. We see a lm and hardly ever ask ourselves how, in what way? . . . Nor is any psychological motivation supplied. . . . What is a lm plot? An artful selection of scenes, a successful chronological transposition and good juxtapositions. (Shklovsky 2008 [1923]: 61 62; cf. Tynjanov 1982 [1927]: 40 41)
16. This is also why my overview of estrangement (2006) dovetails with this study of motivation.
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Simplistic? Yes, but nevertheless revealing and, as well later see, inuential, even prophetic. For now, just one interesting comparison. That in the cinema nothing is told; everything is shown recalls not only the Jamesian call for dramatizing narrative and the ensuing modernist telling/showing dichotomy, but also their ancient precedent or origin. I mean the Aristotelian belief that epic aspires to the condition of drama and, thanks to Homers quantum leap toward this ideal (Poetics, chap. 8), evolved so as to approach and then to generate it, in the form of dramatized epic, second best to drama proper. A strong analogy, doubtless, except for a contrast in one regard. Ancient and modern, all these pro-dramatists correlate showing with rich, even overall motivation whereby the works artistry (devices) will operate through the characters physical and verbal behavior as against the bare (unmotivated) telling (summary, commentary) in the authorial narrators own voice. But Shklovsky reverses this double correlation, as if everything . . . shown, cinema style, were self-contained and self-explanatory, speaking for itself to make hows and whys dispensable, because imperceptibly absent. In brief, it is telling that corresponds here to the pressure, and showing to the disregard, for motivation under cover of reality. Needless to say, I trust, Shklovskys polar data, linkage, contrast, and rationale are all questionable. Simplistic, indeed, regarding the early lm itself and duly contradicted by Shklovskys (e.g., 2008 [1923]: 40, 63) own occasional references to assorted cinematic motivations. But the polarizing of the sister arts on this ground highlights, by its very extremity, the differential value and power that Shklovsky ascribes to the motivated/unmotivated dividing line, with its correlations among or within the arts. For that matter, a large subgrouping in these terms can appear reasonable per se, not a rhetorical hyperbole. Thus, Shklovskys polarity is itself uncannily prophetic, in that it anticipates various divides and developments in the later history of the cinema. His own colleague Tynjanov (1978a [1926]), for example, showed how cinematic devices left behind their early motivated guises, such as the grounding of camera movement in a shift to a characters viewpoint. Spiegel (2008: 381), focusing on a cinematic type rather than a device, argues that todays sf movies prefer defamiliarization without diegetic [reality-like] motivation, as in Andy and Larry Wachowskis inuential exemplar The Matrix (1999). On a still larger scale, much the same difference opposes classical Hollywood to style-centered or parametric narration (Bordwell 1985). Or consider a synchronic branching described by Shklovsky himself. Folk drama interpolates highly developed motifs at various junctures of the nuclear plot, sometimes resorting to the most diverse motivations, some-
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times to a particular motivation, sometimes doing without any motivation whatever (ibid.: 67 68). Further, the with may even turn into without, and vice versa, during the creative or the actual narrative process or both. In the genesis of War and Peace, the creator demonstrably vacillated. The ideas on war . . . are rst put in the mouth of Andrei Bolkonsky and only later does Tolstoy strip him of these thoughts and express them as his own (ibid.: 74): de-motivates them, as it were, from one novelistic variant to another. Besides the genesis, Shklovskyan motivations come and go along the continuum of a single nished discourse. In the staging of Arthur Schnitzlers Green Cockatoo, for example, the theater alternates between breaking down and keeping up the illusive appearance of life, from the contrived to the realistic and back (ibid.: 94). A fortiori with the mere change in lifelike fac ade, rather than into or out of it. Recall my argument that Aristotle already discerned this ever-available change of reality-like motivation. He implies it in ranking character below plot, as just one of the causal means (interchangeable with, say, outer developments) for the necessary end of propelling the action from happiness to unhappiness or the reverse. More explicitly, in abstracting and telling the gist (logos) of the Iphigenia and Orestes tale, he comments on the pivotal recognition (anagnorisis) between the siblings, which averts the imminent tragic deed, so as to invert their fortunes toward happiness. This necessary mutual discovery, he observes, can be variously realized (caused, enchained) in the nished plot, either the way chosen by Euripides in Iphigenia in Tauris or that suggested by Polyidus, via the brothers telltale cry (Aristotle 1961: chap. 17). This idea of alternative means for driving the action toward a pregiven juncture, or sequel, anticipates Propp 1968 [1928] by over two thousand years.17 Shklovsky, though, both further articulates and repeatedly applies this idea of means to choose among. He thus generalizes that there are a number of ways for literature to motivate the plot device whereby the intentions of lovers keep diverging. . . . In Ariosto sorcery provides the motivation, while in the work of Pushkin natural motivation looms larger (Shklovsky 1975 [1923]: 71). This constancy below variable world-like surfaces recurs on the diachronic axis. The history of the novel thus moves forward as a series of different, changing motivations for a single work-length device, that of
17. The same holds for other supposed Proppian novelties: the unhappy-to-happy run of the move (function) sequence, with enchainment and stable closure, all trace back to Aristotles (1961: chaps. 7 9) whole but are again left unacknowledged (Sternberg 1992a: 485 512; 2010: 253ff.).
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linking together (threading) a number of short stories (Shklovsky 1990b [1929]: 53ff.; cf. Steiner 1984: 58 89). The rule operates within an authors corpus as well. In Conan Doyle, for example, it is the client who usually meets the exigency of communicating to us readers the mystery in question by narrating it to Holmes, and the ofcial detective from Scotland Yard who voices the obligatory false solution. But in the absence of these motivating resources, their jobs fall to Holmes himself, who accordingly informs Watson of the case or draws the wrong conclusions for a time (Shklovsky 1990b [1929]: 104 5, 110). That job is evidently a multiform plot role or link in the causal chain here, a two-form, Holmes or other, agency and so would count as a function, in the terms of Propp (1968 [1928]: 19ff.). Indeed, the latter was a fellow traveler of Formalism and, besides silent echoes, cites Shklovsky in a related connection (ibid.: 13 14, 116). Morphology of the Folktales analogy to Shklovskys motivational variants (let alone to Aristotles) is doubtless unexpected, and indeed generally overlooked.18 But it remains so close as to suggest a direct origin for Propps basic point: that a storytelling function can be expressed (in all but name, motivated) by different yet coeligible, interchangeable acts.19 But what about the possibility of many functions or, generally, devices expressible (motivatable) by one and the same act or other reality-item? This converse option doesnt obtain, allegedly. Or wouldnt obtain, rather, because Shklovsky neglects to spell out what he undoubtedly means regarding this converse, and what he sometimes even overstates in particular contexts. Unlike its motivation, that is, the device itself in effect counts here (wrongly, well nd) as irreplaceable by another, even untouchable. So no particular motivation would be sharable or transferable among devices. In terms peculiar to narrative, I would add, this means a diametric contrast between fabula and sjuzhet, narrated world and narrating discourse.
18. The more so given the tendency to divide Formalism and especially its Structuralist heritage into two opposed lines of narrative theory: Shklovskyan and oriented to the sjuzhets actual discourse (e.g., medium, ordering, viewpoint) or Proppian and fabula-oriented (action logical, story grammatical). If Shklovsky originated both lines, however, the history of narratology calls for revision, along with its articially divided theory. Compare my earlier arguments for a unied narrative theory, most recently in Sternberg 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010. 19. Under the subheading Motivation, Propp even silently adopts Shklovskys very term to conceptualize this key idea of surface variability. Identical or similar acts [functions] are motivated in the most varied ways. Expulsion and casting someone adrift can be motivated by: a stepmothers hatred, a quarrel over an inheritance among brothers, envy, a fear of competition. Likewise echoed is the alternative possibility of a requisite state or development brought about, yet not motivated by anything at all, as with an unmotivated realization of a lack (1968 [1928]: 75 78, 94 95).
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In Shklovskys view, then, the fabula is open to variants and replacements of or along its event sequence they only involve a surface, material (hence, potentially motivational) alternative, but hardly a genuine, functional difference while the sjuzhet tolerates no change at all, anywhere, down to the nesses of language. As the sum-total of devices, it embodies and formalizes the poetic works estranged poeticity. That is why interart translation [from literature] is impossible, possibly except for writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose concern with broad extraverbal, fabula-like, semantic form makes them translatable to another medium (Shklovsky 2008 [1923]: 24). The popular, omnipresent transfer from literature to lm accordingly comes here under violent attack and not for the loss of (fabulaic) motivation entailed in the process but, quite the reverse, for the device lost in all its nished embodiment. If it is impossible to express a novel in words other than the original let alone change the sounds of a poem without changing its essence then it is even more impossible to replace words with a gray-and-black shadow ashing on the screen. Little wonder, Shklovsky asserts, such intermedia transfers have come to naught and actually, worse than naught, for they merely retain the abstracted storyworld content, the bare-bones action (ibid.: 25 26). However disputable, this strong language brings out a still deeper or larger yet, Ill argue, equally disputable, even refutable article of poetic faith, which Shklovsky typically drives too far. The works art, as encountered in the narrative sjuzhet, above all, thereby remains constant, irrespective of whether and how its (de)formation involves the recourse to so-called materials, especially those (re)constructible in the underlying narrated fabula. The categorical impossible stamped on literatures translatability thus bespeaks the (in my view, plainly excessive) integrity and inviolability ascribed here to the device, and the device alone, across wide-ranging motivational changes that the art of ction licenses. The claim he drives is fundamental and maybe not implausible: dont the end and the means, intrinsic value and instrumental alibi, contrast in their necessity and stability? Let me now therefore briey anticipate two disabling problems with this absolutism. First, devices are themselves replaceable, just like their motivations and possibly even instead of them, not together. In terms of the Proteus Principle, one motivating resource can offer a fac ade to several devices, as vice versa. A diversity of effects (e.g., verisimilitude, narrative interest, shifting expectancy) may thus operate, even cooperate, below and through a mimesis of orderly action (e.g., Scriptures grand chronology), or of a characters (e.g., Blooms) disordered associative sequence. Shklovsky (1990b [1925]: 157) himself provides an example of device substitution in another context. There, Tristam dismisses the idea of writing a chapter on
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knots and chambermaids, proposing, instead, a chapter on chambermaids, green coats, and old hats a substitute bawdy excursus, in an otherwise unchanging framework. Later, as if to underline the freedom of choice, he changes his mind again (or, inversely, the motivation recurs) and he promises to write the former chapter, after all. Besides, the unmotivated device, rather than forming a sheer minus as the prex indicates and Shklovsky hastily assumes is itself gradable. It can and often does become more perceptible to the receiver or less, or inversely, less hidden or more. Inter alia, the device can become so that is, quantitatively vary either way in the choice made by the author, or the interart translator, not just between motivated and unmotivated alternatives, but even among variants of the latter as well as of the former possibility. Among unmotivated devices, the least perceptible (and the most frequent) variety consists in the mere absence of motivation: left unadverted, passive, as it were, and accordingly minimal. Take a close look, for example, at any novel quietly told by an authorial narrator omniscient and otherwise omnicompetent but undemonstrative, as usual in Graham Greene or Penelope Fitzgerald. You are then sure to discover no end of discourse features authorized, or aestheticized, and so left uncovered by the ctional reality. Why, you might ask, choose this of all possible events, characters, settings, ontologies, time spans, inside views, languages and their levels, paragraph or chapter divisions, gapping breaches of chronology, shifts between scene and summary, let alone words, and so on (Sternberg 1978: 256ff.)? Only, a great many of the ctionally unanswered queries that emerge in this directed quest for motivation (why, you might ask . . . ) would pass unnoticed during a normal reading, on pain of overloading attention. Beyond a certain point, after all, an excessive demand for mental (or mind-like) activity will break down even a computer program in an explosion of inferences. And this overloading would befall any reader and computer that tried to make perceptible (register, raise to consciousness), let alone estrange, every unmotivated detail or feature in the text. Try reading even a masterpiece like Fitzgeralds The Blue Flower in this exhaustive way and youll see how soon one gets exhausted. By contrast, where the unmotivated reaches its active, deant limit, or height, is in the aunting of the artice: via parody, to name only the resource dearest to Formalism. This exemplary option, energetic and noticeable, makes a real claim to the act and title of laying it bare, as distinct from merely leaving it so. These two vary in degree of course, rather than either amounting to the same or ungradably polarizing somehow, as Shklovskys motivated/unmotivated binarism would dictate.
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But then, regarding act and title alike, or act correlated with title, the theory (and the problem with it) goes beyond (mis)description to value (mis)judgment. Nor does it take long to see that these two arenas are inversely correlated. What is descriptively a plus (motivated) is normatively a minus (inartistic, unpoetic, because unestranging), and vice versa with the corresponding minus (unmotivated) and plus (artistic, poetic, because estranging out of lifelikeness). In Shklovskys eyes, the two variants are by no means coequal: the recourse to motivation being deemed at best a necessary pretext and at worst a surrender to nonartistic pressures, but hardly ever a virtue. For motivation, according to Shklovsky, by nature attenuates what art (and Sterne or Pushkin as a great artist) generally strives to sharpen and maximize the perceptibility of form, device, and artfulness.20 Like the purloined letter in plain sight, it so courts familiarity as to blind even the perceiver on the lookout for it.21 For a change, let me illustrate this judgment from an admiring comment on Nikolai Gogols The Nose, where Major Kobalyevs nose disappears one morning, reappears in a barbers slice of bread, then in the form and uniform of a State Councilor traveling in his own coach, and nally reappears on the Majors face. When it came to the last redaction of the story, Gogol showed what an extremely daring writer he was. Even under pressure, he rejected the suggestion to motivate the absurdity with a dream. What he needed was a pure form (Shklovsky 2005 [1923]: 109). That is why laying bare the device, actively opposing or disabling the world-like fac ade and running the unmotivated to its limit, counts as the height of the poetic. Some may of course question, not just the value frame posited, often preached by Shklovsky, but the very normative attitude directed against world-making (mimesis) at large and its all too popular echoes since: anti-motivation is anti-representationalism. However dubious this tenet, though, it at any rate rmly establishes motivated and unmotivated devices as a contrasting pair, of which the rst is (perceptually and hence typologically) the unmarked polar term. But then, to Shklovsky et al., the polarity doubles: the unmarked is also the unwanted, because unfelt, unestranged, imperceptible in our experiencing of the artwork.22
20. By this logic, a motivated defamiliarization (focused in Martin 1986: 48 49) would be self-defeating, if not a contradiction in terms. 21. Even so, the motivating author, or the motivated device, isnt considered naive, as Peter Steiner (1984: 59 60) believes, but just inartistic, quite possibly with an end in view, like realism or even camouage per se. Shklovsky regards Lev Tolstoy, for example, as anything but naive. 22. Roland Barthes follows suit, with an ideological twist. From the viewpoint of ethics, what is disturbing [or sickening, or nauseating, or base] about myth is precisely that its form is motivated, that motivation is necessary to the very duplicity of myth (1975 [1957]: 126).
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3. How the Extremes Compare: Toward an Alternative Theory
Some of the reasons for my choice to start by collocating these historically removed philosophies of composition Aristotles and Shklovskys will now begin to suggest themselves. Each of them postulates a different relationship (imitative vs. perceptual) between what, how, why art represents most typically in ctional narrative and what nature evolves: between the literary world, always reality-like yet freely inventable for a purpose, and the real world. The difference becomes all the more instructive in view of their common insistence on the primacy of this opposition and on the representational autonomy of the ctive, goal-driven analogue. Further, the respective underlying theories of literary structure are incompatible. Deeply so, because Aristotle locates the poetic in the well-formed, especially the well-plotted, hence coherent, memorable, inference-rich, and pleasurable accordingly; Shklovsky relocates it to the deformed as with a narrative dechronologized out of the fabulas orderly sequence hence to what he considers perceptible, because defamiliarized out of lifes, and conventional arts, automatic response. Moreover, poetics entails narrative-length wholeness and fragmentariness, respectively. Against the same location of the poetic in the well-plotted and its affects, the poetically deformed and defamiliarized consists in the device, not in the entire, still less whole plot. An artwork, in Shklovskys most notorious formula, is the sum-total of its devices, exclusive precisely of motivations and related material. Aristotles holistic search for synthesis, then, presents a sharp contrast to Shklovskys atomistic conception of the artwork as an aggregate of devices, with a smaller or larger residue of unformalized if not antiformal matter. (This is why motivating the devices amounts there to covering them with bits and pieces of reality.) Unsurprisingly, then, the value frames behind all this set of opposites also polarize, to the detriment of both landmark approaches and, most important, of the key concept at issue. Either extreme, I would argue, is characterized by a doctrinal bias that severely limits the range and understanding of motivational factors, varieties, effects, combinations. On the one hand, Shklovskys weaknesses mostly, or most immediately, concentrate in what he would dismiss as the motivated area. (Mostly, but not at all exclusively, given the strong implications of one pole for another within a binary logic and the problems with that binarism itself.) To this motivated pole, he relegates wholesale all the components, a fortiori works, that are allegedly left undeformed (never mind denuded), imperceptible, all too familiar, underdevised, inartistic, in short. Five of the weaknesses incurred by such normative as well as taxonomic binarism are of immediate
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concern to us.23 Exposing them, with their grounds or results, throws new light on Shklovsky, on Formalism, and on subsequent developments, but the light outreaches the modern history of (narrative) poetics. Nor has their exposure only admonitory value; it also suggests positive counterparts within a viable theory of motivation. Even in their negative light, however, these ve doctrinal problems do not yet include a sixth, methodological liability that affects them all. And its common effect is curious, too, because double-edged. Im referring to Shklovskys near-chronic inconsistency, as distinct from shifts of ground or ` -vis changes of mind like the reorientation in Bowstring (2011 [1970]) vis-a Theory of Prose (1990b [1929]) and again opposed to Aristotles remarkable single-mindedness, or Jamess, at the other pole. Why, then, are such inconsistencies double-edged? owing to their multiply useful giveaways, which in some degree offset, if not outweigh, the loss in the arguments unity and intelligibility. They may reect, and transmit, a sense of complexity below the apparent, or along with the genuine, confusion and two-mindedness: here, about motivation. Thats why these double-edged inconsistencies and giveaways, as I call them, are well worth making an issue of. (So are the declared or considered changes of mind, which largely operate to the same heuristic effect, in a different manner.) Among them, they give away more than one useful thing: unavowed awareness of some (less radical, shocking, convenient) alternative or qualication; the felt, though ofcially undesirable, impact of particular artists, artworks, and traditions (e.g., of Tolstoy the realist, as against Sterne the arch-parodist); the pressure of data, fresh ones or earlier forgotten; or just the difference between cavalier theorizing and close analysis. Whatever the force behind it, the inconsistence accordingly supplies counterstatements and/or counterexamples from the horses mouth. As such, these giveaways help to bring out and possibly, obliquely to repair the ve principled weaknesses. And this repair promises, in turn, to help us develop at last the wanted alternative approach, that is, a systematic functional account of motivation, which this quintet render conspicuously and unhappily absent, from different sides, even as they present obstacles to it.24
23. Among the existing works on Shklovsky and Formalism, the single most fruitful critique remains Medvedev/Bakhtin (1985 [1928]), even though often partisan and disputable. Steiner 1984 and Striedter 1989 offer good modern complements. 24. With the possible exception of Tynjanov, the Formalists were not functionalists, as some (e.g., recently, Gorman 2008: 135) believe, or at least not programmatically and consistently so, as Aristotle was according to his lights (Sternberg 1990: 50ff.; 1992: 474ff.; 2010). Nor is this purposive orientation to discourse, artistic or otherwise, missing only in Shklovsky and his circle, but also in Propp (1968 [1928]) and Jakobson (1960), for all their talk about the respective
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With these larger goals in view, therefore, we now turn to the ve principled holes that demand notice and remedy. First, Shklovskys categorical prejudgment against the motivated device, a fortiori the motivated artwork as a sum of its devices, or even as a betterintegrated whole hardly accords with the facts of literary history, any more than does Aristotles opposed dogmatism. The facts reveal a constant clash and interplay between two traditions, often even within a single work. Let us proceed from the tense motivational lines of history to those encapsulated within the story. Though reputedly original, the idea and the favoring of open, playful, trumpeted artice like the related concept and resulting value of estrangement derive from Romanticism.25 I mean the tradition of Romantic Irony (from Petroniuss Satyricon to John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman) with its aunting of artice and deance of motivation, as against the Illusionist tradition (whether of the Aristotelian, the Longinian, the neoclassical, the Lessingesque, the Jamesian, or indeed the pictorial variety) with its ars est celare artem.26 From the generic viewpoint, the same tensions manifest themselves between parodic and straight art. Parody-minded, like his closest Formalist associates, Jurij Tynjanov (1979 [1921]) and Boris Eichenbaum (1978 [1925]), Shklovsky is, of course, aware of the latter tension, if not of the larger one of alternating and concurrent traditions to which it belongs. As already shown, moreover, he is equally alive to the shift between the motivated/unmotivated limits along various textual sequences, whether a wavering creative process or a freely changing narrative deployment. At one juncture, Shklovsky even recommends such ickering to an entire performance art, the theater. Generalizing from Tieck and Hoffmann both of them major Romantic Ironists he speaks for a bipolar representation and experience:
The illusion presented on the stage ought to have a ickering quality to it (i.e., it should alternate with the other, more realistic element in the play). . . . The spectator . . . must experience within himself a shift in his perception of the action on stage from the contrived to the realistic and back. . . . The action on the stage
functions. There, no essentially free, all-inclusive, ever-shifting play between means and end controls discourse, regardless; nor, accordingly, its analysis. 25. But see the historical retrospect in Shklovsky 2005 [1923]: 48 50 and the belated acknowledgment. 26. Lessings is the cross-artistic, especially interart paradigm case par excellence, unrivaled in both the inuence exerted and, nowadays, the hostility elicited. On illusion as arts supreme value in his aesthetics notably the Laocoon and on its forked manifest correlates in literature and painting, time and space art, see Sternberg 1990c: 67 81; 1999.
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is perceived either as play or as life. (Shklovsky 1990b [1929]: 94; also 2005 [1923]:
48 50; 2011 [1970]: 203 4)
The generalization, though, goes no further, because these artful/lifelike clashes and shuttles remain for him special cases, some even possibly undesirable, if judged by his dominant anti-illusionist tendency. In reality, they prove anything but special, however.27 Such work-length ickerings actually join and mirror the systematic divergence traceable along the established lines of genre and history of empirical performance as well as of sheer theoretical possibility to rule out anything like the Shklovskyan normative extreme. So much so that his prejudgment becomes reversible. Even the pursuit of convincing motivation, just like its exposure or abandonment, may itself form a device (function, end), let alone a central means to others. And this, of course, is what happens throughout the illusionist practice in all media, realism and its rhetoric of authenticity included. Whether end or means, covering up is itself an art, one of persuasive self-dissimulation, with appropriate rhetorical strategies (devices) to wield. This art remains little known, never mind appreciated all too successful, if you will, as well as denied a priori by Shklovsky et al. but it compares and competes with the occupationally self-focusing one of laying bare, which itself awaits further inquiry. (Thus the leaving/laying bare contrast drawn above, as well as the survival tactics and historical dynamism in Sternberg [2006: 152ff.].) The two would especially repay functional study as value and countervalue.28 The more so because, like or even beyond the countervalue, this motivating art can grow to strategic proportions. At its higher limit, all the artworks various choices will get motivated in lifelike terms, not just the fragments in the manner conceded by Shklovsky. The lot can even jointly or continuously refer to some determinate reality-like ground or sequence or viewpoint. Examples that Ive detailed elsewhere include Aristotles action logic, running all along the enchained whole or nished plot; the Bibles (as later the Icelandic sagas or Hemingways) overt tendency to motivate its poetic choices in the guise of the exterior world and events, history fashion; Henry Jamess (or earlier, and less rigorously, Jane Austens) new strategic ideal of narrative-length perspectival unity from within, as in The Ambassadors;
27. Examples of such tense mixtures predictably abound. For studies of two very different corpora, with their rhetorics of mixture, see Sternberg 1978: 203 35 on how fantasy meets realism in Balzac, and Sternberg 1983c on the play of the corresponding reality-models in the James Bond saga. 28. See also Sternberg 2007: esp. 743ff. on the polarities of omniscience.
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or, near to Shklovskys own interests, the quest of the detective for the criminal, which keeps motivating the deferral of the solution all the way to the end (Sternberg 1992a, 2010: 546ff., 1985, 1978: 129 82, 276 305). Indeed, another Formalist, Roman Jakobson (1978 [1921]: 45), acknowledges such an opposed normative scale in encoding the consistent motivation and realization of poetic devices among the key meanings of realism. Likewise, much nearer to home, Eichenbaum (1978 [1925]: 269) nds that the reversal of O. Henrys storytelling from parody to manners and morals brings into focus carefully worked out, thorough-going motivation. Second, why is the motivated art, or value, strategic like or even beyond the countervalue? Because theres no escape from the represented world in narrative, except in local stretches, nor therefore from the motivation that it provides throughout, on this reality-like ground or that, to this end or that, with more cover and consistency or less. Dead against this inescapable generic law, Shklovsky in effect equates the motivated with the unmotivated variety as something of a special case one restricted to a certain number of otherwise effective devices, avoided in good writing, virtually excluded from the cinema, while frequent elsewhere. But to equate the two kinds in status or limited range (and oppose them in value alone) is to miss the point of aesthetic representation. How would any representational genre, and narrative as the most representational of all, avoid representing some (mobile) world for some purpose?29 Except among the utmost anti-representationalists, or perhaps even among these, who would go so far as this extreme, to deny, not just a properly artistic effect, but any role whatsoever to all devices concealed behind mimetic elements and referential patterns, along with the concealments themselves? That way madness lies; and Shklovsky himself stops short of this madness, regarding Tolstoy, for example, even at the price of inconsistency. At times he even concedes a motivational necessity, one possibly systematic at that, as with the exchange of messages in the epistolary novel. (There, the essential thing is motivation precisely why should these people be writing to each other? [1971{1923}: 3].) Inversely, Shklovsky remains ambivalent about the Suprematists abstract painting, though it is all-unmotivated, because a coloured at surface all over (2005 [1923]: xvi xvii, 63 64), and so apparently ideal for an all-out anti-mimeticist.30 Yet, unless one goes so far, despite everything, then motivation cannot but be a sine
29. In more precise generic terms, suggested below: How to escape the two global narrative dispensables, that is, the motivating, reality-like fabula and the artful yet largely motivated sjuzhet based on it? 30. Compare Any 1990: 418 21 on Eichenbaum. And contrast an overreaching antirepresentational slogan like narration has nothing to do with the referential (Robbe-Grillet 1977: 17 18).
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qua non in all representational art and, on the whole, throughout the artwork at that allowing only for unmotivated (i.e., nonrepresentational) runs, pockets, segments of limited extent, here and there. This rule governs all literature, with the possible exception of some concrete or indeed transrational poetry and analogous thrusts against the immemorial literary norm of reference-based meaningfulness. And along the literary works sequence of discourse about the world, a fortiori narrative discourse, the corresponding possible exceptions would be (say) prosodic form, occasional metadiscourse, passing asides on cabbages and kings, or the like.31 In narrative, as I have long argued, the very dening, work-length fabula/sjuzhet intersequence and interplay entail a motivational relation, showing itself in a variety of means-end pairings. Unfortunately, the relation has been missed, among other points of contact, by the originator of this historical dualism in Theory of Prose, along with his Formalist associates and, generally, their assorted following since.32 But a closer analysis, even in Shklovskys own inadequate terms, yields the necessary conclusion: the fabulas lifelike chronology or chrono-logic, with the spaces and the states entailed, inevitably motivates (hides, realizes, justies) a host of the devices (e.g., patterns, effects) contrived and conveyed along the sjuzhet s discourse sequence. A host of the devices, not all of them, to be exact. The sjuzhet, even if fabula-motivated in principle, can also motivate itself to some extent, especially by associating its selectional and syntagmatic musts, choices, effects with the characters viewpoint. (Thus Shklovskys own case of an estranging horse-view or Tynjanovs subject-motivated camera angle, though neither relates his example to this issue.) Inversely, within the sjuzhet, there can be some exceptions left unmotivated (e.g., what the authorial narrator appears
31. Only possible exceptions, these features of sound or metadiscourse, because even they are always assimilable to the rule. Like everything else in a representation, they can turn representational hence mimetically motivated or motivating or both and, in narrative, narrativized: hence a fortiori motivational on some reading. Just as they may be found exceptionally unmotivated on another reading: a literalist, minimalist, cautious one, for example, or, inversely, one more imaginative yet nding the same absence on an ad hoc, contextual, probabilistic basis. To this hypothesis-dependence well return, especially throughout the last section. But for now, see also pages 357 58, concerning a related inference-bound transformation, from (descriptive) simultaneity into sequentiality (narrative or other). 32. Shklovskys nearest approach to it is that the fabula provides material not motivation for the sjuzhet (1990 [1929]: 170). Medvedev/Bakhtin (1985 [1928]: 106 7, 112) apparently overinterprets this and analogous statements in attributing to the formalists the view that story is merely material for the motivation of the devices of the plot, and doubtless overstates matters in alleging that the formalists called the motivation of the device material. But the extreme view thus wished on the opponents and always on their school as a whole still largely reects Shklovskys unreective practice.
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to tell us directly, rather than through the narrated world and the characters in action or at thought). Still, both the extras and the exceptions are essentially optional and often local, rather than mandatory and overall like the fabulaic, narrated spacetime. The sjuzhet therefore remains on the whole a motivated, goal-driven pattern or pattern of patterns, system of devices as against the basically motivating fabula. Reconsider all the examples already given and you will nd that they conform to this motivational rationale built into narrative. Across opposed value judgments, moreover, this law compares examples again included with the way Aristotles orderly and enchained whole relates to the actual plot, simple or complex, that it underlies: as overall motivator to overall motivated. (Always adhering, for now, to how Shklovsky would, or should, put it.) The fabula/sjuzhet manifold of relations, then, can be summarized as follows:
Table 1
Fabula/sjuzhet manifold of relations. (Sternberg 1978: 8 14, 236ff.) Fabula Sjuzhet

Actual, down to the medium (and, as such, object of abstraction and reconstitution) Indispensable to narrative Highly variable, freely anti-chronological Additive and/or causal, but possibly also spatial (e.g., analogical) and/or other Highly variable, usually different in subject and complexity from that of fabula Motivated overall, with possible local extras or exceptions
Mode of existence
Abstractive and reconstitutive Indispensable to narrative Chronological Additive and/ or causal Objective (i.e., impersonal) Motivating overall
Order of presentation Mode of linkage
Point of view
Motivational role
On a more general level, though, this rule of motivation equally applies to verbal descriptive discourse, outside or within narrative.33 Of course, the ` -vis narrative look wide and deep generic polarities of the descriptive vis-a
33. Bal (1985: 130 32), strangely, connes motivation to description, and in a textbook supposed to introduce narratology, too.
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here; especially one sequence given in the medium instead of two, and the orientation to the represented space where features coexist, as in a portrait, or states, as in a panorama not to time. But the one descriptive sequence of words still represents a world, which accordingly motivates on the whole the ends sought and produced. For example, an initial charactersketch, like Jobs or Squire Allworthys or old Karamazovs, will serve to generate (motivate) a certain response to the character: possibly even the rise of a misleading rst impression that the sequel will demolish or qualify, with a view to effects like interest, emphasis, or epistemic caveat. Similarly, a landscape can evoke a mood; a group portrait encapsulate humanity; an ekphrasis vie with the visual image it re-presents; a preliminary exposition set up the premises of the ensuing action, and with it the if-plot concerned. The descriptive text or segment thus essentially works by the same motivational logic as the narrative counterpart. Across the spacetime polarities between the two genres, the world/discourse (or, in Shklovskys idiom, world/device) relation thus corresponds to the uniquely narrative fabula/ sjuzhet by operational measures. The correspondence even tightens, because the descriptive word/world, sign/referent pair can also engage in certain sequence-motivating operations. We thus nd chronologized or perspectivized, and so world-like, orderings of the discourse about coexistents: they then unfold in order of birth, say, or of an observers perception, respectively. The choice between these two motivating sequences in description recalls that open to the storyteller in unrolling the sjuzhet by objective appeal to the fabulas order of events or by perspectival contrast to it. (See Sternberg 1978: 203 35; 1981a; 1983a; 1985: 331 64; 1990a; taken up since in various contexts and disciplines. For example, these descriptive ordering mechanisms have recently been applied to the cinema in Buckland 2012. See also the next paragraph.) Much the same rule of more-or-less overall mimetic motivation extends further yet, and again beyond mainstream work. It holds for the spatial and visual art of painting, with a Kandinskys pictorial abstractness as a limit case and, in standard representational painting itself, with departures from the norm such as the ancient Egyptian Gods-eye view or the latter-day unrealistic color. The cinema, essentially representational as well as combining these arts and others, too, tolerates even less (pace Shklovsky) wholesale breaches or suspensions of its mobile narrative logic.34 So even Tristram Shandy, or an impossible-looking setup by Escher, or an experimental lm, is incomparably more motivated than unmotivated, let alone than device34. See, for example, Bordwell 1985 on classical as against highbrow lm; Thompson 1981, 1988 on cinematic motivation in both; and Buckland 2012 in the previous note.
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baring. Equally more motivated than otherwise is the entire nonsense genre, which opposes but also entails sense: not least mimetic sense, possibly even carried to overall motivation. Thus Alice as picaresque heroine or the voyage in quest of the Snark. Both these nonsense classics deploy episodic plots that nicely suit Carrolls overall ends, in providing unity loose enough to enable optimum room for play within or between the episodes. Similarly with farce or screwball comedy or Rabelaisian carnival or the assorted postmodern narratives mislabeled as anti-mimetic by so-called unnatural narratologists (e.g., Alber et al. 2010) and earlier wishful demoters of representation (e.g., Cohen 1994). A narrative syntax modeled on life always persists, then, regardless of all idle dreams and slogans. For what matters here is neither illusionism nor verisimilitude nor consistency but reference. However tendentious or unusual or attenuated the representation and however partial or perforated the mimetic camouage, the law of world-making as the correlate, embodiment, mediator, and overlay of discourse-making still obtains. Inevitably, to postulate, develop, and refer to an imagined world is to motivate artistic ends (e.g., unity, variety, ambiguity, wonder, suspense, estrangement) in other terms (e.g., causal sequence, heros wanderings, future unsettled, observers ignorance, outsiders other-mindedness) than their own functionality. There is accordingly no escape from mimesis as a motivating, organizing, interlinking strategy. This brings us straight to the third point, regarding the prevalent Fig-Leaf Approach to such motivation. The references to it in terms or glosses like disguise, illusion, pretext, and so forth though useful enough for shorthand notation or local emphasis are misleading, unless properly delimited and translated into explanatory sense-making patterns. What highlights this unhappy reference is that even Shklovskys or any other world-like motivation need not consist in disguise, far less exclusively, and its alternative workings (e.g., unity, emplotment, realism) foreground the pattern-making that motivation always involves. His own naked bathhouse example tells against him. How does introducing the bathhouse into the represented world motivate the wanted comedy-of-errors device? Not, and certainly not only, in concealing, but in causing the play of mistaken identities that needs to be devised: supplying a vital kinetic link in a causal chain. Nor, more evidently yet, is the motivating bathhouse left a fragment, or isolate, but is rather assimilated to the whole enchainment in the tight, dynamic patterning. This paradigm case illustrates the rule of disguise-plus, up to integration with the event dynamics, which governs motivation in and beyond Shklovskys variegated range. In reducing motivation to disguise, then, one undesirable at that, because its reality-likeness might steal the show from the device it overlies, Shklovsky ignores what the very label he has assigned to it signals, namely:
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a denite reason-giving, hence structuring (e.g., Aristotles emplotting) activity or its product or both. Denite, because his so-called motivating essentially consists in (to him fragmentary) world-making generated by and for a purpose, or at the other end of discourse, consists in our inferential quest for it. Either discourser organizes the given elements into an explanatory pattern under mimetic guise. All the examples above, and those to come, establish this basic meaning of the term: as a goal-directed constructive operation on the level of reference. But this ground rule even to the extent that it lurks in the Poetics eludes the originator of the modern term. And the rules consequences hardly fare better in his reductive approach. Still, Shklovskys misses, or mistakes, are again worth recognizing, and not just as caveats, in view of their ongoing allure and persistence. Once recognized as such, they are in effect also repaired, if you simply turn the negative ndings about Shklovsky et al. to positive theoretical account. What ensues, then, from the terms connement to an unwanted lifelike bit of cover? That motivation, as such, forms the basis of representational art, no matter what its dissimulatory power or perceptibility compared with the devices it serves, is undreamt of in Shklovskys philosophy. Nor is the idea that, even if an aid (e.g., fac ade) to a specic device, motivation yet constitutes a versatile means and part of the discourse whole. That motivational factors may be elevated into ends, as always in realistic and otherwise world-oriented art, or into binding architectonic principles articles of artistic faith, like causality in Aristotelian and perspectival consistency in Jamesian poetics is of course alien to the Shklovskyan theorys spirit. Still more so is the fact that camouage itself may assume the form of spurious or mystifying artistic explanations as well. In The Brothers Karamazov, for example, take the narrators dismissal of Smerdyakov as unworthy of thorough presentation: I should really say something more about him, but I am ashamed to keep my readers attention occupied with common servants too long (Dostoevsky 1963 [1880]: 114). This ashamed, contemptuous treatment serves the detective line of interest no less than do the twists of the plot itself. The brushing aside of common servants diverts attention from Smerdyakov as murder suspect by placing him low too low to introduce properly on a hierarchy of representational interest. So the artistic excuse, just like dramatized (motivated) red herrings, serves (motivates, as it were) the novels overall rhetoric of dissimulation. The dissimulated/undissimulated cuts across the Shklovskyan motivated/unmotivated antithesis, because it doesnt correspond to the life/ art, lifelike/artistic axis.
