Irene Kacandes-Talk Fiction - Literature and The Talk Explosion (Frontiers of Narrative) (2001)
Irene Kacandes-Talk Fiction - Literature and The Talk Explosion (Frontiers of Narrative) (2001)
Irene Kacandes-Talk Fiction - Literature and The Talk Explosion (Frontiers of Narrative) (2001)
frontiers of narrative
Series Editor: David Herman
North Carolina State University
Talk Fiction
Literature and the Talk Explosion
i r e n e k a c a n d e s
University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln and London
by the University of Nebraska Press.
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United
States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Kacandes, Irene, I,,8
Talk ction : literature and the talk explosion /
Irene Kacandes.
p.cm. (Frontiers of narrative series). Includes
bibliographical references and index.
isnx o-8o,:-:,,8-8 (cloth : alkaline paper)
isnx o-8o,:-,8oI-: (paperback : alkaline paper)
I. Fiction :oth century History and criticism.
:. Narration (Rhetoric) ,. Talk shows. i. Title.
ii. Series
vx,,o,.x,, :ooI 8o,.,odc:I :ooIo:,oo,
For Philippe
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxi
1. Secondary Orality: Talk as Interaction 1
2. Storytelling: Talk as Sustenance 33
3. Testimony: Talk as Witnessing 89
4. Apostrophe: Talk as Performance 141
5. Interactivity: Talk as Collaboration 197
Notes 219
Works Cited 255
Index 277
ix
Preface
Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a
dierent name for conversation.laurence sterne, Tristram Shandy
As a graduate teaching assistant in a course called Comedy and the
Novel, I had an encounter with a student that has intrigued me to this
day. Indeed, in many respects the kernel of this book lies in that inter-
action (and for this reason I am particularly sorry I have long forgotten
the name of the student). The professor had assigned Italo Calvinos If on
a winters night a traveler, and just before we began our small-group
discussion on the novel, a male undergraduate rushed in and blurted
out: This book was so cool. It was talking to me. I never read a novel
before that was about me. I wasnt amused. I was puzzled and annoyed
by his reaction. I had read the novel for the rst time to prepare for this
class and had been thoroughly irritated by it, so the students enthusiasm
alone irked me. My initial hunch about the dierences between this
students aect and my own was based on gender: the inscribed reader in
Calvinos novel is male, and this student was able to identify with him
because he too was a he; in contrast, I was put o by yet another
instance of the male masquerading as the universal. That the student
hadnt overtly noticed the inscription of gender in the text didnt par-
ticularly surprise me; after all, it is less immediately apparent in the
English translation the class had read than in the Italian original (a topic
I take up in chapter 4). But I continued to be perplexedand initially
discouragedby how a Harvard undergraduate whod been through an
entire semester of a novels course could think that the text actually was
talking to him or could actually be about him. Hadnt I spent a signi-
cant proportion of our discussion time in the previous months introduc-
ing narratological terms, distinguishing, for example, between the nar-
ratee, the inscribed reader, and the esh-and-blood reader? Ironically, I
appeared to have failed as a teacher where this student succeeded, for his
conviction that the novel was talking to him eventually taught me to
revise how I readat least how to read certain novels like Calvinos.
More precisely, I realized that this novel aims for readers to have both the
Preface
x
students reaction and mine: delight and annoyance, engagement and
disengagement, identication and alienation. My frustration turned to
pleasure when I started trying to have both reactions simultaneously.
I propose to call If on a winters night a traveler and novels in the
same mold talk ction, because they contain features that promote in
readers a sense of the interaction we associate with face-to-face conver-
sation (talk) and a sense of the contrivance of this interaction (c-
tion). Furthermore, I mean my phrase to signal a mingling of elements
from spoken and written communication: these texts contain talk in
ction, as in prose ction. This hybridity of orality and textuality links
the works Im considering to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
when a sense of literature as but a dierent name for conversation had
not yet been banned from the developing novel form, a period, too,
when literacy itself was becoming a mass phenomenon. It also links talk
ction to the twentieth century through the phenomenon of secondary
orality, a term referring to the resurgence of oral communication made
possible by technology like the telephone, radio, lm, television, video,
and computer. I submit that we cant know whether talk ction is a
response to the talk explosion or a response to the same forces that led
to that explosion. In either case, it seems to me that to fully appreciate
the communicative hybridity of our age, we need to register the presence
(reemergence? persistence?) of oral elements in literature, the verbal
form that the twentieth century nevertheless posited as the most unlike
speech.
Contrivance connects my phenomenon to its auditory template, talk
radio and the television talk show, related genres based on mediated
engagement of speakers and interlocutors, not on passive transmission
of music, news, or other information. While not arguing for the direct
inuence of developments in radio or television on prose ction or vice
versa, I do intend talk radio to echo in my phrase talk ction, be-
cause talk radio, television talk shows, and talk ction all privilege in-
volvement over contentfalse though the dichotomy may technically
be. I propose that this privileging of interaction remains partially unrec-
ognized, even as it characterizes many cultural phenomena of our sec-
ondary oral age.
Before I expand my denition of talk ction, Id like to contextualize
my embarrassingly haughty graduate student posture of judging those
Preface
xi
readers who do not perceive the impermeable boundaries between the
world of ction and the world in which people actually live as nave, and,
well, illiterate. I now see a connection between such a view of literature
(one fostered in many academic environments) and a widespread hos-
tility in contemporary society toward the ubiquitous spoken word. With
the exception of media enthusiasts and some professional linguists, I
suspect that much of the worlds formally educated population fears that
secondary orality is threatening print culture, leading inexorably to a
decline in literacy. While there are numerous valid reasons that educa-
tors and the general public should be concerned about literacy rates and
failures to educate subsequent generations, assumptions about the rela-
tive value of spoken and written discourse that underlie these concerns
hinder appreciation of various phenomena that are products precisely of
new shifts between the two. If humans could suspend a long-standing
habit of thinking about orality and literacy as dichotomous, we might be
able to apprehend emerging forms of communication, with the gains
and the losses that their deployment entails.
1
Talk ction is one such emerging form. To bring it into focus for
myself I had to confront not only personal and societal views of oral and
literate culture but also an academic crisis closer to home: a crisis about
the role of literary studies in an age of cultural studies. While denitions,
merits, and demerits of cultural studies (rightly) continue to be debated,
I submit that cultural studies is one of those intellectual developments
that shifts our very notions of literature and literary studies. We may
eventually reject the term cultural studies and coin a new one; we may
even rene our practice of interdisciplinarity. Still, I believe that the
nineteenth-century German university model of segregated academic
disciplines has already been irrevocably undermined. Cultural studies
has taught me that cultural phenomena are linked. They cannot be com-
prehended in isolation, and therefore they must not be analyzed this way.
Scholars need to cast their nets widely in trying to describe the links
among them. Media philosopher Marshall McLuhan revealed a similar
understanding of culture when he argued that the use of radio to broad-
cast the human voice was bound to produce new shapes for human
experience (1964: 302). He perceived scholars resistance to change,
marveling at the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology
(304). McLuhan himself, of course, created curiosity about the psychic
Preface
xii
action of technology, and media studiesnecessarily interdisciplin-
arynow thrive in many universities of the global village.
2
In my view, an interdisciplinary model does not imply abandoning
either the close study of literary texts or the tools that have been devel-
oped to understand how prose ction works.
3
Rather, lessons from cul-
tural studies call for exploring the way prose ction responds not only
to internal developments like the use of stream of consciousness or
present-tense narration but also to various types of forces in the world in
which literature, like other cultural products, is created and consumed.
Therefore, a cultural studies approach to prose ction works of the twen-
tieth century requires special attention to how literature might be re-
sponding to secondary orality, a task not yet undertaken, I suspect,
because of the propensities mentioned above to denigrate talk and to
venerate (and thus isolate) literature. Bakhtins campaign to categorize
prose ction as one of several speech genres (1986), Pratts project to
dene literature as speech act (1977), and more recently, Fluderniks
attempt to derive narratological categories from features of spontane-
ous conversational storytelling (1996) are three examples of previous
literary investigations that have tried to overcome the traditional di-
chotomization of orality and textuality. I oer this study in a similar
spirit, and yet I distinguish it from these through its cultural and histori-
cal specicity. Its major claims are not about speech or literature in
general, but rather about a particular trend in contemporary prose c-
tion. I suggest that from the current vantage point of cultural studies,
available maps of the twentieth-century novel (Realism-Modernism-
Postmodernism; x-y-z) dont help us navigate well enough anymore
through certain features of the cultural landscape. We have to frame
dierent questions and then redraw the maps. To push my topographical
metaphor one step further, Im not suggesting that the continents have
shifted but rather that there are mountain ranges and deserts, or, better
still, roads through the mountains and deserts that people have been
using but which we havent charted yet. Identifying talk ction may help
us chart some of them.
During my rst pedagogic journey through novelistic territory, I was
waylaid and forced to notice that If on a winters night a traveler ad-
dressed my student in a dierent fashion than that of other novels we had
read in the course. That student did not feel addressed just in the sense of
Preface
xiii
encountering a topic he found interesting. He felt addressed in the sense
of being the interlocutor. He experienced properly managed writing as
a conversation in which he had a personal stake: the novel was talking to
him, and it was about him. His reaction and particularly his choice of the
word talk prompted me to ask myself in what sense reading could be
like conversation. The answer I eventually came up with after apprentic-
ing in sociolinguistics is that in the case of certain texts, reading can be
considered talk as interaction.
4
By talk as interaction, I mean conversa-
tion as a turn-taking system. Turns or moves, as understood by
Erving Goman and other sociolinguists, are not necessarily verbal but
rather are characterized by their expression of orientation to exchange.
Specically, Goman thinks of the rst move, the statement, as reveal-
ing orientation to some sort of answering to follow. The second move,
or reply, is characterized by its being seen as an answering of some
kind to a preceding matter that has been raised (1981: 24). Along these
lines, in many cultures, clapping ones hands together functions as re-
ply (applause) to the presentation of an entire story or play as state-
ment. Similarly, gesturing to ones bare wrist with a quizzical look on
ones face functions equivalently to uttering the words Do you have the
time? And the shaking of ones head side to side replies as eectively to
the issue that has been raised as the verbal response No.
Using a framework of talk as interaction to reconsider twentieth-
century prose ction, I seek texts I can classify as statements, in Go-
mans sense of oriented to an answering. What I mean here by the text as
statement, as the rst part of the conversation, are texts that in toto or in
part ask for their readers to react to them in certain ways. Such texts do
not suppress telling to promote showing, to use the terms given wide
currency by Henry James and his collaborator Percy Lubbock that sub-
stantially inuenced the way we drew our rst maps of twentieth-century
prose ction; rather, they reveal their addressivity, as Bakhtin puts it.
When such texts are read by esh-and-blood readers like my student or
myself, who nd themselves feeling something, something like being the
audience for this text, something like wanting to display the orienta-
tion the text seems to be asking for, readers can be said to be respond-
ing, or replying in Gomans sense. In the type of analysis I propose, to
do something (feel something, think something) and to identify that
something as an appropriate reply to the text-as-statement, constitute
Preface
xiv
reading as interaction, or as Talk (with a capital T to mark this sense of
the word). It could be argued that all texts, literary and nonliterary,
reveal their addressivity by virtue of being written down, and that all
reading involves having a response. But, in the spirit of cultural studies,
my concept of Talk is only intended to apply within an historical context
in which to write and read literature self-consciously as communication
that aims for eects in the real world must be viewed as going against the
grain, as going against the hegemony of a twentieth-century aestheticist
view of literature as art for arts sake.
Reading prose ction as a turn-taking system like conversation helps
me notice texts from numerous moments and places that havent re-
ceived much attention to date and to perceive roads between these texts
and some others that are more well known. The contribution of this study
is to connect such texts to each other not so much through content or
national tradition or literary movement or style or narrative technique, as
through the type of orientation to exchange they exemplify, as through
the type of interaction they create between themselves and their readers,
as through the type of response they seek outside the writing and reading
transaction. Focusing on prose ction as Talk allows me to ask what
cultural work such interaction does in our secondary oral age. My vari-
ous answers to this question allow me not only to group certain texts
among those I have identied as talk ction that seem to do similar work
but also to relate these groupings to extraliterary cultural developments.
I think of these groupings as modes of Talking. The modes I will
discuss in this book are storytelling, testimony, apostrophe, and
interactivity. In accordance with a view of secondary orality as a wide-
spread phenomenon, I assume there must be other modes that can be
identied by experts with cultural knowledge dierent from my own. For
now, I will present my four modes in an order that foregrounds my
dening criterion of interaction. That is to say, I examine these modes
along an axis of increasing exchange; each subsequent mode demands
greater eort on the part of the reader to recognize the call of the text to
interaction or to carry out the interaction itself.