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But, fourth, even such covers and pretexts as Shklovsky does consider reveal the inadequacy of his overall notion of structure. To him, the artistic device itself is an isolated form, or deformation, mainly geared to estrangement abrupt cutoff, say rather than part of the text as an integral whole. Correspondingly, his devices motivation, if any, is a piece of world that comes on top of the device to render it imperceptible: an accident, say, that cuts off the discourse prior to any rm closure. If the artwork envisaged by (the early) Shklovsky consists in its sum total of devices, then its motivations amount to the equally fragmentary sum total of world-items placed over some of the devices, at least, to deaden or deceive the perceivers eye. Even when regarded as dissimulation, however, motivating a device consists not just in superadding a ctive element but in superimposing and foregrounding (or at least suggesting) a pattern, and one whose logic of combination, being reality-like, differs from that of the dissimulated effect. With such mimetic patterning for cover, psychological determination overlies generic predetermination, the monologists associative meandering conceals his creators artful ordering, gural repetitiousness veils the authorial art of repetition. The perceptual tactics of art like its semantic density or dynamics of surprise rests on its amenability to multiple frames of coherence. This holds true in principle for any motivation, however transparent or even parodied, that is anchored in the ctive world. Since in each case we have to do with alternative and variously interacting organizations of the text, Shklovskys atomistic model must be rejected (as he himself nally came to reject it) along with his normative bias.35 The more so because the alternative organizations can run, and run parallel, throughout a text: as does the psychological/generic (pre)determination of Hamlets revenge, or the monologues (dis)orderings just exemplied. Equally untenable and perhaps least obvious is Shklovskys fth premise, the last relevant to us now. It concerns his very binary approach: motivated or unmotivated, all-or-nothing, as well as minus or plus value, artless (if not downright inartistic) or artistic, accordingly. By contrast to this either/or
35. The recantation came decades later but, unlike his gestures of political surrender, rings true. Shklovsky 2011 [1970] unequivocally withdraws his rash disunifying maxim, to the point of self-mockery and complete inversion. He laughs at his old . . . mistake of believing and preaching that an artwork has no content but amounts to the sum of its devices. Why summed up? Why arent they being subtracted from one another, divided, or multiplied? Or more constructively, Today I think that literature is not just a system, rather than a sum, but a system of systems, all of which primarily reveal the contradictions in phenomena (ibid.: 285, 304 5, 308; see also Nicholas 1992: 68 69). Across the decades, amid recantation and reversal, though, there lurks a continuity at a still deeper level: his remains a poetics of tension and disharmony, one even pushed to the oxymoronic limit of a contradictory system, a systemic contradiction.
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polarity, recall rst the gradable distinction I already suggested at the unmotivated pole itself: the ascending order (or motivational descent) of perceptible artice from leaving bare to laying bare. (Fuller elaboration in Sternberg 2006: esp. 152ff.; cf. attempts, such as Chatman 1978: 166ff., to quantify narratorial presence along the mimetic/diegetic, covert/overt or showing/telling axis.) Inversely with Shklovskys motivated pole. There, observe that ctively anchored motivations vary not only in plausibility (e.g., likely vs. barely possible, realistic vs. merely reality-like or mimetic in the broad sense) and scope (e.g., local vs. text-length) but also in their coverage of the device from partial to perfect. Informational gapping and temporal displacement are, for example, far more justiable all-around in humanly restricted (The Sacred Fount, Chance, Lolita) than in freely omniscient (The Bostonians, Nostromo, Lucky Jim) narration. In the one, restricted case, the narrator may not know the information that we nd gapped and displaced in the telling, or didnt know at the narrated time, as a character in the happening, or has an equally lifelike reason not to tell it: whatever the variant chosen among these three and whether single or composite at that the epistemic motivation for the untold can then run throughout, as a strategic principle. In the other, the freely omniscient narrator can only justify such gaps and discontinuities on a local basis, notably by adopting for a time the restricted epistemic viewpoint of some character (focalizer), or characters, one here, one there. The three pairs of novels just cited exemplify how the difference works, possibly with further maneuvers and intricacies but always short of binarism. So the authors choice ranges between overall and partial, piecemeal explanation, or strategy and tactics, not between all or nothing. Here lies another reason why Shklovskys dichotomy of motivated vs. unmotivated devices must give place to one of motivating principles, gradable no less than combinable. As I have argued elsewhere (Sternberg 1978: 236 305; 2005), far from showing the either/or choice suggested by the former dichotomy, devices more often than not partly cohere in lifelike terms, on top of the aesthetic sense they make. And the partiality lends itself to more forms, degrees, subvariants, combinations than readily imagined or than already illustrated above. Thus the works chronological manipulations may to some extent be passed off as the adherence to the limited human narrators (e.g., Pips, Watsons, Marlows, Humberts) tortuous order of discovery in the happening, or experiencing, although the narrating self is already well aware of the truth. Again, in a comparative light, the diary form where the unself-conscious diarist envisages no reader, hence no informational exigencies and proprieties by nature justies such manipulations to a greater extent than does standard retrospective telling, with some audience in view,
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who need to know, follow, make sense. And it is not even quite true that nothing motivates the [abrupt] conclusion of Tristram Shandy, which may be assimilated to Tristrams waywardness in his narratorial roles, as distinct from Sternes (largely overlapping) strategy. But whatever varies in these instances of mixed and partial motivation, I would further argue, the two principles that inform them remain constant and duly polarized. In the simplest phrasing, one of them organizes and explains the discourse in terms of art, as a goal-driven pattern (e.g., a sequence twisted out of its natural event order to generate mystery, inference, estrangement); the other principle does so by reference to the world and its way, as an image of life (e.g., that sequence nds an explanation in a characters own twisted order of discovery, or more precisely, against Shklovsky, nds an alternative but parallel motivation there). Such a shift from textual units to the synthesizing logics that produce and cut across them gives us a basic opposition to operate with, while allowing for all possible interplays of specic factors. This notably includes variations in representational coverage and also explanatory tensions within a single, yet doubly (let alone badly) motivated unit. And nally, of the two organizing principles that coexist in the motivated device, as in the example of twisted order, note that only one (e.g., the characters ordeal of discovery) opposes, whereas the other (e.g., the artists intentional disorder) corresponds to, the principle monopolizing the so-called unmotivated variety. Shklovskys primary contrast accordingly turns out less than happy even from the terminological standpoint. Apart from implying a positive feature (motivated) where he sees a perceptual negative, and a lack (unmotivated) where he sees a superiority, this contrasting pair gives a wrong impression of the actual contrast even on an objective level, as a matter of discourse patterning, organizing, coherence. His opposed pair fails to suggest the complexity of integrative relations within one of its terms and between the two terms. Within one term, since motivated is actually doublepatterned as life overlying art; and between the two, since the unmotivated other is actually single-patterned, as a bare yet obviously organized artistic device, not patternless, as the labels minus implies, and so seemingly unrelated to the double-patterned. In brief, even leaving aside the ungradability of his motivation, Shklovskys usage is misleadingly and hopelessly incongruous with the key concept at issue. The double-patterned (in effect, doubly motivated) text or component gures here as motivated and the single-patterned (or -motivated) as altogether unmotivated, to its gain in artistic, estranging perceptibility at that. Consequently, either of these binary terms appears to do without one
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tre, and the two appear to do withvital logic of organization, one raison de out a meeting ground. The rst step toward reconceptualizing motivation, therefore, necessarily consists in a shift of ground, with a terminology to suit. Instead of motivated vs. unmotivated devices, I speak of two motivational modes, the quasi-mimetic (mimetic, for short) or referential and the aesthetic or rhetorical: the latter omnipresent, because identical with the teleology of art, as of discourse, and the former either actually or potentially coupled with it, as a ctive image of life. Any viable theory must begin with this basic shift from the multiply variable, gradable, possibly composite motivational units (e.g., devices) to the invariant mimetic and aesthetic pair of discourse forces (logics, rationales) that produce, usually co-produce them all at will as specic instances of motivation, always for a purpose. Shklovskys assorted (and representative) omissions and commissions, with special regard to mimetically motivated art, have their counterpart in Aristotles attitude to aesthetically motivated artice. Unlike Longinus in antiquity or the Jamesians in modernism, he does not so much condemn outright such obtrusion of artice as ignore it; but nor is this wholly attributable to its infrequency within his literary corpus. That Aristotles silence reects a theoretical preconception, as well as a historical contingency, is suggested by his very denition of art as mimesis and further reinforced by several particular indicators. I refer, for instance, to his studied neglect of Aristophanes, perhaps the earliest device aunter and anti-illusionist on literary record. (Small wonder that Shklovsky 2011 [1970]: 362 65 does invoke him.) Let us also recall Aristotles objection to the deus ex machina, on probabilistic grounds that easily translate into a warning against bending the mimetic to the generic and functional demands of plot, such as closure. But, above all, I have in mind another statement that has long troubled readers of the Poetics: The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person, for it is not this that makes him an imitator. Other poets appear themselves upon the scene throughout, and imitate but little and rarely. Homer, after a few prefatory words, at once brings in a man, or woman, or other personage (chap. 24). What has imitation or imitator, a matter of representing a world, to do with the value-laden contrast between telling (The poet . . . speak[ing] in his own person . . . poets appear[ing] themselves upon the scene . . . prefatory words) and showing (bring in characters to form a scene of action or dialogue)? This reference to the poet as imitator, notably Homer, indeed makes little sense as long as Aristotelian imitation is understood as idealization or,
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inversely, replication, and the like. It remains even less explicable if, as often, the term is rendered or glossed in the circular terms of mimesis, and vice versa: even a disciple of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians (Phelan 2005: 216) formally denes mimesis/mimetic by such tautological appeal to imitation. But once grasped in motivational terms, as outlined above, mimesis at once links up with the telling/showing contrast. Entailing a mutual determination of artistic function and imaged reality, such mimesis is at odds with any direct (as opposed to world-mediated) contact between the poet as producer and the reader as receiver of effects. Bringing on characters to mediate between the two, in the form of lifelike interaction, verbal and otherwise, is therefore deemed mimetically superior to the poet addressing the reader/ viewer in his own person, by way of exposition, summary, aside, commentary, let alone apostrophe (Dear reader . . . ). Hence also the general superiority of drama, whose very im-mediacy (scene without poet) realizes this ideal, to epic, with its mixed resources and performance. Actually, the generalization that the poet should speak as little as possible in his own voice, if at all, inaugurates the recurrent modeling of epic on drama in literary and literary critical history, all the way to the modernist rank order of oblique, drama-like showing before plain, speechlike telling in narrative. (Contrast the minority view that reverses this scale into Brechts epic theater.) It is not, then, that Aristotle is any less aware of aesthetic than of referential motivation. Rather, the two principles combine within his conception of mimesis, and that is for him their proper, not, as with Shklovsky, their improper, mode of existence. To formalize art means here to objectify, at will ctionalize, and always counterbalance it in terms of the world, not to bare its artfulness. If therefore Aristotle frowns on imbalances dictated by the exigencies of the plot and resulting in the exposure of the aesthetic (teleo)logic as in the deus ex machina it is easy to imagine how he would regard that (teleo)logics aunting and explicit revelation as an independent force or pattern. This is exactly what happens when Anthony Trollope adduces the necessity of drawing out the plot as the reason for preventing an early eclaircissement between the hero and the heroine of Barchester Towers. How easily, he says, could Eleanor be made to burst into tears and Arabin to relent and declare his love: But then where would have been my novel? She did not cry, and Mr. Arabin did not melt (Trollope 1983 [1857]: 281). A suicidal selfexposure, Henry James called this laying bare of ctionality within the realistic novel itself. Even Sterne never went quite so far. Trollopes display of artice, however, is still coupled with a (quasi-)mimetic justication on psychological and situational grounds after all, it is a
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fact that she did not cry nor he melt.36 Elsewhere, this conjunctive form gives way to the monopoly of the aesthetic principle, with the denuded device supplying the only justication for compositional choices. This is how, in Joseph Andrews, Fielding aesthetically motivates the delayed disclosure of Josephs love for Fanny, and by implication the burlesque of the previous chapters, where Joseph defends his virtue against Lady Boobys attacks. Dispensing with any lifelike excuse and guise, Fielding justies this pivotal disclosure, compounding belatedness with unexpectedness, in relation to his doctrine of opening by small degrees: For this reason, we have not hitherto hinted a matter which now seems necessary to be explained (1960 [1742]: 17). Again, in line with his binary, either/or and normative choice, Shklovsky would call it a device unmotivated, because left without a mimetic motivation for the poetics of opening by small degrees. But this negative, reason-denying label ies in the face of the narrators overt and genuine justication or even of Dostoevskys misleading excuse for the omission of Smerdyakovs antecedents. Applying to the explicated (and, by Shklovsky himself, also approved) device the minus of unmotivated would almost sound like a contradiction in terms. Rather than being unmotivated, as if it were arbitrary, this device, with the underlying artistic doctrine, is in fact unmediated by the novels world by the alternative, reality-like motivation because addressed straight to the reader.37 Indeed, it is a short step from articulating this doctrine of gradual disclosure to spelling out its effect on the reader, whose knowledge gets manipulated by this means. Evidently enough, any gradual disclosure of the narrated world in the telling/reading a genetic must produces the three dening narrative interests: suspense, curiosity, and, above all, in Fielding as in Austen, surprise. The demands of length, recognition scenes, unexpected turns: these are all problems that Aristotle has more than a nodding acquaintance with. In fact,
36. Michael Riffaterre (1990: 32) objects to this statement of mine on the wrong grounds. Against my insistent distinction and warning, he not only conates mimetic with realistic the way others often do but even opposes it to ctional, as if it signied real. The emphasis of my statement actually falls on the odd co-occurrence of opposites here: the device of retardation gets motivated, as well as laid bare, in Shklovskys unhappy parlance. 37. Though another popular term, (un)mediated and its cognates have remained generally undened by their users in narrative study not even variously misdened, like (un)motivated, and, least of all, relative to it. As pointed out in Sternberg 2005, mediation actually signies mimetic motivation, through some interposed world or viewpoint, and the lack of mediation entails the absence of this motivation, resulting in im-mediate author/reader contact. Further, of the two mimetic components interposable between the author and reader, the characters world or viewpoint, the latter has been unduly privileged in critical usage at the formers expense (e.g., Cohn 1978; Stanzel 1984; Fludernik 1996; Alber and Fludernik 2011): as if reality-like mediation/motivation were exclusively perspectival.
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the mechanism of his complex plot meets them as effectively as do the modern systems of perspectival refraction. (In this correspondence even lies a historic instance of how the mimetic motivational rationale forks out into what well call below the existential, objective and the perspectival, subjective types.) But that very fact suggests that Aristotle anticipated, probably inspired, and would endorse still more of Jamesian narrative poetics than the recurrent injunction, Dramatise it, dramatise it! He would also applaud the Jamesian protest against the baseness of the arbitrary stroke, the touch without its reason (ibid.)38 the arbitrary being equated with the frankly articial and the missing reason standing to the reason overtly provided by Fielding (opening by small degrees as a ground for belated disclosure) in the same relation as quasi-mimetic to aesthetic logic.39 This difference assumes even greater point if we observe the functional continuity in, or underneath, the motivational variety between the narrative poetics at issue. Fieldings novels follow the Aristotelian model, with surprise preserved as leading narrative interest, even amid the shift to comedy (comic epic in prose). Again, one familiar with the doctrine of opening by small degrees will encounter in James explicit, as well as practical, creative equivalents to it. You show the reader the cards in your hand too early, he warns Mrs. Humphrey Ward, so that a wait to begin to guess what and whom the thing is going to be about doesnt impose itself: the antechamber or two and the crooked corridor before he is already in the Presence ( James 1920, 1: 330) Grand family likenesses, compositional and affective, below equally strategic motivational difference cannot go further. What emerges beyond doubt, at any rate, is a restrictive bias, if not blindness, that mirror images, and so highlights without correcting, what Formal` -vis the world it represents. Here, Aristotle ism has got wrong about art vis-a fails to consider purely aesthetic motivation, though it shows itself in his own ancient Greek literary corpus. Recall his silence on the anti-illusive, effectively anti-mimetic drive in Aristophanes; or, in the poet he most loved, on Homers invocations to the Muse as the origin of artistic superpower, or on Homeric addresses to the audience as narrative dependents, partners, or contemporaries looking back together on embattled old-timers in action.
38. James 1962 [1934]: 89. On the Jamesian doctrine of motivation, see Sternberg 1978: 281 305; on the practice, with special reference to The Ambassadors, see Sternberg 1971: 299 431. 39. Henceforth Ill drop the emphatic redundancy quasi-, to leave mimetic as the adjective of mimesis, except for occasional reemphasis. I trust this shortening for convenience will not be mistaken for disapproval of the usage by others that echoes the original full term: e.g., Fluderniks (1996: 12) well-known denition of experientiality as the quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience.
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In turn, James does consider aesthetic motivation in the quiet form of bare, unmediated telling or in the vocal deance of laying bare, Trollope style yet much to the same effect of failing to recognize its legitimacy. This despite the fact that in practice he sometimes concedes its effectiveness ad hoc, even grants it artistry of sorts, most warmly and memorably with regard to none other than Fielding. Unlike the extrovert Tom Jones, we hear, his author is handsomely possessed of a mind and he has such an amplitude of reexion for him [Tom] and round him that we see him through the mellow air of Fieldings ne old moralism, ne old humour and ne old style, which somehow really enlarge, make every one and every thing important ( James 1962 [1934]: 68). Even here, though, James doesnt go so far as to express approval of the bared artistic operation (as distinct from the ne old moralism . . . humour . . . style) that he singles out for dispraise in Trollope. Given the prominence of the anti-illusionist and nonillusionist traditions, above all in narrative, these Jamesian failures to acknowledge or accept them are no less radical than Shklovskys counterparts. On a normative ground opposed to the Russian Formalists poesis ideally working under mimetic cover he would join by at, whereas they would disjoin, the articial and the lifelike: the story-like and the history-like, in narrative proper. The respective failures to acknowledge the uncongenial even betray much the same concern with variable products (complexes, simplexes, degrees) of motivation, rather than with the two universal modes that produce them (by way of juncture, disjuncture, or now this, now that).
4. Conceptualizing Motivation: Basic Requirements
Besides its other expository and admonitory uses, then, the juxtaposition of the two extremes has helped largely through their symmetrical weaknesses to replace them both with a pair of motivational logics, mimetic (world-like, referential, ctional) as against aesthetic (rhetorical, communicative, functional). It also brings out three further minimal requirements for any viable theory of motivation: (1) a functional model of literary and/as referential, especially ctional, discourse; (2) mimesis as the mediating term between world and artice, referential and functional pattern; (3) an asymmetry between the two motivational modes. To draw up the threads of the argument thus far, let me now specify and establish these requirements in turn.
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(1) A Functional Model of Literary and/as Referential, Especially Fictional Discourse
Motivation is inextricably bound up with purposive discourse structuring: the interplay of its two modes presupposes a means-end relationship between the organization of the text as a simulacrum of reality (a chain of events, a mental state, a milieu, a dialogue) and as a functional whole (a formal design, a thematic pattern, a sequence of effects). By its very rationale, therefore, motivation is incompatible with nonteleological views of art and mechanisms of artistic coherence, notably those of the genetic variety. I dont mean genetic only in the narrow sense of editorial text criticism: variants, amendments, speculations on the original wording, or what is known in biblical study as low (local, verbal) criticism. However, mini-genesis as a source for textual problems and a resource of problem-solving needs to be rst emphasized and generalized. With the exception of text criticism proper, ancient and modern, it has been traditionally ignored in all elds of discourse study, from poetics to, say, pragmatics, as if on principle.40 More so, indeed, even than higher, larger varieties (mishaps, repairs) of the same originary kind, presumably because mini-genesis is deemed the most inglorious, insignicant, or accidental among an unappealing lot, hence the most inessential to discourse, never mind artistic discourse. Once we pay closer attention to both our sense-making repertoire and practice as they actually operate on (artistic) discourse we learn better. Such low-critical activity may itself work or help to establish coherence, on a small scale, and at times beyond; nor is it just owing to scholarly reconstruction of a word, phrase, sentence, but also in ones stride and even outside literature. In a simple as well as local form, we equally consider or activate the genetic mechanism when reading (not to speak of proofreading) a newspaper, an e-mail message, a students essay, a letter from a child, or a dysgraphic. But here is a less simple yet fairly typical example from a novel Ive just read:
One Sunday, after a game he had barely managed to win, he said to her, You should learn the Sicilian Defense. Whats that? she asked irritably. . . . When White moves pawn to queen four, Black does this. (Tevis 1983: 11)
Spotting, a fortiori resolving the incongruity latent here assumes a bit of specialized knowledge. Anyone familiar with the Sicilian Defense and with basic chess notation will encounter the excerpts last line as follows. That
40. Comparable to Saussurean or Chomskyan linguistics, which would banish the whole of language genesis (i.e., diachrony) to parole and performance, respectively, and so out of theory altogether. See also Sternberg 1985 7ff.; 2001a esp. 152ff.
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reader will be surprised by the reference to the rst move as White moves pawn to queen four; will identify (and mentally adjust) queen four as a mistaken substitute for the referring term king four; and, in context, will probably ascribe the misreference to the author, Walter Tevis, as a slip of the pen, rather than of the speaking characters tongue. A genetic, not a mimetic lapse, in short; and therefore not a trigger to gap-lling, nor leading to a functional (e.g., speaker-characterizing) closure, either. Even the fact that properly informed (implied) readers will make this inference in their stride complete with the entire process Ive outlined is typical enough of the local appeal to genesis.41 Just think of the daily, often unconscious hypothesis-making by which we identify a surface discourse oddity as a typo or a mispronunciation or a Freudian slip or a fat-nger syndrome or a trick of memory or a homeoteleuton all of them inferences, however local, linguistic, obvious-looking, rather than given oddities and correct it in passing.42 But we also must (and sometimes do) reckon with genetic in its largest sense, which encompasses text units ranging from the word to the work as a whole, and so inferential activities from low to high criticism (origindirected problems, repairs, surmises). This inclusive source-oriented analysis, as I call it, maximizes not only the extent, the number, and the variety of the discourse units, levels, aspects, issues open to treatment as genetically problematic. It also multiplies the options of treatment for genetic coherence by reference to the author, editor, censor, printer, to mind, matter, or machinery, to faulty writing or transmitting or receiving and the degrees of consciousness in our advance from apparent givens to hypothetical giveaways to the sense we resolvers give them and the implications drawn. Genesis thus denotes the entire process whereby the work gets, or got, composed and the rest of its textual (mis)fortunes on the way to us. Gets, since the appeal to the genesis may be doctrinal, like the Romantic approach to poetry as an expression and index of the poets personality; or the notorious source-critical project of reconstructing Homers or the Bibles or Shakespeares original text, or materials, by way of decomposition, amendment, realignment, and so forth; or the latter-day symptomatic reading, by
41. On the one hand, the fact that the uninformed reader will miss the whole thing, and without genuine loss, as it happens, goes to show that, unless we postulate a communication model with implied author and implied reader at the opposite ends the incongruity of the reference to queen four will depend on the beholders eye. 42. Even mini-examples, though, can variously range between the easy and the difcult to perceive and/or geneticize. For one complementary example, see my analysis (Sternberg 1985: 13 15; compare Orgel 1991) of the biblical verse, Saul was one year old when he began to reign. A baby warrior king?
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appeal to the troubled writers traumatic experience as a child, lover, combatant, Holocaust survivor, for example. Or got, since the genesis may also be invoked ad hoc, whether grounded in evidence, for a change, or again inferred or invented. Thus the explanation of a works referential features and incongruities (e.g., what T. S. Eliot sees as Hamlets pathological condition) in terms of the troubled writers creative process (1999: 124 27): of the man who suffers, as distinct from his properly artistic self at work. In any of their variegated forms, such genetic approaches and procedures and readings may be equally concerned to make sense of the text, but never the purposive sense yielded by the idea of discourse under authorial control. They may likewise account for difculties by establishing relations and referring textual parts to some whole (say, Shakespeares psychology), but never to a whole consisting in the hierarchical ordering of elements according to their ` -vis one another: ends above the means and the determinative power vis-a routes to them, art before its mimetic embodiment and camouage, teleology regulating typology. Such assorted genetic forms and problems (or, from the readers viewpoint, possibilities of resolution) do not, therefore, belong to motivation. They all fall, instead, under the less discriminate, all-inclusive umbrella that well call integration, namely, the large variety of measures (prosodic or syntactic or thematic, say, as well as genetic) available to humans for establishing coherence, regardless of functional sense and sense-making. A basic difference, evidently. Resolving a discourse incongruity, or otherwise approaching the text, by way of genesis is thus an integrational, not a motivational, route to order. Still, even motivational hierarchies and schemas can be less than adequate, theoretically or empirically, by their own distinctive (teleo)logic. Those extractable from Aristotle (with plot at the top, diction at the bottom, and character and thought in between) and Shklovsky (headed by devices and coming down to motivating pretexts and similar dead weight) are both marked by static, preconceived ranking. Wanted, instead, is a exible means-end interplay, what I call a Protean model of discourse. It thereby relates means to hypothesized functions placed above them and motivates them all in terms of the topmost, dominant pattern, but allows for free (and freely reversible) hierarchical structuring in response to motivational variations between (and within) works. In the classical detective story, for instance, the construction of the ctive world (as regards time, space, dramatis personae, interpersonal relations, normative attitudes, the progress of the hunt, Watsons obtuseness) is determined by the generic necessity of retardatory structure on the way to the solution; whereas within the detective
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framework of Oedipus Rex or The Ambassadors, the retardatory structure largely serves to unfold, by degrees and with twists, a vision of the world. Without going into further details at the moment, I want to emphasize that such a exible ordering of discourse elements has notable consequences; the more so because undreamt of in the various approaches to motivational rationale, trafc, and workings. The remodeling of the dogmatic or preconceived binarisms into dynamic interplay, as Ive outlined it, easily accommodates, among other things, two-way motivations, developmental views of character as well as plot, and functional disparities in the status of the represented world all the way from artistic liability to necessary means to desirable goal and value.
(2) Mimesis as the Mediating Term between World and Artice, Referential and Functional Pattern
Whatever the causal or spatiotemporal (metonymic) connection between items within the works eld of reality, each referentially motivated pattern or effect, qua end, by denition outranks its motivators within the work as a whole. Even the relationships of mimetic determination that may inform the ascent of the textual hierarchy (as when the lower character causally determines plot in the Aristotelian scheme) serve to realize, and possibly to veil, the relationship of aesthetic, functional determination that always informs the descent. The topmost plot, as necessary literary macrosequence, thus functionally determines if and how the recourse to character (as against, say, the alternative force of circumstance) will best produce (mimeticize) this plots causal drive, likelihood, enchainment, and ultimately its and the works overall impact: from all-artistic pleasure to generic (e.g., tragic) catharsis. All this follows from the twofold rationale of motivation, but is always subject to context. The doublet involves no kind of xed, a priori division into any value-laden Shklovskyan binarism of components: (motivated or, best, unmotivated, ideally naked) artistic ones and (motivating) nonartistic ones. Or device vs. material. Nothing justies, for example, the opposition of plot as motivated poetic end as aesthetically motivating its mimetic motivator(s) to, say, character as a subservient and dispensable, because optional, form of mimetic motivation. Still less is there ground for correlating the artistic/nonartistic polarity with that of the nonmimetic/mimetic as the anti-representationalists would have it and least of all with nonrealistic/realistic, hence device-uncovering/-covering or perceptible/ -imperceptible antithesis. Quite the contrary. After all, plot itself is a, indeed the mimetic form, because geared to the entire narrative-dening action and subsuming its
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own, optional motivators (notably character and viewpoint). Even plot therefore serves, on the largest scale, the poetics of literature, of the kind, of the work, and it often (for Aristotle, always) best does so by means of a probable, natural-seeming action logic. More generally, the point of replacing an atomistic by a relational theory largely consists in establishing mimetic motivation as part of the texts strategy and the ctive component itself as amenable to both mimetic and aesthetic synthesis. Thus, there is no reason why the patterning of elements into, say, a chain of events that progresses within the framework of reality inhabited by the characters should either exclude or be excluded by these elements (and the event chains) alternative coherence as a suspenseful or geometric or symbolic or persuasive or just art-specic design that unfolds within the framework of the text addressed to the reader. If anything, that artistic coherence must subsume as well as regulate the causal concatenation. After all, like every item or set or pattern within the world that we (re)construct, this enchainment denitionally operates for a purpose, and so joins or develops another (e.g., suspenseful, geometric . . . ) pattern, within the texts communicative frame. In Aristotle, the event chain running throughout by necessary or probable sequence is (besides its variable, contextual functions) the differentia specica of poetic art: a marker abounding in pleasurable effects, from unity to inference to concrete universality. Doubly motivated, then, the linkage has one foot in representation and another in communication, one in plot as quasi-natural movement that logically follows and another in how plot moves the audience following it with affective response. Or take the readers resolution of an ambiguity or an incongruity in subjective, perspectival mimetic terms: by attributing the problematic discourse to some fallible channel of information, like a ctive teller or observer of the scene. Confronted with a factual, verbal, normative, or aesthetic trouble spot, readers demonstrably infer a trouble-prone speaking/ thinking subject to blame and map it on thereby resolving the difculty, equivocal origination included in numberless cases of free indirect discourse or other perspectival montage. Further, the free indirect discourse or other perspectival montage itself emerges from between the lines in and through such a process of motivating unharmonious, equivocal, or just loose givens.43 Overall equivalents abound as well. Thus our quest for the identity of the creature that so oddly retells the story of Noahs Ark in Julian Barness
43. Sternberg 1982a; 1982b; 1983a; 1985: e.g., 52 54, 137 38; 1991; 2001a; 2009: 480 524; cf. Fludernik 1993; Vandaele 2009. On how this rule of inference extends to (un)reliable narration, see the works of Tamar Yacobi listed in References. The last section of this article, focused on point of view, will return to this entire complex of issues.
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History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, or looking for the mysterious perspectival origin and focus of the narration in Alain Robbe-Grillets Jealousy. Once inferred, through a process of gap-lling, the voice or the view at work serves to motivate on a mimetic basis an entire troublesome narrative discourse. Why is it like that? Because mediated as a whole by this or that strange, and aesthetically estranging, creature. Whatever its extent and duration, this process of inference, with its mimetic product subject, (re)teller, reector is often the aesthetic point of the whole device. Here, the aesthetic point of the mimetically directed quest consists in nothing other than estrangement, and would therefore disarm Shklovsky himself. The means-end linkage between these synthesizing modes, therefore, reects a necessary condition of representational art, not at all a disparagement of representational structure or even of realism, which may well form the aesthetic end in question and thus determine the choice of mimetic means.44 Mimesis, in short, operates as a mediating rather than qualitative term; and its two faces also draw attention to the third requirement, namely,
(3) An Asymmetry between the Two Motivational Modes
Of the two motivational modes, only the aesthetic can appear apart from as well as together with its mimetic complement. Always opposed and so mutually illuminating in logic of operation, they do not necessarily coexist. Mimetic entails and embodies (mediates) aesthetic patterning; referential choice presupposes functional intent; the ctive framework holding the dramatis personae must be (re)constructed with an eye to the rhetorical framework holding author and reader. But the converse is not true, since the latter framework may exist and operate independently. For one thing, it is time to overcome the persistent tendency of automatically linking, hence limiting, motivation to represented or even specically narrated worlds, where those two frameworks must co-occur. Of the two, instead, the (teleo)logic of aesthetics also marks nonrepresentational art from concrete poetry to abstract painting which has its own reasons, goals, effects, notably including the elimination of mimesis as a correlated patterning and explanatory logic. A single rationale then governs the entire work, one that brings the discourse partners into straight contact: it directly issues from the
44. This possibility includes an estranging realism, which would appear to Shklovsky a contradiction in terms but, like an estranging narrative chronology [Sternberg 2006: 138ff.], actually follows from his own unthought-through historical logic of estrangement: it deautomatizes some earlier model or sense of reality that has grown conventional, and so imperceptible. But the possibility would accord with Jakobson 1978 [1921], now revisited by McHale 2008.
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author to affect the reader or viewer as directly, without any reality-like mediacy. There, motivational links and hierarchies can indeed still obtain, but among aesthetic varieties alone, as between graphic and prosodic design in a concrete poem, for instance, or between the effects of shape and color on Kandinskys world-free visual surfaces. For another thing, representational imaging can itself have its abstract moments, so to speak, including narrative. This is the genre of mimesis par excellence, because denitionally and compositely so, in its unfolding of a narrated, lifelike sequence parallel to a narrative, discourse sequence: the former motivates the latter, the latter remolds and relays the former. But even this exemplar neednt be mimetic all over or all the time. Rather, the genres constitutive double track may here and there turn single, that is, purely communicative (aesthetic, discoursive, rhetorical, functional) in its advance, workings, and motivation. Think of Fieldings (or his authorial narrators) running commentary in Tom Jones, especially the prefatory chapters of the novels eighteen books. My Reader then is not to be surprised . . . if my History sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to y (1994 [1745]: 77). The contact between the ultimate, framing discoursers is here unmediated (undramatized in Jamesian idiom) by the eld of reality that the discourse has invented as an arena for Toms adventures and his contacts with the other characters. There is nothing to prevent the teller from speaking straight to his addressees from directing or misdirecting them, explaining his procedure, indulging in digressive talk with no reference to the represented world. All the resulting elements and effects will then be assimilated in rhetorical terms, pure if not simple. Why is this piece of discourse found in the work? Because it has this or that impact, plays such and such a role, enables some desired linkage or necessary inference. As with selectional, so with pure combinatory choices: those, I mean, that likewise forego or transcend the narrated reality, hence its various whys, covers, embodiments, intermediaries, in favor of im-mediate (but not unmotivated, except in Shklovskys unhappy usage) patterns and devices. The motivation then goes again directly from authorized narrator, in effect author, to implied audience, and so encompasses all nonrepresentational yet purposive drives, structurings, omissions, breaches, rationales. As important as it is wide-ranging, such purely aesthetic or communicative motivation includes major resources of narrative patterning. Further, while the combinatory resources involve the narrational discourse sequence along which Fielding also comments some extend to the narrated, reality-like sequence itself, and so bear on narrativity proper. Among these, none looms larger than the gapping, with the disordering and withholding that
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triggers it, performed by an omniscient narrator. Why else would an allknowing communicator leave us addressees in the dark, if not for some communicative end(s)? And the end(s) must begin with the dening, universal effects of narrative suspense, curiosity, surprise all dependent on the movement from gap to hoped-for closure along the sequence. Amid the common sheer aesthetic motivation behind suppressive omniscience, the gapping even varies according to the universal wanted: the disorder of the event line we encounter grows perceptible for suspense and curiosity, but turns imperceptible for surprise (Sternberg 1978: 254 305, 1985: 84 320, 2007: 761ff.). In any case, the entire variety of these devices never appeals for explanation to the logic of mimesis, which otherwise dominates the narrative as well as all representational genres, and with which it elsewhere cohabits and cooperates in a motivating twofold.
5. Motivation and Integration: The Concept of Functional Mediacy
But if these two motivational modes are nothing but principles of assimilation, making sense of the text by incorporating and interrelating elements into patterns, what distinguishes them from other forms of integration? Arent the two modes just part of the texts unifying strategies or the readers interpretive resources, and cant their sharp opposition be absorbed and rened by some even more comprehensive scheme? A good way to answer these questions is to look at the critical fortunes of Shklovskys dogma, even under the name of motivation, inter alia, or in his name, also borne in vain. His own failures of consistency pale beside such rudimentary and ongoing deviance, especially toward the poetics of unity.
5.1. Motivation in Tomashevskys Thematics: The Shift from Cover to Coherence
The work of the Russian Formalists themselves so the above (a) (f) list of denitions began to indicate already diverges in various places and respects from the original Shklovskyan approach. On this as on some other key issues, the impression of theoretical uniformity given by Victor Erlichs Russian Formalism (1965: 194 99, 241 46) is at least a simplication of the facts. Actually, regarding the term and doctrine of motivation, there is not much signicant, consistent, far less overall adherence within the school to the original novelty. Strictly, it boils down to one continuous idea and one exceptional continuator. The one idea that runs through all Formalist approaches or references to motivation (under whatever label, in whatever sense) is, predictably
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enough, estrangement: the master concept of Russian Formalism and, arguably, of twentieth-century literary theory. Indeed, like most of its successors, Formalist theory is so poor in literary, aesthetic or general discoursive effects the force of narrativity conspicuously missing among them, as already in Aristotle that this affective staple comes to enjoy a near-monopoly (Sternberg 2006, 1992a: 474ff., 2010; and see also the next note). Even so, the recurrent pairing of estrangement with motivation exhibits differences in role, as well as in the name or meaning assumed by either of the correlates or both. According to Shklovsky, motivation thus works against, and its absence for, the cardinal poetic value of making strange. On the other hand, as well nd, Tomashevsky associates this value with one of three motivational types, the artistic: he even opposes it to the (illusive, conventional) familiarity effect governing a separate type, the realistic, while dissociating it altogether from the economy pursued by the third, compositional motivation. And so forth.45 Again, the only Formalist who would appear to have both understood and adopted Shklovskys position is Boris Eichenbaum. Examples of this rare conceptual continuity on the front of motivation, terminology included, would be Eichenbaums important survey of the Formal Method (Eichenbaum 1965 [1926]: esp. 119 22) and his illuminating essay on O. Henry (Eichenbaum 1978 [1925]), which parallels and, historically, even resumes Shklovskys classic analysis of Tristram Shandy as a laying bare, parodic exemplar.46 In general, however, Formalists not only show little of this
45. The claim that estrangement (ostrannenie) nds almost no resonance in the work of the other Formalists and plays a restricted role in Shklovskys (Gorman 2008: 135) is so far from the truth (compare Sternberg 2006), and indeed so unusual, as to sound incredible. The more so, if possible, because Gorman (2008: 138 39n2) refers to the double special issue on the topic that appeared in Poetics Today 26.4 (2005) and 27.1 (2006). As incredible is the fact that Lisa Zunshines book, Strange Concepts (2008), ignores the most celebrated Formalist heritage. But then, literary cognitivism must apparently reinvent estrangement itself, instead of building on it (Sternberg 2009: 264 65). 46. Eichenbaum (1978 [1925]: 247) himself comments on their relation, just as he (1974 [1918]: 270 72) juxtaposes his study of the making of Gogols The Overcoat with an overview of Shklovskys innovative theory of prose, again including the Tristram Shandy exemplar (120 22). Most quotable on this continuity is Eichenbaums (1978 [1925]: 256) quip that O. Henrys incessant device-baring and parody look as if he had taken up the Formal method in klovskij. The artists impossible follow-up Russia and had often had his ear bent by Viktor S reads, of course, as a hyperbolic simile, or similitude, but also as a metonymy for his analysts actual Shklovskyan performance. (In French structuralism, by a typical contrast, Genette [1980 {1972}] keeps silent on how the relation extends to his own anchorage in Proust all along as a modern defamiliarizing paradigm case. For details, see Sternberg 2006: 168ff. and Chateau 2011). More restricted usages in the same Shklovskyan line, whose hallmark is the motivatedunmotivated antithesis, include Propp 1968 [1928]; Holquist 1967; Hrushovski 1976;
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continuity. They even seem as little aware as their followers and historians of their own manifold divergence or that of their associates the conceptual ramication having been shrouded in terminological parity. A probable exception in awareness is the most divergent and best-known account of motivation, Tomashevskys Thematics (1965 [1925]: 78 87). On the face of it, his account is concerned to develop and generalize the earlier Shklovskyan insights on which it obviously draws, and, in fact, it has been widely taken as derivative or, at all events, as representative. Shklovsky himself not being interested in systematic expositions, we thus hear, the job of laying out an explicit theory fell to others, especially Boris Tomashevsky: his essay on Thematics (1925) gives a clear concise account of narrative unlike anything in [Shklovskys] Theory [of Prose ], and yet is dependent on it for almost every point (Gorman 2008: 136: also, for example, Scholes 1974: 77; Duffy 1992: 68; Mandelker 1993: 24 25n26; Wellek 2009: 179).47 Such claims of dependence and continuity within a singleminded drive toward a Formalist narrative theory largely hinging on motivation have also had a great many practical equivalents over the decades since. As well see, these generally take the form of mixing or interchanging the respective motivational terminologies, on the automatic assumption of a unitary concept and approach, inspired by Shklovsky. But this is very far from the truth of the matter, with its wider and still less visible implications for the poetics of narrative and literature, if not beyond. Tomashevskys version strategically deects and all but transforms Shklovskys original concept.48 Not that Tomashevsky ever indicates, let alone species, this deviation, though, unlike his numerous following, he may well be conscious of it.49 Both the shifts magnitude and his avoidance of it elsewhere, in an overview of Formalism (Tomashevsky 2004 [1928]), suggest that it is deliberate. Nor are his changes and twists perforce for the worse. On the contrary, as already promised by the opening of his section on motivation. A works system of motifs, he claims there, needs to
Chatman 1978; Brinker 1983; Bordwell 1985; Thompson 1988; Mandelker 1993; Fludernik 1996; Phelan 2007; Walsh 2007. 47. Gorman, though unusually well-informed about Formalism, doesnt seem to know the counterargument in Sternberg 1983c, the earlier version of this paper. 48. As we nd this concept expressed and applied in various essays and books throughout the ten preceding years: most notably in the Art as Device manifesto and in the exemplary analysis of Tristram Shandy, rst published in 1916 and 1921, respectively. 49. His silence verged on plagiarism in the eyes of Shklovsky (1977 [1926]: 83n48), who branded his entire volume as derivative without acknowledgment. (Whether he also saw the differences, and how he regarded them, is even more interesting but less clear.) Perhaps this helps to explain the changed attitude toward reference in Tomashevsky 2004 [1928]: a belated attempt at reparation?
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show some kind of artistic unity. If the individual motifs, or a complex of motifs, are not sufciently suited to the work, if the reader feels that the relationship between certain complexes of motifs and the work itself is obscure, then that complex is said to be superuous. If all the parts of the work are badly suited to one another, the work is incoherent. That is why the introduction of each separate motif or complex of motifs must be motivated. The network of devices justifying the introduction of individual motifs or of groups of motifs is called motivation. (1965 [1925]: 78)
The interest in motivating as a question or imperative of unifying the literary artworks smallest world-units its motifs is perhaps not kept by Tomashevsky visibly focal throughout the section, let alone overtly and progressively developed, but we do nd it announced beforehand here. Relative to Shklovsky, that interest also assumes here special point as well as novelty. Just observe, for now, the occurrence of devices and, whats even more, their emphatic interlinkage, toward the end of the quote from Tomashevskys opening. The network of devices justifying the introduction of motifs, he roundly asserts, is called motivation. A device, of all things, motivating [sic ] rather than motivated?50 Counting as motivation, not underlying, opposing, and outranking it? Odder yet, devices forming a network, along or in harmony with the complex or group of motifs being motivated? Yes, the text unequivocally responds. What befalls this devised core of early Formalisms poetics, as the locus and measure and hallmark of literariness, with estrangement itself for effect or poetic function is nothing short of inglorious reversal, and by (re)denition at that. Device comes down here all the way from supreme end to sheer means: from a possibly motivated, yet at best unmotivated, hence self-sufcient as well as selfvaluable center of artice and notice a poetic cynosure, in brief to a motivator of the need for introducing elements into the artwork, in the service of unity. The unity gains reinforcement from the structuring of both the motivating devices and the motif objects into larger organized units (network . . . complex . . . group). A still farther cry, this, from the device as coupled, if at all, with a piece of reality that motivates it. And the if at all, in turn, crowns the unity, and the distance from the original generally. Motivation and device, or artwork, are no longer a variable and a contrast, respectively, but a constant pair: where either occurs, the other co-occurs in a certain unifying relation. A related signal of divergence, with integrity in view, is the punning link of motif to motivation. Again, it is as if the two went together no minimal units, hence no artwork, without connectivity and they actually do in nar50. Even Eichenbaum (1978 [1925]: 244) may deviate into motivational device. But this remains a local exception, nothing like a basic shift, as with Tomashevsky et al.
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rative: the puns rhetoric of shared etymology underlines a general artistic exigency and practice.51 ` -vis These inverted roles and statuses amount to a conceptual breach vis-a Shklovskys motivated/unmotivated dichotomy, implying a strategic refocusing and reordering of the analysts priorities, in line with the artworks. Further, this opening announcement isnt satised to generalize the necessity of motivation or to impose it on ordinary motifs or motif complexes, with which the sequel mainly deals, in fact. Instead, Tomashevsky drives home the general point by singling out two extreme cases, where motivating textelements for unity accordingly becomes most urgent. One concerns the problem of the superuous motif(s); the other, the incoherent. Or in my language: one bears on apparent redundancy, or irrelevance, and the other on its mirror-image, incongruity, or inconsistency, for which self-contradiction marks the limit case. Like motivating-as-unifying itself, these extremes do not loom large in what ensues there, either by way of theorizing or illustration.52 Yet their passing initial mention doubtless helps to signal a change of viewpoint on the established Formalist concept, one redoubled and immediately followed by that on device. Therefore, even Tomashevskys brief reference at the start to the unifying or coherence-promoting role of motivation marks a welcome shift from Shklovskys vocal focus on camouage and local effect, with the resulting fragmentation of the text into devices proper and motivating excrescences. Actually, as I in effect argued, it is important to realize that such different emphases, on coherence and on cover, neednt even pull different ways. They may be rendered not just compatible but complementary. For what does it mean to camouage a device: say, a retardatory structure, which heightens our expectancy of some outcome or sequel through in-between mimetic developments (e.g., a retarding, interposed chain of events)? It means to overlay that device with a show of reality, and so to foreground an alternative principle of organization (lifelike causality, instead of manipulated suspense) that will invite the reader to assimilate its components to a different network of relationships (the exigencies of the hunt in the detective story or the obstacles to love in comedy). So concealment (in the guise of reality) and coherence (in terms of reality) prove to be different but joinable
51. Hence motif(s), as against the domesticating and misleading (especially because psychological-looking) motive(s), into which some English it (e.g., Chatman 1978: 111; Brinker 1983: 575). 52. For a richly illustrated account of these extremes, apart and together, see my books 1978a, 1985, passim, and various later articles (e.g., 1986, 2001a, 2001b).
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aspects of motivation, after all. Though Tomashevsky never says so, of course much less his following, blind to the very difference his text somehow gestures toward this complement and juncture. More generally yet, it least betrays the conceptual hole gaping in most other Formalist and subsequent usages: the failure to understand that motivation, regardless of kind, shape, role, and context, entails some explanatory pattern or patterning of discourse features. Another promising initiative of Tomashevskys is declared and known, for a change, even if similarly in need of a closer look. It has to do with the attempt to classify motivations into the realistic, artistic, and compositional varieties. Even the naming itself, with its distinctive force, promises to repair a signicant omission: one that at times led before to inconsistency in motivational usage and ground, as already illustrated, or even to ostensible self-contradiction. For example, Shklovsky states both that in Tristram Shandy the artistic form is presented simply as such, without any kind of [realistic?] motivation and that Sterne lays bare his artice because he considers such [artistic?] motivation an end in itself (Shklovsky 1965 [1921]: 27, 30; 1990b [1925]: 147, 149). How to resolve this apparent glaring incongruity, at best ambiguous, is far from self-evident, in the absence of any subgrouping like that I provisionally inferred and interpolated here in Tomashevskys terminology.53 Nor can we afford to neglect this problem. Though rare enough in Shklovskys own work, it is always liable to arise, with its unsettling consequences and has predictably recurred since (e.g., in Phelan 2005: 11 12) because it issues from his nominal plus/minus dichotomy. The danger of ambiguous reference even grows, here and there, with the unsignaled throwback to [psychological] motivation (as, confusingly, in Martin 1986: 65 66). Not to mention the number of puzzling references in Shklovsky et al. to motivated vs. unmotivated forms, where the actual aim is to indicate not the presence or absence but the basis of assimilation. Little wonder that the account focused by Tomashevsky on motivational coherence and subdivision refocused, in truth, though often mistaken for, or mixed with, Shklovskys has been steadily gaining currency over the last decades.
53. To avoid the same threat of ambiguous reference, Franco Moretti (1999: 26) attributes to the Russian Formalists a distinction between motivation and function, which they never explicitly made. Bakhtin (1984 [1963]: 128, 145), who owes more to Formalism than Medvedev/Bakhtin (1985 [1928]) suggests, would instead counter the threat via redundancy, one possibly misleading at that. He blows up Shklovskys term into the otiose (and worse, again Tomashevskyan) realistically motivated or realistic and motivated, with countless later parallels everywhere.
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Unfortunately, however, these potential gains are more than nullied by a wavering that has left its mark on later developments and still continues undetected. Where Tomashevsky gets into trouble will come to light once we note how his typology breaks down as a result of a double confusion between the particular and the general.
5.2. From Polarity to Threefold: The Typology of Motivation
On the one hand, Tomashevskys compositional motivation, justifying the introduction of material in terms of economy (if one speaks about a nail driven in a wall at the beginning of a narrative, then at the end the hero must hang himself on that nail), is in fact nothing but a subtype of the artistic category. Where outside art do such high norms and expectations of relevance operate? Where else must every detail (e.g., nail) count, by falling into some pattern (e.g., a suicide by hanging)?54 Indeed, the sections opening, quoted above, has already generalized that to motivate is to fulll the need for some kind of artistic unity, with motivating (in effect, assimilating, composing) the superuous as paradigmatic limit case. Or the other, negative way round, which Tomashevsky actually takes in that opening: the failure to motivate even an individual motif, let alone a complex of motifs, into some artistic unity exposes the literary work to judgments of superuity and incoherence.55 Nowhere, moreover, does this peculiar high selectivity and integrity of the artwork loom so large as in compositional motivation. Nor does any other motivation in Tomashevsky serve as a common denominator for such a variety of represented items, linkages, workings; and the greater this variety, the more perceptible the (sub)types artistry on the widest scale. The composition urged and illustrated here by Tomashevsky applies, for example, to different orders of being, static and dynamic existents; to small and large represented features, all possibly operating (hence integrated) as targets and/or means of characterization. Also included under that rubric are character/action interlinkages, whether by psychological analogy or by contrast. On a more general and accordingly inclusive level, that of discourse economy, we recall afresh the proverbial nail or gun on the wall and eithers countless echoes. Or, even a little more inclusive as well as overt: Not a single property [represented object] may remain unused in the telling, and no episode may be without inuence on the situation (ibid.: 79). Beyond
54. Not in human communication at large, not even according to Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilsons (1986) theory of discourse relevance as a correlate of economy. 55. A polar contrast to Bal (1985: 132), who, odder still, limits motivation to descriptive writing.
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doubt, then, the alleged compositional type reduces to a subtype of the artistic.56 However, instead of properly generalizing the compositional motivation to the whole range of art if not of discourse at a still higher level, with a yet wider range to suit Tomashevsky and his followers overspecialize it, by way of multiple, even increasing connement to some part(s) of the whole. Regarding this as well as the other motivational kinds, Tomashevskys own restriction of their scope begins with the chapter heading. Whatever his titular Thematics exactly means the works general thought, for instance, or what is being said in it it doubtless exclusively applies and gives unity to the entities within the represented world. It is this world that decomposes into motifs, namely, the smallest, irreducible particles of thematic material: evening comes, Raskolnikov kills the old woman (Tomashevsky 1965 [1925]: 62 67), and the objects of some motivating interlinkage. As these mini-examples suggest, however, the restriction doesnt stop here. The entities involved (world-items, down to motifs) are in turn limited and even more arbitrarily than ever before to narrative, of all worldrepresenting discourse genres. In theory, Tomashevsky (ibid.: 70 71) does recognize static as well as dynamic motifs. But the latter remain the most important, even so, while the former do not just rank low but are kept conned and subordinate to narrative, with its dynamism, rather than also considered within their proper, descriptive framework. And in practice, the static kind appears to have been virtually forgotten thereafter. The sequel concentrates on what Formalists term story materials and how they get motivated on pain of incoherence. Note, though, that the difference from more standard usages of theme associated with the texts ideas, rather than with the (story)worlds existents does not necessarily involve one in coherence-building. These usages likewise regard theme as a force for unity, sometimes even explicitly, as when Gerald Prince (1992: 5) describes theme as a unifying macrostructural category or frame. Its aboutness likewise makes for overall coherence (as rightly noted in Diengott 1993: 185).
56. Eric de Haard (1989: 11) asserts the very opposite relation between the two, and even subsumes the third, realistic type under the compositional umbrella. Both realistic and artistic motivation, he asserts, are forms of compositional motivation. A twofold category mistake, this, because, to say the least, neither of the alleged subtypes (forms) shares the compositional hallmark of economy. Their motivations of illusive effect and novelty value, respectively, are even liable to prove costly, rather than composing, in economical terms. Worse, if possible, Brooks (1984: 14) mistakes the compositional type for motivation as a whole; and Scholes (1974: 78) reduces Tomashevskys trio to one motivation, as if it were Shklovskys, but his tangled account of it corresponds to none, nor to any viable alternative.
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While Tomashevsky unduly reserves compositional motivation for narrative or its storyworld, his followers proceed to restrict it to various narrative subdomains. Note rst that the constantly iterated reference over the decades to the Chekhovian props as typifying this motivation has incurred, or encouraged, two major and cumulative limitations of scope. To begin with, the linear and causal effect of the nail/gun has tended to (mis)associate the compositional imperative with plot, as distinct from character though Tomashevsky himself overtly includes both and a fortiori excluding the entire nonnarrative realm. Among the numerous restrictive linkages of motivation to the narrative plot chain at the expense of reality-items and forms in general some are even denitional or otherwise principled (e.g., Genette 2001 [1968] on causal determination; Brinker 1983: 575 on the probable chain of events; Haard 1989: 10 11 on fabular causality, Wollen 2002: 60 on dramatized agency). Moreover, plot itself has suffered constraint. Whether for the same reason that villains prove more attractive than the righteous or because of human (scholarly?) pessimism, the variants of this Chekhov maxim, with their frequent repetitions, all end unhappily, even fatally. By compositional logic, as it were, a nail mentioned predicts the heros hanging himself on it, a gun forecasts a (self-)shooting with it, and the like. The psychologist Louise Sundararajan (2008: 244), quoting in turn Tomashevskys version of Chekhov, goes so far as to generalize what his own enclosing account would deny even more categorically: that narrative unity, under the dictate of compositional motivation, is not without its dark side. And this darkness allegedly extends beyond the usual, Chekhovian range of props, too. It may be why, she suggests, violence becomes almost ineluctable in the consummation of anger narratives. If angry at rst, then perforce violent at last. Doubtless a useful extension, this, being propless and relocating the trigger, instead, to a characters state of mind. But it still toes the old line of unhappiness, from mood to ending as if the dark masterplot were only more basic and extensive than its nail/gun variants. It apparently needs recalling, therefore, that the compositional logic, as such, works on every imaginable plot, including the other, light way, as in comedy and farce. Given an obstacle in the dining room, the butler serving dinner will stumble on it; given a banana peel, . . . ; given a couple in love, . . . So protean is this logic that it intersects with the narrative-wide rule that every plot makes an if-plot (Sternberg 2008). Intersects, not coextends, because the rationale of economy and connectivity equally applies beyond storytelling, as far as the opposite generic pole of literary (or cinematic) description. Unlike the if-plot, moreover, compositional motivation is suspendable, even invertible as I proceed to argue and its discourse-wide range only contingent.
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But the arbitrary specializing of composition doesnt end even here. It also reveals itself in the connement imposed on particular means or devices. By this very criterion of relevance, for example, one cannot help wondering why Tomashevskys long and useful comment on the possibility of misleading motivation, intended to distract the readers attention (ibid.: 80), has been attached to the compositional (sub)type, when such distraction is equally relevant to any other motivational type, as well as to any genre or text. It is just a matter of temporarily withholding knowledge (or genuine, objective, authorized knowledge) from the reader. If we can be misdirected about the works composition, then why not about, say, its realism? But then, like everything else that Tomashevsky writes about the compositional (sub)type, only more glaringly, this ill-placed excursus on misleading motivation applies to the entire aesthetic domain. Within the domain of art, moreover, this integrational constraint varies in line with different conceptions of unity, and sometimes (as in ancient epic and the realist novel) one nds it decidedly relaxed if not inverted.57 Even works related to the same literary milieu, like biblical narrative and The Gilgamesh Epic, operate with entirely different norms of economy as against redundancy. In one, for example, retellings and repetitions at large, even verbatim ones, are newly and richly functional, often multifunctional, hence an exemplar of economy; in the other, they are traditionally formulaic and presumably enjoyed as such by the original audience, if not by common adult readers today.58 Nowadays, indeed, a novel-centric encounter with overtelling like Phelan (2005: 11 29) betrays afresh Tomashevskys obliviousness to this deep and wide polarity, found in the relevant critical as well as artistic traditions. Little wonder Phelan still misgeneralizes narrative redundancy, and in motivational terms too, as if it were all unipolar: reducible to a single, univalent model of composition, governed by economy. So redundant telling allegedly consists in
a narrators apparently unmotivated report of information to a narratee that the narratee already possesses. The motivation for redundant telling typically resides in the implied authors need to communicate information to the audience, and so it can also be described with the longer phrase redundant telling, necessary disclosure. (ibid.: 218)
57. The same variability holds for discourse generally, against Sperber and Wilsons (1986) likewise absolutist criteria of relevance/economy. 58. See the illustrated analyses in Sternberg 1977; 1985: 365 440; 1986; 2001b. On this strategic front, interestingly, the Bible is akin to the far-off Homeric epic compare the above references with Sternberg 1978: 56 128 on the Odyssey rather than to its Ancient Oriental neighbors.
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Though cast in terms of Shklovskys unmotivated/motivated binarism, this idea of redundancy in no way shares his ideal of art as a glorious, defamiliarizing overinvestment of resources, energy, attentiveness never mind a bipolar, context-sensitive approach like mine. Instead, Phelan actually inherits, even overreaches Tomashevskys bias for compositional motivation: for the peculiar high standard of informational economy that dominates the classical novel, in other words, as against repetition-favoring Gilgamesh or Icelandic saga or Robbe-Grillet or narrative poetry with a refrain. The relations between the two communicators, therefore, must allegedly contrast (narratorial redundancy vs. authorial necessary disclosure). An untenable at, this, since the narrator/author relations freely shift, as always, all the way between contrast and concord (two-level wanted redundancy or, for that matter, disclosure), even along the works sequence. In character (homodiegetic) telling, if anything, the overtold information isnt even unmotivated or nonmimetic or (as Alber et al. 2010: 130 call it) unnatural in the rst place. Quite the contrary, given the extent to which we repeat ourselves as everyday tellers; and, moreover, such repetition happens consciously or otherwise, arising from designs on the auditor (e.g., persuasion) or from internal pressures (e.g., excitement). Far from Phelans unmotivated, therefore, the analogous character overtelling shifts at will between aesthetic and mimetic, rhetorical and reality-like motivation except that, since this (over)telling proceeds within the told world, its very aesthetics is mimetic and its rhetoric a reality-like performance. In turn, the narrator/author relations become multiply variable to suit, and all the less reducible to the preconceived uniformity that Phelans follow-up would again impose on narrative by denition. Further, repetitions and other surface redundancies have a miniature, pinpoint equivalent in apparently unrelated details. Whether and how they fall into pattern offers a revealing measure of compositional integrity, economy, (multi)functionality, by the norms operative in context. The measure even turns paradigmatic with Chekhovs props, adduced by Tomashevsky, and a host of followers or fellow admirers since, as a model of economy via ultimate, long-term emplotment. The static-looking detail (nail, gun) eventually assumes kinetic force, to lethal effect. Hence the signicance, indeed shock value, of nding this very paradigm case (with the underlying regulative norm or model) changeable to a drastic extent along the history of art and the theater specically. Witness how, in recent decades, it has been inverted into agrant, even parodic waste, miscarriage, inconsequence, especially by actional criteria, yet with ample compensation in estranging impact, which is surely most artistic and valuable to a Formalist. This countertrend, predictably enough, indeed begins with
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Shklovsky: his sheer lust for rule-breaking, his focus on defamiliarizing, and his anti-economical poetics, all converge here. The mystery novel, he observes, dees the Chekhovian general principle of art. In it, the gun that hangs on the wall does not re. Another gun shoots instead (1990 [1929]: 109 10). The drive against the compositional paradigm has been endlessly updated and extended since. For a long time, as one critic puts it, we quoted Chekhovs famous aphorism about the gun onstage ring at last, so as to emphasize the need for planning and strict pertinacy in art. In the plays we now discuss with our students, however, that gun may re only blanks or it may be turned on the audience (Wilcox 1965: 73). Some of Woody Allens one-act plays would appear not only to keep enacting this metamorphosis but to thematize it. In Old Saybrook, for example, just as David prepares to kill everyone with his gun, the playwright stumbles down the stairs from the attic/heaven and interrupts him. The dramatist even complains that his own characters have got out of hand and turned on me (Yacowar 2005: 115), as if to underline the inverted allusion. They want to follow the good old Chekhov scenario, as it were. Then Central Park West resumes the theme. Howards suicide attempt fails because he forgot to release his guns safety catch. Yet, just as the playwright did with the character in the earlier drama, he blames the gun: Its a German Luger it should be like a Mercedes! The Luger does re at last, only by accident, and a comic one at that, when the ustered Juliet shoots Sam in the rear (ibid.: 123). Another revealing miniature polarity shows across, not along, historical lines. The detective story, where every detail counts in the work-length dynamics of suspicion frequently more than once, in more than one role, within more than one pattern would stand opposed to the use of details for sheer reality effect, where they would precisely elude compositional synthesis and service: only so can they produce the wanted sense of unassimilable, irreducible, brute existence.59 The motivation wouldnt then reverse from presence to absence, from plus to minus compositional value, as Tomashevsky in effect believes. Instead, it would shift from one compositional norm and model to another that of the rhetoric of authenticity, as economical and structured as any or, by his own groupings, from the compositional to the realistic kind of motivation. But its art that encodes, licenses, moderates, hardens, or reverses either polar norm, always in some differential relation to life and its images. Far from an autonomous, distinctive type, the compositional rationale is there59. On the hard or inessential detail, see, for example, Jakobson 1978 [1921]: 43 44; Auerbach 1957 [1946]; Orwell 1965: 80 141; on Dickens, Barthes 1986c [1968]; Sternberg 1983b.
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fore a subtype of the artistic. As such, the compositional subtype deserves no preferential treatment, not even a singling out by name, at the expense of others belonging to the same populous category yet forgotten here thematic, generic, stylistic, affective, or for that matter, prosodic motivation. Further, as the structuring or economical variable within the overall artistic type, this subtype of motivation necessarily ranges over art at large. But its range doesnt stop there, either, any more than does the poetic, let alone the aesthetic function, however dened. (And the Formalists, we recall, dene the poetic by its estranging impact, from which Jakobsons [1960] set toward the message also derives.) Less obviously, typically, and dominantly, but with equal force, the range of this motivational subtype even extends beyond arts universe: to any kind or instance or level or segment of text that manifests the drive involved, the compositional function, so to speak. To put it the other way round, there is no conning that function even to the enormous domain of, say, representational, mimetic art, or discourse, because all the nonrepresentational opposite numbers (e.g., abstract painting, concrete poetry) have their own unities and economies. Far less is this motivation connable to a particular, albeit developed and widespread, representational genre like narrative, with which it has been unreasonably associated as a matter of course since Tomashevsky, or in effect since Aristotles holistic literary mimesis, geared to epic and drama. To this connement to narrative, there have been all too few exceptions, starting with Shklovsky himself, taken up with greater emphasis by Tynjanov (1981 [1924]). But their references to (un)motivated aspects and choices of poetry its language, above all have usually gone unnoticed, certainly little mentioned and less developed thus far. This unthinking narrow generic linkage, we have already found, has at times been specied into a more or less advised requirement of distinctively narrative elements and patterns, like causal enchainment (e.g., Genette 2001 [1968]; Haard 1989: 10 11). Here and there, this linkage-cum-limitation even rises to the surface in an overt and doctrinal claim of narrative monopoly. Thus the groundless statement that, in compositional motivation, the term compositional is especially related to the plot (sjuzhet) of the story-plot ( fabula-sjuzhet) distinction (Mandelker 1993: 74 75).60 This alleged orientation to Formalisms plot as manipulated event-sequence ( fabula) shrinks, indeed contradicts Tomashevskys own narrative-centered frame of reference. His compositional demand equally bears not just on the underlying
60. With the same unreason and the same diminished scope of narrative, Haard (1989: 177n12) keeps the plot (sjuzhet) for artistic motivation a subtype of the compositional umbrella, in his view while consigning the realistic kind to the story ( fabula). More on this below.
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fabula sequence, in point of both relevance or economy (the nails activation must already start there) and chrono-logical (rather than loosely chronological) unity.61 The demand also applies to plot in any of the diverse event-linear senses ascribed to it nowadays (regardless of label at that) and often assumed by nominal followers of Tomashevskys composition. Besides, whatever the emplotment in question, it would hardly enjoy a special status, let alone a monopoly, according to his view. He lays equal emphasis, we have seen, on the economy and interlinkage of character (by psychological analogy or contrast) as on those of either, or any, event sequence: on object as on episode, in a nutshell.62 All this goes to show that the range of motivation at large, or of any particular type, needs to be expanded generically and otherwise, with due classifying into subranges not conned. Such discriminate expansion, along lines that progressively emerge in the re-analysis here, is among the central repairs on the way to an adequate theory of making sense for a purpose. The same requirement, well discover, challenges a fortiori the larger and more heterogeneous theory of making sense regardless, or integration, which Tomashevsky conates with motivation in name, drive, and activity. His account of the next motivating type, likewise problematic, further underlines both requirements. The realistic type fares no better under scrutiny. The treatment accorded to it by Tomashevsky, as well as bristling with internal difculties, likewise proves overspecialized without, or against, reason. That (sub)type, therefore, needs in turn to be subsumed under a more general theoretical heading, but this time the heading required is conspicuously absent from the tripartite scheme. Realistic motivation, we hear, arises in response to the readers demand for illusion. No less than a throwback to Lessing 1963 [1766] who famously universalizes this affect and so no less than opposed to Shklovskys devicebaring, startlingly estranging, anti-illusionist poetics.63 More subtly, but as doctrinally, Tomashevskys realistic motivation-as-illusion does not correspond to Shklovskys motivation-as-dissimulation (fac ade, camouage), ei61. We must emphasize that a story [ fabula ] requires not only indications of time, but also indications of cause (Tomashevsky 1965 [1925]: 66). 62. By the same token, it is untrue that the compositional motivation bears on prose narrative rather than on lyrical poetry and (lyrical) motivation (Mandelker 1993: 74 75). Instead, just like the compositional variety itself and a host of other generic (comic, tragic, melodramatic, epigrammatic, . . . ) and otherwise determinate or reader-oriented workings (notably estrangement itself ), this lyrical variety falls straight under the umbrella of artistic motivation. There, it becomes far from irrelevant for [the art of] realist prose. 63. Another Formalist, Roman Jakobson (1978 [1921]: 45), even identies consistent motivation as one of the central meanings and lines of realism.
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ther, however akin or even identical they may appear. Rather, the ones illusive motivation also opposes the others dissimulatory kind, and in conceptual as well as evaluative terms: if only because this illusiveness doesnt serve to cover any device any more than to lay one bare for the simple reason that it doesnt, certainly neednt involve any device. The realistic illusion, instead, comes to enjoy intrinsic value here (again echoing Lessing) in the publics experience of art, and they demand it accordingly, regardless.64 This heavy demand even goes beyond the usual sense and limits of realism, toward a feeling that what happens in [the work] is real part of life itself, not just like life, however close to it. As such an ontic extreme, inversely, the pressure for life runs, once more, clean against Shklovskys laying bare of artice, and not just of the works devices but of its ctionality. By contrast, ve reader may even try to verify the existence of the Tomashevskys na characters. Pushkin, for example, or, on a larger generic scale, the historical novelist, anticipates and fullls this desire, which the naive only overindulge. Some hastily generalize that, in Formalist eyes, motivation was merely designed to make the literary product appealing to the common sense of the Philistine reader (Erlich 1965: 76). For Tomashevsky, instead, the strength of the illusionary experience wanted, or felt, can vary, but it remains essentially typical of the entire reading public:
Although rmly aware of the ctitious nature of the work, even the experienced reader demands some kind of conformity to reality. . . . Even readers fully aware of the laws of aesthetic structure may not be psychologically free from the need for such illusion. As a result, each motif must be introduced as a probable motif in the given situation. (Tomashevsky 1965 [1925]: 81)
Equally revealing is the stress laid here on the clash between conventional and plausible techniques for introducing motifs, with a view to exposing, as parody does, what habit conceals from view: the irreconcilability of these
64. Nevertheless, Brinker (1983: 575 77) projects Shklovskys view of motivation as camouage onto Tomashevskys realistic motivation. He even narrows it down in (mis)transfer along two lines: from reality-like to probable, realistic camouage (following Tomashevskys own shift toward illusion) and from any overlying image of reality to a chain of events (against Tomashevsky as well). The detective tale, for example, ends with a solution that works to probabilize what was formerly improbable about the crime and also to camouage the artistic-generic constraints of suspense and surprise generated by this form of plot. Inversely, Brinker (ibid.) asserts, Works that forego realistic motivation . . . dont bother to disguise the story: again, a claim wrong in both fact and logic. Actually, such disguise coextends with representation at least, and so with represented, world-like, mimetic motivation, however unrealistic. Whats more, an aesthetic disguise for an aesthetic effect is equally possible and sometimes, though less often, resorted to by motivators: as when Dostoevsky shrugs off Smerdyakov the secret parricide in the tale ahead on the ground of his being too low-class and marginal for a proper introduction.
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absurd traditional techniques with realistic motivation. Thus, having grown used to the tricks of the adventure novel, we overlook the absurdity of the fact that the rescue of the hero always occurs ve minutes before his seemingly inevitable death. And given the criterial status of verisimilitude probability, even illusiveness no wonder that fantastic narrative and realistic motivation nally appear here as diametric opposites. They must collide, unless the audience believe in the real existence of witches and goblins, or enter a state of conscious illusion for a time (in effect, a willing suspension of disbelief), or can somehow domesticate the fantasy on view into, say, a dream (ibid.: 80 84; recall Shklovskys praise of Gogol for avoiding this domestication). In view of its identity with the verisimilar, or probable, Tomashevskys realistic cannot correspond to Shklovskys motivated variety, which includes fantasy . . . sorcery . . . magic (2008 [1923]: 61). As repeated occurrences show, the Formalist originators (reality-like) motivation accommodates what its ostensible analogue (of realism) categorically excludes that is, mere possible or improbable cover for the device, along with absurd traditional appearances and at times even singles out the verisimilar motivation for special dispraise. Predictably so, because the more likely and illusive the cover, the less visible and estranging, if at all, the underlying device. Moreover, this discrepancy in ontic range between the two approaches is even sharper than that between the orientation toward (un)veiling isolated devices and toward unifying motifs, respectively: it can neither be dismissed as just another instance of happy pluralism within the Formalist camp, nor bridged in terms of some inclusive theory. If the fantastic contrasts with the realistic, does it constitute a separate, fourth (or, eliminating the compositional, third) type of motivation? And what about the intermediate degrees? Likewise of course with other nonrealistic ontologies, whereby the typology would ramify into a multiply branching tree or, given cultural and historical differences, trees. Further, Tomashevskys realistic also irreconcilably contrasts with absurd traditional motivation, along another axis of probability as against absurdity, but now combined with one of novelty as against traditionality. Given this contrast, where does the traditional (device, literature, motivating resource) belong? Hardly to the artistic category, whose paradigm is none other than the device of defamiliarization (ibid.: 84ff.), preferably laid bare at that, so as to shatter illusion. The traditional must then form a category of its own (and this still leaves unsettled, again, the whole range of possibilities between the newfangled and the stereotyped, historical dynamics and all). But the exclusion of the traditional or conventional from the realistic type
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leaves room in that type for the perceptually potent or viable alone, and the realistic motivation (as did the compositional) then suspiciously begins to look like the artistic. Odd though it sounds, making real is accordingly making strange. And whether or not this convergence falls short of downright incongruity, the typology, at any rate, breaks down on another side.