My study unfolds in ve chapters. In the rst chapter, I dene my
concept of talk ction by exploring the general notion of talk as inter-
action and by developing more fully the restricted notions of state-
ment, reply, and Talk introduced briey above. I review current
Preface
xv
conceptions of secondary orality and suggest how they help us under-
stand the communicative hybridity of our age. I look at talk radio and the
television talk show to illustrate mediated interaction, a structural char-
acteristic these genres share with talk ction.
Each of the next four chapters takes up one of my talk ction modes;
each strives to illuminate the nature of orientation to exchange in
that mode by discussing the historical or cultural circumstances to which
it responds and by closely reading several literary texts. In chapter 2,
Storytelling: Talk as Sustenance, I propose that some late-twentieth-
century novels address their readers as if they were not only auditors but
also as if those reader-listeners were committed to sustaining the rela-
tionships extended to them by the narrators. I use the term storytelling
to signal the connection of these texts to the oral exchange of stories
whose intimacy and immediacy they try to reproduce in their own fash-
ion. While my suspicion is that every culture in the twentieth century
registers the shifting relationship between orality and textuality, I have
chosen my examples from two cultures that particularly employ talk for
passing on cultural and historical knowledge that sustains community:
the Modern Greek and the African American. This preoccupation with
oral communication is apparent in late-twentieth-century texts like
Kstas Tachtsss The Third Wedding Wreath and Gloria Naylors Mama
Day through the relationship each establishes with the reader, an en-
gaged listener who will in turn become a teller. I foreground these
relationships with reference to nineteenth-century texts like Dimtris
Viklass Luks Lras and Harriet Wilsons Our Nig, where the narratorial
clamor for response exposed a belief that creating a relationship between
text and reader was even literally a matter of life and death. Our associa-
tions with storytelling as a primary form of human interaction and the
vitalin the sense of both basic and life-sustainingdemand on the
reader to listen suggest to me that the storytelling mode should be
considered rst.
In chapter 3, Testimony: Talk as Witnessing, I propose that novels
from a wide array of societies over the course of the century have tried to
respond to trauma inicted through war, brutal regimes, and interper-
sonal violence by witnessing to these rampant acts of aggression. The
nature of trauma itself requires modifying notions of telling and listen-
ing to reect that constructing a narrative about the trauma is a collab-
Preface
xvi
orative task between witness-victim and cowitness-enabler. Whereas in
my storytelling mode, readers are called through direct address to listen
(receive the story) with the proper attitude, Talking in my testimony
mode is more dicult to decipher; readers must rst recognize the text
as a call to testify, and then they must interpret the evidence in an act of
cowitnessing that creates the story of the trauma for the rst time. Testi-
mony to the presence of trauma can take the form of mimetic textual
performance of traumatic symptoms (for instance, repetition, elision,
absence of inside views within the narrative) or of the telling itself (for
instance, uncompleted, unpublished, or misunderstood texts whose lack
of success is subsequently interpretedwitnessed toas testimony to
trauma). Specically, I oer a schema of circuits of witnessing that
accounts for testimony at the levels of the story, the discourse, and the
production and reception of the text. I briey illustrate these circuits
with a wide range of familiar twentieth-century texts (from Woolf s Mrs.
Dalloway to Camuss The Fall to Atwoods The Handmaids Tale), and
then oer a more sustained treatment of one less well known novel,
Gertrud Kolmars A Jewish Mother, to show how the various circuits
interrelate to produce Talk between text and contemporary reader.
My fourth chapter, Apostrophe: Talk as Performance, borrows from
the rhetorical gure for turning away from ones normal audience to
address someone or something who by reason of absence, death, inani-
mateness, and/or mere convention cannot answer back. Though apos-
trophe has been extensively discussed in the context of oratory and lyric,
no one has remarked its systematic use in some recent narrative ction,
where a rst-person narrator (inscribed or eaced) tells a story primarily
through address to a you, who does not reply. Apostrophe is a particu-
larly apt metaphor to describe a type of talk ction, since the content of
the message being delivered is rarely as important as the relationships
created by the complicated enunciative situation. Structures of address
are mobilized not to promote a verbal reply by the specied addressee
(who, besides, may be incapable of speaking) but rather to promote an
emotional response in actual readers. Whereas identifying the text as
statement in the testimony mode provides a hermeneutic challenge to
readers, in the apostrophic mode, readers face the perhaps even more
dicult task of recognizing the address as double, as simultaneously
for and not for them. They can choose to step into the role of the ad-
Preface
xvii
dressee, while recognizing that they are performing a script written for
someone else. I describe actual and inscribed reader responses to the
apostrophic yous in Jane Rules This Is Not for You, Michel Butors
Change of Heart, Gnter Grasss novella, Cat and Mouse, Julio Cortzars
Grati, and John Barths Life-Story. I conclude by returning to the
text that launched my search for talk ction: Italo Calvinos If on a
winters night a traveler. My readings illustrate how apostropheaddress
that is not quite addressdelivers another kind of message, a message
about various blocks to intimacy in postmodern societies and how to
redress them.
In chapter 5, Interactivity: Talk as Collaboration, I sketch out what
appears to be the endgame of talk ction. Late-twentieth-century in-
novations in communication technologies have spawned an era of inter-
active storytelling. Technology facilitates the orientation to exchange
that I have been tracing in prose ction in the twentieth century, leading
to even greater activity on the part of readers. If we think of the role of the
reader in the apostrophic mode as scripted and performed, in the inter-
active mode, the scripting itself requires the activity of both participants
to the Talk, the traditionally named writer and reader. I begin this
chapter with a brief analysis of Julio Cortzars pioneering novel Hop-
scotch, in which readers are invited to create their own text by assembling
the chapters in one of two orders. Of course, to invite reading in an order
other than the conventional start to nish is to open the door to reading
in any sequence whatsoever, and thus Hopscotch can be considered the
forerunner to cyberstories that are told only when the reader selects
and ordersand even writes. I conclude with a consideration of com-
puter hypertexts and interactive videomodalities through which the
very concepts of book, writer, and reader begin to vanish, as does there-
fore my concept of talk ction.
Like authors of most cultural study projects, I make large claims about
the phenomena Im considering. I attempt to support those claims by
reading a particularly broad range of texts in complexly developed con-
texts. My choice of specic novels and stories was guided above all by
selecting those that most clearly illustrate the mode I describe in each
chapter. But I also purposely selected examples that might be less famil-
iar to some readers, hoping to support my thesis that the talk phenome-
non is a widespread one. My corpus prompts two provisos, one practical
Preface
xviii
and one more substantial. As for the practical, wherever possible I have
used published translations of non-English texts to facilitate my au-
diences independent evaluations of my readings. Still, there are oc-
casions when such translations do not follow the original text closely
enough to illustrate my point, in which case I have included both the
original language and my own translation of it. As for the more substan-
tial issue related to my corpus, as varied the literary traditions from
which I have selected, my examples are limited by my own primarily
Western training. I hope that scholars will seek Talk in prose ction from
cultures not represented in this study, and I will welcome any additional
modes or modications they may propose.
Prefaces often mention the origins of the study at hand, and this one has
been no exception. But in sharing my encounter with the undergraduate
who talked with Calvino, I have admitted only the most explicit prod
to developing the concept of talk ction. I want to conclude by briey
mentioning a more personal source of my study, because I believe it
provides some insight into my fascination with orality and textuality and
into what has come to feel like an obsession with certain types of liter-
ary texts.
I have always wondered why my family members tell stories the way
they do. Even as a youngster, I noticed how each of us tends to connect
many things with the telling of an anecdote, quotidian or extraordinary.
No one in my family tells a short story. We never go directly to the event
but rather set the scene with detailed explanations of the people involved
and how we know them. If one of us wants to relate a feeling or an idea,
we always seem to embed it in a story: how I came to have that feeling or
idea. While I, as much as any other member of my family, engage in this
behavior (for instance, I knew I would open this preface by telling the
story of how I came to the idea of talk ction), I also nd myself some-
what embarrassed by it.
At the time I began investigating the dynamics of orality and literacy, I
believed I was following a strictly intellectual concern. Yet it wasnt long
before I realized the extent to which this search addressed my dilemma
about family speech style. I recall the sense of relief I felt after reading
Deborah Tannens comparative analyses of Athenian Greek and Califor-
nian American womens reactions to the same silent lm (1980, 1982a).
Preface
xix
Although my own parents were raised in rural Greece and I in suburban
New York, the participants in Tannens study matched closely enough to
intrigue me, indeed closely enough for me to identify with all of them.
In evaluating their responses to the question What happened in the
movie? Tannen remarks several sets of dierences that organize along
cultural lines. Whereas Americans discussed the lm as a lm, recount-
ing details, reconstructing the temporal sequence, and using technical
cinematic terms to do this, the Greeks tended to oer explanations of the
events and characters in the lm, omitting the movie frame and details
that didnt contribute to their philosophizing. Americans focused on
message content to display their analytic skills to the interviewer, while
the Greeks used personal interaction to display their storytelling skills.
Even though everyone gave their answers orally to an interviewer, Tan-
nen suggests that the Americans were deploying literate strategies they
had learned at school and that they associated with an interview situa-
tion, whereas the Greeks deployed oral strategies they had learned at
home and that they associated with interpersonal communication. (Tan-
nen and others connect focus on message with literate culture and
focus on relationship with oral.) Tannen concludes that insofar as any
verbal performance is an exercise in presentation-of-self, it seems that
the Americans were concerned with presenting themselves as sophisti-
cated movie viewers and able recallers, while the Greeks were concerned
with presenting themselves as acute judges of human behavior and good
storytellers (1980: 55). While I nd these markers of oral and literate
strategies ultimately too simplistic, Tannens work helped me under-
stand how, as a member of both cultures, I was judging my familys
storytelling strategies by American criteria I had learned outside the
home. And yet when it came to conversing, like the Greek women in
Tannens study, I would tell stories in the style of my relatives.
The Greek civilization, of course, has known writing for millennia.
Nevertheless, because of historical circumstances, like the centuries-
long Ottoman occupation (with its repression of Greek schools), to
name the most prominent one, oral strategies have played a large role in
shaping and preserving the culture of modern Greece. As I educated
myself about debates over the nature of orality and literacy generally, I
began to notice that features cited to explain the presumed poor quality
of Modern Greek prose ction are characteristics associated with oral
Preface
xx
storytelling, for example, episodic structure (Tziovas 1989).
5
I was in-
spired to search for oral elements in Greek prose, not to compare it
against more literate traditions and pronounce it inferior, but rather to
characterize more precisely its unique qualities as a written genre de-
veloping in a culture with high residual orality, as Walter Ong has it
(1982: 6869). While the exact results of that investigation have been
published elsewhere and are not directly relevant here (Kacandes 1990,
1992), I mention this previous direction of my research because my love
of Greek prose with its oral residue led me to frame the broader ques-
tion behind this book about the hybridity of prose ction written in other
(all?) cultures of our secondary oral age. I found myself shifting from a
more mechanical evaluation of literate and oral qualities of a par-
ticular novel to an investigation of the cultural values it expresses and the
cultural work it does. As a result, I began to see textual strategies that
seemed to recruit readers into relationship, into forms of interaction
with works of prose ction that potentially had consequences beyond the
actual reading experience. I began to think of the secondary oral cultures
in which these texts were produced not primarily as cultures where the
spoken word can be heard anywhere, any time, but as ones in which the
main characteristic of speechthat it brings participants into relation-
shipbecomes privileged in almost all forums of life. This is why Talk
became the organizing principle of my study. Talk ction lls the same
function as speech: it creates relationships and elicits interaction.
I think of this book as a celebration of talk in all its senses. Like
Tannens Greek interview subjects, I am aiming to tell a good story. And I
look forward to you talking back.
xxi
Acknowledgments
This is a book about writing and reading as interaction, something with-
out which this book never could have been written. It is also a book
about stories, and since I tell quite a few anecdotes in the main text, I will
try to restrict the length of the ones I tell here. I have been fortunate to
teach a large number of very smart students at Harvard University, the
University of Texas at Austin, and Dartmouth College; their reading
agendas have concretely contributed to what I read and how I think
about literature. I particularly want to single out the students in Donald
Fangers Comedy and the Novel course and Susan R. Suleimans Au-
thor, Text, Reader seminar at Harvard, where the specic seeds for this
study were planted in me as a graduate teaching fellow; and the students
in my Comparative Literature 39 class, Trauma and Prose Fiction, at
Dartmouth, where I rehearsed the model of narrative witnessing that
informs chapter 3.
Developing the skills to write this book has taken many years. I want
to thank Dorrit Cohn for teaching me how to read closely and Susan R.