5.3. Motivating and Integrating Distinguished in Face of Persistent Mix-Up
If we had to choose between the two Russian Formalist accounts of motivation, then, the choice would doubtless be between evils. Compared with Tomashevsky, Aristotles idea of a two-faced mimesis looks still more par` -vis Shklovsky, but also far more reasoned tial and unarticulated than vis-a and consistent and applicable. All this, accordingly, speaks even louder for the principled alternative Ive been suggesting. There is every reason to base a theory of motivation on the two (dis)joinable motivational forces rather than the units they handle or the products they yield, let alone any values attached and on either force being taken as a well-dened mode of patterning the texts data, with the consequences that ensue from these new premises. The assorted weaknesses of the major Formalist approaches, however, still have lessons to teach and to turn into further positive gains. Tomashevskys chief claim to interest lies in his having fallen between two theoretical stools, two concepts of sense-making, a fate that not many of his followers or other conators have managed to escape. Before sorting out this old-new mixture, wed better look at some actual mix-ups over the decades and how they produce the worst of both worlds. In another work of the 1920s, where Tomashevsky (2004 [1928]: 127) surveys the New School of Russian Formalism, he exclusively and on the whole accurately outlines Shklovskys original position: from the binary terminology, motivation for the incidents as against unmotivated events, to the latters coupling with baring the devices of art and its aesthetic advantage (usefulness) as such. This goes to suggest that his removal from Shklovsky in Thematics (Tomashevsky 1965 [1925]), though never declared, was intentional. But why not declare it, here or there, on pain of confusion, which duly materialized? The reason perhaps lies in his statement that the [Russian Formalist] school is not unied, but a concise retrospect on it may neglect small differences [a fortiori those involving oneself?] to stress the ideas more or less shared by all (Tomashevsky 2004 [1928]: 132n1; but see also note 49). ` -vis the hostile authorities and climate of In-group Formalist solidarity vis-a opinion may also have argued for such neglect of differences within the
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group, lest the Philistines rejoice.65 Concerning motivation, however, the differences are anything but small and the ideas nothing like shared by all. So a lingering doubt remains about whether, or to what extent, he discerned this not unied front and the issues at stake. If Tomashevsky probably understood Shklovskys doctrine of motivation, including the original polar forms of reference, even though he himself altered it, and them, the recent introducer and editor of his essay on the New School evidently does not.66 Instead, he conates the two approaches or, more precisely, converts the earlier into the later. In a note ad loc, made exactly on Tomashevskys (2004 [1928]) survey of the term and the concept as originated, this editor offers the following gloss:
Motivation, in Shklovskys sense, refers to the justication that a writer provides for a character, action, description, or event in a story. For example, if an event in a text is well motivated, the reader accepts it as believable. (Gelikman 2004: 32nc)
This gloss projects Tomashevskys onto Shklovskys sense all along the motivational line. At Formalist source, to begin with, it is the device (conspicuous for its absence here) that possibly receives some motivation if at all justied in terms of life not character, action, description, event, which, as reality-items, generally serve to motivate the device. But then, this indelity to the alleged Shklovskyan original is consistent with Tomashevskys reference to motivation itself as a device, which would accordingly apply and lend a credible appearance to character, action and so forth. Again, why my above conditional if at all justied in terms of life? Because, second, nor does a writer provide (always, necessarily, throughout, or even at all) such reality-like justication for event and character, as if he were operating under Tomashevskys absolute at of motif connectivity. Rather, Shklovskys writer may opt for or (better in his view) against justifying, and so overlaying, devices. Third, the imposed generic strings and narrowing recur as well. For the connement of the motivational target and workings to narrative (all the elements listed occur in a story, denitionally so with respect to action . . . event) also issues from the motif-bound Tomashevsky, not the more inclusive, device-bound Shklovsky. Fourth,
65. On the side of the original theory, this may likewise explain why Eichenbaum keeps silent on Tomashevskys (1925) deviation in his own, better-known overview of Formalism citing with approval, instead, the latters work on poetry (1965 [1927]: 126 27) as does Shklovsky himself, who ignores it in the expanded Theory of Prose (1990a [1929]). 66. No more than did, we recall, the editors of the rst and best-known, indeed pivotal, collection of the schools writings in English, Russian Formalist Criticism (Lemon and Reis 1965: esp. 30n9).
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believable doesnt come into the original picture any more than does unbelievability or the degrees of credibility in between but paraphrases Tomashevskys realistic motivation. Fifth, even the use of the original terminology gives away the same conceptual mixture and shift. A Shklovskyan device is motivated or not, rather than well or ill motivated, especially considering the normative ground. To Shklovsky, who celebrates Tristram Shandys anti-motivational poetics, well motivated would sound like a contradiction in terms (a semantic monster analogous to a good evil) and ill motivated like a redundant negative judgment (a bad evil), if not like an aid to perception by its transparent weakness. A large variety of other usages betray in miniature similar or related confusions. Such accidents would deserve little more than passing notice did they not conveniently serve and did their recurrence not stress the need to disentangle two extremely important lines of inquiry converging on literary structure and structuring. On the one hand, Tomashevskys sporadic concern with unity might have developed into a general theory of textual coherence and integration, with its principles ranging through all the genres and levels and contexts of the literary work (if not of art and discourse generally). But such an undertaking presupposes, among other things, an incomparably bigger ensemble of hows and whats: of available patterns (linkages, sense-makings) and of discourse objects (corpora, elements) open to the patterning repertoire. By this I mean not just a wealth and specication of unifying procedures (types) that extend far beyond what is allowed for by Tomashevskys actual threefold outline all too limited as well as confused but also the denial of any pride of place to reality and realism. No privileging of representational, let alone verisimilar, least of all temporal, verbal, storied art; or else the range of the works to be unied will shrink with each privileged attribute, from discourse in general to literary narrative, Tomashevskys focal concern, exclusive even of poetry. Nor should any discourse type be privileged as a eld either of integrating measures (e.g., causality) by reference to some world preconceived (e.g., verisimilar, mobile at that), or of distinctive existents (e.g., agents here) and other referents (events, dynamic motifs) within some world to be integrated in world-like terms. And no privileging, of course, to the exclusion of every object that is other than mimetic, outside world-making, because motif-free. This translates into the most important line in need of drawing since Tomashevskys inuential account, the line that divides the integrating from the motivating arena, thrust, activity, rationale. What I call a general theory of integration accordingly presupposes a sharp disengagement from his fellow Formalists (or Aristotles or Jamess or, thus far, my own) concern with motivation, within which the relationship between art and reality (rather
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than between sound and sense, syntax and semantics, language and theme, character and plot, or beginning and ending) must hold the center of the stage. In fact, however, so far from his mind is the cutting of this umbilical cord that he adheres (and elsewhere, recall, ofcially subscribes) to Shklovskys particular narrative focus of interest as well as term: if only in their bearing on the motif sequence, exclusive of such favorite nonmimetic devices as parallelism or verbal play in narrative. Instead of widening, he gratuitously restricts the scope of so-called motivation. That Tomashevsky fails to provide additional forms of intelligibility (e.g., fantastic, ideological, generic, stylistic, affective, prosodic, intertextual, . . . ), even where they would appear logically indicated (as just shown), is only another part of the story, and not yet the most telling part at that. Thus, reconsider his very dening formula: The network of devices justifying the introduction of individual motifs or of groups of motifs is called motivation (ibid.: 78). But there is surely no reason to limit motivational techniques to the introduction of material, or in other words, to accounting for its selection alone: What is this element (world-item, motif) doing in the work? Why a gun on the wall, for example? Actually, even selection, with the need to explain it, ranges far more widely than discerned and covered in Tomashevsky, or since. For, regarding selectional features, we have to make sense of negative ones (omissions, permanent gaps) and relative ones (redundancy, scene vs. summary), as well as of those categorically present in the discourse (e.g., the choice of events, characters, times, places, speeches, thoughts, reality keys). As I already argued, such gaps, absences, discontinuities (with contradiction as limit case) and redundancies (up to extended verbatim repetitions) exert polar yet equally powerful pressures for sense-making. Between the two selectional extremes, even so, the gaps are the least coverable in Tomashevsky et al. as motivated objects, for how would one motivate what has not been introduced into the work: an absence, a negative selection? Further, I would argue, beyond the items selected for inclusion or omission or recurrence or (dis)proportioning in the work, it is no less important to explain combinatory features, local or strategic or work-length. No less varied than the repertoire of selection, these other discourse features to be explained notably include combinatory staples: temporary withholding (as with informational delay and distribution), presentational order (e.g., displaced chronology) and viewpoint (say, authorial vs. gural narration), linkage by analogy or metonymy or both, for example. All such patterns, moreover, keep ramifying and interlocking to generate progressively specic formations,
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with why-questions to match.67 Unhappily, an account geared to the introduction of material, as in or after Tomashevsky, has even less to say about registering and motivating the works combinatorics, global or local, narrative or otherwise, than about what, how, and why it selects.68 Even more restrictive is the implied theoretical linkage between motif (as distinct from motive) and motivation. Raskolnikov kills the old woman, the hero dies, the letter is received (ibid.: 67): each of these tiny, ultimate reality-items exemplies a motif. And motivation is dened by Tomashevsky as what justies the choice of a motif (rather than an occurrence, episode, agent, place) or of a motif group (ibid.: 78). Regardless of etymological validity, this motif/motivation nexus leads to the connement of integrative operations to those irreducible ontic, mimetic (i.e., narrated, ctive) particles that make up the texts world and sequence of events. All elements and structures outside the represented world are automatically excluded: whether phonic (like the sounds integrated into a rhyme pattern) or grammatical (recurrent constructions) or semantic (other than referential, like gurative elds) or ideological (thematic and normative synthesis). This implied condition of motif only is gratuitous even from within, on Tomashevskys own ground. For, as regards the artistic and compositional types in themselves, it should make no difference whether or not the elements to be explained and assimilated are world-items a syntactic unit being as amenable as an ontic one (character, occurrence) to estrangement or followability or economical exploitation. Nor is even the third, realistic variety necessarily geared to ontology all over, let alone to one composed of (or based on or dened by) motifs. Instead, strictly speaking, this last variety requires only that, of the two elements brought into a motivational pattern the device or effect and what motivates it the motivator(s), not the motivated device or effect, should belong to the works eld of reality. A characters drunken state can as readily motivate a broken syntax as a broken neck. But this of course makes the self-imposed limitation to the latters ontic domain specically ctional, at that, and dynamic, because narrative only more arbitrary and revealing. So much for how and why Tomashevsky falls hopelessly short of a general theory of (discoursive, narrative, ctional, and/or poetic) integration, which appears to be envisaged and promised by his shift of emphasis: from atom67. For further discussion and various examples, see Sternberg 1978: esp. 56ff., beginning with a set of combinatory problems, and section 4, third requirement, above. 68. This limited introductory concept has nevertheless been widely and uncritically taken up since. E.g., the Formalist concept of motivation . . . provides an answer to the question why a motif is there (Haard 1989: 10 11; see also Marshall 1976: 66; Brinker 1983: 575; Bakhtin 1984 [1963]: 252, 266, note 2; Bal 1985: 130; Wollen 2002: 60).
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ism local devices loosely collocated, with the rest of the text brushed aside, including their mimetic fac ades, if any toward unity, coherence, relevance. Nor, it will soon emerge, have these shortfalls been repaired, or so much as perceived, by later work, in Structuralism, for example. On the other hand, Tomashevsky might have pursued a different more sharply delimited but no less challenging line of inquiry by revaluating and systematizing the scattered Formalist slogans and uses into some theory of motivation proper. But for this the minimal requirement, perhaps the only one equally met in effect by Shklovsky and Aristotle, is the subsumption of diverse-looking motivational phenomena (features, exigencies, resources, techniques, occurrences) under what I distinguished as two appropriately opposed principles. With this in view, one must keep rm hold of the elusive truth regarding the criterial force of the reference to reality: it is the presence or absence of represented (notably ctive, at best also narrative) mediation, rather than of structuring value, that distinguishes the two principles. One is the aesthetic or rhetorical or communicative mode of motivation, organizing elements into patterns and effects (e.g., interest, mystery, estrangement, surprise, irony, empathy, ambiguity) addressed to the reader. The other is the referential or mimetic or specically ctional mode (realistic in the widest sense possible of world-likeness or, in narrative, also history-likeness): it organizes elements in terms of the (story)world interposed between author and reader and variously overlying or articulating the texts functional (aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative) design. This line of motivating accordingly encompasses all reality-like mediacy (via character, action, spacetime, dialogue, thought, perspective, interpersonal network). So realism in the narrow sense (verisimilitude, likelihood, reality effect, possibly even illusionism) is still relevant here; but, just like surrealism, only as a special case of mimetic motivation operating under certain aesthetic constraints. Similarly, integration still remains of paramount importance in such twofold motivational framework regardless of the elements brought into double pattern but only insofar as the integrational drive is convertible or channeled into the issue at the heart of motivation: functional mediacy vs. immediacy. For instance, how we make sense of gurative language by subjecting it to contextual operations may be, in itself, beside the point here, as it involves a sheer integrational activity; how we make sense of a metaphor in relation to the ctive persona who utters it (say, as unconscious self-revelation) and at the same time to the hidden author who manipulates him into uttering it (as deliberate, ironic betrayal of his intermediary), is a reasoning process that
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exhibits the hallmark of twofold motivational logic.69 Nor would that logic come into sense-making action when we integrate an event series into a chain merely tightening it in conformity with an alleged post hoc ! propter hoc theoretical rule (e.g., Barthes 1988b [1966]) but only if we endow the tightening process and product with an operational reason: desired effect of unity, or plain style, or readerly involvement, and the like.70 Given such distinctions, there would have been nothing to prevent Tomashevsky from going on to subdivide the primary motivational modes and elaborate their implications for textual coherence. But he observes none of them. Hence, quite apart from all internal difculties with the resulting harder fall between the stools the chasm that separates our functional and exhaustive mimetic/aesthetic, mediated/immediate opposition from his trio or any other noncontrastive analysis. A measure of the prevalence and deep-rootedness of this conceptual indecision among the Formalists is that it shows even in the work of a discriminating and synthesis-minded theorist like Tynjanov. In his remarkable essay On Literary Evolution, motivation appears in the original Shklovskyan sense: The story might be used merely to motivate style as a strategy for developing the material (Tynjanov 1978a [1929]: 70). He similarly adopts the motivated/unmotivated binarism with the conceptual and normative premise behind the terminology and applies it with condence even outside literature. In the early cinema, Tynjanov argues, camera angle and close-up were motivated as or by the viewpoint of a character. When this motivation is removed, however, they become a stylistic resource of cinema: an independent device for the selection and emphasis of the object as a meaningful sign outside all temporal and spatial [motivating] relationships (Tynjanov 1982 [1927]: 40). Shklovsky fashion, he does not even say that, with the (mimetic) motivation gone, camera angle and close-up assumed an independent (aesthetic) motivation for the device, but that they turned into an independent device. Unmotivated equals purely devised. But little of this remains in a more extensive analysis he makes elsewhere:
69. This case of metaphor as subject to double motivation has now been taken up in Yacobi 2011, including further narrative and specically perspectival variables. 70. The need and the argument for such a reason even grow, because, as it happens, the alleged rule is demonstrably wrong (Sternberg 2010: 552 55, 629 31; cf. Pier 2008). Our business, though, is not with the strength or weakness of a motivation, or motivation at large, relative to the corresponding integrations, but with the difference between the organizational principles; and that principled difference remains unaffected by this contingency, whatever its value elsewhere. (It properly, and importantly, belongs to the theory of narrative or inference.)
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` -vis all the others, the Motivation in art is the justication of some single factor vis-a klovskij, Eyxenbaum). Each factor is agreement of this factor with all the others (S motivated by its connections with the remaining factors. The deformation of factors is applied evenly. The inner motivation which takes place on the constructive level of the work tones down, as it were, the specica of the factors, making the art work light and acceptable. (Tynjanov 1978c [1924]: 130 31)
Though Tynjanovs parenthesis invokes the appropriate Formalist authorities, the denition he attributes to them here actually reects his own views and interests.71 Note in particular four motivational differences from his own orthodox use of Shklovskys concept, as quoted above. First, there is the shift from justication as addition (story merely brought in to motivate style) to justication as welding of elements (each . . . motivated by its connections with all the others). Second, the notorious device, isolated or self-contained, gets replaced by factor as part of a whole. Third, motivational linkage insistently extends to all textual components, including meter and syntax, rather than kept limited to world-items. Even the value-laden judgment implicit in the cinematic development traced the approval of how the close-up shed its motivation to become an independent device undergoes a sea change. The normative bias is still noticeable in the equation of motivated with light (as opposed to difcult or perceptible) art, but it has been given a radical twist, indeed almost turned upside down. For what makes such art light is not the subordination of the motivating to the motivated elements Shklovskys ideal but their balance and indistinguishability. Either way, nally, it is relations, not isolated ploys, that count for Tynjanov, making or breaking differential structures. As we move from the rst to the second context, then, we again note what we diagnosed in Tomashevsky: the passage from Shklovskyan motivation proper to (this time, undesirable, because lightening) synthesis and intelligibility. Only by such a variety of maneuvers for conceptual reorientation, with occasional lapses that bespeak unawareness, could the most holistic of the Russian Formalists the rst and maybe last genuine poetic Structuralist operate with the same term introduced by the most atomistic of the lot, his close friend and associate, the creator of the new theory of plot (Tynjanov 1982 [1927]: 47). But then, Tynjanovs motivation remains a functional concept, even if no longer involving a reference to the world for disguise; and so, unlike Tomashevskys, it in effect maintains the vital difference from what we call
71. Perhaps misled by this invocation, however, OToole and Shukmans (1977: 38 39) Glossary of Formalist Terminology strings together this denition with Shklovskys and, for good measure, Tomashevskys.
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integration. More recent echoes, usages, theories, often including professed or obvious follow-ups, betray failures to appreciate this difference even in practice, and thus to delimit the object and method of inquiry. These undiscriminating revisits, or reuses, no matter what they state, intend, develop, yoke together, or how they label the concepts in question, have usually gone Tomashevskys way, with further disruptive and misleading results. Take Vraisemblance and Motivation, among the most inuential of Structuralist essays. Here Genette (2001 [1968]: 253) explicitly claims to follow the Russian Formalists in dening motivation (motivacija) as
the way in which the functionality of a narratives elements is dissimulated under a mask of causal determination: so that the content can only be a motivation, in other words an a posteriori justication for the form that, in fact, determines it: Don Quixote is presented as learned to justify the intrusion of passages of criticism in the novel, the Byronesque hero is tormented to justify the fragmentary character of the composition of Byrons poems, and so forth. (2001[1968]: 253)
As a paradigm case, Genette cites with approval what sounds like a protoFormalist defense of Corneilles El Cid by a seventeenth-century critic. He avows and enumerates, in effect foregrounds, the plays long series of unlikelihoods: a young woman wants to marry her fathers murderer, a nobleman tells his servant about the business of the Council, characters are relocated to another chamber without having passed through any door, and so on. Yet this early modern critic justies each unlikelihood whether mental, ethical, social, or physical by appeal to the dramatists artistic exigencies, concluding that the author needed to do all this (ibid.: 248). Such a pragmatic reading, Genette (ibid.: 250 53) observes, will antagonize lovers of psychology and did at the time but implies elements of a functional theory of narrative aligned with Formalism and its newly conceived motivation. One might think, as Eichenbaum said of O. Henry, that Corneille and his defender had their ear bent by Victor Shklovsky. Indeed, on the evidence presented thus far, Eichenbaum would never commit the error of Genettes group reference to the Formalist school. Thus the term used here for the key concept at issue, the line of dening it, the seventeenth-century artistic and critical exemplars, the Structuralists retrospective (meta)commentary on them, the linkage of motivated to dissimulated or g leaf, even that of the motivational issues as a whole to narrative: all these actually follow Shklovsky, not the Russian Formalists at large. Importantly so, because, as we have found, they dont share any denition or application of the new common term that he introduced, except
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the estrangement key value and the negative bedrock feature: the switch away from what impels the characters. Moreover, Genette in fact vacillates between this Shklovskyan and an altogether different, or even equivocal, sense of the term motivation, which comes to the fore in his subgrouping of narrative into three types: (1) the vraisemblable narrative, with its silent, implicit motivation of the characters conduct by reference to some generally accepted worldview to which it conforms throughout (The Marquise called for her carriage and went for a drive); (2) the motivated, which manifests deviations from the prevalent worldview, but always justies them through explanatory comments and maxims (The Marquise called for her carriage and then went to bed, because she was very capricious or, the generalizing way, because, like all Marquises, she was very capricious); (3) the arbitrary, implicit again, as in (1), but with an invraisemblable (antimotivational, rather than just nonmotivated) effect in view: to the silence of conformity what goes without saying this type opposes the silence of disregard, deance, or, if you will, de-motivation, which speaks louder than words. Such arbitrary narrative, liberated from any allegiance to public opinion, tacitly refuses to account for what the public would view as its improbabilities (The Marquise called for her carriage and went to bed). Now, does this threefold (1) (3) typology, where (de)motivation looms so large, show any reasonable or even consistent basis? If designed (as suggested in the nal summary of the argument [ibid.: 254]) to differentiate implicit from explicit motivation, it is rather trivial and certainly not tripartite but, like Shklovskys original pair, binary, regardless of vraisemblance. Formal, presentational (in)explicitness is one thing, ontic (un)orthodoxy another. The typology then amounts to motivated vs. unmotivated narrative, which again contrasts, after Shklovsky, in the presence or absence of a world-like reason for what the text narrates, but with three important differences: First, the presence of such a reason in Genettes motivated narrative (2) does not merely entail that it is inferable from the narrative givens as are both Shklovskys motivated and Genettes own unmotivated variants (1, 3) but that it should itself be overtly given on the discourse surface. Thus the because clause formulated in (2), which accordingly counts for Genette as a motivation present. Inversely, even when the presence of the clause would be superuous, as in (1), and its absence repairable via gap-
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lling, as even in (3),72 a lack of motivation ensues. This insistence, echoed in Bal (1985: 132), that the motivated should be explicit, carries formalism to absurdity. Second. Only the reason here justies and explains the characters doings . . . went to bed, because she was . . . not the authors. Going back to the old psychological usage, focused on motives that drive an agent, this counterreverses even the Formalists (including Tomashevskys) unanimous shift of motivation from agentive to artistic bearing and doing.73 Third, as such, the range of Genettes motivation narrows to a limit unprecedented and never exceeded in poetics. It shrinks even further than Tomashevskys motifs (world-units ofcially static as well as dynamic, characterological along with actional) to admit motives for action alone. The object of any reasonable theory of motivation the all-inclusive array of discourse elements open to reality-like, ctional as well as aesthetic or functional explanation grows absurdly small. So much for the (1) (3) subgrouping as an explicit/implicit dichotomy. In another case, if at the same time offered as a gradation marking a descending order of probability (ibid.: 242ff.), the (1) (3) typology hardly makes any sense. It is then, to start with, theoretically narrow, and so rigid and undependable too, at the very narrative basis that determines the gradated order. Of all the available and operative criteria, no more than one is responsible here for the location of a work upon the sequence leading from the verisimilar to the improbable. This depends only on the institutionalized beliefs (doxa) of the reading public regardless of the complex of premises making up the works own reality-model, which may freely challenge, even invert those normative beliefs and the works location along the range of probability with them. Due to its ctionality and its interiority to the ctional work concerned, this reality-model can always establish its own verisimilitude and do duty for an increase in motivation at the points of divergence from the public norm. As a result, even stranger things can assume verisimilitude or motivatedness than calling for ones carriage and going to bed. Indeed, things normally deemed odd, groundless, arbitrary keep ascending the scale to assume a verisimilar, motivated appearance in ction.
72. Whereby post hoc tightens into proper hoc, especially in face of the Marquises odd-looking, inconsequential behavior. 73. A shift toward literary, especially narrative theory, it is silently followed even by Genettes wayward fellow Structuralist Roland Barthes (e.g., 1988b [1966]), down to his postStructuralist phase (Barthes 1974 [1970]: 135, 178 79).
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And vice versa, since the potentially verisimilar action can likewise descend at will toward the arbitrary. Familiar events turn strange, for example, when refracted through an unfamiliar viewpoint (e.g., Apuleiuss The Golden Ass, Swifts Gullivers Travels) or when crossed with the supernatural (e.g., Gogols The Nose, Jamess ghost stories). Inversely, anachronistic, heterocultural, or just uninformed readings (all indeed producible by such accepted worldviews) can in turn reverse the texts operative frame of existence, and with it the (un)motivatedness, both ways. Now such a reading may unknowingly transform the arbitrary into the verisimilar world image and impact, now twist the verisimilar into the arbitrary. Think of an outsider to the culture misreading its ironic, parodic, satirical, or even ctional discourses as real (istic) images of the cultures world or otherwise missing their licensed, generic ontological play and vice versa. As with authorial freedom, in short, so with readerly lapse. A busy, endless, two-way ascending/descending trafc, between the polar (1) and (3), accordingly ensues. Genettes narrow-based and rigid tripartition, with its claim to universality, therefore also proves empirically untenable. The more so since both the vraisemblable (e.g., popular romance) and the arbitrary (e.g., the fantastic from Apuleius to Kafka) often resort to circumstantial or psychological explanation. To say nothing of Genettes wholesale banishment of drama on purely presentational grounds the awkwardness and hence rarity of authorial exegesis compared with linguistic narrative from the middle (motivated) range of probability. Worst of all, this scalar (1) (3) typology is logically fallacious. It should go without saying, but apparently doesnt, that the overtness of a motivation neither entails nor necessarily correlates with its probability, having in principle as little to do with public acceptability as with internal validity. No one who has threaded his way through the commentary of a Fielding, thick with ironies and double-bluffs, will ever be tempted to make such a package deal between voice and vraisemblance, formal elucidation and semantic lucidity. Three independent features of representational strategy are thus yoked together here: (a) formal mode of articulation (the dichotomy explicit vs. implicit); (b) degree of probability (supposing it is amenable to a tripartite division); (c) referential context (external vs. internal, generic vs. empirical, conventional vs. original, etc., with their innumerable mixtures and variations). Still more disturbing than this conation of the three variables, (a) (c), is the fact that this typology if possible, to an even greater extent than Tomashevskys has lost touch with the very point at issue. Its three types are all referential, but it cannot count as an attempt to distinguish techniques of referential camouage according to their distance from the most illusive one,
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namely: realistic motivation. What precludes any such attempt are two conceptual shifts that transform the term. So much so as to divorce it from Shklovskys original bearing on camouage, which was ofcially taken up by Genette in the linkage of motivated to dissimulated within his Shklovskyan denition above. One shift concerns the relapse into the traditional use of motivation as psychological intelligibility. Hence, among numerous other things, the odd and radical connement of motivation as dissimulating mask to causal determination as motive (in the opening quote from Genette). Why privilege causality, excluding all the rest of the worlds axes and items and event ties? Only because a motive has causal force by nature. The other shift, echoing Tomashevsky, involves the opposition of the realistic not to the functional or artistic (the devised, as it were) but to the strange or nonverisimilar. In none of the three Marquise examples, not even in the one designated as arbitrary and hence expected to foreground the teleology of art at the expense of the conformity to reality, is the least aesthetic purpose either evident or assumed certainly not as an alternative to the nominal reality-like (i.e., causal) mode of organization. The whole idea of what I called functional mediacy the image of reality (e.g., action, character, landscape) used as a vehicle for discourse goals or effects simply does not belong here. For the means/end relationship between world and function is entirely lost sight of in Genette; the notion of arbitrariness as the articial logic regulating or underlying referential development gives place to arbitrariness as referential novelty, license, or sheer recalcitrance on the part of an artist refusing to play by the rules; and motivation becomes no more than an overt and/or moderately plausible technique for linking and elucidating a sequence of events. And yet, the parts amount to more than the whole. Quite a few of the points do make sense; and were we to disregard the sections characterized by an odd (nontraditional or all too traditional, because regressive) use of motivation, the remaining argument would somehow hang together. From the viewpoint of narrative intelligibility, a work grounded in convention is doubtless more easily assimilable than one deant of it; overt rhetoric may indeed (though, again, it need not) do much of the work that its dramatized equivalent leaves to the reader. It is not the novelty of these themes, all known, but their orientation that I believe suggestive. In Genettes references to Formalism, signicantly, his denitions, examples, slogans, antirealistic bias, even the terminological pairing of motivated vs. unmotivated, are all drawn
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from Shklovsky. But his wavering between illusion and intelligibility reveals a predicament similar to, and presumably descended from, Tomashevskys.74
5.4. Naturalization
This reinforces my claim that such inconsistencies in the handling of the inherited catchword partly reect a radical division or shift of interest. The clinching evidence is provided by Jonathan Cullers synoptic account of naturalization, drawing on various French Structuralist sources, combined with Veronica Forrest-Thomsons (1978) study of poetic artice, which he himself (1975: 271n19) calls the best analysis of naturalization in poetry and from which he borrows the term. This is partly why the lucidity and perceptiveness of Cullers account do more than justice to Structuralist work on this subject. However, given that Structuralist narratology associates itself with Russian Formalism and that Cullers synopsis here correlates the new term with motivation (Culler 1975: 159 60), the question is only what, or which, subject this is and which of the different but undeclared Formalist concepts it actually takes up. He discriminates ve levels of vraisemblance, in terms of which a text may be naturalized or made intelligible: 1. the real (naturalizing a discourse in relation to a model that requires no justication because it seems to derive directly from the structure of the world. We speak of people as having minds and bodies, as thinking, imagining, remembering, feeling pain, loving and hating, etc., and do not have to justify such discourse by adducing philosophical arguments); 2. cultural vraisemblance (based on various categories, stereotypes, and generalizations that make up what the culture or public opinion itself recognizes as a valid, if not universally binding, conception of the world); 3. models of a genre (a set of literary conventions or worldviews by virtue of which texts may deviate from the laws governing everyday reality and yet remain meaningful and coherent); 4. the conventionally natural (an attack on generic articiality in the name of conformity to life, with a view to forestalling objections and gaining or conventionally strengthening referential authority); 5. parody (the assimilation of one work in terms of another that it takes as its point of departure but literalizes and exaggeratingly imitates) and irony
74. Compare Genettes (and, among other Structuralists, Barthess) silent handling of estrangement equally inherited but polar to motivation as traced in Sternberg 2006: 168 96.
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(likewise involving a contrast between two positions, one overt and incongruous, the other covert and deationary). (Ibid.: 131 60) In contrast to the wavering, incoherent Genettian tripartite scheme just considered,75 Cullers straightforwardly develops and makes its point; but the point hardly coincides with mine, or even with its own correlation of the naturalizing (1) (5) with Formalisms motivating precedents (ibid.: 159 60). In fact, his consistency helps to bring out the extent to which the Structuralist concern with motivation, recuperation, naturalization, and so forth whatever its imagined antecedents actually resumes, not Shklovskys original idea and focus, but Tomashevskys silent divergence under the same motivational heading. This later concern involves, for better or worse, a shift of emphasis from the means/end (usually world/device, referential/aesthetic) relations to the forms and conditions of intelligibility and the interplay of coherence-promoting and coherence-resisting factors; in short, from motivation proper to integration. Either of these cruxes lurks behind a wide variety of names (or even more confusing, as already in Formalism, under the very name given to the other) and ostensibly unrelated or, worse, misrelated readings and critical activities that bear on the linkage and interrelation of parts into a coherent whole. And the sharper our awareness of their disparity, the better equipped we become to deal with either. Integration emerges as much the more inclusive and amorphous of the two, in that its object is nothing less than all that can make a text hang together. Therefore, for instance, the fact that Cullers quintuple typology looks far more developed than the motivational contrast (motivated vs. unmotivated) in which it historically originates is not a sign and measure of advance, but quite beside the point. The ones crudity, by nature redeemable only along oppositional lines such as my alternative mimetic vs. aesthetic, referential vs. rhetorical polarity, with its implications is left unaffected by the others renement. While that renement, in its own sphere, by no means sufces to suggest, let alone encompass, the range of factors that make and break a literary text the models and dimensions of integration.
75. Or parallel, as well as echoing, incoherencies elsewhere. In an extreme case, Phelan (2005) yokes together no fewer than four systems of justifying discourse. Among them, two are borrowed yet undeclared, let alone dened; two are relatively new and introduced as such. Thus (1) (Shklovskys) motivation (e.g., 12, 27, 28, 139, 218); (2) (Cullers) naturalization (e.g., 11, 44, 48, 83); (3) character, narrator, and disclosure [authorial] functions (e.g., 12 14); (4) mimetic, thematic, and synthetic functions (e.g., 12 15). The four may even co-occur (e.g., 11 13), without ever falling into place. Given the silent use of the rst two metalanguages, this quartet is predictably never integrated, or even correlated; but it would seem to compound overlaps with opacities and disharmonies. Too many cooks . . .
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The new terminology itself already encapsulates and delimits the theorys all too narrow range. Observe the nominal as well as conceptual choice to subsume the naturalizing forms (1) (5) under vraisemblable/vraisemblance, so that both interchangeable terms entail an anchorage in the world, singled out thereby as eld, point, target of reference. Next, consider what this inherent grounding betrays and enforces in miniature. The pride of place thus given in Cullers umbrella and subgrouping to ctive reality as in Tomashevsky and for much the same reason imposes severe restrictions of scope. Why focus on the assimilation of referential elements, at the expense of the phonic, the lexical, the grammatical, the thematic, the communicative, or any other (con-, inter-)textual dimension? Dont all these have their conditions and conventions of coherence? And doesnt this coherence or intelligibility likewise result from synthesizing operations that relate part to part (e.g., sound, word, clause, idea, dialogic turn) and part to whole? What is more, why focus on referential models (texts, contexts, worlds) to the exclusion of, say, such omnipresent compositional and reconstitutive principles as analogy or implicature or logical and chronological sequence? And why focus on referential relations rather than literary interests and effects as sources of intelligibility, on static models and congurations (e.g., the worldview involved in cultural vraisemblance) rather than dynamic processing and synthesis, or on naturalizing rather than disruptive (e.g., gapping, competing, unsettling, laying bare) forces?76
76. Here Forrest-Thomson 1978 does better, though she deals, not with the (counter)forces themselves, but with some of their products, and within modern poetry only. She thus opposes bad naturalization, which one imposes on a resisting discontinuous poem, to good. Still, the holes just exposed in the coverage and application of relevant integrating mechanisms if the word holes ts the vast absent, silent majority of aids to (dis)unity largely reappear even here, of course. So they do in another of the rare coherent sets of unifying measures, one far better known and immediately concerned with a different art, yet again much too limited even in its own terms. Within lm studies, the standard account of motivation in Bordwell et al. (1985: 19 23) lucidly reformulates Tomashevskys three supposed types (compositional, realistic, aesthetic) and adds an original fourth, intertextual (mainly generic) variety. The addition doubtless helps, but so would a large assortment of other integrational (motivating) devices from the repertoire I outlined, some even implicit in the lm analysts later chapters. So why begin and end the development of the inherited trio with intertextual motivation? On the other hand, as one closely associated with the present theory, Tamar Yacobi is of course alive to the selectiveness of the ve mechanisms of integration rst presented together in Yacobi 1981: the genetic, generic, functional, existential, and perspectival. She has actually drawn those ve from the vast repertoire of integration outlined here not as a closed, let alone a complete set, but in the service of a fresh approach to narrative (un)reliability as a perspectival hypothesis: its collocation with the other four integrating mechanisms sharply illumi` -vis the various nates both its hypothetical status and its perspectivizing distinctness vis-a alternatives. So, adding or dropping some mechanism(s) would make a heuristic, or expository,
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Which simply points the moral that, within a theory of integration, the clear-cut antithesis between referentially mediated and unmediated patterning must give place to a crisscross of equipollent and variously overlapping divisions, not necessarily marked by any functional logic. For what informs the multiform activity I have called integration is not so much a sense of purpose as a rage for order. If, in other words, such a theory (like the interpretive activity it systematizes) always works with an opposition, it is with the all-inclusive one directing the whole process of reading: between the coherent and the opaque, the fragmentary, the incongruous. So any mechanism that serves to establish or undermine, initiate or terminate, reveal or conceal, resolve or ambiguate, any pattern (and thus to determine intelligibility) deserves equal consideration, though its integrating role will of course vary in particular cases. Thus the mechanism of integration may be:
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functional (authorial strategy) or genetic (authorial slip, trauma, pathology); formal (including typographic arrangement) or semantic (from coreference to world-picture); sequential (like causality) or suprasequential (from rhyme to thematic counterpoint); extratextual (historical circumstance or philosophical system) or intratextual (repetition, built-in probability-register) or intertextual (from allusion to convention).
Nor does this rich variety yet exhaust the lines of patterning at our disposal. The integration mechanism can also be normative or empirical, lexical or grammatical, ear- or eye-bound, psychological or ideological, perceptual or perspectival, cognitive or affective, referential or rhetorical, logical or chronological or analogical, ubiquitous or archetypal, or generic or unique. And so on, till the whole repertoire of ordering resources and sense-making combinations available to humans has been covered.
not a theoretical difference to the novel conception of (un)reliability, just as it would in presenting the larger theory of motivation and/or integration on which the concept rests. (Compare also Sternberg 2001a: 150 67 and section 7 below.) This is not always understood, however, among the analysts who have adopted or otherwise discussed the vefold sensenning 2005: making (e.g., Cohn 1999: 73, 148; Zerweck 2001: 64ff.; Ferenz 2005: 138ff.; Nu 98; Shen and Xu 2007: 51 52; McCormick 2009: 32ff.; Shen 2011). Some appear to mistake this selective and largely replaceable quintet chosen with a particular goal in view, at that for a closed and complete set: for the whole range of human, or at least narrative, integration. Here precisely, except for their specic focus and follow-up on (un)reliability, they recall Tomashevsky and his latter-day adherents or analogues.
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To recognize the magnitude and complexity of the task is hardly to depreciate Cullers vefold grouping, still less the underlying purpose that it really serves. But, given the drastic shift from functional (im)mediacy to the adventures of reading, one might expect the former to be, if not jettisoned here, then at least distinguished and reserved for its proper motivational context. But one waits in vain for such a dividing line. If anything, were it not for the mixed and misleading Tomashevsky-Genette (etc.) heritage, it would be surprising to discover how closely Culler (ibid.: 159 60) relates Structuralist naturalization and Formalist motivation: These [Formalist] varieties of motivation represent different ways of naturalizing the text, of relating it to models of intelligibility: realistic motivation involves my rst and second levels of vraisemblance . . . and artistic motivation the second, third, fourth, and fth. Though not groundless, considering the Formalism-old split, these equations turn out extremely problematic even if we leave out more obviously unmatchable naturalizing devices among those Ive just outlined (the genetic, above all). The rst equation identies the realistic type, Tomashevsky-fashion, with the adherence to two external and powerful verisimilar models the real and cultural vraisemblance excluding the conventional and otherwise ad hoc. But take, for instance, the works justication of a referential ambiguity in terms of a naturally limited narrator like a child, a conventionally limited Watson, a fantastically limited observer from outer space, and a parodistically limited Catherine Morland. Given their common goal to produce and sustain an informational blur, arent all these diverse tactics of harnessing the restrictedness inherent in the human condition revealed to be of a single, more or less realistic (world-like) mode of motivation especially when compared with the recourse to a freely omniscient teller, who could, if he would, enlighten us at once? A naturalizer may indeed prefer to oppose the childs narrative to the others on naturalistic grounds. A motivator, his rst concern not with naturalness but with mimesis as a devised means/end complex, will unhesitatingly join it to the others, on the grounds that they all temper the bluntness of the nal explanation The artful author wont tell with the referential indirection of The limited mediator cant (or couldnt) tell. Again, look at the second coupling of motivation with different ways of naturalizing the text. It in fact identies the artistic type with a series of models, (2) (5), whose employment, just like that of the only one (the real ) excluded, may no less serve to synthesize elements by recourse to some image of reality than to rhetorical strategy. Among models of a genre, for example, the appeal to that of tragedy will integrate Oedipus Rex as a causal sequence
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enacted by the characters and/or as our own ordered experience of catharsis (pity, fear) along a riddling and surprising process. As such, these integrational options are divisible, or joinable, or even replaceable and/or reinforceable by various other forms of coherence based on (1) (5), let alone the entire repertoire of sense-making. Possible replacements and/or reinforcements include prosodic, syntactic, genetic, thematic, normative, analogical, psychological, conventional, innovative unities or, for that matter, disunities that the plays critical record indeed exhibits. All this hardly equals the welldened twofold complex where, say, the tragedys (dis)ordered chain of events serves as mimetic motivation for the aesthetic motivation of generating catharsis, along with the rest of the effects aroused (here, also twisted) in the process. One still needs to guard against the results or analogues of Cullers misequations. Apparently misled by them, Fludernik (1996: 31) invokes Cullers naturalization, only to turn it back sometimes into motivation, and purposive motivation at that, the way I distinctively redened it in Sternberg 1983c (cited in Fludernik 1993: e.g., 29 31, 452). Thus, once naturalized, as it were, inconsistencies become necessary functional elements (Fludernik 2003: 51 52). Or more explicitly: one can naturalize texts . . . by providing a realistic motivation that helps to ensure readability (1996: 46). This bracketing of the concepts also explains how Fludernik (1996) comes to associate naturalization with what Culler himself doesnt single out, namely: the pressure of inconsistencies, which I repeatedly foregrounded (e.g., 1978, 1983c, 1985) as the strongest trigger for motivation and its reasoned patterning, because they force open the most disharmonious and inescapable gaps. Such projection between the concepts, therefore, hardly benets either, and least reects Cullers own priorities: the focus on intelligibility, above all, rather than on goal-directed inference and coherence, with the quest for them by reference to the author (as has just emerged). Inversely, and as confusingly, with the thoughtless or doctrinal replacement of motivation with the naturalizing concept as well as term; and nowhere more frequently so than regarding the crux of (un)reliable discourse.77
77. This shift betrays itself in references made even by followers to Tamar Yacobis work on (un)reliability as one of ve different mechanisms of sense-making: the perspectival kind rather than the genetic, generic, functional, or existential. Unsurprisingly, Yacobi herself distinguishes among these various terms and notions with special care, according to the lines drawn here. By explicit appeal to those lines, on the one hand, she describes the vefold set as mechanisms of integration rather than motivation, since most of them can be employed (and the [genetic] is typically employed) without the readers interrelating world and function; whereas the perspectival one not only enables but often encourages such interpretation. It then has us ground the works mimetics in its poetics this narrator fullls such and such a purpose or accounts
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Outside the Formalist tangle, and its progeny, then, our motivational antithesis in no way subsumes but crosscuts the levels of intelligibility that may seem to elaborate it.
6. Integral and Differential Motivation: The Mimetic Function
The protagonists of motivation are ction and function, reality-likeness and rhetoric, world-making and discourse-making, rather than part and whole in general; its antagonist, the sense or threat of the discourses purposelessness, hence the absence of any inferable means/end coupling, rather than simply looseness and incongruity; its arena, conned to the texts network of designed relationships, rather than enlarged to encompass genetic contexts and symptomatic mechanisms as well; and the internal tensions between its two modes as alternative, mimetic vs. aesthetic, ctional vs. functional, logics of patterning are always resolvable and always in favor of the second mode, by way of a higher teleological explanation, rather than of synthesis
for this or that incoherence and so doubles as a motivation in terms of unreliability (Yacobi 1981: 119, including note 3, and 1987: 365). On the other hand, she rightly disassociates such motivation, integration, and their dividing line from Cullers approach to the problem, encapsulated in naturalization (1981: 114n1). Despite all this care, however, some mentions or applications by others indiscriminately change, alternate, juxtapose the distinct terms, so that the theory and its mechanisms get naturalized, from label to (il)logic. Take Zerweck (2001: 154 55): Tamar Yacobi has long developed a model of readerly strategies of naturalization and thus provided a systematic account of . . . the interplay between the writers and the readers operation. Among other integration measures, this account offers the perspectival principle, whereby the reader, confronted with referential difculties, incongruities, or (self-)contradictions, can naturalize a given text as unreliable. This betrays a manifold mixture. For example, readerly . . . naturalization interchanges here (and not only here) with the motivational writer/ reader interplay. Observe also how naturalization is crossed here (as often elsewhere, Fludernik style) with my emphasis on the exemplary role of difculties, incongruities, or (self-)contradictions: being so troublesome like redundancy at the opposite extreme they perceptibly trigger and complicate the motivating and/or integrating process as a quest for sense, down to trial and error. To Culler, instead, the typical, and worst, naturalization is the least demanding, processual, conscious. Even if born of carelessness, nally, such mixtures are nevertheless tendentious. Just witness how they frequently correlate with a shift from Yacobis anchorage in a model of implied communication and an authorial reference point for (un)reliability judgments by us motivators (details in section 7 below) to a reader-centered, uncontrolled, authorless naturalizing, via unreliability, inter alia. This shift of models traces back to the earliest and most important naturalizer of nning 2005, where he turns communicational on unreliability: see his own account of it in Nu second thoughts, but still associates Yacobi as well as himself with Cullers readerly and purposefree naturalization (ibid.: 98).
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per se.78 Motivation thus reveals itself to be less a special area than a (or the) dimension of integration, one where much (though not all) of the same range of phenomena is (re)grouped from a distinctive, because goal-centered standpoint. A still closer look will also reveal why and how the two frameworks of structuring bear this relationship of partial overlap amid discriminateness. Integration, as the overall quest for coherence, driven by our rage for order, includes a variety of patterning and sense-making mechanisms common to all discourse, along with type-specic devices like enchainment in narrative or entailment in logic. These all-discoursive integrational mechanisms encompass, inter alia, assimilating troublesome or just unrelated discourse elements to syntax, co-reference, stylistic register, generic rule, or breach, analogical gestalt, hierarchical (descending or ascending) sequence, ideological bias, editorial interference, memory lapse, Freudian slip, irony, and point of view. Motivation, with its focus on the poetic license or presumption of ctionality or world-making generally brings out the principles of order and ordering inherent in representational discourse, and radicalized in literature as a privileged, often playful, always changing type of such discourse and pattern-making at large.79 To give one of many examples, even a piece of language that is deviant to the point of virtual incoherence (as autonomous speech garbled by you or me in the real world) may cohere on more than one level within a ctional context (as fabricated and mediated speech, from Mrs. Khokhlakovs grotesque transitions in The Brothers Karamazov to Benjys infantile monologue in The Sound and the Fury to the unidiomatic English of foreigners like Joseph Conrads Stein and Vladimir Nabokovs Pnin).
78. Always, unless one turns evaluator by prejudging the tension, as would illusionists or their opponents, the so-called Romantic Ironists. Higher, because this explanation supplies a reason (meta-motivational, as it were) for the tense interplay between the workings or the products of the two logics themselves: e.g., that the mimetic one has been weakened, or ironized or parodied, in order to throw the aesthetics into relief. 79. For balance, at the same time, it enables us to meet (map, motivate, materialize) them in various discourse forms: as guaranteed by the Proteus Principle, the narrative force can lurk in, or below, any surface, no matter how (in)different or even alien to the narrative genre it appears. Ive repeatedly demonstrated this balancing license since Sternberg 1978, 1981a, against the Aristotle-old objectivist, surface-bound (i.e., overconstrained) approach to the genre. A constitutive rather than occasional or form-specic or otherwise conned license, moreover, it enters into the explicit redenition of narrative/narrativity in the functional terms of the mind generating it by its felt unique effects (best known, perhaps, from Sternberg 1992a: 529ff.). Therefore, the operation of narrativizing the apparently nonnarrative is not limitable to any special cases: to those, for example, where it saves an awkward discourse, as Fludernik (1996) would specialize this ever-available, protean reading option of investing discourse with narrativity (Sternberg 2010: 638 39 and passim). Hence the range of the motivating law at issue here. See also notes 84 and 105.
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Above all, while the integrational imposition of coherence may be, the motivational must be, regulated by a sense of the texts purpose. This is why integration covers, while motivation excludes, patterning by way of the unconscious, of the self-betraying, of the genetic in short, of intelligibility centered in the biographical as opposed to the implied author. And while integration has a thousand faces, motivation has no more than two, but not with-out compensation, either. Its two faces are incomparably vital, large, welldened, and, where they co-occur, also complementary, interactional, and all-encompassing in regard to the operative discourse: one face is turned to the text as a model of the world, the other to the text (notably including its world) as an artful structure, a goal-directed transaction between author and reader. Hence, among other things, the power of the motivating doublet to reconcile the ction of reality with the reality of ction. Nothing can better illuminate the rst member of this pair than the law of narrativity. The nature of narrative including the narrative dimension available to all temporal art, even to all world-making as such exerts its distinctive representational constraints. Like the tragic hero caught in the consequences of his own acts, the artists freedom of action increasingly narrows from the moment he has made his initial choices. Few decisions look so elementary as that to compose a narrative rather than, say, a descriptive or concrete poem. (Beside it, opting for a tragedy as discussed above, with regard to Aristotles priorities evidently makes a specic and limiting choice.) But even this elementary generic decision already forces the authors hand: narrative uniquely entails the development of a process of change within a referential framework or reality-model, as well as unfolding the more common (verbal or otherwise temporal) changeful sequence along which we gradually process and experience the narrated process. The twinning of these processes generates narrativity through the inevitable, unmatchable play of suspense, curiosity, and surprise between them all along: the genres master effects, interests, progressions, gap to gap-lling quests for knowledge. Still, it is the twinning of the unique actional process with the widespread discourse process that ultimately makes the difference. It marks off narrative/narrativity from other representational genres (e.g., description), even from those likewise boasting an inherent, medium-given presentational sequence (e.g., literary or cinematic description), a fortiori from discourse in general; it also motivates, in dynamic world-like terms, the narratives strategies, goals, effects, including the three universals born of its twinning and interplay with the discourse process. Serving as both generic prime marker and motivator, the action doubles as the highest constraint, a sine qua non.
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Whatever else the storyteller, in whatever medium, does or fails to do, whatever the world he creates or invokes and the poetics guiding his procedure, whatever his repertoire of means and ranking of ends, he must then realize (embody, ctionalize) his strategies in and through the dynamic interplay of event, character, and circumstance. It is therefore not the evervariable demands or preferences of readers or artists (e.g., for illusion, laying bare, empathy, impartiality, estrangement, wonder, closure, authenticity, verisimilitude) but the invariant logic and necessary condition of the art (storytelling as actional dynamics with, or for, peculiar interests) that enforces mimetic motivation in the most basic sense of the term: the appeal to some mobile image, or ction, of reality as a realizing (embodying, worldconstructing) measure. The best way to highlight this all-important enabling principle of narrative is to recast it in terms of the basic dualism, fabula/sjuzhet, with which modern narrative theory has operated since the Formalists. Best of all is the irony involved. Shklovsky himself, the reinventor of this Aristotle-old dualism along with that of (un)motivated device, was too atomistic and anti-representational to appreciate the principled overall correlation between the two reinvented pairs. Those dualisms once correlated, however, it should leap to the eye that the fabula as the narrated actional dynamics, or underlying chrono-logic, provides an indispensable narrative-length mimetic motivation for the sjuzhet, and so enables, indeed realizes the narratives aesthetic, discoursive motivations: its art, goals, devices, effects. (It does so, further, no matter how you characterize them: my own denition begins with the universal generic trio of interests suspense, curiosity, surprise but the principle holds regardless, as long as narrative goes with some effect.) Quite plainly, if no fabula chronology, then no sjuzhet teleology, just as if no Aristotelian beginning ! middle ! end whole, then no nished plot. Whether you like it or not and todays anti-representationalists, a fortiori anti-narrativists, still dont the genre stands or falls on this sequential twinning and interplay of the one motivation with the other, its correlate.80 In the light of this rock-bottom common denominator, the genres peculiar rationale not only cuts across differences in the aesthetic or rhetorical effects of narrative(s), or in how we choose or happen to motivate even a certain narrative in such terms. The disparities between particular forms of mimetic motivation also turn out to be quite irrelevant to the polarity with the aes80. Hence the fallacy in the traditional attempts to dene narrative/narrativity by one of its sequences, usually by that of events (as Ive often argued, most recently in Sternberg 2009: 459 64, 2010).
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thetic mode as such. A case in point is the difference between conventional and original motif-groupings, whose undue emphasis by Tomashevsky leaves out of account the distinctive referential feature adhering to both motivations alike. A tired old plot, or plot schema, initiates an action no less than does its estranging metamorphosis into a felt re-emplotment, even one compounded with the overt laying bare or parody of the outdated devices. As regards actional mimesis, theres essentially little to choose between the extremes. ` -vis the romance tradition, Austens Northanger Abbey Thus Don Quixote vis-a making fun of the Gothic tale, or Max Beerbohm (1993 [1912]) parodying James, Conrad, and other novelists. Such commonality in world-making, across all variations in novelty value, evidently stretches from events to existents: familiar/defamiliarized character, place, state of affairs, reality-model, to the last ontic feature. For another example of mimetic commonality across variations in something or everything else whatever their distinctive force on their appropriate axes reconsider Genettes threefold vraisemblable/motivated/ arbitrary subgrouping. Doesnt the Marquise ordering her carriage, even in its so-called arbitrary variant (and went to bed), perforce represent a character in action and hangs together accordingly? The arbitrary subtype hangs together as a tiny narrative, in short, just like the motivated (because she was very capricious) or the implicit vraisemblable (and went for a drive) alternatives. So the tripartition drawn by Genette among these, apart from its other problems, comes at a similar price to that incurred by Tomashevsky, especially by his overstated original/conventional dualism: losing sight of the mimetic common ground, one that the absent because . . . even energizes, hence specializes, into felt narrativity. Most important, the same holds true for the (variously termed) distinction between the probable and the improbable. To identify probable (realistic) with what I call mimetic or referential motivation is again to mistake the part for the whole. And this leaps to the eye against the background of a system like Aristotles, especially since he is the last theorist to be accused of slighting the claims of probability. There we nd different, even polar ontic lines or levels workable for a single goal, and so, in this basic regard, interchangeable as mimetic variants. Confronted by the necessity of bringing his hero to an unhappy (or happy) end, the artist may thus arrange a recognition or a providential interference, devise character-traits or external pressures, activate his own premises or draw upon popular tradition, choose any realitymodel, from the necessary or probable to the possible to the improbable. The plots shape, and so its effect on the reader, will of course vary according to the nature and interrelation of its propulsive forces. (Since for Aristotle the works value depends on the internalization of its structure of probabilities,
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such disparities may even have far-reaching normative consequences.) But regardless of all these variations in probability, each choice will be regulated by the inescapable logic of imitation, realizing the functional requirements of art (from unity to catharsis) in terms of referential processes and linkages analogous to life. Poetic at, features, drives, scales, impacts will then all be mapped onto what I call the actional dynamics of narrative. The probable and the improbable thus emerge as equipollent subtypes of mimetic motivation. At this level of generality, the actional progress of the most fantastic, convention-bound, or even incoherent tales, dramas, or movies shows the same two faces and calls for the same double-edged operations as Jane Austens Emma. And once we manage to extricate the universal opposition between the two motivating lines from the clutter of vogues, genres, conventions, prejudices, and other red herrings, we realize that the opposition is universal: it applies and ramies far beyond the constant of narrativity, just exemplied, or, further still, beyond the limits of narrative itself. The twofold motivational logic governing the ction of reality is in no way conned to procedures that derive from the genre-specic regulating necessary condition of actional dynamics neither as regulating nor as necessary nor nally as an actional condition. Rather, this double logic may apply to any pattern, any means-end relationship, any selectional and combinatory measure in the literary text. By this I do not mean or no longer mean just any element in the world of the literary text, but Ill start with such elements in the interests of gradual advance. Take, for example, the metonymic principle of linkage, operating in terms of spatiotemporal relatedness, or contiguity, and so governing all and only world-items: whatever points, belongs, assimilates to the eld of mimesis as we (re)construct it, in short. Thus the nexus or, in discourse order, the shift between producer and product, illness and symptom, parent and child, house and yard, exterior and interior, smoke and re, or cause and effect in general. And the stronger the contiguity the more encoded within the operative reality-model the rmer the inference between them, too: the mention of either can then signify, characterize, round out the other, as smoke does re. This all-mimetic metonymic principle of linking contiguous items, therefore, doesnt depend on their typology as imagined, represented objects. It runs across the boundaries that otherwise mark off ontic varieties, down to opposites: events from states, agents from inert (co)existents, doing from being, portraits (verbal, visual, composite, ekphrastic) from motion pictures, narrative from descriptive representation, ctionalizing included.81
81. See further discussion, theoretical and illustrative, in Sternberg 1978: 131 32, 208 34, 1981a, 1985: 321 64, 1999: 372 76. The last of these also relates the notion of contiguity to
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For example, this metonymic principle informs both the referential dynamics of plot (as causality) or stream of consciousness (as associative sequence) and the referential statics of landscape (as contiguity among world-items existing simultaneously, rather than in sequence). If a cause bears a metonymic relation to its effect in forming a chrono-logical chain, and a thought to its neighbors, whether triggered or triggering, then so does a tree relate to a neighboring house. Or a body part to the ones next to it, whereby they can form a motivated order of description, going up or down, from right to left or left to right. Similarly with the relation of persons to their native or surrounding environment: given an appropriately tight (e.g., Balzacian) model of contiguous existence, we even advance from simple interlinkage to inference between mental and material reality, secret and social `re Goriots opening description of the repulsive boarding-house and life.82 In Pe its owner, Madame Vauquer, for example, the milieu and the character do not merely dene each other by their metonymic association; they have thereby even determined each other over time as if they were shell and oyster, in Balzacs favorite metaphor or developed an eerie two-way causal interaction (Sternberg 1978: 208 34). The parity across generic polarity runs further yet, on a ground different and normally even deeper than the time/space, sequential/simultaneous, dynamic/static correspondence between world axes. It also shows in the metaphoric below the metonymic linkage, the patterning by similarity that underlies, reinforces, possibly even outranks that by contiguity, its mimetic surface and motivator. Below the line or web, the narrative or network of contiguous items, the text then distributes subtle metaphorical or analogical links whether the symmetrical shape given to the beginning and end of The Ambassadors or the network of correspondences unifying Balzacs minute descriptions (ibid.). In either case, further, the one, reality-like patterning not only motivates the other, as an aid-cum-alibi to a superior artistic design, but can also join forces with it. Thus Darcy and Elizabeth gure as metonymic analogues in Jane Austen (ibid.: 129 58), just like any of the numberless pairs in verbal or visual description that invite comparison besides their mimetic ties of love, family, or simple co-presence. So authorial strategy must in each case (telling/depicting, chronologizing/analogizing) be realized in and through the spatiotemporal attributes of the represented object itself. Or from the readers viewpoint, the process of
the index, the least well-dened of Charles Peirces three semiotic types, compared with the better-understood symbol and even icon. 82. This undertheorized relation has now been studied in Duchovni-Tamir 2007.
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aesthetic synthesis and explanation goes hand in hand with the piecing together of the ctive construct. To pass to a very different area of motivation that yet exhibits anew its universality. In the Odyssey, the rhetorical need to communicate the expositional premises to the reader is (inter alia) met obliquely, via two dialogue scenes about the Odysseus affair: rst through the divine assembly on Olympus and then through the civic assembly at Ithaca. Both of the speech interchanges among characters, harking back to the past, mediate (realize, motivate) the communication of the necessary antecedents to us, at second hand. Needless to say, the distance between Olympus and Ithaca, heavenly and earthbound mediators, correlates with some variation in plausibility, as well as in knowledge and informativeness and reliability. But these distances are bridged in the common opposition of the assembly scenes, with their retrospective dialogues, to such aesthetically motivated devices as Homers own retrospect on Odysseuss scar in his own epic and inspired voice, on his own supreme authority where the same expositional function is performed by way of immediate communication from authorized teller to audience. Between the same motivational opposites, the authors choice to delegate generalizing commentary to an authoritative agent, whether human (chorus or raisonneur) or supernatural (ghost, god, or God), contrasts with its direct authorial pronouncement: This, as I could not prevail on any of my actors to speak, I was obliged to declare myself (Fielding 1994 [1749]: 142, bk. 3: 7). The order of these examples goes to show, moreover, that as we move from functional necessity to choice, the at of mimetic mediation in representational and, above all, storied discourse may give place to the license of purely aesthetic operation. Thus, for narrativity, the propulsion of the represented (actional) dynamics is inescapable, so that, however articial the tale, even the storyworld itself, the characters used by the author to propel things forward in it, where and as required, nevertheless seem to be going about their own business in their own sphere of activity. A twofold motivation ensues, willy-nilly, with the latter dynamics justifying and covering and obeying the former. Next in mandatory force to this dening generic imperative comes the pressure for expositional antecedents like the reality key, the dramatic arena, the social matrix, the protagonists character, all often causative on pain of disorientation, ambiguity, misreading, or, at least, of belated gaplling in retrospect. Here, the mimetic at gets looser but not altogether lifted. On the one hand, the exposition, though it forms the basis of the narratives referential lucidity and structure of probabilities of its if-plot, in short already enables great freedom and variety. The motivator may convey it directly to the reader (the way Jane Austen greets us with a portrait
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`re Goriot opens by of Emma, handsome, clever, and rich or Balzacs Pe describing the Vauqueur pension) as well as through ctive indirection (via metonymic inference, say).83 On the other hand, even in the former case, though the narratives communication of antecedents is aesthetically motivated in terms of the need to enlighten (or mislead or intrigue) the reader, the communicated material itself always still assumes a mimetic guise, in that it is identied and patterned and explained as part of the objective represented world. It forms a network of contiguities, in short. This is how events, existents, enchainments, and all other referents (e.g., Emma, the Vauquer house) make sense by nature, as it were, whatever the art and impact of the underlying discoursive formations they realize. The objective mimetic guise will even grow thicker at will, whenever the author adds to it as always possible a subjective counterpart. Thereby, the expositional communication passes through the voice or view of some mediating character (e.g., dialogist, soliloquist, reector, correspondent) from within the narrated world itself. Thus Odysseus, Darcy, Molly Bloom, all hark back to the distant past, in speech, writing, and thought, respectively. So much for why and how the imperative of mimetic going with aesthetic pattern, of reference overlying rhetoric, lessens between our rst two cases on the way from narrativity to exposition. In a third case, the imperative of mimesis is lifted altogether and replaced with a choice. Normative commentary, an interpolated discourse on ethics or literature, say, need not have any reference to the storyworld, and its optional nature will then correlate with purely aesthetic motivation. Thus Fielding as commentator on his own tale, in the face of the characters supposed refusal of the job. All this exhibits, diversies, and grades the spectrum between narrative must and can, with the options far outnumbering the dictates. The new ndings, therefore, hardly affect my claim that any pattern and every means-end relation is amenable to mimetic distancing, and hence to bimodal synthesis. For even the most abstract commentary may be ctionalized through its delegation from authorial to gural speaker, or writer, or reector. Thus, for example, the act of ventriloquism whereby Nabokov makes the dramatized narrator of Sebastian Knight voice part of his own aesthetics: The heroes of the book are what can be loosely called methods of composition (chap. 10). Or recall how, during the genesis of War and Peace, Tolstoy keeps shifting passages of commentary between voices: from his own to Prince
83. Hence the obvious untruth of the statement that whatever functions to facilitate our understanding of the ctional world is referentially motivated (Keating 2003: 19), though it can be.
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Bolkonskys, and then back. In fact, contrary to what is suggested by Fieldings pose of helplessness, it is only because he doesnt choose to prevail on any of his actors to formulate, and so mimeticize, the novels theme that he himself appears by way of chorus on the stage. The disentanglement of the mimetic constant the mediation of the texts ction of reality, existing independently, as it were, of the rhetorical frame occupied by author and reader also reveals the true nature of its variables. Notable among them is that concerning the reality of ction: the mimetic as the probable or verisimilar or, strictly, realistic. The tremendous inuence that mimesis in this narrower, more demanding sense has exerted on the theory and practice, thematics and development of literary art must not blind us to its contingent status as differential motivation. Though provocativelooking, maybe, this term implies no demotion within the works scale of signicance. The purpose is rather to bring out that every instance of mimetic motivation serves at least two distinct artistic aims or exigencies, and to separate its obligatory constants from its variables: xed or recurrent world-like features (e.g., mimetic in the widest sense) as against those that are optional or peculiar (e.g., mimetic in the narrow, hence differential sense). Briey, instead of treating each case of motivation as a simple and isolated phenomenon, we can use the integral-differential contrast always on an ad hoc basis for juxtaposing it with its alternatives, so as to gain a fuller, sharper understanding of its choice and workings. This operation is less complex and, I trust, much more familiar than it perhaps sounds in the analytic language needed to articulate and conceptualize it into a theory of motivating discourse. But it goes as follows, with that richer understanding in view. Faced with any specic case of motivation, we then place it in some set(s) of analogous cases, actual or possible, break it down into the relevant aesthetic and mimetic features, and interrelate these features in functional terms against the background of this cases analogues. Within either motivational logic, the integral feature or complex of features runs through the whole set of analogues and forms the ground for comparison indeed, for putting the set together in the rst place. Within the aesthetic mode, this integral feature lies in a common end or effect serving as a principle of discourse organization: suspense, closure, redundancy, ambiguity, empathy, catharsis, intelligibility, cohesiveness, estrangement, control of attitude, implicit characterization, semantic density, and so on. Within the mimetic mode, the integral feature lies in whatever aspects or components of the storyworld can be explained in relation to the necessity or choice to actualize and mediate that common end, rather than give it up altogether (when mandatory) or give it over to unmediated, purely aesthetic treatment (when optional).
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In the case of suspense as the aesthetic integral, for example, the corresponding mimetic integral that produces and freely prolongs it would be a gap left about the narrated future in the narratives event order. Such a match of integrals evidently displays itself in our hope and fear about Odysseus, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary (Flauberts and Chabrols), Lambert Strether, Jean Brodie, and all other objects of the suspense set. Contrast Shklovsky on narrative motivation (and silently echoing him, Propp on the folktales event sequence, with his more open and numerous adherents). In effect, they distorted this picture by acknowledging only half of it at best, or even only half of a half, since their view is limited in two basic respects. Recall their claim that the storyworld motivation for a given function may widely vary, while the function itself stays constant, rather than likewise (inversely, symmetrically) varying beneath a single motivation. This dogma recognizes and privileges only what I term integral features, exclusive of differentials, which, if arising at all, count as merely instrumental, hence so easily changeable. And among the integral features, the dogma concentrates on the aesthetic (or functional) ones as against the mimetic (or motivational) opposite numbers. A double imbalance, in short, rather than a double, protean many-to-many relation. As long as they remain integral to the set concerned, however, both kinds of feature including their matches can vary widely within the respective sets or between their cross-linkages and always to differential effect. Thus, if the aesthetic integral feature may range over assorted ends like unity, suspense, closure, ambiguity, etc., so may the corresponding mimetic integral feature range over world-items that will embody and incorporate those ends in the works frame of reference. Again, such end-mediating referential complex (e.g., an event chain for unity) need not, and usually does not, overlap with any particular measure (e.g., tight, likely enchainment): it adheres, as a common denominator marked by a smaller or larger degree of abstractiveness, to the whole set of reality-like motivating (e.g., tightly or weakly enchaining) options eligible for that purpose. These integral features may be as general as the positing of a world, a ction of reality, in the set of representational art, and of an action, as well, in the less inclusive set of narrative art. These features may also combine into overall mimetic/aesthetic, means/end patterns in more restricted and determinate sets. Among narrative subsets, for example, take the process of investigation in the detective story: it must be enacted to fulll the subgenres requirements of chronological displacement and retardatory structure, with the thematic who/how/why gaps kept open and intriguing in the process until the ofcial discovery scene. Or compare the humanly limited perspective (e.g., the standard character narrator) that may be chosen for a
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corresponding discriminate aesthetic reason: to sustain the play of ambiguity in narratives otherwise as diverse as The Sacred Fount, Chance, and Lolita, for example. Even more particularly, these integral features can also be abstracted from local and either/or choices. An example would be the choice deliberated by Fielding regarding the fate of the eponymous hero, threatened with the gallows in the preface to book 17 of Tom Jones. Given the subgeneric dictate to provide a happy resolution for the comic epic in prose, Toms rescue from Tyburn tree must gure in any denouement, whether realized through supernatural assistance or natural means. Running across all these forms, scopes, levels of determinate (sub)sets is the texts reference to some integral mimetic/aesthetic, means/end correlation. Throughout, a (sub)set-wide reality-like pattern mediates a (sub)set-wide purpose; and both of them are further, yet now differentially, correlatable in a multitude of specic, even unique or unprecedented (hence more differential) pairs. This exhibits anew the many-to-many correspondences between form and function in all (artistic, literary, narrative, ordinary) discourse that I have often demonstrated under the name of the Proteus Principle.84 The Protean motivating correlations thus revealed are, to judge from experience, no less elusive (to some, even unwelcome, because unsettling) than they are important. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at the ad hoc nature of the Principle, much of whose power indeed springs from the resultant exibility. According to it, the correlated integrals will vary with each shift of grouping. And the variance will take the form of progressive accumulation, or specication, when the grouping into a set shifts along a line of ascending determinacy. Again, the rule is simpler, and less rareed, than it may sound. This progressiveness already appears when we shift a novel from the category of representational art, a lofty standpoint from which all images of reality are alike by virtue of their referentiality, to that of narrative, as the image of a changing, dynamic reality (event, action, movement). Within the diverse generic category of narrative, in turn, character necessarily reduces
84. As others have done since I rst named the Principle (1982a), and in various elds and contexts, despite all the resistance from the old and strong tendency to package deal form with function. So the Principles demonstrated range keeps widening, along with its currency beyond the Tel Aviv school. Some diverse notable examples would be Bethlehem 1996; Jahn 1997; Yacobi 2001; Jacobsen 2004; Vandaele 2009; Herman 2009; Segal 2011. As discerned by ne and Vandaele (2009: 22), the Proteus Principle informs human Jahn (1997: 450) or Bro cognition, certainly our discourse cognition. But most cognitivist discourse and narrative analysis literary as otherwise still runs against it, like Package Dealers elsewhere (Sternberg 2003a, 2003b, 2009).
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as already in Aristotles plot-rst hierarchy to a subservient, motivating causal variable: an optional (hence omissible, because replaceable) means of launching and sustaining the genres indispensable process of change. But what happens once we move from narrative in its narrativity to the subset, and the differentiated, subgeneric context, of psychological narrative? This unidirectional domination of character by plot dynamics will then turn into a two-way motivation between these components: the process of change now serves at the same time (as with Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Rastignac in `re Goriot, or Densher in The Wings of the Dove) to disclose or develop character. Pe Here lies narratives
unique power of unfolding character by the logic of its own (suspenseful) development, as well as that of the temporal portraitists (intriguing and/or surprising) disclosure: if static character/characterization is the common property of all mimesis, and dynamic characterization of static character is an extra resource peculiar to temporal [sequenced, hence emergent, e.g., verbal] mimesis, then dynamic character is reserved for narrative mimesis, along with every other component of the worldin-motion. (Sternberg 1992a: 530, my emphasis; for details and examples, see also
Sternberg 1978: 56 235; 1985: esp. 186ff.; 2001b; 2009: 467 75)
A unique power, this, and so, as we have seen, conspicuously missing from Aristotles (or Structuralisms) idea of narrative as imitating a changeful world. Otherwise correct in generic principle, his idea unhappily enforces a single and irreversible relation of one-way dependency of character on plot. For it remains geared to musts exclusive of cans, even if equally unique like the possibility of dynamic character in narrative and there alone. As a can, at the same time, this is a unique power, hence only eligible with a difference, not, like action with its genre-wide effects a criterial feature or invariable practice. A matter of generic choice rather than integral, genrewide necessity, or commonality, narratives unrivaled power to develop (as well as to disclose and/or focus) character is left differentially activated by a particular generic subset. Also, the more drastic or well-dened the shift between (sub)sets with their different levels of generality the more perceptible the variations. Thus, compare the progressive shift from focusing to disclosing to developing character eligible by mimetic, temporal, and narrative art, respectively with a less gradual analogue in the detective story. Within this narrative subgenre, the Watson tradition produces on the reader certain effects (heightened involvement, comic relief, an alleviation of our sense of inferiority to the sleuth) more specic than the subgenres basic, integral reading experience (a curiosity-driven play of gaps for closure at the end). More peculiar than the common integral denominator of its narrative kind,
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this former, Watsonian set of affects requires a corresponding specication of the detective storys mimetic integral: no longer just a process of inquiry, but one narrated by a fallible eyewitness, usually of less than average intelligence, Watson style. On the other hand, consider a tales or tale groups ascent toward, not descent from, its larger narrative subgenre. Placing Tom Jones in the framework of comedy thus requires a despecication of the mimetic integral from the rescue to the well-being of the sympathetic hero and correspondingly an increase rather than a decrease in the works differential ` -vis that comic set. features, vis-a But in each instance, the (uniform and logically prior) recourse to mimetic motivation having been explained, the (contextually variable) recourse to a particular procedure out of the available or conceivable mimetic range still remains unaccounted for. And this is where differential correlation comes in. The selection and arrangement of mimetic differentials requires further aesthetic justication, again widely varying in line with the nature and point of the grouping into (sub)sets. After all, from the essentially abstractive viewpoint of integrality, all tragedies (comedies, detective stories . . . ) will exhibit the same motivational structure, or else the tragedy category can exist only as a loose denomination or an open set, but not as a distinct functional pattern; what is more, in this abstractive view, a parody must exhibit the same general features as the parodied text, or else the parodic relations between a Shamela and a Pamela will pass unnoticed. But whatever its intrinsic interest as in genre theory either sameness covers just the unitary integral, set-wide half of the motivating whole and process: indeed, from the other, differential viewpoint, the establishment of such parities only provides a rm basis for the meaningful exploration of disparity. Given the common functional groundwork, what distinguishes Greek from Elizabethan tragedy? With what distinctive purpose? And in what means/end correlation? Likewise, the differentiator asks, to what specifying procedures does (or can) one subject the motivational base of a text in order to invert it into its parodic opposite? The accounting for mimetic in terms of aesthetic differentials may thus result in explanations of the most diverse kinds. But, as with Fieldings preference of natural to supernatural unraveling in Tom Jones, these explanations often turn out to be the desire to enhance probability beyond the minimal ctionalizing, cohesive, or dissimulatory effect that is equally producible by any of the alternative measures. Each motivation appealing to the world must be multifunctional, then, by virtue of the interplay between its constants and variables, integral and differential features. But it is the latter features that determine the specic kind and
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range of operation in context. Such variables not merely ll out (as does the Watson tradition) the referential scaffold (the detectives quest for closure) set up by the invariants. Far more important, in joining with those invariant counterparts, the variables may even promote the resultant world-like synthesis, whether verisimilar or fantastic in tonality, from the role of means to that of end. Contrary to what is implied by Aristotle and roundly asserted in the Formalist-Structuralist line, each in the appropriate theoretical parlance, the referential/artistic does not overlap with the means/end, let alone the cost/gain distinction. In fact, motivational strategy in art reveals a whole complex of mimetic functions. They range among and join at will: (1) the representational universal (the enabling function of mimesis at large); (2) the communicative exigency (the transmissional function, which can always be delegated to a speaking/thinking mediator within the represented world); (3) picturing the world at rest (the space-oriented, descriptive function, essential to all mimesis); (4) the narrative at (the time-oriented function, actional and transactional; it denes narrative by the effects of the genres unique twofold, happening/reading dynamics suspense, curiosity, surprise and is therefore more particular than the descriptive function and less integral to the representational basis in [1] above); (5) the shaping of the referential key or tonality (the ontic function, differentiating between the synthesis of, say, factuality and ctionality, the tragic and the comic worlds); (6) the rhetoric of realism and probability and verisimilitude as goal (the realistic and, in extreme cases, illusive function).85 Mimetic throughout, (1) (6) constitute increasingly specic discourse ends, self-valuable motivations, as well as operating for other, nonmimetic ends, which they motivate in representational and increasingly specic terms to match. Even as ends, however, (1) (6) are widely pursued or observed in literature and only the last ( pace Tomashevskys obligatory realistic motivation) is optional in narrative: the ction of reality must imply an attitude, but not a commitment, to the reality of ction.