Suleiman for modeling how to risk who one is and enjoy it. Madeline
Maxwell, Jrgen Streeck, and the late Robert Hopper of the College of
Communication at the University of Texas at Austin generously invited
me to join the Monday afternoon viewing group, where they introduced
me to the tools of conversation analysis and inspired me to consider the
insights of sociolinguistics in the context of literature. For rst suggest-
ing I read the work of Walter Ong, I am indebted to Margaret Alexiou;
and for stimulating conversations on orality and literacy I thank Dina
and Joel Sherzer. The Society for the Study of Narrative Literature has
been a hospitable place to learn more about narratology and to try out
ideas: Jim Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and Gerry Prince need to be singled
out for their helpful feedback on this project. For culturally specic
explorations of what is at stake in talk, I thank my father John G.
Kacandes and my friend Michael Hanchard. My rst introduction to the
Modern Greek texts I analyze in chapter 2 came through the erudite and
kind late George P. Savidis; my mother Lucie N. Kacandes helped me
Acknowledgments
xxii
puzzle through the meaning of several critical Greek phrases. My jour-
ney into cyberspace would not have been possible without the guidance
of my computer-savvy friends, David Bush, Alfred Dupraz, and Marc
Comina. My thanks, too, to Sebastian for demonstrating the use of a
joystick and for answering all my questions and to Keith for patiently
explaining the thrill he nds in Unreal.
Concrete aid for writing this book came from Dartmouth College,
most especially in the forms of a Burke Research Award and a Junior
Faculty Fellowship. Research help from Lauryn Zipse, Laura Montague,
Linda Williams, Susan Stiles, and Audrey Choi greatly enriched the his-
torical dimension of the project. My thanks to Gail Vernazza for techni-
cal help. Invitations to lecture from the Modern Greek Study Group of
the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies and the Department of
Comparative Literature at Harvard University, the Public Lecture Series
at Davidson College, the Department of German Studies at Indiana
University, the Womens Studies Research Seminar at the University of
Texas at Austin, and the Humanities Forum at Dartmouth College pro-
pelled this project forward at critical stages. Series editor David Herman
and humanities editor Virginia Wright-Peterson showed an early enthu-
siasm for the project that has made my interaction with University of
Nebraska Press enjoyable and productive from beginning to end.
I would like to thank Michael Rubiner for his kind permission to
reprint a portion of T. S. Eliot Interactive, which originally appeared in
the New York Times Magazine (18 June 1995). I would also like to thank
the editors and anonymous readers who helped me work through earlier
versions of some of the arguments made in this book. The commitment
to text-reader interaction in Modern Greek novels discussed in chapter 2
was originally rehearsed in Orality, Reader Address, and Anonymous
You. On Translating Second Person References from Modern Greek
Prose (Journal of Modern Greek Studies 8, no. 2 [1990]: 22343) and in
The Oral Tradition and Modern Greek Literature (Laografa: A News-
letter of the International Greek Folklore Society 9, no. 5 [1992]: 38). A
shorter reading of Kolmars novel than that which appears in chapter 3
was published in Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work: Reading Ger-
trud Kolmars A Jewish Mother (Acts of Memory, ed. Mieke Bal, Jona-
than Crewe, and Leo Spitzer [Hanover, 1999], 5571). The ideas of lit-
erary performative and narrative apostrophe that are discussed in
Acknowledgments
xxiii
chapter 4 were rst oated in Are You in the Text? The Literary Perfor-
mative in Postmodernist Fiction (Text and Performance Quarterly 13
[1993]: 13953) and Narrative Apostrophe: Reading, Rhetoric, Resis-
tance in Michel Butors La Modication and Julio Cortzars Grati
(Style 28, no. 3 [1994]: 32949).
As I hope to convince you in the chapters ahead, some of us cannot
write without readers who are very much present to us; I could not have
written this book without those friends and colleagues who were willing
to be interlocutors for me: Kit Belgum, Susan Brison, Scott Denham,
Mary Desjardins, Gerd Gemnden, Mary Jean Green, Linda Haverty-
Rugg, Lynn Higgins, Alexis Jetter, Monika Kallan, Amy Lawrence, Jenni-
fer Levin, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Diane Miliotes, Adam Newton, Annelise
Orleck, Graziella Parati, Jonathan Petropoulos, Ivy Schweitzer, Leo Spit-
zer, Andrea Tarnowski, Tom Trezise, Janet Whatley, and Mark Williams.
Robyn Warhol and Mary Lou Kete, the members of my writing group in
Burlington, and Lisa Moore, Marianne Hirsch, and Susanne Zantop read
my drafts with a level of attention that even Pulitzer Prize winners would
be lucky to get; this book is simply better written and more interesting
because of their input. The aws that remain can be no fault of theirs.
The emotional support that allowed me to complete this project came
from many of the people acknowledged above, but most especially from
Nora Pirquet, my church family, my nuclear family, and from the famille
suisse into which I married. John, Lucie, Maria, Steve, Tina, Georgia,
Tom, Regina, and Peter, et Mireille, Alfred, Marie-Claude, Christine, et
Anne-Marie, your tasty meals, encouraging conversations, and simple
faith that I had something interesting to say kept me going at times I
truly would have preferred to stop. Half and Susanne Zantop encouraged
me in this and other endeavors with the pride of parents and the con-
dence of best friends. They would have enjoyed celebrating the appear-
ance of this book. Finally, I thank Philippe Carrard, whose good ideas
inform every aspect of this project, and whose wit and love sustained me
in ways that cannot be adequately described here.
talk fiction
1
1
secondary orality
Talk as Interaction
It is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the rst
duty of a man [sic] is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk,
which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of
pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it completes our education, founds and
fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state
of health.robert louis stevenson, Talk and Talkers
The premise of this book is that literature, like other institutions, shapes
and is shaped by shifting forms of communication. The major shift of the
just completed twentieth century has been identied colloquially as the
talk explosion and professionally as secondary orality. In my view,
the most important consequence of this oral resurgence has been an as
yet unfully recognized privileging of the interactive component of com-
munication. In the preface I proposed talk ction as a label for works
of twentieth-century narrative literature that promote a sense of rela-
tionship and exchange in readers that we normally associate with face-
to-face interaction. I connect orientation to exchange in these texts to
sociolinguistic denitions of conversation as a turn-taking system to
bolster my contention that some literature, in this sense, anyway, truly
does talk. I use the word ction in my titular concept denotatively to
signal the restriction of my study to prose ction, but also connotatively
to evoke the useful pretenses, the ctions, on which the broader idea of
secondary orality and the narrower idea of talk ction rely. On the sur-
face of it, my modes of talk ction, storytelling, testimony, apos-
trophe, and interactivity, sound like four quite distinct phenomena.
In this chapter I follow the thread of talk as interaction that ties these
modes together by (a) creating a context for and eshing out the socio-
linguistic denition of talk introduced in the preface; (b) identifying the
Secondary Orality
2
place of interaction in notions of secondary orality; (c) illustrating talk as
interaction in familiar secondary oral genres, namely, in talk radio and
the television talk show; and (d) demonstrating what talk as inter-
action, my Talk, can mean in prose ction.
Talk
Baby talk, grown-up talk, girl talk, self-talk, street talk, small talk, shop
talk, black talk, straight talk, double-talk, hot talk, bad talk, cheap talk,
talk about town, talk of the party, talking-to, talking back, talking up,
talking down, talking out, talking over, talking big, talking dirty, talking
sense, talking turkey, talking garbage, talking shit, talking story, talking
cure, talking book, talking head, talk radio, talk show, alltalk, confron-
talk, talk explosion. Talk, talk, talk. We use the word all the time, but
what does it mean?
For the purposes of this study, I follow Robert Louis Stevenson and
others in understanding the term talk as referring rst to the ubiq-
uitous situation of the mundane exchange of words between two or more
people. In summoning this model, I foreground the interactional ele-
ment of language, as well as its immediacy, its topicality, and its reci-
procity. Further, I aim to align myself with those scholars who believe
that conversation is the foundation for other forms of communication
and that the same dialogic principle governs relations within and
among written words as within and among spoken utterances (Holquist
1985: 83).
They listen instead to the word spoken in situ. Data are gathered
mainly from interpersonal encounters unelicited by researchers and are
analyzed for the interconnection of mundane conversation, social struc-
ture, and culture. Why? Because, as ethnographer Moerman puts it, in a
formulation with which many practitioners of these disciplines would
probably be comfortable, language itself is mute. Anyone interested in
how a view of the world is shared, recognized, maintained, or socialized
within a community must attend to language made public and socially
compelling, must attend to talk (1988: 103).
By attending to talk, these sociolinguists shifted notions of conversa-
tion toward the interactional. Three aspects of this shift particularly
inform my project: the building blocks of talk are not words or sentences
but rather turns or moves; the roles of speaker and listener are
conceived as equally integral participants; and the activity itself is
dened not so much by what gets produced (the content of the speech)
as by participants perceptions of what is going on.
Baldly, participants take turns. A more elegant denition of talk in the
idiom of conversation analysis characteristically emphasizes interaction
and reciprocity: Talk is designed to reect back on prior turns and
project ahead to future ones, and we interpret talk as if it is tied in some
way to prior and future turns (Nofsinger 1991: 3). The basic principles of
turn organization were rst outlined by Sacks, Scheglo, and Jeerson in
their foundational 1974 article, A Simplest Systematics for the Organiza-
tion of Turn-Taking for Conversation. Specically, conversation ana-
lysts dene ordinary, natural, or spontaneous conversation as in-
stances of speech exchange organization with variable turn order, turn
Secondary Orality
4
size, and turn content peculiar to a given occasion and the participants
involved (West and Zimmerman 1982: 515). Sacks and Scheglo further
proposed the useful concept of adjacency pair, observing that a cur-
rent action (a rst pair part such as a greeting or a question) requires
the production of a reciprocal action (or second pair part) at the rst
possible opportunity after the completion of the rst (as summarized in
Goodwin and Heritage 1990: 287). That the absence of a second pair part
will be noticed conrms that it is expected. Conversation analysis posits
that adjacency pair organization is an elementary framework through
which conversational participants will inevitably display some analysis
of one anothers actions (Goodwin and Heritage 288). From this per-
spective, a rst turn is always produced not only with the traditionally
named receiver in mind but also with the idea that the receiver will
quickly take a turn as speaker. Sackss terms participant and party
facilitate a reconceptualization of the roles of speaker-sender and
listener-receiver, particularly with regard to independence and ac-
tivity. In the view of conversation analysts, speakers are not sovereigns
imposing what they have to say on passive listeners. Rather, hearers
are active participants in the process of building a turn at talk, and
their action, or nonaction, can lead to substantial modications in the
sentence the speaker is in the process of producing (Goodwin and
Heritage 293).
Goman derives concordant notions of talk through the Wittgen-
steinian concept of games.
The
complementary enacted capacity of respondent may be a single lis-
tener or a group of varying size orienting to the statement (story, play)
as an audience. The instance of self-talk further illustrates the utility
of this more capacious conception of participants since both roles of
speaker and respondent are enacted, but a sole individual makes all
the moves (Goman 80).
These denitions and examples have brought me far from my baseline
of talk as the mundane conversational exchange of words between two or
more people. However, exchangemore precisely now, orientation to
exchangeremains central. I appear to have set myself up to make the
argument that the interactional unit of talk ction would be the pro-
duction (writing) and consumption (reading) of the literary text. I do
mean this, though this applies to all ction, indeed to all writing. I
want to dene talk ction as something much more narrow. Goman
and conversation analysts have expended much eort in specifying the
modications from spontaneous conversation for other kinds of speech-
exchange systems, such as visits to the doctor, telephone calls, or televi-
sion news interviews.
Sound of any kind quickly fades away, and the unassisted human voice
does not carry very far in space; writing, depending on the exact mate-
rials used, can be transported and can last, in some cases, even for
millennia. Finally, in terms of medium, talk in its conversational form is
not of a predetermined length. Breath is an immediately renewable re-
source, and as Chafe observes, speaking seems to be natural to human
evolution. Writing and reading, on the other hand, must be laboriously
learned and are highly dependent on resources external to the bodies of
writers and readers (1994: 4344).
No contempo-
rary culture is either purely oral or purely literate, and I agree with
Dimitris Tziovas that the relationship between orality and textuality is
not one of rigid opposition, but rather one of intrication and enfolding
(1989: 321; see also Tannen 1982a: 3). To better familiarize ourselves with
the intrications and enfoldings of our age, we can turn to Walter
Ong, one of very few scholars to concern himself with the eects on the
human mind of specic types of technologizing of the word, most no-
tably, of handwriting, printing press, and electronic word processing.
To begin with, Ong explains how one sign of the current continuing
grip of literacy is our obsession with media. For, the very term me-
dium reveals a sense of communication as a pipeline transfer of units
of material called information from one place to another (1982: 176).
Our willingness to live with the media model shows chirographic con-
ditioning. That is to say, literate cultures regard speech as more spe-
cically informational than do oral cultures, where speech is more
performance-oriented, more of a way of doing something to someone
(177). Of course, Ong is not denying the eects of medium; rather, he is
cautioning that the media model obscures what he considers most dis-
tinctive about (all) human communication: the capacity of human be-
ings to form true communities wherein person shares with person inte-
riorly, intersubjectively (177).
Ongs search for how this sharing occurs has led him to hypothesize
about primary oralitysomething no literate can truly knowabout
literacy, and, most relevant to our purposes here, about secondary oral-
ity (his description of this last highlights its hybrid character). On the
one hand, electronic word processing creates more written texts, rein-
forcing the mentalities of literacy, what Ong calls a commitment of the
word to space, sequentiality, and closure (for example, 13536). This
literate understanding of the word contrasts with that of primary oral
cultures, where the spoken word is an event, a movement in time,
completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed
word (75). On the other hand, the spoken word proliferates through
technology; it becomes available to more people over larger amounts of
space and longer periods of time. I quote at length Ongs analysis of the
eects of hearing more talk:
Secondary Orality
11
Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary
orality. Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong
group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a
true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in
on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immea-
surably larger than those of primary oral culture. . . . In our age of
secondary orality, we are group-minded self-consciously and program-
matically. . . . Unlike members of a primary oral culture, who are turned
outward because they have had little occasion to turn inward, we are
turned outward because we have turned inward. In a like vein, where
primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reectiveness
implemented by writing is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spon-
taneity because through analytic reection we have decided that sponta-
neity is a good thing. We plan our happenings carefully to be sure that
they are thoroughly spontaneous. (13637)
In addition, then, to literacys legacy of privileging information and the
individual who communicates it, secondary oral cultures display fea-
tures known to characterize primary oral cultures: a strong communal
sense, desire for participation, and love of spontaneity. What distin-
guishes these features in a secondary oral culture from these features in a
primary culture is a mental capability developed through literacy: self-
consciousness.
I want to extend Ongs analysis by adding that the self-consciousness
and analytic reection to which he points can be sporadic and short-
lived. That is to say, at least from the perspective of the early twenty-rst
century, what is most striking about the rise of secondary orality in the
twentieth century is the propensity of individuals to forget the plan-
ning that went into making the happening spontaneous, to cite Ongs
oxymoron. To put it another way, the technology that brings us the
spoken word becomes invisible to us. Or, to return to my earlier formula-
tion, we forget the secondary in secondary orality, creating for our-
selves a partial ction that the happening is spontaneous or the inter-
action the same as face-to-face. Such slippage or forgetting is
illustrated in the anecdote of my students sense of talking with Cal-
vinos If on a winters night a traveler that I related in my preface. But in
order to facilitate my analysis of the more specialized case of literary
secondary oral genres, I want to turn next to the more familiar, if not
necessarily apparent, case of radio and television talk shows. Though
Secondary Orality
12
what follows can by no means be an overview of the history of broadcast-
ing nor even of the specic form of the talk show, a pause over certain
aspects of those histories reveals a bizarre combination and/or alterna-
tion of self-consciousness and navet about technology that I propose is
characteristic of many secondary oral phenomena and that can serve as a
helpful backdrop for the kind of reading procedures I am proposing in
this book.
Talk Radio, Talk Show
Long before the development and proliferation of specic formats
known as talk radio and the television talk show, the earliest days of
radio provide support for Ongs thesis that secondary orality generates
relationshipsor at least a sense of them. In articles with titles like The
Social Destiny of Radio and Radio Dreams That Can Come True,
journalists in the 1920s marveled at the ability of radio to bring Ameri-
cans together: How ne is the texture of the web that radio is even now
spinning! It is achieving the task of making us feel together, think to-
gether, live together. Another commentator saw radio spreading mu-
tual understanding to all sections of the country, unifying our thoughts,
ideals, and purposes, making us a strong and well-knit people. The
same writer supports his view by citing the hundreds of letters a day that
Newark station wjz received in 1922 from illiterate [sic] or broken
people who are for the rst time in touch with the world about them (as
quoted in Douglas 1987: 306). For some listeners, like the author of Its
Great to Be a Radio Maniac, the thrill of knowing he was connected to
others in far-ung places outweighed the substance of the contact: To
me no sounds are sweeter than this is station soandso (as quoted in
Douglas 1987: 307). This sense of being part of a group is the prominent
feature distinguishing early radio from the prior development of the
telephone.
Early radio history also provides support for Ongs claim of self-
consciousness about this new kind of interaction. In contemporary
commentator McMeanss view (1923), radio listeners thought of them-
selves as an audience totally dierent in several ways from anything
before known (as quoted in Douglas 1987: 312). One appreciative lis-
tener praised the fact that he could be part of a crowd and yet remain at
Secondary Orality
13
home: This vast company of listeners . . . do not sit packed closely, row
on row, in stuy discomfort endured for the delight of the music. The
good wife and I sat there quietly and comfortably alone in the little back
room of our own home that Sunday night and drank in the harmony
coming three hundred miles to us through the air (as quoted in Douglas
1987: 308). He and the wife consider themselves part of a vast company
and yet they are happy to be alone. Another early fan of radio cele-
brated listeners control over speakers: With radio we, the listeners,
will have an advantage we have never had before. We do not even have to
get up and leave the place. All we have to do is press a button, and the
speaker is silenced.
Im raising the
specter of the talk show nevertheless to foreground the concept of sec-
ondary orality and to provoke consideration of the inevitable inuence
of media upon each other. Though I am uninterested in tracing any
direct inuence by the broadcast media on the production of specic
literary works, I do aim to point out the common privileging of interac-
tion over content in talk radio, talk shows, and talk ction.
In this era
when many children learn to view television at a much younger age than
they learn to read, when televisions and radios are tuned in for more
hours a day than most people are at work or school, how could the mass
media not play a role in how we read and write? I intend not to under-
mine our appreciation of literature as a distinctive form of communica-
tion but rather to challenge the notion that it is somehow a sacrosanct
one that responds only to internal formal developments.
For those of us who grew up with radio and television, Goman once
again helps us perceive the specic functioning of the mundane. In his
analysis of radio broadcasting, he identies three main modes of an-
nouncing, that is, all routine talk into a microphone (1981: 232). He
names the rst mode action override, where the action in question is of
primary concern to the audience, as in sportscasting, for example, and
the talk of the announcer is only a means to that end (234).
His
second category is three-way announcing, where a host conducts a
conversation with one or more persons in the studio and a studio audi-
ence and/or broadcast audience listen in (234). Direct radio, in which
Secondary Orality
15
the announcer speaks to the individual listener at home as if in a tte-
-tte is his third category (235). With this last term, Goman is referenc-
ing direct address in speech, an analogy that also applies to the moment
in cinema and television when actors or announcers look directly into
the camera. The television medium in particular has a propensity for
direct address, which Sarah Kozlo suggests gives such a strong impres-
sion of interpersonal exchange that some viewers even answer back
(1992: 81).
To describe
the genre more fully, one needs to add the additional category of call-
in, shows or segments of shows in which a radio host engages in fresh
talk with an individual over the phoneand on the airin the context of
an extended conversation with other callers and silent listeners. Many
television talk-show formats combine a segment of Gomans three-
way announcing, with guests and hosts interacting and studio and
home audiences only listening, and a subsequent segment of call-in,
where the studio audience reacts to the talk of the rst segment and
creates fresh talk based on the subject introduced. These may be linked
by moments of direct address.
Talk showsI will use this term alone when I refer to both the radio
and television formatshave enjoyed nothing short of a meteoric rise
(and partial fall) in the last few decades in the United States. Radio talk
shows became so popular, and therefore lucrative, that exclusive all-talk
stations developed in the 1970s.
The idea
that a talk show is about interaction rather than delivery of information is
another feature that links it to primary orality. Ong refers to this as
Secondary Orality
17
the person-interactive context of orality and suggests that the privileg-
ing of the interpersonal component over the informational (object-
attentive) context may cause irritation to literates by making all too
much of speech itself . . . overvaluing and certainly overpracticing rheto-
ric (1982: 68). This privileging of interaction over content may partially
account for the strong negative judgments talk shows elicit from social
commentators who consider themselves the guardians of literacy.
With these ctions in mind, we can now return to the idea of the
Secondary Orality
18
talk show as a hybrid communicative form. It contains face-to-face in-
teraction: real people speak to one another; but the show eects and
disseminates those conversations through technological mediation, self-
consciousness, and pretense. Though he does not use the same frame-
work, Wayne Munson concurs with this analysis, calling the talk-show
format a bizarre combination of paradigms of the traditional and the
modern worlds: talk and show; the format links conversation, the
interpersonalthe premodern oral traditionwith the mass-mediated
spectacle born of modernity (1993: 6). Even though media experts point
out that we really do not (yet?) know very much about how radio and
television get consumed (Shattuc 48), they still make pronouncements
about what audiences experience. Eric Bogosian, author of the play and
star of the movie Talk Radio, hypothesizes that the popularity of the talk
shows depends on audiences attraction to realness. When a caller dials
in to a radio talk show or when Oprah or Ricki Lake speaks with mem-
bers of the studio audience, we, the nonparticipating but present au-
dience, can ascertain with our own ears and/or eyes that those are hu-
mans talking to one another. Other folks want to listen to those people,
according to Bogosian because they might hear some small tidbit of
genuine emotion (xvii). Similarly, Shattuc suggests that the draw of
television talk shows is the ultimately uncontrollable: real people with-
out scripts (73). Audiences are not lured as much by a desire to under-
stand social or personal problems (that is, content), Shattuc maintains,
as by a desire to identify with the participants (that is, emotion, relation-
ship) (95). Again, creating identication is set in motion by the talk
hosts awareness of the presence of absent addressees; as Goman puts
it, the remote (and studio) audience is treated as if it were a ratied
participant, albeit one that cannot [always] assume the speaking role
(234). It may be the attractiveness of being treated as a part of the conver-
sation, in addition to the witnessing of real emotion mentioned by Bogo-
sian, that rst gave talk shows their large audiences.
Participation is key to the evolution of the genre. In the 1990s, talk
shows (especially those occupying a late-night time slot) attracted their
audiences not so much with the promise of talk as of show: these
audience members, according to Shattuc, are not as concerned about
witnessing authenticity and real emotion as they are about reveal[ing]
the performance behind the notion of truth. They foreground much of
Secondary Orality
19
the contrivance by themselves participating and putting on the most
outrageous parts of this show (16061). The partial fall of talk shows to
which I alluded at the beginning of this section may in fact be related to
mediation. For example, there has been negative publicity about manip-
ulation of guests and audiences, what, drawing again on the framework
introduced above, we might call an intentional obscuring on the part of
producers of the mediated aspects of the talk.
According to
Lako, we are not completely comfortable with any of these changes,
even though they seem to express our preferences, because the borrow-
ing of a device from one medium into another is always overdetermined:
it carries with it the communicative eect, or feel, of one medium into
another (the metacommunicative eect) and at the same time attempts
to utilize the language of one mode to communicate ideas in another (the
communicative eect). It is no wonder that this sort of translation can
create confusion in readers (or hearers), and can also create in them very
strong feelingstypically negative (25152). Lako oers her analy-
sis to address this negativitynot by denigrating literacy, but by identi-
fying these new practices as attempts to come to terms with the future
(25960).
I nd Lakos argument extremely helpful and recapitulate it here for
two purposes. First, I want to emphasize that the particular communica-
tive change on which she focuses, what she calls the mingling of oral
and written communicative strategies is of course not a fact, but a ction
to which we agree. Written texts do not now speak, but because they
are doing something dierent from custom we let them function for us as
spoken interaction. Though Lako never draws attention to this point,
her argument implies active reading. Her examples do not constitute
speech in some ontological sense: they are not oral, they are to be taken
as oral. It is readers who may interpret them as templates for the sound of
speech or as spontaneous and emotional, and therefore like speech.
Readers activity and pretense play important roles in the talk shows
described above and in what I call talk ction, too, though I judge the
activity involved in reading talk ction as necessarily more self-con-
scious, and the pretense of a dierent nature.
Accordingly, my second purpose in citing Lakos observations is to
distinguish the specic written phenomena she is describing from the
ones I am treating, beyond the fact that she deals with various types of
writing, whereas I deal only with prose ction. I take Lakos borrowing
of a device from one medium into another to mean a substitution of
one sign system for another, say, italics for a rise in pitch or capital letters
Secondary Orality
23
for such emotions as excitement, anger, and hysteria. The italics and the
capitals signal: to be taken as oral. My corpus may contain some
of the borrowing that interests Lako. But the strategies I focus on do
not involve substitutions to be interpreted as imitations of qualities of
speech. (I am not interested in representations of dialect, for example.)
Talk-ction texts are not translations into writing which we understand
through reference to speaking (Lako 247). Rather, they mobilize tex-
tual strategies that reveal orientation to exchange between text and
reader. That is to say: I call my phenomenon Talk neither because the
written page sounds like oral speech nor even because it signals dier-
ence that should be interpreted as informal or spontaneousand there-
fore as resembling speech more than writingbut rather because talk
ction performs what many experts identify as the central function of
speech: it creates relationships and invites interaction.