85. The whole issue requires much more detailed treatment than I can give it here. (For some further discussion, though, see especially my case study of realism and reality-models in the James Bond corpus [Sternberg 1983b].) Among the interesting problems to be resolved is whether to regard the transmissional as a mimetic function must mean to dene ction as a mimesis of a speech-act, along the lines persuasively suggested by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978: 14 40).
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7. Motivation and Communicative Structure: Point of View as Sense-Making Construct
7.1. Who Motivates, and from Whose Viewpoint?
What we have seen so far establishes, above all, the ground rule that every functional thrust in discourse is amenable (some, like narrativity, even bound) to mimetic embodiment, so that these motivating modes form a doublet at least potential, often actualized. But their interplay suggests further relations and implications, which we need to dene and develop in turn. The preceding analysis has thus not only elaborated a contrast of this functional/ctional twofold with sheer integration, which is miscellaneous, open-ended, and performed or performable regardless of discourse goals. It also goes to show where exactly the line runs, within the twofold, between the comprehensive organizing principles called here motivational modes (or logics or rationales) because they make or mediate purposive sense. Given this doublets unique commonality, where the motivating modes themselves differ is not so much in their materials and formal arrangement as in their locus and mode of existence: their distance from the implicit relationship uniting author and reader within the discourse frame. The aesthetic (or otherwise rhetorical or communicative) mode relates these two participants directly through the text that they frame, as ultimate transmitter and receiver, constructor and reconstructor; the mimetic counterpart relates them (including the aesthetics of their frame) obliquely, through the mediation of the world of the text. But regardless of its immediacy or mediacy, motivation as an explanatory activity or process ultimately operates between author and reader. Hence the question, which of these participants in the communicative event performs the motivation? To this there seem to be two primary answers, implicit under various guises in critical practice and again conspicuously radicalized in the approaches instanced above. To Aristotle, making sense is making plot; and making plot is the business of the artist, not for nothing designated as maker. Further, this designation literally marks and matches his engagement in the art-making eld of poetics. Art, plot, sense are all geared to their producer.86 Not so in most
86. With discernible echoes in Formalism, though less consistent and single-minded, not even literally: they being a group, and often divided at that, quite apart from individual two-mindedness, which we have also encountered. Yet some of their best-known work foregrounds literary making (of Don Quixote in Shklovsky 1990b [1929]: 72 100); or of The Overcoat in Eichenbaum (1974 [1919]). And even in the absence of titular focus, this orientation to the author manifests itself in both their theoretical and their practical analyses. Tomashevsky (2004 [1928]: 225, note 5) even cites these accounts of story-making to exemplify the Formalist distinction between the author as person and as artist, between historical or genetic and poetic or implied authorship. Inversely except for Shklovsky, not for nothing the codier of the
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latter-day theories, where the emphasis and the very inherited name of the discipline that Aristotle founded have changed sides. Poetics itself no longer relates these days to the production of artworks, nor even always to their or, specically, to literatures objective and systematic makeup, analysis, theory as such, but at times to the ways and study of their reception: of literature from the experiencers (understanders, interpreters, mimeticists) viewpoint.87 To Roland Barthes (1974 [1970]; 1986 [1968]: 51, 55), suppressing the author in favor of writing means establishing the readers place or, inversely, the birth of the reader entails the death of the Author. Barthes even goes so far as to preach and practice a writerly reading, by an inversion and doubling of discourse roles that verges on oxymoron. Similarly, this polar shift lurks, undeclared yet unmistakable, in the title as well as the argument of Jonathan Cullers Structuralist Poetics, for example.88 To the Structuralists contrary to the Formalist as well as
estrangement affect their analytic preference came at the readers expense. Formalism sometimes pushed this imbalance to the limit of readerlessness or even antipathy to readerly response (e.g., Any 1990: 421 43, with earlier references). 87. Such has been the force of this reversal that it has overtaken self-declared followers of the original Poetics and the Chicago neo-Aristotelians. Among them, just observe the titles of Before Reading (Rabinowitz 1987) or Experiencing Fiction (Phelan 2007). Contrast notes 86 and 90 above. 88. Likewise with Reuven Tsurs interdisciplinary Cognitive Poetics (1992) or the far less signicant and systematic, but more one-sided, Cognitive Poetics (2002) by Peter Stockwell, which reductively opens: Cognitive poetics is all about reading literature (ibid.: 1). Across their differences, these shifts of poetics to the interpreter reect the cognitive disciplines ofcial focus on so-called information processing (and, in cognitive psychology, also on experiments with the reading of subjects). But then, the supposed focus and its poetic reex do not accord with the (inter)disciplines actual theory or practice in the analysis of discourse, particularly narrative. There, professional cognitivists and their literary followers mostly assume a two-sided author/reader communication model, not an interpretive monopoly, or license, free of authorial control. (On this basic inconsistency and its problems, see Sternberg 2003a; 2003b; passim, 2009: 480ff. It nnings [2005] attempt to synthesize cognitive and rhetorical narratology, also disables Nu because the former wavers between the interpretive and the communicative model, while the latter entails communication by nature. A related major problem, which is shared by cognitivism with other elds of discourse analysis, literary and narrative theory included: a missing sense of discoursive purpose what drives a narrative all along, for example, or us all along a narrative and so a failure to correlate motivations.) For a change, articial intelligence programmers have devised both story-generating and story-understanding machines, yet without interrelating the authorial/readerly communicative partners in either of them and therefore without any motivational interplay. As in other cognitivist branches, the only motivation sought there is the reality-like (psycho)logic behind the action, especially the goal driving the characters. It is as though narrative were motivated by a one-level, agentive why instead of a double why with the author left purposeless, if acknowledged at all. Even Gretchkos (2003) attempt to align cognitive science with Russian Formalism misdescribes the orientation to the receiver not the transmitter as a point of similarity. From within cognitive narratology, however, Abbott (2011) develops a welcome argument for a (re)turn toward the author. See also Herman (2008) on the Intentional Stance.
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the Aristotelian line making sense of a text by recourse to naturalizing models is, instead, a staple of the operations of reading.89 Such disparity between what I call author-oriented (or encoding) motivation and reader-oriented (or decoding) motivation often corresponds to further radical oppositions. These consist in the theoretical centrality, not just of the respective makers-of-sense, but also of the textual components with which their respective activities occupationally begin: above all, world vs. language. The opposed points of departure may appear surprising. But our paradigm cases of literary theory again serve to highlight and correlate these further motivational oppositions, so that their rationale becomes understandable, even seeming hardly escapable. For Aristotle, art is dened by a certain relation to the world, mimesis; and arts branches variously specify that mimetic relation, including even the point of departure toward the nished artifact. Composing a tragedy (say) necessarily begins with its generic nucleus of happening, whereby somebody (e.g., Oedipus) injures or (like Iphigenia) is about to injure somebody close to them (father and mother, or brother); and so the tragedian ensures beforehand, in miniature, tragedys distinctive impact (catharsis, based on the affects of pity and fear). This bare-bones narrative the mimesis of a denite world-in-action, with an eye to a denite, marked poetic end therefore comes rst. First, mind you, (teleo)logically and hierarchically, not genetically, in the actual creative process, whose start, march, even nish remain accidental, subjective, endlessly variable by nature.90 At the opposite, modern pole, the Structuralists like the New Critics earlier followed the inverse logic. Willy-nilly, the operations of reading
89. Or the negative way around, they, much like the New Critics before, are notoriously antiintentionalist. But what this exactly means, whether it rules out contact or communication with an author, and how the answers stand to the plain emphasis on reading or to the encoding/ decoding dissymmetry that will appear below are not easy questions. 90. The same end-to-means order would essentially hold for all other poetic kinds, including more general ones, as already suggested by the teleological anteriority of plot to character. I illustrate from tragedy rather than from the wider category of narrative, however, because here lurks the biggest single hole in Aristotles poetics of impact: he knows nothing like a narrative impact or effect or function, extrapolates no sense of narrativity analogous to tragedys denitional affect of catharsis that all epic and drama produce in the audience (Sternberg 1992a: 474ff., esp. 499 507). The subtype of tragic narrative thus highlights what the master type lacks. This also explains why all his heirs also lack a dening narrative effect and fail to perceive it, just like other narrative theories that have no functional bearing in the rst place. This inherited hole shows from the great Renaissance commentators on the Poetics to Lessing, his only genuine follower in the Enlightenment, to the so-called Chicago neo-Aristotelians: rst generation (e.g., Crane 1952), second generation (e.g., Booth 1961; Sacks 1964; Rader 2011), and third-generation (e.g., Richter 1974; Rabinowitz 1987; Phelan 2007). See also Sternberg 2010, and note 87 above, and note 97 below.
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must begin with the discourses language what we readers encounter rst and Structuralism notoriously, yet predictably enough, assimilated literature and storytelling to a linguistic model, whether Saussures or Chomskys.91 Thus, just as the orientations to the author and the world go together at the opposite pole, so do those to the reader and language here. The contrast runs further still, but just how far? Let me rst emphasize again that it extends to opposed views of poetics (including the signied of poetics) itself: as the art of production or as the theory of our own reproduction, at most re-constructive. At most, because either orientation is liable to such abuse or extremity as will carry it beyond the pale of communicative structure, hence beyond the motivational realm proper. The reader-oriented variety may go so far as to reject the communication model altogether, under diverse banners. Among them, let me quickly mention the death of the author, including, for some, the implied as well as the real-life authorial gure; Barthess call for a writerly discourse-cum-analyst, later taken over by hypertext enthusiasts; the deconstructive exposer, going against the grain of the text; the resisting reader and other Poststructuralist counterreaders, all supposedly liberated and liberating interpreters; or symptomatic reading, on the lookout for unconscious textual giveaways, especially psychological or ideological. Throughout, communication gives way to interpretation; discourse partnership mediated by the text going from author to reader for some joint (re)construction under a shared code vanishes in favor of one-sided readerly license. Or so it appears.92 But comparable liberties may be taken with the discourse, and pushed to similar lengths, in the absence of any doctrinal, provocative, or even knowing intent to break the two-party communicative contract. The reader-oriented variety then falls into the anachronistic, idiosyncratic, and otherwise textually uncontrolled explications that the history of criticism is notorious for and scholars are so quick to discover in the opponents camp. Is the Elizabethan villain, culminating in Iago, a psychologically intelligible character in his own right or, as the anti-Bradleyan school has it, little more than a personied instrument for catastrophe? If the latter, then a whole interpretive tradition has been guilty of substituting its own models of tragic people and plot for the authors: of dissociating (a Romantic) decoding from (the Shakespearian)
91. Compare the older and wider tendency, among literary as well as language scholars, to assume, or stipulate, that narrative is verbal and even naturally, according to some (e.g., Labov 1972; Fludernik 1996; Turner 1996). 92. Deceptively so, even self-deceivingly, as indicated in notes 98 and 105 below, with further references.
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encoding motivation. This can only reduce the literary text to a gloried Rorschach inkblot.93 In contrast, the edges of the author-oriented variety merge into the concern with the creative act, environmental determinants, practical exigencies, obsessions having more to do with the man who suffers than the artist who creates in short, into genetic integration. Why does Mrs. Proudie die in The Last Chronicle of Barset ? The mimetic cause is a sudden heart attack; the aesthetic cause, the effect of her sudden death on both reader and plot; the genetic cause, the accident by which Trollope overheard the strictures made on this favorite character by two clergymen at the Athenaeum Club and his consequent promise to them, I will go home and kill her before the week is over (n.d. [1883]: 209 10). But does Trollopes long retrospect on the genesis unlike the ofcial discourse motivations provide just another autobiographical tidbit? No, because Mrs. Proudies exit may still look untimely from a mimetic or an aesthetic viewpoint. In other words, the extratextual reason for her withdrawal hasnt been sufciently textualized, hence converted and camouaged, via either motivation. Or not sufciently, at least, in the experience of attentive readers. They may feel that she dies too abruptly no gun visible earlier on the wall, as it were or may wonder why the author hastens to deprive us and himself of a character so original, colorful, full of life. Such readers will likely regard the genetic prehistory, once discovered, as not merely amusing or informative; it will also operate for them (in my terms) as a welcome integrational complement to the pair of imperfect motivational logics. Her departure, in short, will grow more understandable, owing to an extra, third rationale and driving force of a largely different order. Not altogether different, though, since it has arisen in response to aesthetic (and, who knows, typical) strictures made by the two clergymen on Mrs. Proudie. Here, then, the two extreme orientations to the reader and to the author are not symmetrical. At the one extreme, the picture is simple enough and ultimately irrelevant to motivational theory and practice. What resisting readers, or counterreaders, make a point of ignoring is exactly what their less doctrinal fellows miss or mistake: the implied author as normative frame of reference, hence the implied authorial rationales of sensemaking. These liberated, text-unfriendly readers ideologically shift from a two-sided communication model to free, self-centered interpretation, and
93. For some further analysis and illustration, see Sternberg 1992b. There, a reading informed by a communicational poetics is opposed to a counterreading where (odd) feminism and (multifold) anachronism join liabilities.
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with it from the double (teleo)logic of motivation to the boundless repertoire of integration, whereby to generate forms and sense as one pleases. At the other extreme, the historical author and his discourse-making fortunes do not quite mirror image their readerly counterparts. While the desires and idiosyncrasies and blind spots of particular readers rarely have more than autobiographical interest, the status of genetic explanation is indeed somewhat problematic. This holds especially true where the factors of genesis cannot be sharply distinguished from established conventions or historical developments, or, as in the Trollope example, where they have not been fully transformed into, and thus superseded by, aesthetic and mimetic motivation. It is quite one thing to discount the pieces of dinner-party gossip that, by a process of elaboration designed to shackle accident and bolt up change through the internal mechanisms of art, germinated into Henry Jamess masterpieces. Inversely, the textual ssures and breaches alleged by deconstructionist, symptomatic or otherwise source-critical readings can often be shrugged off as, in effect, imaginary genetic giveaways, occupational trouble-making, even for survival. Those readers must somehow contrive an incoherent text and project it on the author, or else go out of business.94 It is quite another thing for us to ignore the manifold operational (selectional, segmentary, rhetorical) consequences of serial publication; or to wave aside the effects of social, even socioartistic, pressure on the coherence of individual works, as with Mrs. Proudies untimely death or the altered ending of Great Expectations or the dark hints of the Nibelungenlied.95 But, despite the uidity of the borderline between the poetic and the genetic models of production, the shift to the genetic coincides in principle with a shift in the object and logic of explanation. And whatever sense this shift to the genesis makes from the integrational standpoint say, in the face of an otherwise stubborn incongruity, big or small, which the writers genetic process and the products own fortunes thereafter can resolve it hardly makes any sense from the motivational viewpoint. Reconsider Trollopes overhearing of the two clergymen at the Athenaeum. This encounter generates Mrs. Proudies death, for example, but doesnt at all map it onto
94. Indeed, like some of their ostensible poetic opponents: e.g., what I call (Sternberg 1992a: 493 99) deviation-based narratologists, such as Genette (1980) and his followers, or even Shklovskys anchorage of estrangement in manifest form-breaking rather than implicit norm-breaking (Sternberg 2006). 95. No more discountable are the local ambiguous trouble spots mentioned in section 4 above. A transmissional problem (e.g., scribal error) or a difcult reading?: this choice between genesis and poetics often forces itself on, say, the Bibles low critic or the editor of Shakespeare, with their respective addressees. Yet its always available to the integrating sense-maker, as distinct from the motivator.
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the novels action within the ctive reality (e.g., in causal terms) or onto the novels operations within the aesthetic, discourse frame (e.g., in terms of the impact on us). Still less does their encounter correlate the two motivational mappings via, or into, a means-end linkage. In short, that ultimate, real-life driving force that arose at the Club never provides (suggests, enables) by itself either a ctive or a functional answer to the question, Why her abrupt death? If you like, it drives Trollope as historical author, known to few readers and so hardly ever invoked, not as the implied author, whom all would-be readerly partners need to consider and reconstruct throughout. As usual with all those textual features for which one cannot or will not nd room within the texts world/design networks, the process of motivation is then simply suspended and other frames of intelligibility must take over. The motivator gives way, at least temporarily, to the integrator.96 Like the purely reader-oriented approach, therefore, the author-oriented extreme disconnects itself from the functional model of communication: the one because it fails to recognize authorial control as cause and guide of our response, the other because it fails to start from and correlate with the readers response as effect. Apart from these limiting cases, however, the two orientations are so complementary as to become inseparable. Within the communicative circuit of literature, after all, both author and reader are interpretive constructs that have no existence in isolation from each other: in a complex but nonparadoxical sense, each makes and shapes the other. No wonder that, throughout the development of his production model, Aristotle hardly loses sight of the reader as recipient of effects.97 Pleasure, surprise, catharsis, inferential
96. Interestingly, diachronic and long-scale equivalents of this shift in sense-making priority manifest themselves in the history of modern literary theory and criticism. Russian Formalism thus began by reversing the traditional, Romantic focus on genesis, especially the authors biography, toward the poetics of discourse. So much so, Tomashevsky (2004 [1928]: 125 26) generalizes, as to deny the usefulness of biographical investigations. Positively speaking, this reversal generated, long before Booth (1961), their distinction between what amounts to the historical as against the implied author: Understanding a work of art depends on making the act of its creation alive again, not as originating in the authors personal psychology but as the functioning of the authors art, or craft (ibid.: 128, 132n5). This also amounts to a shift from genetic integration to poetic motivation, even at the expense of its mimetic guise. In the West, at almost the same time, the Anglo-American New Criticism marked a parallel reversal, though oriented to interpretation more than theory, and with a still bigger difference in fortune. Sadly, while the New Criticism kept gaining in dominance and development until the 1960s at least, the Formalists had to reverse back in the late 1920s, under heavy pressure from the Soviet regime. So Shklovsky and Eichenbaum became famous in turn for their genesis-based, indeed biographical investigations, especially into the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. 97. Again, with the cardinal exception persistent ever since of the missing narrative effect or sense of narrativity. Even this hole is inadvertent, though, and accordingly, whatever its magnitude, not a doctrinal, principled exception to the poetics of impact.
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(learning) to-and-froing between the particular and the general, between given details and posited models: all are responses that arise in our experience of the artwork as a mimetic teleology, and so are reasons for what it does how. But this very response of ours to the artwork, as a mimesis serving an affective poetic teleology, entails an appropriate teleologist at the other end, one that has already made the plot, sense, impact for us to receive. Short of the Rorschach extreme, even the most determined foregrounding of the readers motivational activity cannot, therefore, keep it purely readerly, out of touch with a communicating opposite number.98 Whatever it declares or believes, that is, such an activity cannot dispense with the purposive and regulating concept of author (as distinct from the term, whose anthropomorphic associations sometimes lead to its replacement by the neutral-looking metonymy, text).99 Thus qualied, the difference between these orientations, to author vs. reader, proves a matter less of doctrinal substance than of methodological emphasis, or even heuristic and expository effectiveness. Not that this reduces the difference to an analytic nesse, negligible with impunity. It rests on a rm interactional ground, namely: a dissymmetry between the communicating parties, one explored and specied throughout my work on (narrative) discourse, especially its processing, but still calling for a wider appreciation of its basis, variants, and consequences.
As in all temporal communication, the communicative transaction in literature entails a basic dissymmetry between encoding and decoding, constructive and reconstructive activity: between the author, presumed to know what he or she wants to present, and the reader, who can nd it out only by trial-and-error methods, in and through its gradual presentation in time. (Sternberg 1990c: 50)
Unsurprisingly by now, I hope, this dissymmetry bears with special force on the two motivators at either end of the communicative encounter and on how their operational viewpoints cooperate, ideally dovetail.
98. For some further argument and illustration from the highest exemplar, see my 1985: 1 2, 7 13, and passim, then 1992b. See also note 105 below. 99. Nilli Diengott (1993: 182), having quoted my denition of motivation (Sternberg 1983c), goes on to paraphrase it as: In other words, motivation is the explanatory procedure used by readers. She thus throws the motivational act, process, result out of communicative balance and interplay. This one-sided paraphrase grows odder yet, since, as her own title already indicates, she relates motivation to the opposite side, the authors. She even burdens me with that one-sidedness in turn, as if I tipped the communicative balance in favor of the authorial motivation, and irreparably so. Sternbergs usage of motivation and implied author overlaps (Diengott 1993: 188). My two-way motivational trafc, then, turns unidirectional, and indeterminately at that, now limited to one of the ways and discoursers, now to the other.
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With author-oriented motivation, the typical movement is then from the general to the particular, from strategy to tactics, from referential key and eld to verbal art, from rhetorical end to mimetic means. Within each of these movements, the implied author knows the former term (general . . . strategy and so on) in advance by denition, because he predetermines it, hence advances therefrom to guring out the more specic latter term (particular . . . tactics) that will embody and realize on the discourse surface the (pre)known aesthetic motivating force. Take Poes (1922 [1846]) retrospect in The Philosophy of Composition on the series of selections and connections (the progressive steps) whereby he produced The Raven. The story he tells amounts to claiming what Aristotle already implies, as we have seen, from his own author-oriented viewpoint. That is, at each juncture en route to the nished narrative poem, within each motivational (differential) doublet, the artistic rationale preceded and determined the world-like. As bets a procedure aspiring to the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem, the rst thing settled by the producer was the complex of effects to be generated: novelty and vividness, unity of impression, melancholy tone, semantic variety, and so forth. Then, we hear, the poet allegedly advanced at the time from desired effect to objective correlative: action, speaker, and situational framework. So the reasoning goes, or went, backward from aesthetic effect to mimetic cause, from goal to instrument, as already in Aristotles plot-to-character backreference, movement, and hierarchy. Examples of such reasoning abound of course in the authorial, as well as author-oriented, tale of generation.100 Some, though, prove less usual or expected, and accordingly more defamiliarizing and instructive, than others. Given the need for a melancholy (poetic) tone, for instance, the choice of a bereaved lover as the speaker hardly comes as surprise. But why is his interlocutor a bird, and of all birds, a raven? Mainly, strange as it may sound, in the service of semantic variety. Seeking to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried, Poe required a pretext for the continuous use of the one word nevermore : here the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech, and very naturally, a parrot, in the rst place, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven as equally capable of speech, and innitely more in keeping with the intended tone. Of the two equally vocal and mindless birds, then, the
100. Or, considering the poems own narrativity, tale of genarration: on this term for the poetic genesis of narrative, see Sternberg 2008: 65 69; cf. Sonnet 1997.
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Raven enjoys a motivational plus: it can actualize to a further extent in tone as well as speech the wanted repetition with variation. It covers more aspects of the device than the parrot would.101 Even so, given the black bird to voice the refrain, what explains the indoors arena? Why do the ill-sorted speakers meet in a room rather than, more naturally, in the open air? Again because, though these two mimetic motivations for their encounter are almost equally serviceable from the integral viewpoint (dramatic face-to-face collocation), the chamber has marked differential advantages (rhetorical focusing): A close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident it has the force of a frame to a picture . . . in keeping concentrated the attention (ibid.: 194 198). I. A. Richards, in his own retrospective account of writing a poem, The Poetic Process and Literary Analysis, orthodoxly brushes aside this tale of genesis. In Poes Philosophy of Composition, he states, we are given not the literary authors usual and expected composition by trial and error but
an ostentatious parade of allegedly perfect adjustment of selected means to fully foreseen ends. . . . What species of the authorial vanity is this? Who shall say? But, however The Raven may in fact have been written, we know that most poems are not composed so; the authors manuscripts, where rst drafts are available, at least show us that. (Richards 1960: 10)
Instead of this quick dismissal of the given problem-solving account by supposed empirical standards as unlikely in real creative life, Richards would do better to consider its theoretical point and value. By now, we can discern there, below and through the given story of genesis, what Richards overlooks: a narrativized, teleology-driven model (indeed a philosophy) of composition, with rm motivational priorities (aesthetics before and above mimetics), and thus essentially akin to the art-making rationale implied in Aristotles Poetics as we have read it. The more so because Poe elsewhere, in his review of Twice-Told Tales (1842), generalizes the process-cum-priorities out of all empirical contingency, let alone egocentric singularity and authorial vanity. The very topic broadens from how he himself to how any skillful literary artist has constructed a tale:
Having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. . . . In the whole composition
101. This also newly illustrates the gradability of the overlying reality-like means, as against Shklovskys yes-or-no, motivated/unmotivated binarism.
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there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to be the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. (Poe 1999: 59)
Aristotle would of course nod at this bare-bones schema of the artists progression, as he would at its eshing out apropos The Raven, at least if considered a parable of poesis. Where else would the artist begin than with the unique or single effect to be produced, as the tragedian does with the denitional, making-or-breaking impact of catharsis? And, I would add, the effect or impact produced on the receivers is the operative, experiential basis they share with the producer, and so enables them to retrace his motivations from this basic affective end to what produces the affect in the given text (Sternberg 2009: esp. 499 502). Whatever ones doubts about its genuineness and its validity as a model of actual creative construction, therefore, Poes orderly philosophy certainly applies to the authors constructional teleo-logic and beyond it: to the authororiented process of theoretical and interpretive reconstruction. Authororiented, mind you, not just authorial, and so necessarily a processual activity of reconstruction by you and me, via inference all along the given discourse. Seldom do authors trace the line and rationale of their artistic construction even more seldom, actually, than they uncover the accidents of their genesis the way Poe does.102 Instead, it is we the receivers (readers, viewers, theorists, interpreters) that do the reconstructing here, and across the chasm of interactional dissymmetry at that. But we do it, for a change, with a view to simulating as best we can the implied authors own motivational procedure from his own vantage point. How, then, do we simulators motivate the discourse from the authors side, in the authors name, as it were? Roughly, that explanatory operation pursued by the authorial reader, or readerly author, starts with the aesthetic (rhetorical, communicative) premises. First it reconstructs the works hierarchy of interests and functions, its
102. As he himself uncharitably formulates it, Most authors poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of ne frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought (of belated intention, faulty execution, erasure, appendage) en route to the nished work (Poe 1922 [1846]: 185). Even leaving truth value aside, such pretense of real-life inspired composition, what with being unspecic by nature, evidently doesnt compare with Poes account as an explanatory, far less motivational model of authoring an artwork or of author-like reasoning on the way to it. Richardss (1960: 10) language is softer, To be mysterious and unforthcoming about his own work seems a part of the poets role, yet never denies the typical reticence.
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generico-historical constraints, and its range of choices; and only then does it proceed (or rather double back) to inquire and infer how this abstract poetic system is embodied and deployed in a particular world, language, crisscross of patterns, and dynamics of presentation. What the communicating author (fore)knows, because he strategically predetermines or tactically determines it, we as author-like motivators attempt, if not to equal, then to approximate, with more success and condence or less, after the fact. We try, that is, to piece out the regulating aesthetic motivations and the ensuing mimetic correlates in the light of our imperfect, because always inference-bound, retrospective knowledge of the whole discourse; but still, given the hindsight, from a position other and higher than ours normally is as genuine readers in the human and the even lower dissymmetrical condition, who grope our way forward along the gapped discourse sequence as best we can. In narrative, especially, the key measure of the difference between these two positions and processes the simulating, authorial-like as against the genuine readers is the extent to which we are respectively vulnerable, for better or worse, to the knowledge-dependent universal effects of sequence: suspense, curiosity, and surprise.103 To give an example with some empirical grounding, and with Poe on The Raven in mind: Boris Eichenbaum (1978 [1925]: 248) asserts that O. Henry foreknew the construction of the story from beginning to end or from end to beginning before he sat down to write it. Far from peculiar, moreover, such early constructional overview typies the short story. What he typically did at his desk was to work out the details of language and narrator (ibid.): to move, as I called it, from the general to the particular. And if this is the case with O. Henry the historical author according to some evidence about his writing process (ibid.) then a fortiori his implied author.104 Here therefore lie the advantages of the author-oriented approach for the performance of certain critical tasks, which require a strategic, birds-eye view: like theoretical extrapolation from artistic practice, comparative analysis, tracing the development of an artist or a tradition, highlighting the onemany relationship between end and means or between the integral and the differential. Motivating the discourse from the authors side, with its vantage point, also helps to counteract certain readerly dangers, such as mistaking
103. Not the same difference, of course, as between rst and later reading or later and rst if these are given to theorizing at all. 104. Eichenbaum (1978 [1925]: 253; cf. Any 1990: 421 23, 425 26) himself, in fact, probably questions, rather than overlooks, this distinction between authors as well as that between author and authorized narrator.
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authorial choice for necessity, accident for purpose, convention for invention, the serious but unwise for the ironic, the integral for a differential reason, and vice versa. Just as shifting sides to the discourse-maker works against ignorant or arbitrary or all too charitable overreading, that is, it also encourages a richer, nicer, informed reading. Not the least of this shifts virtues, to give one of many examples, consists in drawing our notice to the motivational, or even differential signicance of what, from the viewpoint of integration, might pass for casual, perfectly congruous, intelligible, indeed natural, referential items or features: Poes raven, Watsons obtuseness, the sex as well as the age of Jamess Maisie. When we encounter these items as givens in a nished discourse, or its reading process, and without any pointer from the author, to how many among us would it occur to wonder about the reason behind such hard ctive data? Reader-oriented motivation largely and, given the communicative dissym` -vis the author, inevitably, reverses this movement. Inevitably, metry vis-a because such motivation operates from the unprivileged side of the dissymmetry, the one that is subject throughout to the others unknown premises, goals, norms, choices, devices, maneuvers. It accordingly faces challenges and goes through adventures of its own, with their appropriate pleasures those integral to the drama of reading as reader-oriented motivation. In narrative, the readers subjectness to the communicational (and always less than fully, strictly communicative) partner is most perceptible, because the reading drama ultimately consists in our exposure and response to the genres three universal effects the suspense, curiosity, surprise dynamics all of them based on ignorance of the narrated world, of its narrative disclosure in sequence, and of the authorial frame that regulates their interplay. Everything hinges, in short, on the movement from gaps toward a closure that may, for all we know, elude us to the end, to some end.105
105. Over the last decades to cut a long story short there has been plenty of talk that goes to privilege, or empower, the reader at the authors expense. But such talk often doesnt bear on the implied reader, and so turns from a communicational to an interpretive (and when pure or consistent, a Rorschach) model of discourse, with no authorial, let alone authoritative transmitter, either. Where it does bear on the implied reader, under whatever name and guise, that ` -vis the author is unreasonable, grounded in desire rather than readers empowerment vis-a logic and experience. Signicantly, the arguments for it do not just overlook the built-in dissymmetry, working to the implied readers disfavor. They also appeal to the shifting sands of meaning, not to the hard mimetic information on whose knowledge or ignorance everything else depends in all discourse types, and which in turn hinges on the choices made by the authorial information holder and, if ctive, inventor as well. The author can supply or deny it, postpone or anticipate, unify or distribute, elucidate or ambiguate, and control the reader/reading accordingly, beginning with the fundamentals of gap-lling, hence of understanding. This goes to the heart of the dissymmetry, of course, and any test of reading will make nonsense of its wishful inversion into readerly empowerment.
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What this reader-oriented motivator begins and operates with is therefore not the hindsight of full retrospection, which simulates the unique authorial (pre)knowledge of the relevant goals, norms, choices, etc. always as against the receiving end of discourse. In motivating the discourse forms to that end, instead, the emphasis falls on the exact opposite: the temporality and exigencies of the reading process as an experience entailing progressive and provisional discovery via hypothesis-formation, always revisable, even reversible from one minute to another. For better or worse, this eventful quest is the reconstructors lot, and most of all in face of verbal discourse, even compared with other time media or processes, like the analogous reconstructive work done even by the cinematic viewer all along. For the cinema greets the viewer with images, iconic of the or a world and its movement, not with arbitrary (e.g., verbal) signs, which rst need decoding into comparable images. And this makes a difference even between such kindred arts, including their largely common processes of narrative motivation. Since what the reader directly encounters is a piece of language, it is the passage from (given) word to (conjectured) world and function that now comes to the fore. Since the reader starts by groping his way into the texts universe of discourse, the motivational procedure brings out with special force the drama of discourse, particularly what we go through as narrative experiencers: our hesitancy in the face of gaps, ambiguities, and discontinuities, our constant shifts of patterning on the move under the pressure of new information, the trial-and-error methods by which we distinguish ends from means and incorporate or generalize details into schemas and regularities. Further, the sequentiality of the text ensures that this state of uncertainty should, if necessary (i.e., if the author chooses), last to the very nish. So the reader-oriented explanatory process alerts us throughout to the dynamic rather than the static and to the hypothetical rather than the objectifying (actualizing, embodying) or dissimulatory aspects of motivation. Of course, as later examples will show, the reconstitutive set of operations performed by the reader on a readerly basis that of progressive discovery must again correlate the doublet: move between aesthetic and mimetic inference, function and ction, notably from (experienced) effect to (likely triggering) cause. But this serves more to distinguish motivation from (possibly effectless and/or worldless) integration than to obliterate the disparities in inferential route, circumstances, and certitude between our two motivational orientations, toward author or reader. These disparities especially show at the outset of the reading process, where our ignorance, and so our falling back on sheer inference, is greatest. There, we can hardly postulate a regulative purpose without rst abstracting a world from the language, all of them unfa-
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miliar as never in the partly, progressively known sequel and tentative to match. As long as the readers motivating activity, even from the lowlier reading viewpoint, is grasped as authorially controlled hypothesis-making, however, the two orientations work together from their opposite sides: they converge in line with the texts gradual reconstruction (as shown in practice throughout my books on narrative) and ideally coalesce when the last page has been turned. Even so, the ideal of the two motivators at one is not often realized to the full, and is always contingent, depending on the producers will no less than on the receivers skill. The communicative dissymmetry straightens out at last, but, again, only to the extent wanted and predetermined by the authorial communicator.106 Just think of temporary gaps, whose eventual stable closure makes us the omniscient authors equal, as against permanent gaps, left open forever and so perpetuating our inequality as well. An exemplary case in point, this, because it involves narratives unique and central process of multiply (at least thrice) doubled sense-making, notably by way of gaps and closure, whether temporary, permanent, suspenseful, surprising, or curiosity-driven. There, and there alone, double (reader/author) double (mimetic/aesthetic) motivation is necessarily carried out along a double (actional/presentational) sequence, with the power always vested in the second term of each pair, and vested by arts distinctive rules: the ctional license, and contract, above all. Indeed, by these rules, as Ill argue next, the three motivational doublings uniquely associated together with the narrative process are compounded by a fourth, whereby the communicators side doubles in turn: the role now divides into speaker (inscriber, dialogist, monologist) and author, but with the same balance of power as the rest.107 In other words, the control and manipulation typifying this communicative structure all over justify my reference to author-oriented, instead of the perhaps more expected speaker-/narrator-oriented motivation, and bring out an important difference between literary and nonliterary communication.
106. And as always, of course, to the extent wanted and determined by the authorial receiver or readerly author, who actually infers (simulates) it all. This should now go without saying. 107. There is a corresponding, fth doubling, namely, that of the respective narratees, implied vs. dramatized. Its balance of power, though, does not correspond to the author/speaker absolute hierarchy at the other end: the dissymmetry between the sides newly manifests itself. So, beyond completing the picture of doublets involved, I wont go here into this last one, the least polarized and systematic.
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7.2. Motivating Fictional as against Factual Discourse: The Difference Made by Quotation
It is certainly not that ordinary discourse fails to have rhetorical intent, or to exploit situational factors, or even (pace traditional exclusionary art vs. life philosophies of mimesis, starting from the Aristotelian) to accomplish the one through and in the guise of the other.108 Quite the contrary, as any observer of what actually happens in such discourse must realize. Just look at how we ordinary speakers or writers take measures in order to unify our description of a person or a house. Among other available, current, indeed universal devices, we, no less than Balzac, then resort to metonymic transitions following the natural makeup of the represented object, going from top to bottom, for example, or from outside inward. Our descriptive sequence then coherently progresses from one reality-item or set to another by appeal to a mimetic logic. Further, to strengthen the coherence, the real-life Balzac in us will often so devise those metonymic transitions as to insinuate analogical (metaphorical) links of equivalence and contrast as well. The result parallels what I called, apropos Austens Darcy and Elizabeth, metonymic analogues. For example, when I describe my neighborhood, the placement of two described neighbors in immediate sequence will encourage the motivating hearer or reader to compare them, and so infer an extra, hidden reason for the givens. Analogical likeness thus both underlies and compounds metonymic lifelikeness, as aids to optimum unity: to the best (rmest, most signicant) gestalt. Likewise with the chosen and, in narrative, twofold sequentiality. In our everyday storytelling, we invoke the natural dynamics of the action (This is the way things happened) to propel and camouage the artful dynamics of presentation (the sudden twist, the curiosity gap, the ascending order, the deferred punch line) in the best novelistic manner. As historians, ordinary or professional, we also exploit this orderly lifelike dynamics to promote intelligibility, or a sense of the inevitable, or, with our truth claims in mind, the rhetoric of authenticity. Here, for example, Edward Gibbons history parallels Anthony Trollopes or Robert Gravess history-like novels, from communicative ends (e.g., lucidity) to narrative (chrono-logical) measures (Sternberg 1978: 44, 217ff., 256ff.; 1990b: 934 40, 2006: 205 6). Similar
108. See Sternberg 1985: 23 35; 1990a; 2007 for some continuities between historiographic and poetic discourse, against attempts to oppose (or join) them across the board. See, moreover, the rest of that book for an analysis of the Bible as the earliest and greatest exemplar of the poetics of a history-bound, truth-claiming narrative, with a running comparison to traditional and especially modern (e.g., Jamesian) ction. Here, therefore, Ill just touch on such continuities and extend them to the more common equivalent of history in our everyday truthbound speech and storytelling.