Readers must be
self-conscious about this hybridity and about interacting with a written
text for the reading experience to constitute Talk. I will return to this
issue below.
In presenting sociolinguistic denitions of talk in the rst section of
this chapter, I suggested that the concept of the interactional unit invites
consideration of the production of a literary work by an author as a
statement that asks for the reply of being read. After all, literature is
written with the intention of being read by someone, even if only by the
author who then wants it destroyed, as Kafka purportedly did. But I also
suggested, following Ong, that this interactional unit in fact applies to all
writing and doesnt help us specify anything about literature, much less
about some twentieth-century prose ction.
Describing talk ction requires time and space, and I try to give each
mode its due by discussing it in its own chapter to illuminate the way
a set of texts has responded not only to secondary orality as broadly
sketched out above but also to more specic, though still widespread,
cultural phenomena: the changing forms of transmission of cultural/
historical knowledge (chapter 2, Storytelling); the iniction of trauma
(chapter 3, Testimony); and attempts at intimacy in societies that for
various reasons promote alienation (chapter 4, Apostrophe). The signs
and extent of interaction in each mode vary; in some cases the initial
situation of enunciation invites the reader to consider the entire dis-
course as displaying orientation to exchange. In others, specic textual
Secondary Orality
24
features elicit a distinct response from the reader. In all cases, the texts
aim to provoke some kind of reaction in the readers world, that is, in the
world outside the text. Without undermining the specicity of the talk
ction modes I analyze in subsequent chapters, I want to adumbrate how
Gomans conception of talk can be applied to narrative ction.
Traditional narratological models of the narrative communication
system draw arrows from a real author to a ctional narrator of a story to
a ctional receiver of the story, the narratee, to a real receiver of the story,
the reader.
Technological, eco-
nomic, and social organizational innovations contributed to and, in-
deed, created a wide readership for ction. As Christopher Flint argues,
however, this readership developed at the price of a referential belief
system, predicated on the evidential aura of an authentic manuscript, by
which a ction frames its empirical status (1998: 214). Specically, Flint
sees reected in the content and structure of eighteenth-century (mainly
English) stories narrated by speaking objects, real authors concerns
about the amount of mediation between author and reader, the unpre-
dictability and heterogeneity of readership, and commodity culture. In
describing the functions of these speaking-object narrators, Flint writes:
the power to tell stories is compromised by the subjection of the [speak-
ing object] storyteller to systems of social, economic, and material ex-
change that delimit its identity. . . . To some degree, the narratives do
prevent the author from being drawn into the kind of public vortex that
necessarily envelops the text. . . . But the protection the surrogate pro-
vides is nonetheless a sign of the authors vulnerability (221). Although
Flint emphasizes transformations in relations between author and text,
the changes he details aected all dyads of literary communication: texts
and readers, authors and readers, readers and authors. Literary rela-
tions, like increasingly international nancial transactions, were becom-
ing anonymous (223).
Admittedly, Flint focuses on only one type of ction, and we would
have to investigate much more widely to discover the extent of anxieties
about transformations of literary relations and to deduce the persistence
of an attitude toward literature as communication. The important work
of Robyn Warhol on reader address reveals the nineteenth century to be a
period of further transition when authors used narrators to obfuscate and
emphasize the boundaries between their ctions and the world of lived
Secondary Orality
28
experience (1989: 44). As we will see in the next chapter, some talk ction
utilizes the same strategies as Warhols engaging narrators by implying
or even asserting that author, reader, and characters are all present si-
multaneously on the same diegetic plane (204). What then is new and
distinct about talk ction? Why is it not merely a continuation of some
strains of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose ction? My answer
to these questions is modeled on the distinctions between primary and
secondary orality or face-to-face conversation and talk shows. They
share qualities but are not identical; the second element in these pairs
resembles the rst through lters of self-consciousness about mediation
and pretense. In the case of talk ction, this self-consciousness involves
choosing to interact despite my second moment: the early-twentieth-
century triumph of art for arts sake, that is, of what we might style
the most literate of moments in the history of the novel, when prac-
titioners and theorists advocate elimination of all overt signs of ction
as communication.
We might associate the idea of the literary text as an autonomous
aesthetic object most closely with Modernism, the New Critics, and po-
etry. But we can trace to Flaubert the seeds of analogous attitudes for the
novelistic genre, that is, a privileging of impersonal, objective, or
dramatic narration over any mode that allows for direct appearances
by the author or his [sic] reliable spokesman (Booth 1961: 8). In the
history of the Anglo-American novel this position is most forcefully
presented by Henry James, in prefaces written for the revised publica-
tion of his novels (begun 1907; see James 1962) and then reiterated and
synthesized by his younger friend Percy Lubbock. In the latters 1921
study The Craft of Fiction, Lubbock praises the technique of Madame
Bovary, for example, commenting, the art of ction does not begin
until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so
exhibited that it will tell itself. To hand over to the reader the facts of the
story merely as so much informationthis is no more than to state the
argument of the book. . . . [I]n ction there can be no appeal to any
authority outside the book itself (1957: 62). By privileging showing
over telling, James and Lubbock contributed further to the loosening
of author and reader from each other and from the literary text detected
already by Flint in eighteenth-century novels. Needless to say, the idea
that a story will tell itself would be ludicrous to sociolinguists like
Secondary Orality
29
Goman.
And yet the allure of the view that literary art should be, not
do has been so strong that it has aected both what is written and how
people read since the early twentieth century. Jane P. Tompkins describes
this legacy of Modernism as an eradication of a sense of literatures
ability to accomplish social tasks, such that we no longer think of
writing or reading it as a means of carrying out social transactions
(1980: 210).
I have proposed we call post-Modernist prose ction that aims to have
eects in the real worldor to return to my framework, to interact with
readerstalk ction.
In this chapter I have argued that there are moments in history when
forms of communication are pushed to the fore and that we are experi-
encing one of them. I will turn now to a series of texts that have not
received appropriate attention in canonical approaches to twentieth-
century prose ction. With Talk and deixis in mind, I hope that you will
become a recipient of my hey, you by noticing features of this prose
ction that you would not have noticed otherwise.
33
2
storytelling
Talk as Sustenance
A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the
bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee.
mikhail m. bakhtin
I call my rst mode of Talk storytelling since the moves involve the
recital, reception, and passing on of stories. Specically, the statement
of these texts should be thought of as the narrators entire recital of the
story, and the reply as the readers proper reception and eventual
retelling of that story. The deictics that guide us to this understanding are
the personal pronouns we are familiar with from pre-twentieth-century
reader address: I (we) and you. I am taking up storytelling rst
because of our associations with oral storytelling as a basic form of
human interaction (Nofsinger 1991: 162), and more specically because
the call for response is the easiest to identify among the four types I
present in this study, indicated as it is by direct address: you. This is not
to say that the activity of replying is itself automatic, passive, or trivial. As
in my epigraph from Bakhtin, the authors of these works of talk ction
want to create bridgesrelationshipsthat can only be sustained when
speaker and respondent are equally active. The phrase dear reader
never appears, in part, I surmise, because readers are posited as listeners
who are as present as the tellers, to paraphrase a point made by Gayle
Jones (1991: 161). For this reason, too, I use the term storytelling to
make a bridge to (primary) oral cultures where telling stories is an ac-
tivity of serious purpose. As Ong explains, putting information vital to
the survival of a people into a narrativized form allows it to be more
easily memorized and passed on (1982: 34, 140). I am spelling these
points out at the beginning, because the sense of readers as active par-
Storytelling
34
ticipants and of stories as accomplishing social tasks is not necessarily
familiar to us secondary oral creatures.
To demonstrate how novels of my storytelling mode reassert a notion
of literature as interactional, I will read two twentieth-century texts,
Kstas Tachtsss The Third Wedding Wreath (To trto stefni 1963; 1970)
and Gloria Naylors Mama Day (1988), whose statements call for read-
ers to reply by listening with the proper attitude, which implies accep-
tance of the responsibility to hand on the story. To understand the full
import of the demand for attentive, respectful listening it will be neces-
sary not only to consider these texts in rather great detail but also to
consider two nineteenth-century texts in their respective traditions
Dimtris Viklass Luks Lras (1879) and Harriet E. Wilsons Our Nig
(1859; 1983)to whose calls for the creation of community, I would
suggest, Tachtsss and Naylors novels are responding.
Despite
his stated intentions to tell his own story, relationships to others prove
central to the theme and form of the novel. The novel is not so much a
recital of individual heroic feats as the story of trying to preserve family
and community under extraordinary conditions.
But I
suggest that Lukss need for connection also explains his frequent narra-
tive wanderings. He pleads his case early in the novel in a passage about
digression in the form of a reader address:
For this reason, and because I am an old man, perhaps I shall not always
succeed in avoiding such digressions while writing my reminiscences. But
neither are you, good reader, under an obligation to peruse them to the
end. When you were a child, and your nurse related to you her tales, she
did so in order to gratify not only your curiosity, but also her own impulse
[anngi ] which prompted her to repeat them. Sleep may have come over
you sometimes. Yet she continued her tale, and you awoke just in time to
listen to the nish. That is why you perhaps remember the beginning only
and the end of many a fairy tale, though you may not know how the
Storytelling
42
recollection of the middle portion has failed you. But my story has no
particular beginning or end of its own; so that you may fall asleep even
now: you will not interrupt me. (1881a: 2526; 1881b: 1920; my emphasis)
Luks associates old age (the writing self ) with childhood (the oral/aural
self ). His nursery analogy emphasizes the oral character of his tale and
implies that he, like the nurse, wants to tell this story regardless of the
listeners commitment to hearing it. The word translated by Gennadius
as impulse is anngineed/necessityin the original Greek.
Luks does need the reader, however, even if only as a prop (recall Havi-
lands anecdote; see too Ong 1982: 34). But I would not interpret Lukss
main intent as expression of solipsism, false modesty, or mere adherence
to the sentimental convention of self-disparagement. Rather, by convey-
ing these thoughts in the second-person singular, Luks not only enters
into relation with the reader in the present moment by engaging him in
dialogue but also assumes that the reader is like himhe creates a
coalition, displaying engagement and solidarity (Brown and Gilman
1960: 25758).
But for my
purposes here, more remarkable features of this preface may well be the
way Wilson carries out a criticism of white abolitionists while seeming to
deect oense, and more remarkable still, the subtle address of her
appeal for support of her general political and specic personal goals to a
peer constituency. Like her bracketing of rened and cultivated pleasure
seekers at the opening of her preface, Wilson, as I see it, turns from white
abolitionists as well.
What if, on the other hand, as I have already proposed, we assume that
Wilson writes for a black audience, an audience of free blacks like her-
self ? Her subtitle, after all, makes clear that she is not relating the narra-
tive of a slave, slavelike though her protagonists existence might have
Storytelling
54
been, but rather Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. I propose that
the word Nig can then function as a sign of recognition: someone else
like me. Instead of drawing the reader into a collective of racist whites,
the rst-person plural phrase would place the (black) reader into a peer
collective of blacks, the kind of peer collective Wilson hopes for in her
preface. Lest my interpretation seem anachronistic, I point out that such
a solidaristic use of the word nigger appears in Wilsons novel. In the
very rst chapter, Mag Smith, My Mother, Wilson has Jim, a free black,
wondering out loud to himself whether the scorned and destitute white
Mag would marry him:
After the usual supply of fuel was prepared, Jim returned home. Full of
pity for Mag, he set about devising measures for her relief. By golly! said
he to himself one dayfor he had become so absorbed in Mags interest
that he had fallen into a habit of musing aloudBy golly! I wish she d
marry me.
Who? shouted Pete Green, suddenly starting from an unobserved
corner of the rude shop.
Where you come from, you sly nigger! exclaimed Jim.
Come, tell me, who is t? said Pete; Mag Smith, you want to marry?
Git out, Pete! and when you come in dis shop again, let a nigger know
it. Do nt steal in like a thief. (10)
Though Jim is annoyed that hes been overheard, there is no sign that his
use of the word nigger in this scene is malicious. To the contrary, that
Jim uses the word once to refer to Pete (Where you come from, you sly
nigger!) and once to refer to himself (let a nigger know it) enhances
the readers sense that the two know each other well and are comfortable
with teasing each other. It is perhaps critical to the benign valence of the
word that the two men are alone; there are no whites present who could
seize on the term and hear it dierently.