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life/literature parallels show and operate on other discourse levels, to other, even opposed effects, by other means, or all together. We thus break idiomatic and allusive stereotypes the way we do orderly action routines: with a variety of ends in view surprise, ridicule, covert signaling at times under the pretense of innocent slips or inadvertent garbling. Just as, from the selectional viewpoint, we conveniently forget things whose mention is liable to interfere with our communicative purpose. Qua addressee, conversely, one is of course as much concerned in life as in literature to disambiguate and make sense of the message in terms of the speakers intentions as well as his professions. Does the sequential arrangement of items, with its tendentious implications, merely follow, after all, a descriptive convention or associative habit? In suppressing that piece of information, is the speaker genuinely or diplomatically or perhaps affectedly forgetful, like Theophrastuss Ironical Man who pretends he didnt hear when he did; that he hasnt seen when he has (1967: 35)? Is the offensive misquotation we encounter due to malice or ignorance, wit or witlessness? But all this is not to say that the art/life similarity is complete: that Longinus, for instance, is right to cut across all the boundaries of discourse in his attempt to demonstrate that sublime art veils its artfulness. Nor does it justify more recent alluring overstatements. Among those who push this similarity much too far is the Poststructuralist bracketing of historical and literary narrative, even under the umbrella of ction (Hayden White 1990: 27); or the cognitivist doctrine, equally adopted with more zeal and fanfare than thought by various narrative analysts, that we process all stories just the same way, whether faced with artistic, ordinary, even living narrative. But does artistry and all it involves rules, mind-set, training, liberties count for nothing? Moreover, artistic narrative being usually ctional, doesnt the ontology, with the licenses and other peculiarities involved, make any difference? Further, does the concept of narrative, or so much as the term, apply to what humans merely observe outside or feel inside, without expressing, let alone addressing, it? Of course it does the cognitive dogmatist would respond since the everyday mind is the literary mind.109 But is it, and with it the respective kinds of story? The dissimilarity lies not just in the free because typically ctive referential play of literary motivation; it also extends to such motivations dual reference or bidimensionality or bi-perspectivity, resulting from the ctions built-in discrepancy between speaker and author. In turn, this discrepancy uniquely
109. Turner 1996; for detailed responses to this wide (inter)disciplinary premise, see the overviews of cognitivist work on story in Sternberg 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2009, and the account of ction as quotation below.
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joins, and so complicates, the omnipresent one between reader and author. Having just analyzed the motivational signicance of the latter dissymmetry between communicators, let us now advance from this discourse universal to a major systemic variable: how ction as such opens and exploits a disparity at the originating communicative end itself, speaker vs. author. In everyday discourse, beginning with its face-to-face paradigm, whatever the motivations inferred situational or psychological, conventional or idiosyncratic, expressive or persuasive they must all ultimately apply to the speaker himself and for the most part to him alone. As the originator (author) immediately responsible for the utterances he makes, there is normally no going beyond or behind him to explain his procedure. Not that this originators procedure must dispense with all intermediate utterance, for the ordinary speaker may cite other people (or an earlier self) to his audience possibly ourselves just as the literary author quotes his narrator to us readers, between inverted commas or by framing implication. That privilege generally stands, yet remains beside the point here. For the point turns, instead, on whether the ordinary speaker himself, with his own and his quoted discourse, is like the ctional counterpart referable as mediator to a hidden, superior, normative, goal-driven, at will otherminded discourse power who quotes him. And he isnt, but operates quite on his own agenda or premises and must accept the responsibility. So this rule about the everyday author-speaker as ultimate court of appeal governs nonliterary, especially truth-bound discourse regardless. When this discourse goes wrong turns inconsistent, say, or counterfactual we motivators cannot look there for reasons (or judgments) to any higher, more distant authority than our interlocutor, or Gibbons narrator, or the Big Bang reconstructor. And we cannot do it even when they themselves speak out of propria persona, interposing lower subjects, mediators. The speaker himself can indeed hide behind masks (as in irony) or secondary voices (as in all types of reported discourse); but, even so, once we have identied and penetrated these fronts, we have reached the living explanatory terminus. In various contexts, for that matter, even the assumption of such masks, unless unmistakably signaled, is frowned on and penalized. Which is to say, from the encoders along with the decoders viewpoint, that such masking (mediacy, oblique motivation) is institutionally discouraged there, if not ruled out, as both an expressive and an interpretive resource in the interests of straightforward communication. Take a perjured witness who claims in his defense that throughout his testimony he was being ironical or was covertly using a friend of his as a persona: it would do that witness as little good to invoke a possible speaker as it would do a physicist or historian to say that his
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refuted theories were actually referring to some possible world.110 Neither of the excuses, the subjective (other-mindedness) or the objective (other-worldliness), qualies in context as a mimetic motivation, and so as a viable loophole (cover, alibi) for the false discourse. In short, the appeal to perspective would no more help than that to existence, as Ill call them below. All this means that the daily business of living imposes constraints on ctionality that affect both speaker and addressee, both the status of reference to the world in the given text and the distancing techniques by which either party can shift the formal originators responsibility for that reference to an intermediate whipping-boy. It also means that, whether these felicity-conditions are observed or violated in everyday life, aesthetic-rhetorical functionality (and its referential motivation) obtains here only insofar as it is established or at least presumed to be intentional on the speakers own part. If unintended, the impression made on the addressee, whether happy or incongruous, is accidental or symptomatic (or otherwise genetic) rather than properly communicative: it may indeed have effects and consequences but certainly no authorized function. This makes it possible for irreconcilable noncoincidences to arise in life between speaker-oriented and addressee-oriented motivation. Throughout them, the one, speaking motivator doesnt even know, let alone arrange, the fortuitous effects that the message as encoded and unhappily encountered has produced on the other motivator in the decoding. These noncoincidences come often in everyday discourse, and on a wide range. They extend from side effect to boomerang effect, from over-, under-, or mis-reading to counterreading, from failed impact to self-exposure and reversal of intention: as when the would-be ironist turns ironized by the infelicities emitted and other giveaways. Especially notable, then, are those daily noncoincidences that show themselves wherever the decoder infers, integrates, and genetically accounts for (e.g., in terms of the other partys milieu, character, upbringing, social station, mental state, ideological commitment, linguistic dialect, careless writing) such information as the encoder is not at all aware of having betrayed. Even so, the common (speaking, telling, writing) encoder is then presumed to be, as always, the originator of discourse for better or worse, and accordingly self-betraying, rather than betrayed (i.e., maneuvered into self-betrayal) by an author in remote control, who stands higher and knows better.
110. Contrast the recently popular branch of alternative history, which openly declares and develops some such possibility. For ner distinctions among (hi)stories, see my If-Plots (Sternberg 2008).
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The only exception to this unitary responsibility of origination occurs where the formal speaker the inspired prophet, the hired mouthpiece, the mimicked voice, the victim of torture or brainwashing is a puppet manipulated into saying in his own name (motivating) whatever suits the purposes of some more or less invisible puppeteer. Take an overt case in point, which lays bare its exceptionality, as it were, and within a framework of absolute, because inspired historiography. On the Bibles premise of divine inspiration, God counts as author of the narrative itself, as well as of the narrated world (Sternberg 1985: 58 185; 2007: passim). Moreover, the two authorships even intersect, to compounded effect. Just as God inspires, effectively constitutes the global narrator from behind the scene of discourse, so he does in principle transform his spokesmen within the narrated world. And this happens, further, not just supernaturally but at times also against their will, character, or even physical features. Thus, in response to Mosess plea to be excused from the mission of telling Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go, because he is not a man of words but slow of utterance and slow of tongue, God says to him:
Who has made a mans mouth? Who makes one dumb or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt speak. (Exodus 4:10 12)
Or consider a foreign hostile prophet. The word that God puts in my mouth, that must I speak (Numbers 22:38), Balaam insists, more briey yet as strikingly, because regretfully. Despite himself, this mouthpiece of God comes to bless Israel, whom he would dearly like to curse. Or the other way round, all too familiar nowadays: the hostage of terrorists maligning his own country and praising (if necessary, defending) its, and his own, enemies. But such exceptional motivation behind motivation is the rule in typical literary, qua ctive, discourse. (And as far as the reading process is concerned, the same holds true of any text from family anecdotes to scientic writing subjected in that respect to a literary interpretation, regardless of its original nature: one, that is, where the constraints on ctionality have been relaxed or blocked in consequence of historical changes, generic relocation, personal whim, or whatever.) Behind such forces for relaxing the constraints, in turn, there lies the ever-present ambiguity of the works ontic key, as well as of the reference generally. Ever-present, since no formal marker separates imagined from truth-claiming discourse, ctionality from factography, only the purpose assumed, inferred, assigned, imposed by the reader in context, and so never yielding more than a likely reality-key. This entails a radical, because qualitative, difference. Whether obviously or subtly or only nominally distanced from his creator, whether an occasional
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monologist and dialogist or a global, full-edged, and seemingly autonomous narrator, the literary speaker is in principle as fabricated and his speech as mediated as any other textual component, including the world spoken about: events, characters, arenas, interpersonal relations, extrahuman existents and existence.111 Such literary speakers only difference from these nondiscoursive components is that they are ctional represented objects and he is a ctional re-presented, because quoted, subject. He can also quote lower subjects in turn, lengthening and complicating accordingly the chain of transmission or, from our side, reception. The speakers or narrators own discourse, inset within the quoting authors tacit (implicit) frame, will then double as a frame relative to the inset words or thoughts of his quotees, and so forth. As Ive often argued,
ction entails the quoting of all mediators along the line of transmission. Throughout, the world-making author, himself silent, communicates with us, his discourse partners, by re-presenting the words and thoughts, voices and views, supposed to have arisen within and about the imagined world. The entire intermediate chain of transmission there is actually a chain of quotation. The authorial ctionist having quoted the ctive teller, the teller proceeds to quote the characters at speech/thought, then the characters quote one another, all the way to the inmost quote, the last inset. A descending order of quotational scope, control, awareness; an ascending order of mediateness, subordinacy, irony. And fact-bound (everyday, historiographic) discourse, where the author doubles as teller, only starts that chain one link after, with the quoting of the rst speaking/thinking agent, the tellers own experiencing-I included. This . . . modularity once appreciated, our idea of narrative, as well as of quotation, will undergo a sea change accordingly. (Sternberg 2009:
490 91; emphasis added)
Hence a fatal weakness of the cognitivist dogma that the ordinary mind is the literary mind that mindwork cuts across ontological boundaries, among other life/art variables with all it implies for the processing and motivating of discourse, world, storyworld.112 But lets focus, instead, on the constructive, and reconstructive, side of this argument.
111. That speaker is possibly even alone fabricated, in contrast to the world spoken about. An example would be Wolfgang Hildesheimers Marbot, an imaginary biography of a real person (on which see Cohn 1999: 79 95). The inverse case, more familiar even from everyday life, would be a real speaker (e.g., Christopher Isherwood in Prater Violet) telling or newly telling a ction: a joke, parable, (auto)biography, childrens tale, synopsis of a novel or a lm. 112. This stands high among the reasons why, though my approach to narrative and discourse generally is sometimes described as cognitivist, or an anticipation of cognitivism, I have refrained from assuming the label (as distinct from the mentalism and constructivism that do characterize this functional approach. Indeed, the cognitivist enterprise, with its adherents in literary or narrative study, isnt usually function-minded, either). For other reasons, see notes 84, 88, 109, and 114.
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The comparison with the fact-bound antipole helps to bring out the principled difference made by the unique, dening ctional interposition of the speaker between reader (as ultimate addressee) and author (as ultimate originator, not least originating quoter). Due to this uniquely interposed subject voice, mediator the literary ctional text postulates one communicative framework more than the corresponding nonctional discourse: the latters unmediated face-to-face exchange becomes direct quotation in the form of dialogue, inner speech becomes quoted interior monologue, quotation becomes quotation within quotation, and so on. The plus-one framing, unique to ctional discourse, begins with the speaker as the authors inset quote and runs along the entire line of transmission.113 What underscores the distinctive force of this principle is that the additional, outermost context the discourse frame is qualitatively and unmatchably superior to the rest, as every whole is to its parts: whats more, as an authorized discourse frame is to the insets created and cited and controlled by it. This makes the extra discourse frame (and its extra, authorial discourser) unrivaled within as well as unparalleled without the literary ction, by every measure, on every axis: power, knowledge, judgment, reliability, artfulness. Throughout, the master frame differs in kind from all the discourses (written, spoken, heard, mental) it frames, so that any dissonance between the frame and its insets threatens to give them away (as decient in power, knowledge, judgment, etc.) and newly highlights the discourse hierarchy. Even when these lower-level discourses have insets of their own one character echoing or mind-reading another, say they never compare, let alone compete, with the highest, ultimate frame, which quotes them all as it pleases. That frame constitutes the locus of the works art and meaning and rhetorical determination in short, of the primary relationship between the reader and the disembodied (implied) authorial power with whom the nal authority and responsibility lie. Such is the unique intricacy and hierarchy of the ctional-as-quotational communicative structure, which most discourse theory, especially poetics and narratology as well as cognitivism, has yet to appreciate, on pain of continued inadequacy. Nothing else can explain, inter alia, why everything within that manifold complex, whether discoursive or discoursed about, nar113. Note that this line is longer than the chain of communication proper, because transmission also includes all non-communicative, unself-conscious, private discourse: from the written journal to unexpressed self-communion. This public/private variable, whose neglect leaves holes in prevalent communication models unable to accommodate the private discourse of characters and their entire secret life is the focus of Sternberg 2005, with earlier references, especially Sternberg 1978: 254 305; Yacobi 1981, 1987, 2000; Bordwell 1985: 57ff.; Thompson 1988: 49ff on cinematic (un)self-consciousness.
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rating or narrated, always lends itself in principle, not just to motivation but to double, mimetic/aesthetic, ctional/functional motivation. Still less can any other account explain why this special principled rationale extends to the most unpromising, discordant, incongruous-looking elements within the communicative (privileged, literary, narrative) structure in question, and indeed gets most activated by them. All is grist that comes to the mill of ction, but the less grist-like, the more pressing for treatment as such, namely, as oddities devised for a reason. Among them, even what might elsewhere, in ordinary speech events, read as mere genetic causes or symptomatic features of the speakers discourse (e.g., accent, excitement, bigotry, unreason, incoherence, ignorance, redundancy, sentimentality, misjudgment, ill-formedness, loss of control) are here freely and frequently invested with functional signicance. This is because all such apparent discourse oddities, genetic-seeming or otherwise, imply purposive ctionalizing by reference to the special frame and hierarchy of quoted discourse. They are presumed to form a mimetic, inset motivation for compositional choices, which trace back, not to the interposed and foregrounded and possibly untrustworthy narrator (often facing his own addressee) but to the author as the inventive quoter in control, who pulls the narrational strings from behind the scenes for his various ends and his designs on ourselves, the frame-sharers. Accordingly, what passes for a mistake or oversight on the part of the speaker within the ctive world (say, the sleepy Alices garbling of How doth the little busy bee into How doth the little crocodile) invites at the same time a purposeful explanation (say, in terms of Carrollian parody) within the rhetorical frame enclosing it. To the Russian Formalists, a (mimetic, here subject-oriented) motivation for parody, let alone as a camouage, least of all with a novel, estranging effect, would sound impossible, a contradiction in terms, an oxymoronic offense against the rationale and the diachrony of art alike; but it isnt. Instead, like every device, parody lends itself to mediation, ctionalizing, quoting, subjectivizing within an inset, as well as being open to demotivation into the inverse discourse forms (e.g., parody read, or misread, as genuine, unmediated address from authorized speaker to reader, and so on). Here, the mimetic context of Alice half-consciously garbling the poem shifts or extends upward, then, to generate a doubling (because at least twofold) and redeeming (because motivating) effect, orientation, point of view and all by force of scalar contrast. Like the respective discourses, Lewis Carrolls own motivation for the mischance parody stands behind, above, around, and against that anchored in Alice, which ctionally embodies it as a mischance. With that shift of context in the authors silent mastery and measures to the frame, likewise, narratorial ignorance (Mrs. Slipslops malapropisms or
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Huck Finns innocence), or reectorial gaps (e.g., Maisies), come to signal authorial knowledgeability; redundancy and long-windedness (Nestors in Homer or Abigails in the book of Samuel or Molloys in Beckett) to promote economy; immorality (like Jason Compsons) to reect moral fervor; parochialism (like that of Americans abroad in Jamess ction) to develop cosmopolitan themes; unconsciousness of audience (the diarists, the interior monologists) to highlight or dissimulate self-conscious artistry. In each case, the shift involves, not functional substitution but plurality, doubling at least, and interplay. For the reader is led to integrate odd textual data (e.g., errors of fact, reason, judgment, language) through the assignment of certain negative, disprivileging traits (e.g., ignorance, illogic, immorality, foreignness, respectively) to the speaker or, again, reector and to motivate their emergence as the speakers involuntary self-revelation in such unreliable light.114 And this mimetically based process of inference and (re)construction as well as the trait inferred and (re)constructed as its outcome forms part of the works aesthetic strategy, no less than do any other authorial ends achieved by implying that unreliable speaker. It is not just that Mrs. Slipslops malapropisms are Fieldings puns, or Alices garblings Carrolls parody. The ease and condence marking our decision that this is indeed the case, that she is obliquely exposed, laughed at, characterized by his comic strokes, prove as integral to the art of Joseph Andrews, or the Alice books, as are prolonged or unresolved ambiguity and hesitant division of responsibility between speaker(s) and author to the poetics of the modern novel (in The Good Soldier, for example). Like all ction, both extremes greet us with a perspectival montage of transmitters on or below the narrative surface: a narrator/author composite viewpoint. Yet they are opposed in the montages amenability to unpacking into the constituent transmitting perspectives (what in the discourse is whose?) and in the role served by the (un)packing. Further, these respective pairs of ctionalizing and functionalizing, mimetic and artistic motivation, assume even a sharper difference, since neither pairing is instantaneous, either, but drawn out to some extent, at times
114. Here belongs Tamar Yacobis inuential account of narrative (un)reliability as one (the perspectival one) of several motivating or integrating mechanisms available to the reader, especially when confronted with some difculty. First presented as early as Yacobi 1981, within this theoretical groundwork, the new idea of the (un)reliable has since been continuously developed (see the Yacobi references) and increasingly taken up by other narratologists. As with the wider Tel Aviv poetics, this new approach to the problem by reference to interpretive nning 2005 or, better, constructivist choices has often been designated as cognitive (e.g., Nu in Shen and Xu 2007, Shen 2011, for example), though cognitivism is actually still far from equal to such reading operations. See also notes 88, 109, and 112.
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work-length. In either case, the easy or the difcult, the condently or the hesitantly resolvable, if at all, the gap-lling inferred (at the authors end, implied) by the motivator proceeds along a sequence and, in narrative, between the two constitutive, actional/representational sequences. As a result, either sense-making grows more complex in the process its duration longer, its advance twistable but also more determinate. To dene the aesthetics behind a mimetic construct is always to combine the nal inference with the signposts and adventures along the devised inferential route, straight or tortuous, leading directly ahead or doubling back in time for correctives. Of course, the text need not suggest, nor the reader construct, a mimetic motivation (still less one bringing a distinct speaker into play) for each choice and design and procedure; and those left unctionalized, like the incorporation of the prefatory chapters in Tom Jones or the abrupt transitions in James Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are then immediately related in aesthetic terms to the author or his narrating plenipotentiary, the authoritative teller. On the other hand, even a teller rmly situated in the ctive world may deliberately pursue certain artistic or communicative goals (as with Arkady Dolgorukys distaste for literary frills or Humbert Humberts rhetorical apologetics), which need not overlap with the authors. But the discoursive power relations hardly change even with the overlap; and they really change still less here, in ction, than do their counterparts in the scalar doubling of ordinary quotation. There, a researcher quoting popular opinion with irony, say, involves a very different, if not opposed, hierarchy to one, even the same one, who quotes a peer or an authority for support. Comparable imaginative reports of anothers discourse, however, tend to stop well short of the latter relation. Here, the coexistence of the two arts, the one (Arkadys, Humberts) narratorial, the other (Dostoevskys, Nabokovs) authorial, by no means implies equivalence, nor does the self-consciousness common to both artists. Whatever the degree of correspondence between them, the one is framed within the other, devised and dominated by the other, and thus functions to motivate the other. As with all narrator-based motivations, of course, suggesting or constructing an art(ist) other than the authorial enables the author to operate under a certain reality-like guise: in the form of an imaginary discourse event and process running parallel to the implied authorial counterpart.115 An autonomous-looking storyteller thereby deploys what is normally a real-life, (auto)biographical tale, as it were, but possibly substitutes or adds further autonomizing traits. The story then told may itself be an open ction (like
115. Also, to be sure, overlying and within it as surface and inset except that these metaphors belong precisely to the higher, aesthetic logic that assumes the guise of this motivation.
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Scheherazades nightlong spellbinders). The story may also be told from an omniscient vantage point, one located within or without the storyworld: another author-like privilege given to Scheherazade, along with an assortment of more or less human all-knowing precedents and analogues (e.g., Sternberg 1978: 236 305, 1985: 58 185, 2007, passim; Yacobi 1981, 1987b, 2001). Again, only now to a distancing effect, the tellers may seem to address an audience of their own (as Scheherazade does for a difference or, among ostensible truth tellers, Brownings Duke, Conrads Marlow), and even to perform the address with their own goal, skill, or style (like skaz), for better or worse. Such a narrator parallels, and so appears to embody, the author in some major regards independence and audience-mindedness at least, possibly omniscience as well but remains an inset and ctional and at will fallible mediator nevertheless. In this, their relationship does not essentially differ from that just outlined between the far more removed positions of the unconsciously informative source (diarist, interior monologist, Jamesian reector, all informants, for short) and the knowingly communicative, ctionalizing author. Like the unself-conscious informants, the narrators manifold art becomes another hypothesized trait, another more or less opaque fac ade, another ctional means to various aesthetic ends, including the readers probing for the status and limits of that art. In any such system of motivation within motivation, therefore, even the gural insets aesthetic motivations serve as the authorial frames mimetic motivations, regardless of the normative distance between them. Arkadys repeated dismissals of literary nesse thus serve to characterize him as the titles raw youth; Dowells overt postulation of narratee and narration style justies Ford Madox Fords impressionistic method from within the world of The Good Soldier ; Fleurs account of the uncanny trafc between her inventing peoples memoirs for a living and her own novel writing, in Loitering with Intent, thematizes Muriel Sparks lifelong, but usually oblique, harping on the paradox of the artist as ctional God-like truth teller. All this runs throughout dramatized telling as a form of perspectival motivation and of the larger mimetic rationale. It holds as true for a paragon like Pamela as for John Fowless monstrous Collector, for a professional writer like Robert Gravess Claudius as for the barely literate Huck Finn. Inversely, as such opposed couplings go to show, the dramatized, self-conscious narrator is the least homogeneous of narrating, and so motivating, procedures. The variables in the inset/frame, narrator/author relationship are thus many and crucial. Some have already been mentioned: recall the shift of the narrated world between ostensible fact the mimesis of (auto)biography and open ction, or of narrating with perfect and humanly limited knowledge, or the (non)coincidence of audiences. Further signicant vari-
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ables bear on the combination of self-betrayal and intentionality peculiar to each inset speaker; on the nature and cogency of her or his own motivations; or even on the number of insets, ranging from the zero-sign of such typically unrefracted short forms as the epigram and the fable to Conrads Chinese boxes, or, with a smile, John Barths (1969: 148) in the Menelaiad: () (((What?))) (). A quotation in what degree? With how many, and whose, frames around the inmost one-word inset? The puzzle is as suggestive as it is amusing, because it lays bare what theory still overlooks: the role played by the quoting ` -vis factual of discourse not only in ctions making and multivocality vis-a counterparts but also in its (and their) wide variability. As Ive just argued, the numberless variants depend on the features assumed by (or, in terms of communicative processing, attributed to) the quotational chain sheer length most visibly included and here carried ad absurdum. What remains constant is the overall control exerted by the authors primary, sheer aesthetic frame over the intermediaries that distance it from the reader. Inversely, they mediate this frame implied, disembodied art, and all so as to bridge the authors distance from the reader and enable the oblique contact between the framing participants all along. This variety in unity offers the artist a unique gamut of possibilities for operating both through the agency of the gures (as dramatized subjects no less than as dramatized personae, or even in a combined subjective-objective role, like the autobiographer) and behind their backs, though still, possibly, from their own minds, mouths, mores, modus operandi. So unique is this working gamut open to the artist as to form a hallmark. These rich potentials invest the literary text with an extra (authorial/intermediate or framing/inset, as well as mimetic/aesthetic plus authorial/readerly) bi-dimensionality of motivation that sets it apart from all discourse with no inherent tensions between formal speaker(s) and covert manipulator. In turn, literary narrative assumes still another, third axis of (fabulaic/ nished) motivation, which also operates to complicate the two more widespread, all-literary ones. Indisputably, a fabula as a chrono(-)logical event line is peculiar to the narrative genre, even among discourses presented in linear form, including nonrepresentational time art. This genre-specic fabula requires yet another extra set or, better, sequence of motivations for its selectional and combinatory data of whys for its whats and hows and these motivators essentially vary from those explaining the actual, nished narrative line, whose order and perspective as well as encoding are at will other than the fabulas. When the generic actional sequence comes on top of the shared presentational (dis)ordering, everything grows complex. The mimetic/aesthetic play evidently ramies and thickens; while the authori-
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al/intermediate relation freely lengthens into a chain (even a plot) of discourse in time, with multiple intermediaries as relay stations between the ultimate communicators in the narrative frame. It ensues that the ctive world serving as literatures functional mediator (i.e., mimetic motivator) is itself mediated through quotees: whether knowing speakers or unwitting reectors, either wholly (as in the so-called rst-person tale and lyric) or at least locally (as in discontinuous dialogues and monologues, interspersed along the narrative sequence). And this built-in double mediacy begins to suggest the role played by point of view in this context. Since the two grand mediators the imagined world and the discourse about it, the represented and the representing or, better, re-presenting, quotational component relate to each other as object and subject, or, in narrative, also as plot to perspective, they form distinct branches of mimesis, amid family likeness and interlinkage. Accordingly, the referential sphere to which the literary text turns to effect and justify its strategies divides into two mechanisms or sublogics of mimetic motivation. One is the existential mechanism, grounded in what the reader comes to reconstitute as the objective makeup (in narrative, also the movement) of the ctive image of reality, from the minutiae of character and event to general laws of probability; the other is the perspectival, grounded in the subjective makeup (in narrative, again, plus movement) of the discourse situation in and through which this reality unfolds.
7.3. Appeal to Existence or to Perspective? Unrealistic World and/or Unreliable Subject?
These mechanisms are theoretically distinct, amid their shared referentiality. So much so that the forked mimetic motivations they generate prove at times both unreconcilable and undecidable. Consider, for instance, the two mutually exclusive hypotheses that the reader of The Turn of the Screw is directed to construct, so as to account for the apparitions of the dead servants. Either the ctive world is itself abnormal and the narrating governess only a transparent window on it a lucid mediator or the governess is abnormal and projects her supernatural hallucinations into a ctive world that in itself corresponds to our ordinary reality-model. To account for the narrative discourse as it unfolds, neither mimetic construct, the existential or the perspectival, is sufcient on its own. Either of them proves unequal to supplying an adequate (fully consistent, likely) explanation of so much as the discourse data about what happens and why, in face of troublesome givens or coordinates that the alternative, polar mechanism readily accommodates (motivates). The weaknesses of one overall mimetic hypothesis are the others strengths, and vice versa, so that theres no choosing between the rival lines of motivation.
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Or elsewhere, as elusively, neither of them provides a superior, decisive explanation: with the gap-lling left ambiguous and the incompatible sublogics evenly balanced, the clash again remains undecidable.
Thus, one gap-lling (There are no ghosts) is realistic, that is, consonant with the normal logic of reality; and this inclines the reader in its favor from the start. But the second possibility although it requires a suspension of disbelief, a shift from the familiar world of the readers everyday life to the strange world of ction is the one explicitly maintained by the narrating governess; and this serves to redress the balance. And so on. The reader who endorses either hypothesis will be driven to make a narrow and tendentious selection of materials from the text, in disregard of all clues pointing the other way. . . . As with general factors, so with particular clues and features. (Sternberg 1985: 223 34; see also note 117 below)
There results, in short, a stalemate between the existential and the perspectival forks of mimesis. To break it, the reader needs to go against the mimetic grain that they share, as mimetic sublogics, and against what we ourselves do in normal sensemaking, on pain of unreasonable reason-giving. We must not somehow decide between the incompatibles, that is, but, instead, must opt for their impossible pairing, however contradictory in sense and nature. Any adequate reading of the tale must reject either individual hypothesis in isolation and, illogically, admit them only in tense concert (ibid.). They must run together along the narrating/reading sequence, in ever-changing, rival-but-joint formations and with an ever-shifting balance of power; yet they run together without mimetic closure anywhere, anyhow, in any possible world, so as to fulll the new generic, epistemic, hermeneutic ends sought in Jamesian context. James (1962 [1934]: 172) himself alludes to the new impact sought when he designates The Turn of the Screw as a piece of ingenuity and cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the fun of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious readers. Failing a single mimetic motivation of the humanly narrated ghosts, within any possible world, the author inextricably catches us readers, however jaded, between the extremes of attributing the irrational to nature or to narrator, to an unrealistic eld of existence or to an unreliable perspective: to ontic or to epistemic deviance, in short. A running, polar, irreducible ambiguity about the world. Embracing such a radical ambiguity, taking it by the horns, as it were, makes the reading, or storytelling, truly anti-mimetic, then, because (onto)logically impossible, literally unnatural. Even so, anti-mimesis in this radical
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sense, going against nature and logic alike, is not uncommon except for its global extension here because traceable to permanent gapping. What really happened in Rashomon? Why does Hamlet procrastinate? Is Alice part of the Kings dream, or he of hers? Or regarding myriads of dialogue turns, among other small-scale equivalents: How to account for this utterance (or silence) by this speaker in this encounter? By denition, every permanent gap, big or small, opens at least two possibilities of closure, which the sequel never authoritatively resolves. Our hypothetical gap-llings may complement or exclude each other as with motive (e.g., Hamlets) and event (e.g., whose dream?), respectively but their play is left open to the end, either way. Such permanent gapping has always been available to narrative, along with other representational art, and already looms large among the arts of ambiguity developed in biblical poetics (Sternberg 1978: 50 53 and passim; 1985: 186ff.; 1990a: esp. 123 36; 2001b). By the same token, inversely, this radical example from James goes to expose the current vogue of so-called unnatural narrative (or narratology) as muddled and misleading. The name of unnatural is borne in vain there, applied at will to what is merely unrealistic or unusual or just unmodern, yet locatable within some possible world.116 Indeed, the rigorous possible/ impossible distinction and how it correlates with the less rigorous terms (un)natural, (un)mimetic, (un)realistic remains undrawn within these miscellanies. Still less discerned and distinguished there is how the genuine unnatural shows itself, not in any abnormal component per se, but in a relation, even one between intrinsic naturalisms (e.g., arrived/didnt arrive, dead/asleep) that exclude each other by nature, yet are left undecidable all along the discourse, and so unnaturally coexist (co-occur, co-extend) in effect. Thus the irreducible mimetic ambiguity and, specically, that between existential and perspectival motivation, our immediate concern. Though (or even because) denied any mimetic resolution the gap being permanent the ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw must still have a reason for us to tolerate, let alone embrace and justify it against nature. The wanted rationale is implicit within the frame of the aesthetic motivation, especially adjusted to Jamess modernist theory and practice of narrative art. The tales framing motivational logic consists in the playful dynamics of gap-lling, kept unresolved forever, hence in the renovation of the ghost story and the appeal to various orders of reading. There, and only there, do the two opposed mimetic motivations reasonably work together in the service of a common end, rather than a common world. The logical absurdity of inconsistence nature coexisting with supernature, unreliability with unrealism makes
116. For example, Alber et al. 2010 and the comment on it in Sternberg 2010: 516 18.
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teleological sense. Actually, what this purposeful authorial frame motivates, above all, is nothing other than the impossible mimetic coexistence and concurrence of the two forked hypotheses. In those aesthetic terms alone, then, does the mutually exclusive pair turn mutually complementary: either/or reveals itself as both/and on the highest, functional level and authority. Indeed, each of the hypotheses and constructs held here in suspension throughout, in the interest of the Jamesian play of ambiguity,117 operates elsewhere as an independent motivation. Which is to say, one that becomes dominant, sooner or later, with the wavering between the rivals arrestable and the narrative univocal to match or at least the narrative gap in question univocally closed. Not that a hypothesis ever comes alone, strictly speaking, but that it may count as single in the process, early or late, with the competition as good as nullied and the text disambiguated. We then nd the clash between the existential and the perspectival either altogether precluded from the start no veritable rivalry, given the balance of likelihood or deliberately generated but sooner or later resolved, and thus revealed as temporary rather than permanent. Somewhere along the narrative sequence at once, midway, at long last a decision between the sublogics will then emerge, and plot or perspective, the characters existence or experience, will then control how we make sense of the narrated reality as such. For example, the one sublogics motivational primacy is by convention as established in science ction as the others is in the Watson variety of the detective story. Again, it takes as little time to decide that Esther Summersons preternatural goodness is a fact in the world of Bleak House as that Blils is a delusion on Allworthys part. By the same token, the choice between motivations via ontology and via perspectivity, axiology, epistemology, or, specically, between (un)realism and (un)reliability, can prove harder, yet remain determinable, sometime, somewhere. Thus, we have to work and wait as long to vindicate our trust in Fanny Prices priggish-looking views of her environment in Manseld Park (so that what she sees and judges becomes in due course the authorized truth) as, inversely, to validate our suspicions of Elizabeth Bennets image of Darcy (and so to mark the limits of her reliability ` -vis other observers, from the clairvoyant author down). vis-a Even drama, with its notorious perspectival constraints often deemed inherent to it as a globally unmediated type of mimesis in fact realizes, on a
117. For an early discussion of gaps and multiple gap-lling in this paradigmatic Jamesian tale, see Perry and Sternberg 1968. That analysis also leads to some general comments on point of view as an explanatory measure.
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smaller scale, all these gap-lling options and shifts. Thus, the objective resolution of the ambiguity concerning the ghost in Hamlet (in terms of a deviant world) contrasts with its subjective resolution in Julius Caesar and, with still greater surety, in Macbeth (in terms of an overwrought perceiver). The same line of demarcation cuts clean across, not the boundaries of genre alone but also of history, perceptibility, and, above all, subject-matter or referential tonality. Take the conventional techniques of unraveling plot complications, through some deus ex machina (the way Athene intervenes in the civil war at Ithaca toward the end of the Odyssey) and through the disclosure that the whole imbroglio (like that of Alice in Wonderland) has been nothing but a dream: these mark the world-oriented and the transmission-oriented extremes as unmistakably as any corresponding innovations. Also, compare such eventual resolution of all these forked temporary gaps, by appeal to one mimetic sublogic or the other, with the permanent doubt left between the two gap-lling extremes by the opening of Gogols The Overcoat.