Most uses of the word nigger in the novel refer to the mixed-race
daughter of Mag and Jim, Frado, and any number of other scenes show
how the term in the mouths of whites is meant to dehumanize the pro-
tagonist and separate her from people who could be her (cross-racial)
peers. When Frado rst goes to school, for instance, Mary Bellmont sets
the tone by exclaiming that she is ashamed to be seen walking with a
nigger. The other children immediately take up the word and the senti-
ment, shouting, See that nigger and I wont play with her (31). Al-
Storytelling
55
though, under the inuence of their teacher, the schoolchildren stop
ostracizing Frado and even come to treasure her and her antics, verbal
(and physical) abuse only gets worse in the Bellmont household. How
the word nigger inicts harm on the girl is revealed through another
eavesdropping scene. James, Marys older brother and a sympathetic, if
ineective, friend to Frado, overhears her complaining to her dog Fido in
the barn. Frados words are communicated to the reader when James
narrates the scene to his Aunt Abby, another impotent white friend of
Frados. James reports to Aunt Abby that Frado says to her dog, Work as
long as I can stand, and then fall down and lay there till I can get up. No
mother, father, brother or sister to care for me, and then it is, You lazy
nigger, lazy niggerall because I am black! Oh, if I could die! (75).
Frados lament reminds us of Gronniosaws when the book refuses to
speak to him; both feel themselves despised and cut o from human
relationships because of the color of their skin. Particularly relevant to
our analysis of the valence of this epithet is that of all the horrible beat-
ings Frado has received, it is the barb of being called lazy nigger by her
white mistresses that she complains about in a private moment of agony,
a situation in which presumably she utters her most honest thoughts.
While verbal insults must not be the only thing that makes Frado want to
die, they are what she singles out here.
Based on these and other uses of the word nigger in the text, I
conclude that, from the perspective of a black audience reading a text by
a black author, the title page could function inversely from how it func-
tions for a white audience. For black readers, the unmarked use in the
main title of the phrase Our Nig could be read as: [A Story about]
One of Our Own. Whereas the inverted commas around the authors
use of the phrase as a pseudonym at the bottom of the page could be
thought to mark the phrase as one from the mouth of someone not part
of our collective, that is, whites. Our Nig in its second appearance on
the title page could signal to the black audience: this is authored by one
who is/was called by (white) others our nig. To be sure, we dont need
to choose between these readings. As Du Bois has taught us, African
Americans have had to develop double vision and double consciousness;
the minority group has to know how to read through majority lenses
(1903; 1961). Black readers could have discerned both meanings, as Wil-
son could have intended both. Additionally, if Wilson really wrote the
Storytelling
56
book to raise money to support herself and her childresearch supports
this claimshe needed any sympathetic readers she could nd.
What I nd remarkable is that her concrete, urgent nancial reasons
to sell as many copies as possible did not deter her from two challenging
goals that would have an impact on readership. As we have already
examined in the preface and title, Wilson uses sophisticated rhetorical
strategies, addressing black and white audiences to dierent ends: ap-
pealing to black readers to constitute themselves as a community of
equals she had never enjoyed or even witnessed; and appealing to a white
audience to deliver a message about hypocrisy that could only make
them uncomfortable. It may well have been her sense of how likely a
white audience was to take oense at her message about Northern racism
that enforced her desire for a sympathetic black audience. In any case, we
can better appreciate the challenges she faced in achieving these goals by
reviewing the elusive character of Frado/Wilsons black husband.
It is not until the twelfth and nal chapter, The Winding Up of the
Matter, that Frado meets Samuel, a black man, whom she marries after a
very brief courtship. He abandons her several times, nally dying of
fever in New Orleans and leaving her to raise their child. I maintain,
however, that the manner in which this aair is presented in Wilsons text
mitigates Samuels oense. His relationship to Frado, for example, is
described as a natural outcome of the meeting of two lonely colored
people. Wilson achieves this sense of fate by embedding the narration of
the courtship in a series of rhetorical questions: as people of color were
rare there, was it strange she should attract her dark brother; that he
should inquire her out; succeed in seeing her; feel a strange sensation in
his heart towards her; that he should toy with her shining curls, feel
proud to provoke her to smile and expose the ivory concealed by thin,
ruby lips; that her sparkling eyes should fascinate; that he should pro-
pose; that they should marry? (126). The answer, of course, is no, it was
not strange.
Wilson employs several additional strategies to impede a negative
view of Samuel. The entire narration of Frados relationship with him
constitutes only one part of one chapter. As profound an inuence as the
failed marriage with Samuel may have had on Frado, in terms of sheer
space given to the narration of causes of misery in her life, the brutality of
life with the white Bellmonts overwhelms abandonment by her black
Storytelling
57
husband. Indeed, it is Frados preoccupation (obsession?) with the Bell-
monts that concludes even this chapter and thereby the novel. In a
brilliant reversal of the trope of the slave hunter as bloodhound who will
never stop trying to nd the escaped slave, Wilson closes by remarking
that though the Bellmonts may have forgotten her, Frado will never
cease to track them till beyond mortal vision (131).
More specically eecting an exoneration or at least mitigation of
Samuels culpability for his treatment of Frado, the narrator points to the
character we already know and empathize with, Frado, as the source of
the attraction: was it strange she should attract her dark brother (my
emphasis). Frado, not Samuel, is the subject of the sentence; she is the
starting point, so to speak, for the chain of events that will eventually
leave her an impoverished single mother. The narrator also deects
some blame from Samuel to Frado by implying that Frado fooled herself
into thinking she knew him better than she actually did at the time they
married (127). Furthermore, the narrator repeats more than once that
when they are together, he does take good care of her (127, 128). Perhaps
one could use the issue of assigning responsibility to explain the reap-
pearance of the (narrators) rst-person voice at this point in the text,
where the opening sentence of this chapter reads, A few years ago,
within the compass of my narrative, there appeared often in some of our
New England villages . . . (126; my emphasis). The narrator places
herself in the scene in which these events transpire. Still, nothing ob-
structs our view to the facts that Samuel abandons Frado several times
and that she must struggle to sustain herself and their child as a result.
From this perspective, the one specic experience of black community
described in the novel is a disaster for Frado.
As the much greater harm done to Frado by the Bellmonts minimizes
the portion of her misery caused by Samuel, the characterization of
abolitionists in this chapter also contextualizes Samuels behavior. Sam-
uel is introduced, you may recall, by way of reference to others like
him: professed fugitives from slavery, who recounted their personal
experience in homely phrase, and awakened the indignation of non-
slaveholders against brother Pro (126). Abolitionists, in other words, are
painted as Northern whites who would listen to any lie that allows them
to feel better about themselves by criticizing Southern whites. When
Samuel reveals the truth to Frado, that is, that he had never seen the
Storytelling
58
South, he characterizes his illiterate harangues as humbugs for hun-
gry abolitionists (128). Again, Samuels duplicity reects worse on abo-
litionists than on himself or other blacks. He (merely) feeds a hunger
they have for illiterate harangues, as long as Southerners are blamed
and abolitionists left unscathed.
Viklass character
Luks, for one, would have understood how great the odds were against
developing community under the conditions circumscribing the lives of
many blacks in antebellum New England. In looking back at the period
Storytelling
60
of his own troubles from the comfort of his community in London, Luks
laments how impossible it was to think about others during the Revolu-
tion: encircled by adversities, each thought of his own safety, and had
no leisure to inquire into the condition of others (Viklas 1881b: 115). It
is only once they are out of harms waywhen we rested our wearied
heads, without the fear of a sword held ready over us, when we sat at the
doorstep of a hospitable refuge which no Turks shadow could darken
that they begin to reconstitute a community (116). Even though Wilsons
story is not set during an ocially declared war, the circumstances she
recounts show how hard it must have been for blacks who were literally
and guratively ghting for their lives to have the leisure to inquire into
the condition of others.
Unfortunately, historical evidence indicates that Wilsons call for
community through Our Nig did go unheard. Unlike the trajectory of
slave narratives, Our Nig does not end in freedom, in this case the hoped-
for economic freedom. Most tragically on the human level, Wilson did
not raise enough money from the sale of her novel to retrieve her son
from foster care and nurture him herself. Ironically, it is the death certi-
cate of her son that became the critical link in proving the existence of
Harriet Wilson and her authorship of the novel (Gates 1983: xiixiii).
Eric Gardners research has uncovered no record of free blacks oering
support, either materially by purchasing Wilsons text or emotionally by
creating or oering a community of which she could be part (1993: 227).
Furthermore, so few copies of Our Nig were sold that it does not seem to
have had much of a veriable eect on the immediately subsequent
development of African American literature. This provides all the more
reason to follow Debra Walker King when she concludes that Wilsons
appeals for support demand that we do many more revisions of the
ending today (1997: 44).
To do such a revision in our age would require letting ourselves be
lodged together in some kind of intersubjective world, not of the normal
world of conversation Goman was describing with this phrase but a
world created by erasing the boundaries between reality here and litera-
ture there. Readers would have to believe the books you actually calls
them, and they would have to be ready to respond. This includes the
reader-listeners realization that they cannot be passive consumers of an
entertaining ction but that they are instead part of the community
Storytelling
61
constituted through the storytelling. With such knowledge comes the
responsibility of passing on the story. This proper listening attitude
includes recognition of the price of sustaining community: in Maya
Angelous unforgettable phrase, you have to remember that youve been
paid for. Youve been paid for by Luks and his compatriots, by black
slaves and black indentured servants like Frado, by writers like Viklas
and Wilson. Adopting such an attitude toward a literary text requires
displacing the attitude, reviewed in the previous chapter, that art is
supposed to be, not do. Twenty-rst-century readers can be schooled
into these various responsibilities of listenership (Stepto 1986: 306) by
talk ction, two examples of which we are now ready to take up.
Responsibilities of Listenership in
The Third Wedding Wreath and Mama Day
In twentieth-century texts of my storytelling mode, direct references to
the production of the story are gone. Absent, too, are tales of found
manuscripts and explicit directions to readers in paratextual forewords
or afterwords about how to understand the main text. But I contend that
to read these texts as Talk is to discover extratextual communal goals
similar to those of Viklas and Wilson. Talk-ction texts of my story-
telling mode reveal orientation to an answeringthat is, they reveal
themselves as statementsin two ways. Most obviously, they use tradi-
tional deixis, displaying awareness of a communicative circuit by ad-
dressing their readers with youalthough not with the even more
obvious you reader of my nineteenth-century examples. These calls
may appear intermittently throughout the text, as in Tachtsss novel, or
they may appear in the frame, as in Naylors. In either case, that readers
should consider the whole text as statement (and not just the sentence in
which the deictic appears) is conveyed by the second, less obvious move
of the text-as-statement: telling stories that are about creating relation-
ships and communities through storytelling. In other words, these texts
embed negative and positive models of listening and listeners in the
stories themselves. To reply to texts of my storytelling mode, readers
have to feel the vocative force of the narrators youthey have to feel
that they are addressed by it, and they have to be willing to enter into an
intimate relationship with the storyteller and the communities eected
Storytelling
62
and aected by the stories told. As would-be respondents to the state-
ments of these texts, we can learn to listen by deciphering the lessons
learned by the narrators and narratees, the tellers and the listeners, in the
novels. At rst glance, the process of learning to listen appears to unfold
as a battle between two characters who represent oral and literate
cultures, respectively. In The Third Wedding Wreath, Nna originally
appears as the literate character and Ekvi (Hecuba) with her unwieldy,
episodic stories as the archetypal oral creature. In Mama Day, Georges
way of understanding the world is based on logic learned mainside,
whereas Cocoa has been schooled by familial and communal oral tradi-
tions of the island that is on no map, Willow Springs. As in my fathers
anecdote about the widow and in Lukss about the nursemaid, however,
proper response ultimately involves a profound entanglementa mar-
riage in Tachtsss metaphorof oral and literate culture, not a triumph
of one over the other. I would go so far as to say that these two examples
of my storytelling mode are parables about learning how to recognize
oneself and how to operate as a secondary oral creature. For this reason,
it will be necessary to recount a fair amount of what occurs in the novels
and how they are narrated to understand their Talk.
Kstas Tachtsss novel The Third Wedding Wreath, rst published in
1963, is narrated by a bourgeois Athenian named Nna who recounts the
events of her life and those of an older friend named Ekvi (Hecuba)
before, during, and directly after World War II. Nna narrates retrospec-
tively during the civil war into which Greece plunges after the world war,
and after Ekvis death and Nnas marriage to Thdoro, one of Ekvis
sons. (Their marriage serves as source for the titular concept. In marry-
ing him, Nna dons her third wedding wreath.
Ekvi
herself is aware of digressing, but again, like Luks, she believes it always
serves a purpose. After one long sequence in what had started out as a
story about losing her husband to another woman, but ends up about
her daughter being healed from a severe fever through her mothers
intercessions to a saint, Ekvi justies her parenthesis by explaining to
Nna, If Im unraveling this whole history, its to tell you that this same
Saint Anastasa who saved my Xne from certain death once again gave
me the warning sign that I would lose my husband (74). Ekvi is at her
most entertaining as a storyteller, Nna thinks, when her life is the most
tumultuous (245).
As her com-
ments reveal, Nna is wrapped up with the celebrity of these people; even
her relationship to Ekvi could be shifted by connections. Ekvi, in
contrast, takes famous people at face value. She judges them by their
willingness and ability to interact with her as conversation partners,
though she does seem happy to impress Nna in the process. As through
the ght over the politician Metaxs, once again, interaction with Ekvi
leads Nna to a reevaluation of her worldview.
Conse-
quently, the beginning of Ekvis end could be traced to the rst time
Storytelling
69
Dimtris refuses to ght back.
We hear nothing of how Ekvi feels about her sons death, but when
Ekvi and Nna search for Dimtriss grave, her friend reports shed
gotten thinner than she ever had even during the worst famine of 41.
Her back was stooped, her face had a wild look, and even the locks of her
hair, always sensitive to the slightest breeze, were now like tangled pieces
of ne wire. What worries Nna the most about Ekvis condition, how-
ever, is her silence: During the whole afternoon I dont think she spoke
more than two or three words. I expected wailing dirges and the beating
of her breast, and this silence terried me (my translation; 1985a: 278;
1985b: 285). To give Ekvi some time alone at the grave site and to calm
her own anxiety, Nna wanders among the wildowers: It was the rst
time Id been outside of Athens since the beginning of the war. Id almost
forgotten nature existed. . . . My breast seemed to swell with a feeling of
well-being [idon ] I had almost forgotten existed in life (286). This walk
revitalizes her, and her chest swells because nature blows breath and
sensation back into her. (The word idon, which Chioles translates as
Storytelling
70
well-being, has the same root as hedonistic and in Modern Greek
connotes sensual pleasure.) This mini-rebirth seems to come at the ex-
pense of Ekvi, but in fact it allows Nna to become the interlocutor her
friend needs before she can do her mourning and come back to life, at
least temporarily, herself.
As the two begin their journey home, Nna tries to make conversation
about the beauty of the pine trees mercifully still standing despite the
need for fuel during the war:
Its time I thought to myself, to pull her out of that depressing silence. If
she continues that way, shell either get sick or shell go mad. Let her cry
for pitys sake, let her wail at last! Ekvi and not crying! I thought it so
strange. But I never imagined for a moment that what I said would raise
such a storm. Suddenly, she began to shriek and howl. All the tears shed
been holding back in the past few days poured out in a ood, as though
some dam had broken:My son! My child! Do these pine trees live, my
son! They live and rule the world, my boy! Its only you whos dead and
gone [Mno es mu pthanes]! . . . I just let her cry and cry. And when we
got up to start walking again, her face had lost something of that wild look
it had before. (1985a: 27980; 1985b: 287)
There are several features of this interaction that point to changes in the
relationship between the two women. Most obviously, they have traded
places as mourner and comforter. When Nnas second husband, Antni,
had died, it was Ekvi who was saying to the unnaturally silent Nna:
Nna! Dont take it like that! Let yourself go, talk! Scream! Cry out!
(232). Though Nna feels that Ekvi was her only true comfort during
the dicult period after Antnis death, she was not able to scream and
cry, explicitly rejecting an oral, external component of mourning (237).
Therefore, perhaps the aspect of Nnas behavior that is the most un-
characteristic when the tables are turned after Dimtriss death is that she
is able to let Ekvi cry. She is able to be the recipient of Ekvis talk
without judging it, indeed she realizes its therapeutic function. Mourn-
ing, like Ekvis apostrophe to Dimtris, involves making, sustaining,
and cherishing relationships and telling stories. Ekvi not only models
these behaviors for Nna, she specically assigns her the responsibility of
becoming a storytellerthe teller of Ekvis story.
Releasing her grief reawakens Ekvis love of life. Nevertheless, the
loss of her beloved Dimtris has put her on the road to her own end, since
Storytelling
71
no matter where she went, she would always be walking on his grave
(292). When she knows her death is imminent, she has her daughter
Polixni summon Nna to her bedside:
Suddenly she waved her hand impatiently towards Polixni who was
standing beside me, as if she wanted to get rid of her. Polixni left the
room in tears, the two of us were alone. Nna . . . I dont want to die . . .
You remember when I said to you I want to die? . . . I dont want to die
now . . . I want to live to see my elder boy . . . Maybe hes the only one of my
children who loved me a little . . . He was loud and rowdy, I know . . . But
he never said a harsh word to me . . . He may have my blessing. . . . And if I
die . . . Shh! I said, youre not going to die. In a few days youll be up
and at it! . . . She tried to smile, as if to say: you dont believe what youre
saying, I know. But if I die, she said again, I want you to promise me
that youll tell him everything . . . What do you want me to tell him?
All the things they did to me [aft pu mkanan]. . . You have my
word.
Her face relaxed. She sank back on the pillows as if a great weight had
been lifted from her bosom, and she began the same rumbling snore.
(1985a: 28687; 1985b: 294; Tachtsss ellipses)
On the most supercial level, this scene merely adds to the seemingly
endless roller coaster of Ekvis love-hate relationships with her children.
Dimtris is gone now, she feels mistreated by Polixni and her husband,
and shes fought yet again with her daughter Elni, so she posits Thdoro
as the only one who really loved her. But what is important to us here is
that Ekvi cannot rest until she knows her story will go on by being
passed on. Nna is to tell Thdoro what they did to me. Although it is
plausibleand is indeed Nnas interpretation in the immediate after-
math of her deaththat by this phrase Ekvi means Polixni and her
husbands role in causing Dimtriss and her own deaths, the very
generality of Ekvis terms allows for a broader interpretation of what
she is supposed to pass on as all the things that have happened in my
life.
Nna, then, has promised to tell Ekvis story, and she has prom-
ised to tell it to someone whom Ekvi, at least, thinks will be a good,
because empathetic, listenerher elder son.
Ekvis death follows shortly after she extracts this promise from Nna,
but Nna does not have a chance to fulll her pledge immediately since
Thdoros return from the Middle East is delayed. Once he is back in
Storytelling
72
Athens, Thdoro shows no interest in becoming a listener to this story.
On the contrary, though he starts to pay attention to Nna, she practically
ignores him, saying that she was perturbed because he did not ask her
about the death of his brother or mother. Even if he had asked, she
comments, I wouldnt have told him anything of what I knew. In spite of
my word to her, I was determined never to open my mouth. The best
thing, I told myself, was to let the past lie where it was (309). Again,
Nna takes a narrow interpretation of her task; she believes she had
promised to tell about the events immediately prior to Ekvis death, the
quarrels between mother, son, daughter, and son-in-law, and she also
reports her desire to disregard the past. But that Nna has in fact fullled
her promise to Ekvi by telling all of Ekvis story is testied by Nnas
narration itself: a whole novel lled with stories, including, of course, the
events leading up to Ekvis death. Nnas discourse proves that she of all
people is, or has become, unable to let the past lie where it was.
We now have the information needed to understand the Talk of The
Third Wedding Wreath. As I proposed initially, this kind of Talk can only
be detected through the whole story in the sense of the entire story told
within the novel, as well as how the story is toldin other words, its
narration. Readers who want to reply properly to the novels entire dis-
course as statement need to respond by becoming the kind of listener
Nna has become to Ekvi, which includes seeing how all the episodes are
connected and accepting the responsibilities of passing on the story.
As I mentioned at the outset of this section, Nna never describes her
narration as writing. To the contrary, Nna always uses expressions of
speech to refer to her own enunciation, and just as importantly, implies
that her interlocutors speak back. Expressions like I dont want to say
or now that were talking about it or youll say ll the novel and can
be thought of as inscribed statements to which readers who want to
Talk with the text will respond by feeling addressed, thus rearming
their status as attentive listeners. Nnas little interrogations of herself by
the listener
In this
context, I think it is very important to note that there are no prescrip-
tions for the race of the addressees, the you to whom the communal
we of the novel addresses itself. I suggest that this absence of racial
prescriptions functions analogously to the communal we crowning us
with success as the best listeners at the outset or to Lukss invitation
to fall asleep. Ultimately these moves challenge us to confront the very
issue that is elided, in this case, race. Whoeverblack, white, or other
respects the history of Willow Springs as a community that is distin-
guished precisely by the race of its members can join the community by
hearing and passing on its story. In this sense, too, I think Mama Day
must be seen as a response to the call of Our Nig.
Prose ction in my storytelling mode suggests that, like that widow in my
fathers village, we can be in relationship to people who are on the other
side of life or on the other side of the literary transaction by believing
that we can be in relation to them, by listening properly, and by passing
on the stories we thus hear.
89
3
testimony
Talk as Witnessing
No, dont forget. Dont erase it.
You cant erase it. But make it into a story.
graham swift, Waterland
We mostly remember Walter Benjamins 1936 essay, The Storyteller, for
its claim that the rise of the novel comes at the expense of storytelling. I
want to recuperate here Benjamins contention that the communicability
of experience is decreasing. Specically, Benjamin points to a historical
event that numerous cultural analysts of his time and ours consider a
watershed in Western civilization: the Great War and its aftermath. In
Benjamins passionate formulation:
never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly [nie sind Er-
fahrungen grndlicher Lgen gestraft worden] than strategic experience
by tactical warfare, economic experience by ination, bodily experience
by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation
that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the
open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the
clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a eld of force of destructive torrents
and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (1969: 84; 1977: 439)
And the fragile human psyche, I append. Though Benjamin does not use
the word, he is describing the phenomenon of trauma in its recently
coined sense of psychic woundings.
While these
novels would not count as storytelling in Benjamins sense of oering
counsel (86) or conveying the epic side of truth, wisdom (87), nor
necessarily in my sense, which I presented in the previous chapter, of
foregrounding attentive listening and passing on of stories, they do dem-
onstrate orientation to exchange. Recognizing testimony as Talk is di-
cult, however, because the nature of trauma itself demands revised no-
tions of exchange, experience, and storyand therefore also of
statement and reply. I suspect this is why Benjamin read such novels
as information. Accordingly, I will begin with what testifying to trauma
means in a psychoanalytic setting, then propose a schema for witnessing
in a literary context, and conclude by illustrating my schema with actual
works of prose ction.
Trauma, Narrative, and Memory
The term trauma is used in technical and lay literature to refer to both
the forces or mechanisms that cause a psychic disorder and the resulting
psychic state. In her acclaimed book Trauma and Recovery (1992), psy-
chiatrist Judith Herman makes the insightful and polemical move to
connect three types of trauma in the rst sense, that is, modern war-
fare, domestic violence, and totalitarian control, whether it be exercised
through governments, individuals, or religious cults. Traumatic events,
which generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close
personal encounter with violence and death (Herman 33), produce vic-
tims who share remarkably similar symptoms, trauma in the second
sense.
has
called narrative memory, an ability to construct mental schemas that
make sense out of experience (Janet 1928). Understanding how trau-
matic symptoms might be transformed into narrative memory and how
the role of the listener-witness functions in this process is crucial to my
project of reading as narrative witnessing, a form of Talk.
Van der Kolk and van der Hart, following Janet, distinguish at least
Testimony
92
three types of memory: habit memory, which we share with animals
and which refers to the automatic integration of new information with-
out much conscious attention to what is happening; ordinary or narra-
tive memory, a uniquely human capacity; and traumatic memory,
apparently also exclusive to humans, but which is not memory at all in
the common sense of recalling something that has been learned. Rather,
it is a return of the traumatic event as physical sensations, horric
images or nightmares, behavioral reenactments, or a combination of
these (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 160, 164). Unlike normal
memory, traumatic memory is inexible. Perhaps most importantly,
traumatic memory has no social component; it is not addressed to any-
body, the patient does not respond to anybody; it is a solitary activity
(van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 163). For these reasons, more de-
scriptive terms than traumatic memory are traumatic reenactments
or traumatic recall. Janet called them ides xes (xed ideas).
Janet, Freud, and others have emphasized that treatment for such
traumatic reenactments involves integrating the unclaimed experi-
ence, to borrow Caruths phrase (1996).
For more than ten years, Janet treated a young hysteric named Irne,
who had lost her mother after attending to her almost without rest for a
period of sixty days. Irne, however, had no recollection of her mothers
Testimony
93
death. At the funeral she behaved highly inappropriately, talking and
laughing without shedding a tear. At the time she was admitted to the
Salptrire she could repeat what shed been told about her mothers
death, but she did not remember the events leading to or following this
devastating personal loss:
If you insist on it, I will tell you: My mother is dead. They tell me that it is
so all day long, and I simply agree with them to get them o my back. But
if you want my opinion, I dont believe it. And I have excellent reasons for
it. If my mother were really dead, she would have been dead in her room,
on a specic date, and I who never left her and took very good care of her,
would have seen it. If she was dead, they would have buried her and taken
me to the funeral. Well, there has been no funeral. Why do you want her to
be dead?
Ex-
actly how this is accomplished remains a mystery, but it appears that the
traumatized person has to return to the memory often in order to com-
plete it (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 176).