In the department of but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service. Each individual attached to them nowadays thinks all society insulted in his person. Quite recently a complaint was received from a justice of the peace, in which he plainly demonstrated that all the imperial institutions were going to the dogs, and that the Czars sacred name was being taken in vain; and in proof he appended to the complaint a romance in which the justice of the peace is made to appear about once every ten lines, and sometimes in a drunken condition. Therefore, in order to avoid all unpleasantness, it will be better to describe the department in question only as a certain department. So, in a certain department there was a certain ofcial (1992 [1842]: 79)
Does the fear of the bureaucracy, adduced as the reason for suppressing certain trivial information about ofcialdom, reect an existential fact or a narratorial neurosis? Unresolved by reference to either of the opposed mimetic mechanisms, this opening question doesnt just parallel in little the interplay between them throughout The Turn of the Screw. It also nds a counterpart within The Overcoat itself, in the more startling but equally Janus-faced ambiguity as to the predatory ghost (real or imagined?) showing up at the end.118
118. Also, recall how Shklovsky praises Gogol for ignoring the suggestion to refer the improbable events in The Nose to a dream: no perspectival disambiguation, that is, in favor of realism. Such a desire to constrain the perspectival mechanism or some variety of it has some later narratological as well as artistic equivalents: going against the heavy recourse to irony or subjectivity (e.g., Booth 1961), against the texts recuperation via the narrator or the Jamesian limited viewpoint (Culler 1975: 200 2), and so forth. Small wonder, considering the excesses inspired by modernism and, in theory, neomodernism (Sternberg 1981: 88; 2007:
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7.4. Fictional Motivation under the Proteus Principle
The little as well as the big or strategic gaps can, then, oscillate, even forever, between the incompatible mimetic rationales as alternative closures on alternative world axes, object vs. subject. Joining other commonalities regarding ambiguity, this freely variable magnitude helps to bring out a set of nine principled operational conclusions that have suggested themselves, especially, during this section. Of course, the nine guidelines to be generalized here do not just assume but take up the concept of motivation as I redened it in section 4 and further developed in what intervenes; only, everything is now oriented, or newly oriented, to their common point of reference. They all stem from the master law of discourse that I call the Proteus Principle, whereby a many-to-many correspondence obtains between form and function, with a multiple, changeable, and not always resolvable interplay to suit. In this light, what emerges is that (1) once established or approached as ctional, a text becomes referentially ambiguous (protean) throughout, and so is disambiguated by the motivator, if at all, into some particular ction (mimesis of some world from some viewpoint[s]) to yield the best functional sense possible or wanted in context. Or wanted, I add, because a second-best motivating pattern is at times good enough for us: we then carelessly, or even cheerfully, make do with what others (our own other selves included) would endeavor to level up or would reluctantly concede in face of an ambiguous ction that proves too recalcitrant. Either way, the ambiguity is inherent in the necessarily gapped mimesis, while the resolution is contingent, hypothetical, and, if motivating, formed into a twofold (lifelike/artistic, ctional/functional) pattern and scale. Inversely, if it were true that unambiguous reference is the essential condition for constructing from the text both the narrational and el 1998: the narrated spheres alike (Margolin 1991: 519; also Dolez 145 68), then reading (or viewing, let alone motivating) ction would become impossible. Not that the histories we write, read, or daily tell each other escape this ambiguity and the quest for its optimum (or good enough) motivated closure that is launched by all world-making. Rather, ction being an arranged (in narrative, doubly ordered, at will disordered) system of gaps about an imagined rather than the actual world hence unconstrained by truth or instrumental value it
707 19; 2010: 576 77; and note 105 above): perspectivizing is all too readily applicable and too massively, sometimes automatically or overingeniously, applied, at the expense of alternative coherences, interests, values, even ambiguities (such as between the mimetic forks).
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enjoys the license of such gap-lling and all related patterning as will best suit (i.e., correlate) the two motivational logics; (2) these two correlated logics, though of enormous range, power, and importance, even heightened when operating together, do not yet exhaust the patterning resources available to us foreseeably so, given the Proteus Principle again. Just as the Principles dening many-to-many interplay entails radical ambiguity throughout, or all over, so it immeasurably multiplies even beyond the motivational twofold the available ways to disambiguation, sense-making, answering the human rage for order. Under its all-inclusive umbrella are also found and equally open to us the still larger, more heterogeneous, and boundless repertoire of integrational mechanisms, as dened above, genesis included. The open-endedness of discourse, and the pattern-makers eld of choice, therefore increases multifold. Our business, though, is now with the crucial, motivating interplay of ction and function, itself protean enough by any criterion, yet well-dened nevertheless amid its magnitude and changeability; (3) though essentially referential, because ctional, the ambiguity lurking for a purpose in the texts gaps about the world can trace and extend to all other discourse levels, as with the endless two-way interaction between mimesis and medium, extraverbal reality and verbal form along The Turn of the Screw. Two-way, I emphasize, against accepted opinion among views of reading, even of ambiguity proper. Its not even the case that the texts language is given least of all, given as univocal or equivocal while the world we abstract from it is gapped and remains a construct born of gap-lling inference, and so open or closed, equivocal or otherwise, only provisionally and ad hoc. Rather, the two levels or components interpenetrate in the telling/reading. So the ction we construct in the discourse encounter by appeal to some function the twofold motivation of the discourse reciprocally shapes the discourse in its image, complete with the (in)determinate grammar and meaning. A garden-path sentence like The horse raced past the barn fell already encapsulates this universal of sense-making as a dynamic multi-way, multi-level interaction among all the components in play. How else does raced transform in retrospect from active to passive, if not through the surprise given by the incoherent fell and demanding an alternative patterning that will best t (repair, coordinate, satisfy) words and world? And this makes, of course, another protean, manyto-many universal, only more specic than the overarching principle of inbuilt ambiguity in (1);
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(4) the reader can then always resolve any peculiar (surprising, uncommon, incongruous, or otherwise problematic, and so actively ambiguous) feature located on any discourse level by projecting and incorporating it into either ctional axis, the existential (in narrative, also action-logical) or the perspectival; (5) just as this mimetic ambiguity always lies in a narrative gap by my denition a felt discontinuity between narrated and narrating sequence, event and text order so either disambiguating projection and incorporation into these mimetic axes existential or perspectival essentially consists in gap-lling. As often before, I again emphasize that identifying and (re)constructing a mimetic perspective (a tellers, scriptors, reectors, hearers) or a perspectival set-up (subsuming one or more of these) necessarily involves some closure in or of the discourses eld of reality, no less than does (re)constructing the action, and generally in close touch with it. As subject and object, their readings need to correlate, cross refer, and eventually dovetail in the gap-lling process for the mimesis to hang together, always with a motivated poesis in view. The object/subject interplay, driving toward a joint (re)constructed ction, must of course suit and serve the underlying functions, or what counts as such. (More on this denitional hierarchy in point [9] below.) The failure to see all this is a longstanding obstacle to a viable theory of quotation, narration, point of view (including the notorious free indirect discourse) and to a unied theory of narrative; (6) further, the gap-lling we perform on either mimetic axis is, in turn, hypothetical and revisable, even reversible not least from one axis to another or from temporary closure to permanent ambiguity; (7) the more so where the gap-lling (existential, perspectival, coordinated) runs along a given sequence, as in all verbal or cinematic (unlike spatial, e.g., pictorial) representations, and, above all, where it runs between the two sequences peculiar to narrative; (8) the discourse feature projected and incorporated into either ctional axis can itself be ctional (like Hamlets odd behavior, Sherlock Holmess bafing clues) or otherwise anchored in the world (like similar things in factual writing, painting, or cinema); but it neednt be. Against Tomashevskys practice and the near-automatic assumption among analysts since, in other words, the discourse feature that gets motivated is not at all necessarily a kinetic, storied motif (event, happening, action, development). Nor does the motivated feature even have to be any kind of reality unit, not so much as a described
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one (object, existent, landscape, state of affairs).119 If the motivating logics come down to two, one of them mimetic, and this one branches out in turn into two sublogics, then the eld of the discourse items motivated by them is all-inclusive, undelimitable, an open set, in short. Thus, among the host of nonmimetic text elements, an incoherent sentence is referable to the utterers disturbed state of mind; an oxymoron (e.g., the living dead) is attributable to a fantastic state of being; a formal address, explicable either by appeal to a pompous, awkward, or oldfashioned addressor (and/or, at the opposite end, to a punctilious addressee) or to a ceremonial occasion; music in lm can likewise be explained as reecting (realizing) either a subjective or an objective condition (e.g., happiness and danger, respectively); and camera angle, as Tynjanov noted, implies a characters viewpoint in early cinema. Everything in discourse lends itself to motivation of one mimetic kind or the other, hence to motivational clash and doubt. This directly links up with the argument Ive often made elsewhere in kindred terms: that everything within or without a representation, however unmimetic on the surface, can turn representational in the process of discoursing/reading or viewing in the motivating and everything can even turn narrative when subjected to the generic narrative-making operations of double time-ordering. Just as we invest the narrator with traits (e.g., allknowledge, reliability, omnipotence, omnicompetence, or their opposites) to make perspectival sense of the discourse, so, for existential sense-making, we infer and attribute generic features: we project narrativity onto the discourse and, where appropriate, turn it into the dominant force in order to generate a narrative. A fortiori, everything in a narrative can assimilate to its dominant narrativity (e.g., Sternberg 1978: esp. 276ff.; 1981a; 1985: 321 64; 1992a: esp. last section; 2001b; 2010: esp. 632 48). The kinship of such ever-potential referentializing or ctionalizing or narrativizing to motivating lies in the common appeal to the manifold, shifting, ad hoc form/ function interplay of the Proteus Principle, as against theorys unhappy traditional drive toward one-to-one correspondence between form and function. In this light, indeed, the goal-directed (re)construction of narrative shows itself as a special, paradigmatic case of motivation.120
119. Again, I referred above to Tomashevskys practice, since in theory he acknowledges static as well as dramatic motifs. In fact, though, the latter predominate there, owing to his concentration on narrative, fabula/sjuzhet, and related issues. 120. Inversely, narrative is liable to what I call narrativicide (Sternberg 1998: e.g., 391 99, 447 70), through some kind of de-motivation. This primarily involves the readers erasure (i.e., studied or unwitting oversight) of chrono-logical, chronological, spatiotemporal linkage; but also, on the other mimetic axis, disregard for implicit perspectival sense and unity.
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So, coming back to discourse in general, motivating any . . . feature doesnt mean any reality-item alone, nor does ambiguous throughout in (1) mean ambiguous on the ctional texts mimetic level and sequence alone. Instead, even when the mimetic mechanisms run to the ctional limit, existential or perspectival, the discourse components on which they operate include such as grow ctionalized (along either of the mimetic lines or both) only in the process of motivation. These nonctional components that are open to ctionalizing at will or need especially under pressure of their incongruity include the whole extramimetic lot. They range much beyond the examples just given: from peculiar sound, syntax, style, and verbal texture generally each with an equivalent in other media to the high-level dissonances of theme or genre. And nally,
(9) the logic informing the processual (re)constructive effort culminates in the choice of the nal product, down to the operative motivational hierarchy. The decision between the resulting mimetic constructs can be made (if at all) only ad hoc, on functional (aesthetic) grounds, like generic conventions and exigencies, situational probability, normative ends, simplicity and economy, etc. As in any interpretive process, we may describe the motivational interplay from the productive or the re-productive side; we may quarrel about the resolution of the ambiguity and the nal meaning. But the potentialities for making ctional sense remain constant and distinctive. Whatever the artistic function concerned, such mimetic sense-making freely operates by appeal or with an eye to imagined existence or experience or both; and, more specically, in narrative, by shuttling between plot and perspective as mimetic elds (dimensions, targets, sources, resources) of gap-lling inference.
It is this that brings us to the heart of ction as such: the dispensability of any special dispensation, other than the texts own premises, to impose coherence in terms of a possible (notably including impossible, because inconsistent) world and/or an (im)possible (ditto) observer, a more or less subjective reector of that world. And if most of my opening examples have been drawn from ghost-ridden literature, this is only because the irruption of the supernatural (widely considered unnatural or impossible today) dramatizes the explanatory duality inherent, and so in principle omnipresent, within the mimetic mode itself. In conicting with most everyday worldviews, that irruption impels the reader toward guring out some deviant viewpoint on the imagined world. Despite the temptations of the less demanding, because more literal, alternative taking the apparent supernaturalism of reported existence or narrative emplotment at face value, as if it were an objective/existential fact within the ction we then look round for a perspectival loophole by which the imagined world may be drawn into our normal ken, after all.
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Moreover, the process involved is revealing about motivation estranging, if you will regardless of the mimetic line or sublogic that informs it: whether we choose to ctionalize the discourse into otherworldliness, especially by poetic license, or out of it, despite appearances, via some other-, wrongminded, or unreliable mediator of the natural world. Either way with the supernatural highlights the ever-available yet often automatic choice between the sublogics, in that it makes a qualitative difference, unbridgeable by nature and accordingly perceptible to all choosers. And since to place and account for the deviant by assigning this feature of deviance to the represented reality and to the re(-)presentational prism is then to produce mutual incompatibles, the supernatural also brings home the distinctness (amid family likeness and copresence or, in time, concurrence) of the two mimetic patterning operations.
7.5. Sibling Rivalry and Contingent Resolution within the Family of Mimesis
Though distinct, however, the two closely interrelate far beyond their common opposition, as ctive constructs, to the underlying aesthetico-rhetorical logic that regulates both of them, apart or together. This teleology determines in each case the rise and fall of the vying mimetic mechanisms, their temporariness or permanence, their relative power at the start and subsequent fortunes to the very end. But this negative, dening relation between the existential and the perspectival sublogics as equal mimetic subordinates, even in ctionalizing, to the other (teleo)logic, which frames them both has more positive and less obvious counterparts. Not unlike the primary motivational modes themselves, the mimetic as against the artistic, the ctional vs. the functional, these second-order operations, geared to existence or to perspective within a single logic, are mutually implicative. Both their point of contact and their point of contrast render them so. Evidently enough, the fact that both of them are mimetic mechanisms referring discourse items to the discourse world, as vice versa already entails some interplay and interrelatedness between them, if only as complementary processes and products of world-making for a purpose. More actively and closely, however, the two mimetic submotivations imply each other on a disharmonious basis: not as complements operating by the same master (teleo)logic on the same data to the same, world-like effect, nor even as mere ordinary alternatives, but as natural rivals, ghting on this common ground for the same prize. In this spirit of rivalry, they keep struggling all along the line (or lines, actional, functional, discoursive) for explanatory supremacy, or at least for as large a share as possible in the process of making mimetic sense and its ultimate product.
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Hence also the mutual conditioning of these two perceptibly alternative sublogics of mimesis. The recourse to one must come at the expense of the other, whose coherence is thereby either attened to the zero point (if excluded) or (if concurrently posited and developed) complicated in excess at will, even ambiguated in deance of its aspiration to simple gestalt, rm intelligibility. Seldom are the objective and the refractive hypotheses so nely balanced (as well as permanently suspended) as in The Turn of the Screw; and even there the obtrusion of an alternative on our notice, by way of conicting clues, not merely precludes the monopoly of either hypothesis, but threatens and disturbs the integrity, stability, and closure of either. This uneasy interaction becomes more or differently perceptible where the scales of referential hypothesizing are tipped on one side or the other. Thus in Hamlet, once convinced that the various observers of the ghost cannot all be deranged, we gap-llers attribute the derangement to the world they inhabit: it thereby becomes associated with a special, otherworldly, yet still objective (existential) canon of probability, by reference to both dramatic convention and extraliterary belief as to the impingement of the supernatural on sublunary nature. The plays world is out of joint, it would appear, when compared with the ghostless, low-realistic norm. The opposed subjective explanation, with the correlative aesthetic motivation in terms of psychological insight and the like, has indeed been vanquished by an alternative coalition; but not without leaving its mark on the victor. In face of the divergent, the simpler the perspectival picture (e.g., with the voices and views at issue all deemed normal, authorized), the more complex the world picture (e.g., supernatural, ghostly amid the tragedys otherwise earthbound existence and psychology). A more intricate process of inference likewise validates the apparently fantastic series of episodes that Odysseus tells the Phaeacians: the Cyclops, the witch goddess Circe, the cannibals, the Lotus Eaters, and so on. How to motivate the irruption of wonders, monsters, dramatic turns at this point, on this narrative occasion, within this epic frame? An attentive gap-lling, I would argue, yields the conclusion that the prodigies of Wonderland, long dismissed as gments of Odysseuss imagination, in fact belong to the Homeric world no less than do the battleelds of Troy and the rocks of Ithaca. The ambiguity between the existential and the perspectival reading each with its own aesthetic rationale and implications does arise here. For the inset tale addressed by the hero to the Phaeacians regarding his adventures since leaving Troy (Odyssey: bks. 9 12) is indeed less verisimilar than the enclosing omniscient frame Homers own and its teller not exactly distinguished for nicalness about truth. On other occasions, Odysseus even assumes different identities and multiplies life stories, all of them false, beyond
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any doubt. Given this autobiographical practice, now compounded with the autobiographers likely desire to interest and impress his Phaeacian hosts, isnt the tale of marvelous adventures unreliable a fortiori? But the epics system of internal validation (including the factual correspondences between authorial frame and gural inset, in a work where precise as well as variant repetitions assume interpretive signicance) establishes that the marvelous is, after all, probably due to Homers and not Odysseuss inventiveness. The self-narrators inset, though elsewhere lying, for once echoes and elaborates the allusions made in passing to some fantastic episodes (e.g., Circe, Cyclops, Calypso) on the highest, enclosing authority (Sternberg 1978: 113 14). Within the Odyssey, then, the Wonderland series records the plain truth. In short, the existential mechanism of resolution prevails wherever the reader is impelled to atten the discourse perspectivity in the interests of thickening the plot and its spacetime at large. We then minimize, if not discount, the variables of communication the distorting effect of such interposed prisms as narrators, personae, postures, dreams, vessels of consciousness, and other subjective mediating agencies, all (mis)quoted, possibly also (mis)quoting others in turn and, instead, we objectify, empower, and develop the communicated mimetic eld: assimilate the play of referents to the storyworld itself by appropriately adjusting our own reality-model or our conception of the ctive state and sequence of affairs. On the other hand, consider Brutus addressing the ghost of the murdered Caesar or Ivan Karamazov talking with his shabby devil after old Karamazovs violent and mysterious death. In both encounters, the supernatural can be registered as an objective fact (within the ction) only if we are prepared to combine a switch of reality key with a attening of the discourse. To bring these apparitions into the represented world, facing the characters who apparently observe and address them Brutus, Ivan we must suspend disbelief in the supernatural as an existential premise, while disregarding the features specic to the speech-event (e.g., mental pressures, isolated, hence unsupported, and probably guilt-ridden viewers). In Macbeths banquet scene, further, we can do so objectivize the otherworldly apparition, now the murdered king only at the additional price of supposing everybody but the hero struck blind. How else would he alone see the murdered Banquo there? Inversely, the problems on the way to objectively assimilating the incongruous supposed existent Caesars ghost or Banquos, the shabby devil join forces with more constructive pointers to generate and explain the tendency toward the alternative, perspectival sense-making. Through it, these supernatural encounters shift ground, and so pattern, from onto- to psychologic: from the (super)nature of the represented world itself to a troubled
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mind in dubious contact with that world. They are accordingly motivated by reference to their only observers and to another convention, this time more psychological or perceptual than metaphysical: the workings of the guilty conscience as action and theme. Again, these three inward-turning examples may look extreme, just like the objectifying counterparts instanced above, but they are equally instructive, because estranging, and representative. The same perspectival mechanism for resolving ambiguity variously applies to a wide range of inferences and inference-promoting complexes, from irony and parody through unreliable narration to presupposition to free indirect discourse. A mixed bag? Only if observed through the traditional myopic and atomistic eyes, blind to the high common denominator among the lot (Sternberg 1982a, 2001a: 167ff.). Far higher, I mean, than the shared inferential nature of these devices, signicant by itself. Even higher, moreover, than their sharing the inference of a viewpoint and one involving a latent quotation at that: they all imply what indirect or otherwise tagged discourse (she said/thought that . . . ) alone makes explicit, namely, some re-presented discourse, in one of its many shapes, perspectival as well as formal. The signicance and the unifying power redouble accordingly, in line with the common feature. But the commonality within the apparent miscellany goes further still. In all these cases, the perspectival motivation (e.g., closure) of a gap or an incongruity often overcomes some existential gap-lling hypothesis to which it stands in either sequential or simultaneous opposition. The sequential passage from one axis of mimesis to the other takes place in surprise dynamics: whenever we readers discover that we have been lured into reconstituting the wrong past action or state of affairs (hence the surprise effect on the discoverer) but can devise no satisfactory substitute gap-lling without modifying the pattern of transmission as well. A surprise about the represented world, in other words, then gives rise to one about the preceding discourse (voice, view) that has misled us into it and to joint back-referring world/discourse correctives that will make better sense, with a better t: the best possible or wanted, as always. When in the opening of Tom Jones, for example, the omniscient narrator himself calls the eponymous hero Jenny Joness child (Fielding, bk. 1: 9; 1994 [1749]: 60), this is automatically understood as a cogent reference to an objective state of affairs. Shes his mother. Once Toms true parentage has been divulged to surprising effect, however, the dynamics of recognition, or re-cognition, comes to operate along marked and modied, even inverted perspectival lines. For if we can no longer understand the early mention of her child as objectively reliable true, as it were then we cannot any longer ascribe it to the authorized narrator, either, or not without incurring the
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prohibitive cost of unreason on the transmissional axis. How can one keep the origin of that reference to Jennys child stable, that is, narratorial, amid untruth? We would then have to divide the narrators logically indivisible (because qualitative as well as supernatural) all-knowledge, by attributing to him a sudden lapse there from omniscient authority into ignorance and amnesia.121 Instead, therefore, we retrospectively shift the troublesome referring expression child to an alternative, fallible, mediate source relegating and assimilating it to the collective viewpoint of the neighborhood, to which (we now say) the all-knowing teller restricted himself in the service of mystication and, ultimately, surprise. No wonder, indeed, considering that Fielding, like Jane Austen, specializes in re-cognitive dynamics, and orchestrates it from a denite vantage point at that. The gap about the past (e.g., whos whose) is rst imperceptibly launched and maintained, then unexpectedly sprung and closed, by a narrator omniscient (rather than one gradually discovering, himself surprised) yet suppressive (rather than either omnicommunicative or miscommunicative), with a view to the play and impact of belated recognition (Sternberg 1978: 129ff., 258ff., and, on Jane Austens poetics, 129ff.). This presents a contrast, then, to the validation of Odysseuss possibly unreliable tale of Wonderland, as a true account of unprecedented adventure and miraculous survival against the highest odds. In the example from Tom Jones, instead, an objective-looking family tie suddenly gives way to a mind-oriented repatterning of the glance at Jennys child into a subjective false impression: the neighborhoods misbelief about their kinship. Figured out under the impact of surprise and the weight of the evidence, this perspectivized repatterning overpowers the earlier exterior understanding (along with further rivals) and remains stable, because strongest, to the end. The more signicantly so, because either overpowering, at the point of unexpected whos-whose disclosure or thereafter, is not just inferential but essentially, demonstrably contingent. The balance of probabilities here could as it always can turn out differently, or shift again, down to the last word, at that. But then, it doesnt. An explanation of the counter-to-fact child along such perspectival lines is here clearly preferable to, because simpler and more integrative than, any other synthesis. More integrative, it so happens, even
121. Or, in terms of communicative performance rather than epistemic privilege, we must then burden him with a one-off lapse from suppressive and equivocal into deliberately misrepresenting narration: unparalleled in the novel itself, among other God-like tellings. As with the heavenly model the Bibles God and its God-like narrator equivocating is still permissible in this supernatural discourse, but sheer lying is ruled out.
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in the literal, theoretical sense of integration that I propose. For the retrospectively disfavored alternatives go beyond the early objective mimetic motivation (Tom was called Jennys child because he is so in fact, and remains so in spite of the alleged disclosures to the contrary) toward the wider, open-ended range of possible integrations. But these assorted integrational mechanisms do not compare, either, with the perspectival synthesis weve gured out, by appeal to the unreliable, because ignorant, collective view of the child. The mechanisms that prove inferior here, in retrospect, include the genetic (in terms of authorial oversight); the generic (in terms of comic license regarding narrative harmony); the purely aesthetic (in terms of Fieldings arbitrary misdirection, with no mimetic alibi); and, of course, the purely existential. This last sense-making now becomes as far-fetched as it was natural prior to the denouement, since to sustain it (Tom as Jennys child) within the same perspectival framework as before (an all-knowing, objective, reliable narration) would be to take desperate measures: to postulate a reality-model accommodating double parentage, to brand the late surprising disclosures as false, and the like. Further, concerning the motivational sphere itself, observe my insistence on purely with regard to alternatives judged weaker in context. It is not (hence the purely) that the recourse to perspectival ordering excludes either the aesthetic mode or the existential submode. Take another look at these two (sub)logics and youll see why. Aesthetic patterning, as indicated by the very concept of functional mediacy, not only attends but regulates all mimetic motivation whether oriented to perspective or to existence as forks of mimesis. And the existential mechanism also remains omnipresent, though in another sphere and on another ground. Far from dispensable, or eliminable, it can actually exclude the perspectival antipole as a motivating force, by postulating a viewpoint identical with the authors and therefore contextually objective by denition. The omnicompetent narrators discourse in Emma or War and Peace or The Blue Flower counts as such a perspectival zero-point, with the discoursed mimesis all existentialized: taken for a fact within the ction. The same dominance of that mimetic fork virtually zeroing the alternative, perspectival motivation extends to a characters inset (voice, view, ear) when and where judged reliable, like Odysseuss veried tale of Wonderland. The existential submode, however, cannot itself be excluded, by any competing perspectivity, from the discourse about reality (factual, ctional, narrative, descriptive, composite, linguistic, or otherwise) but only modied in turn: a subject presupposes an object. A viewpoint on the world perforce entails a world to be viewed misviewed, reviewed, counterviewed at will and so impossible to eliminate from or through that viewpoint.
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On the contrary, the more problematic the mediating perceiver (narrator, auditor, reector), the more marked both the eld and the locus of perception as referential constructs: he (e.g., Watson, Marcel, Strether, Bloom) is himself part of the world that he observes and that we reconstruct through his observation. The point is rather that the emergence, let alone the prevalence, of a nonobjective viewpoint always affects, and sometimes determines or reshapes, our existential and aesthetic reconstructions. And the further removed that viewpoint in question is from the authorial norm, the more drastic these adjustments and readjustments. But then, the forked motivational hypotheses about gap-lling neednt emerge one after the other, let alone in the others place, as they do along the re-cognitive surprise dynamics. In the surprise-driven play of hypotheses, indeed, there must arise rst an erroneous (e.g., objective-looking) closure, then an unsettling disclosure, generally followed by a true, corrective (e.g., observer-mediated, other-minded) re-closure as a substitute. The Tom Jones example thus reversed from existential to perspectival sense, or (mis)reference, in the light of an abrupt disclosure about Toms parentage. There ensues the Rise and Fall of First Impressions, as I call this drastic model of gap-lling twisted round by surprise, with the frequent carryover of its shock effect to our (self-)judgment or worldview (e.g., Sternberg 1978: 99 104, 225 29, 243 46, 1985: esp. 264 364, 441 515; 2003a: 351 53; and in the cinema, Bordwell et al. 1985: 37 41, 81 82). For the inverse play of the two sublogics of mimesis, let us now return to my general statement that the perspectival motivation (e.g., closure) of a gap or incongruity often overcomes some existential gap-lling hypothesis to which it stands in either sequential or simultaneous opposition, and take up the latter, simultaneous relationship between the mimetic forks. If the sequential dynamics of gap-lling and other inference along the given narrative order brings out the relations between the two submodes by way of retrospective (with surprise, also recognitive) shift and revision, then the simultaneous occurrence of the two further sharpens the point by collocating the different pros and cons. In context, for instance, the following description gives rise to a head-on referential clash:
P. C. Hardman tiptoed into the room. . . . Light seeping through the curtain fabric revealed a sandy-haired boy lying in the bed, breathing rather stertorously, a high ush on his cheeks, a cloth pinned round his neck. (Blake 1972: 88)
As so often happens, and still needs to be appreciated, what triggers the entire process of inference is a discordance: here, a sharp either/or informational
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conict, opening a gap about the world. The head-on clash arises at this juncture from the prior narration of the truth behind the erroneous reference exactly the kind of truth denied us, with a view to late, shocking recognition, apropos Jennys child in Fielding. The discourse given in the passage cited here jars against the already given state of existence. This is because we know that the child lexically and pronominally (his . . . his) referred to here as a boy is a girl in disguise as a matter of fact, none other than the kidnapped girl the police are looking for. The gap about the narrated existence, however, is not to be averted, or even closed, in sheer existential terms or not except at a prohibitive cost. The reading of the passage as straightforward (objective) narrative can be maintained only if we eliminate the factual clash about the childs identity girl or boy? through the ad hoc postulation of a world admitting of sudden sexual metamorphoses (e.g., from girl to boy). But even such a counsel of despair, apart from its aesthetic pointlessness in an earthbound tale, would at best substitute a global for a local incongruity with the surrounding context. The switch in reading key, to sheer fantasy, would incur an even much higher cost than the existing gap in the realistic state of affairs at the moment. The remedy of ontology-switching would be worse than the trouble on our hands, which it purports to settle. Therefore, in face of the troubling gap, the reader must reorient himself not so much along the existential as the perspectival axis. So the mistaken identication, from the referring term to the referents sex, best resolves itself, instead, as part and indicator of P. C. Hardmans uninformed gaze at the sleeping child. And this negative indication is powerfully reinforced by a set of positive clues pointing the same way. One such clue is the girls having previously been disguised by her captors; another lies in the informational discrepancy between the enlightened narrator/reader coalition and the poor constable who doesnt have the slightest idea of the criminal setup in the house. So the simple attribution of the error to the ofcial reporter, the omniscient teller himself, gives place to a more intricate hypothesis of mediated vision and divided responsibility. Thereby, in other words, we (re)construct, instead, a variant of the silent perspectival montage that entangles and ambiguates all quotations of speech or thought hence all ctional narrative. Inversely, disambiguating the montage is unpacking it, by strong inference at best, never with certainty, into its perspectival components and contributors. Who speaks/hears/thinks what? Our example involves a fusion of the two perspectives concerned, that of the quoting omniscient narrator and that of the quoted gazing, thinking, humanly limited subject: on the whole, the narrator adheres to the constables own view of the situation, mistaken references and all, by way of free indirect thought. Accordingly, once we unpack
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the montage, the phrase jarring on the discourse surface, by existential criteria, now transforms in our (re)construction into free indirectness to mean . . . revealed to his eyes a sandy-haired boy or revealed what he (mis)took for a sandy-haired boy. Thereby the earlier fact of the childs sex no longer clashes with another fact similarly narrated on the highest epistemic authority and gapping the data into an either/or, girl/boy polarity to suit but with a false appearance in the eyes of a fallible, ignorant observer: a reconcilable, because earthly, dismissible, even reversible other-mindedness, cast in an implicit yet by now familiar and eligible mold of quotation. So the free indirect thought springs from a (re)constructive process driven by a quest for closure and leading to a perspectival motivation, gap-lling, best t. It is worth emphasizing that, in the excerpt about P. C. Hardman, we puzzle out not just the free indirectness of the quotation latent there, but even the latency of the quotation itself: its very existence underneath the surface of manifest, albeit problematic, narration in the omniscient tellers own voice. Our example thus maximizes the distance between the givens and the nal construct we (re)produce. In principle, therefore, it demands more, or more radical, inference than do even kindred constructs, which may otherwise be no less intricate but are openly quotational in some form. Thus compare tagged free indirect discourse (e.g., with he thought interposed): it at least ofcially signals the fact of quotation (e.g., thought re-presented), along with the form, even if its unpacking into the quoters and the quotees respective inputs may prove tricky or elusive, and so irreducibly ambiguous. Another, much less familiar counterpart so little so as to require a special inquiry (Sternberg 2001a) appears in the quoting integral to factive statements: they denitionally presuppose the truth, or factuality, of whatever their quotee thought (knew/regretted/minded/understood . . . ). Necessarily cast as such in regular indirect discourse, and so manifest on the surface, the factive presupposition may yet be torn by inconsistency, to the undermining of its denitional truth claim: I went down to my bedroom, drew the curtains, locked the door, turned off the light, went to bed knowing I should not sleep. I did not wake till morning (ibid.: 208, with equivalents throughout). The glaring and, in sequence, unsettling contradiction between the event as (fore)known (not sleep) and as actualized (not wake) threatens to make nonsense of the tale, the truth, and the language rule at once. If the factive clashes rather than accords with the fact, then the very logic of presupposition would seem to break down. (And traditional analysis has indeed shrugged off such cases as dead ends.) This shock and threat, however, triggers a process of corrective gap-lling inference, analogous to that launched by the dissonances of the Hardman mystery. Only, here the work of repair from disharmonious nonsense to good sense ends with the transformation
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of objective, quoter-endorsed plain indirect discourse (He knew that . . . ) into subjective, distanced free indirectness (amounting to He thought he knew that . . . ). Nevertheless, the common denominator remains high, with its illustrative motivational value. Forced into complicating the model of either reality or transmission, then, the reader again opts for the second alternative here assuming a particular shape of quoted indirectness as much superior in coherence and explanatory power. From the authors vantage point, of course, the motivational process we encounter (infer, simulate) goes in reverse. Owing to the dissymmetry built into communication, the readers troubling gap is the authors known datum, selected and indeed gapped in the discourse for a purpose. As always, the mimetic elements and linkages come, go, twist, rest to motivate the aesthetic (rhetorical, discoursive) workings, which count as rst in every sense. So, to describe the perspectival mimetic motivation in terms of free indirect discourse from the authors side, with the rhetorical end as starting-point: those integrative difculties we encounter have been devised in order to impress the ambiguity on the reader and manipulate him into discovering for himself the implicit communicative pattern that resolves them into free indirect perspectival montage. As with free indirect, so with unreliable, ironized, and parodied discourse. Small wonder we have just seen it intersecting with them, as well as with factive presupposition, to compounded effect. Witness the oblique irony directed at Hardman the unreliable, because uninformed, reecting mind or at the ignorant factive subject, the ostensible knower. But they are all independent of one another, amid processual and specically perspectival likeness. These further devices are likewise not givens but conjectures, designed to deliver the texts world(view), as well as its style and other nonreferential dimensions, from the manifold weakness looseness, incoherence, inconsistency, irrelevance, improbability, shallowness, or sheer silliness that would vitiate it if taken to be straightforwardly presented by an authoritative speaker. The weakness is then accounted for as a clue of textual dissociation and plurality rather than an index of incompetence, as gural rather than authorial self-betrayal, as an invitation to inference about the discourse-mediating voice or view, rather than a ground for value judgment against the discourse itself and its implied maker. So, though the phenomena just listed seem assorted and are generally kept apart discourse classied as free indirect, unreliable, ironized, parodied they actually reveal a denable, and even extendible, unity in variety. What justies the subsumption of that mixed bag under a single theoretical heading is this: each member is a hypothesis that organizes the text, in line with certain aesthetic and functional assumptions, by recourse not (or not primarily) to a
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peculiar world but to a communicative structure other and more complex than that immediately apparent. For the interposition of some fallible perspective(s) between us and the author always involves a reshufing, relocation, and distancing of the subjectively motivated material. This includes shifts from dialogue to dialogic monologue (as with Ivan and the devil, or the Circe episode in Ulysses); from indirectness to free indirectness (as with the contradictory factive presupposal); from external to internal action (as when Alices adventure turns out a dream of Wonderland); from authorial or authorially backed to deviant or unprivileged narratorial discourse (as with Swifts Modest Proposer or the anonymous voice in Nabokovs Pnin); from narratorial to gural viewpoint (whether the transition from Fieldings own perspective on Jennys child to the environments, or from the narrating to the experiencing selfs in ctive autobiography). All these motivational constructs are thus distinguished by their coupling of mimetic mediacy as the basis with quotation, hence perspectival montage discerned, then unpacked as the mechanism for resolving ambiguity, if feasible, and making purposive sense. The mimetic basis distinguishes these constructs from more variegated techniques like irony and parody, which similarly call for perspectival (re)orientation on the readers part but do not necessarily presuppose any denite fallible mediation from within the imagined reality, by a speaking/thinking character. It is arguably this that separates even Voltaires ironic from Candides ironized discourse. At the thematic heart of the matter, just compare the narrators (ostensibly authorized) with the characters (openly quoted) incongruous reference to this as the best of possible worlds (or ends, ladies, castles). Though the two are equally identied as carriers of irony through inferential operations going below the discourse surface, they vary even as such. The former, ironic discourse is on the face of it addressed straight from authorial spokesman to reader, who on reection credits him with the latent irony rather than saddles him with the manifest absurdity now attributed, instead, to some possible voice/view that would express and uphold it regardless. By contrast, the other, ironized discourse is ctionalized in Candide, obliquely refracted (voiced, viewed) through him, to his detriment, in our eyes, as well as having plot effects on his own world, and placed at one remove (at least) from the rhetorical framework. What makes the ironic/ironized difference is not so much the opacity or the transparency of the camouage, the distance between surface and covert meaning, as its motivation. But whether rhetorically or also referentially camouaged, their common anchorage in reconstructions and shifts of point of view discriminates all forms of irony and parody alike from all motivational resources that (like the happy ending in comedy) operate or (like the quest in the detective story) may operate on objective, existence-oriented grounds.
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The two referential mechanisms having been distinguished, it only remains to emphasize once again their omnipresence as mutually conditioning alternatives. The existential mediator can be absent only in nonrepresentational art or segments monopolized by the aesthetic mode; the perspectival mediator, only where, as in the Bible or Emma, the authors position fully coincides with (and thus aestheticizes) the speakers and his delegates. Even then these absences are signicant, not just because they mark the zero-sign of unrealized potentiality, but also due to their conjectural status: to say that a work (a concrete poem or an abstract painting) is nonrepresentational, or that it immediately reects the objective world as posited by the author, is not to state a fact but to make an inference; and it is not till the reader has reached the last word that he can establish the neutralization (zeroing) of either ctionalizing mechanism, and again only on contextual, probabilistic grounds. But elsewhere, whatever our nal hypothesis, we can make neither mimetic nor aesthetic sense of ctive reality without constantly moving between state of being and state of mind: between discourse as representation and as quotation, between plot and perspective.
References
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Poetics Today 33:3 4

1. Why Is the Discourse Like That? Motivation as Twofold Reason-Giving