The
eect of trauma on society suggests consideration of another commu-
nicative circuit in which readers at a historical and/or cultural remove
cowitness to the stories in the inner circuits by recognizing and explicat-
ing their previous, uncompleted attempts at telling the story/ies of indi-
vidual and collective traumas. Benjamin, as discussed above, perceived
his whole generation as transformed by the experiences of war, ination,
and other forms of social violence. As part of that world himself, he
perhaps could not perceive its literature as telling stories of traumatic
experience, instead calling it information. Herman reminds us that
[d]enial, repression, and disassociation operate on a social as well as
an individual level (1992: 2). Both Benjamin and Herman would proba-
bly agree with Caruths formulation that we are implicated in each
others traumas (1996: 24). This implication bequeaths a role to current
readers and hence creates the need for including this outermost circuit of
witnessing.
My metaphor of the circuit tries to underscore the point made by
theorists of trauma: it is not so much that the analyst/reader knows
and understands a victim who is ignorant and fails. Rather, the
presence of the analyst/cowitness/reader completes the circuit and al-
lows the story to come into being, like components of electronic circuits
that are properly connected so that the current can ow. The listener has
to be there so the survivor can re-externalize the event, articulate and
transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then
take it back again, inside (Felman and Laub 1992: 69). Georey Hart-
man (1996) speaks similarly of transmitting Holocaust testimonies, of
nding a way in which this kind of story can be passed on, even when we
do not fully understand what the experience really was and therefore
what it is we are passing on.
With these lessons of psychoanalysis in mind, I summarize here the
six circuits of narrative witnessing I propose we investigate to under-
stand literary Talk as testimony. Moving from the depicted individual
psyche outward to the literary text in which that depiction occurs to
whole societies in which the texts are produced and/or read, these are:
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97
1. intrapsychic witnessing: a character witnesses to the self about the
characters own experience;
2. interpersonal witnessing: two characters cowitness to trauma suered
by one of them;
3. surrogate witnessing: two characters cowitness to a third characters
trauma;
4. textual witnessing: narrator and narratee cowitness to the trauma
of/in the text;
5. literary-historical witnessing: text and its contemporary reader cowit-
ness to the trauma of/in the text;
6. transhistorical-transcultural witnessing: text and its later or foreign
reader cowitness to the trauma of/in the text.
This classication calls for a few explanations. First, I want to foreground
some of the critical dierences between witnessing in a psychoanalytic
setting and witnessing in literature. Laub, for example, is communicat-
ing his personal experience as survivor, psychoanalyst, and interviewer
of victims of the Holocaust. And though he writes about this, the wit-
nessing he describes takes place orally and has various means for retriev-
ing additional information.
Elie Wiesels pronouncement that our age has given birth to a new
literary genrethe genre of testimony (1977: 9)is well known and
eagerly repeated as a truth about our culture, as is Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laubs similar argument that the twentieth century is the era of tes-
timony. Perhaps the most oft-quoted sentence from Felman and Laubs
widely read 1992 book is the one in which they argue that literature can
do work, witnessing, that history cannot do in an age of trauma. Crises of
history are translated into crises of literature whereby literature be-
comes a witness, and perhaps the only witness, to the crisis within his-
tory which precisely cannot be articulated, witnessed in the given cate-
gories of history itself (xviii). I basically agree with Wiesel, and with
Felman and Laub, as long as the nature of literary testimony is carefully
qualied and, specically, as long as we do not lose sight of the idea of
translation. For one thing, we might keep in mind Culbertsons remarks
about the navet of many current discussions of recuperation of trau-
matic memory: narrative, as simply an accounting in time of events in
time, limits what can be told, indeed making the truth of body recall
appear unintelligible and false, because too disjointed and without con-
text (1995: 191). In a related vein, Trezise speaks of the space between
trauma and testimony (1997: 10). And Tal warns against equating repre-
sentations of trauma and traumatic experience: Textual representa-
tionsliterary, visual, oralare mediated by language and do not have
the impact of the traumatic experience (1996: 15). As reader-enablers,
our account of the Talk, that is, our reply of cowitnessing to the text-as-
statement of trauma, is even further removed from what Culbertson calls
body recall than the testimony of the literary text, circuit four.
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99
Finally, I think it is worth acknowledging the recent explosion of
trauma studies and stating plainly that the northern Western Hemi-
sphere does not have some kind of exclusive claim to catastrophe in the
twentieth century, or in any other century for that matter, even if West-
erners have cultivated writing about it. Though it was the Nazi genocide
of the Jews that has provided the impetus for much of the current theori-
zation about trauma and witnessing, including my own, it was not the
rst or only mass trauma, even within the Western geographical and
cultural realm, as Benjamins essay reminds us.
Below, I purposefully
illustrate the circuits of narrative witnessing with many diverse texts, in
the hope that my schema will be tested and qualied by readers who
supplement these examples with many more from a still wider range of
literary traditions. I have chosen mainly canonical texts to enable my
selective pointing. Though I try to tease out distinct circuits in the analy-
ses that follow, it will not always be possible to focus purely on just one,
since, again, all are necessarily intertwined through the medium of liter-
ary narration itself.
Like the
pronominal splitting of the self, a prerequisite for the search to put
together the story seems to be more chaos. The original German phrase
ins uferlose means literally into that without boundaries and is a com-
mon expression for leading nowhere. That the protagonists belief in
the connection of the statements is framed in the form of a question
reveals not only her skepticism of others to understand her project but
also continued self-doubt about her own ability to gure out the rela-
tionship, the pattern in the metaphor of Wolf s title.
This self-doubt pervades her search and the novel, such that the rst
time the narrator refers to herself in the rst personin the closing
linesit is to say, I dont know (1980: 406). This it of what she
doesnt know is precisely whether she has broken the power of the past
that has kept her split into an I, you, and she: And the past, which
can still split the rst person into the second and the thirdhas its
hegemony been broken? Will the voices be still? (1980: 406). The fact
that the next word of the text is I seems to oer hope that the answer is
yes, and yet, again, that I is used to express doubt: I dont know.
The narrators ruminations end with her desire to face what I would call
her traumatic past, what she calls the experience of dreaming and the
limits of the expressible. As intellectualized as are the terms of the
project the narrator has assigned herself, these closing admissions indi-
cate, to me at least, that she is now capable of proper aect, one of the
goals of witnessing to trauma. She trusts that what she knows, for in-
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103
stance, about the connection of certain sentences or images in her mind,
is not fully expressible. Her conclusion is corroborated by Culbertsons
points about the intranslatability of body recall. And the very act of her
writing the story of her search functions like a call for a cowitness. In
sum, the novel oers a ctional representation of the process of getting
to the stage where a trauma victim could try to deal with the past; an os-
cillation between my rst and second circuits of witnessing. Ultimately,
Patterns of Childhood does not depict the moment of healing, the mo-
ment of the connecting of either or both circuits, though Wolf s novel
gets as close to the experience as any literary text I have encountered.
In Nadine Gordimers Burgers Daughter, we nd another protagonist
who is trying to connect childhood and adult experiences. Although
Rosa Burger reects on the process less explicitly than the protagonist-
narrator of Wolf s novel, Rosa, too, begins by trying to witness to the self.
Rosas reections on who she really is take the form of apostrophes not to
herself as with Wolf s you, but to others: in the rst section to Conrad,
a young man with whom she has lived; in the second to Katya, the rst
wife of her now deceased father; and in the third to her dead father,
Lionel Burger, a white opponent of the South African regime. Rosas
search thus might seem to belong to my second category, witnessing
about the self to another. Yet Gordimers protagonist insists that she
would not be able to articulate anything if someone else were actually
listening. Putting aside for a moment the question of the ecacy of her
self-talk, it is clear that, failed or successful, it belongs within the circuit
of intrapsychic witnessing. In one of these peculiar apostrophes to
Conrad, Rosa explains:
And if I were really telling, instead of talking to you in my mind the way I
nd I do . . . One is never talking to oneself, always one is addressed to
someone. Suddenly, without knowing the reason, at dierent stages in
ones life, one is addressing this person or that all the time, even dreams
are performed before an audience. I see that. . . . Its just that with me it
never happened before. . . . If you knew I was talking to you I wouldnt be
able to talk. But you know that about me. (1617; my emphasis)
Rosas frequently fragmented or truncated statements are just one sign
that she is not in fact trying to communicate to someone else: if I were
really telling, instead of talking to you in my mind the way I nd I do . . .
(Gordimers ellipses). Though she speaks using the second person, what
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104
she says in that speech is that she wouldnt be able to articulate any-
thing if an addressee could actually hear her. Her apostrophes cant
qualify as interpersonal witnessing since she never testies to anyone out
loud. Her admission that this kind of talking in ones mind is new for
her indicates that she has advanced from some even deeper social isola-
tion (with me it never happened before). These internal apostrophes
represent progress, since they do allow her to articulate pieces of her
story, at least to herself. In other words, Rosa imagines an interlocutor
and then occupies that place herself.
This unpolitical daughter of a political martyr comes to view her own
inability to witness as treason. She cannot utter public words about the
wrong that has been done to her (her loss of childhood, her loss of her
father) or, in this racist society, about the wrong that is being done to the
blacks around her. I do not speak, she accuses herself (200), conclud-
ing that I dont know how to live in Lionels country (210). Her deci-
sion to abandon South Africa for Europe and a personal private life
signals her inability or unwillingness to learn how to give testimony. And
yet eventually, Rosa does voluntarily return to South Africa, ending up in
prison. These acts themselves seem to testify, even though Rosa con-
tinues to refuse to speak aloud. In a characteristically fragmented, pri-
vate admission, she apostrophizes her dead father, saying: If I were to
try out telling, which I wont (350). This statement, like much of the
book, portrays Rosa, like Wolf s unnamed protagonist, teetering on the
border of witnessing; she considers trying to tell but quickly asserts that
she wont. Rosas nal reported act, however, causes one to suspect that
her attempts at intrapsychic witnessing did nally change her: she writes
and sends a letter from prison to Katya (Madame Bagnelli). Gordimer
describes and quotes from Rosas letter in the last paragraph of the novel:
In a passage dealing with the comforts of a cell as if describing the features
of a tourist hotel that wasnt quite what the brochure might have sug-
gestedI have rigged up out of fruit boxes a sort of Japanese-style portable
desk (remember the one old Ivan Poliako had, the one he used when he
wrote in bed) and thats what Im writing at nowthere was a reference
to a watermark of light that came into the cell at sundown every eve-
ning, reected from some west-facing surface outside; something Lionel
Burger once mentioned. But the line had been deleted by the prison
censor. Madame Bagnelli was never able to make it out. (361)
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105
That the letter gets censored and that Katya never reads parts of it may
seem to transform Rosas communication into a futile gesture. However,
in the context of her previous, purely interiorized narrative, I suggest, it
represents Rosas rst act of testimony: an attempt to witness beyond the
self to another living person. Perhaps the attempt alone makes a dier-
ence to/for Rosa. Still, a message sent but not received (in the sense that
Katya does not read the part about Lionel, and thus cannot know that
Rosa has nally been able to articulate a thought about him) makes this
letter analogous to Rosas mental apostrophes. Gordimers decision to
end the novel with the announcement that yet another message does not
reach its addressee (Madame Bagnelli was never able to make it out)
leads us to conclude that Burgers Daughter, like Patterns of Childhood,
concerns itself mainly with the psyche prior to healing. Wolf s character
struggles to learn how to say I, and Gordimers to talk to others out
loud. These novels help us appreciate the enormous diculties for the
traumatized psyche to cross the threshold of witnessing.
2. interpersonal witnessing
In this circuit, which also occurs within the story level of the text (in the
narratological sense of the events that make up the plot), a character tries
to communicate to another character a personal trauma. That other
characters listening, her cowitnessing, becomes the means, as Laub puts
it, by which the story comes to be.
My rst example of interpersonal witnessing is structurally close to
the previous one from Burgers Daughter in its use of apostrophe; in both
novels, the protagonist addresses an absent other, but the act of apos-
trophizing functions quite dierently for each testier. In Margaret At-
woods The Handmaids Tale (1986), the main part of the novel consists
of the Handmaids present-tense rst-person account of her experi-
ences; she addresses this eyewitness report of her life in totalitarian
Gilead to an unspecied you. Whereas Rosa addresses real people in
her life, but with the dogged determination that these apostrophes must
remain privatethat is, in her headthe Handmaid believes that the
unnamed other, though absent, will certainly hear her. Her certitude
that her addressee exists somewhere and will empathetically listen en-
ables her to tell her story of indoctrination and institutionalized de-
humanization and rape. In Gordimers text, Rosa uses her mental apos-
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106
trophes to conrm her feelings. She apostrophizes Conrad, for example,
saying: In fact, only if you believe will it become believable, to me
(196). In Atwoods novel, in contrast, belief springs from the Handmaid
toward the other: By telling you anything at all Im at least believing in
you. I believe youre there, I believe you into being. Because Im telling
you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are (267). In the
repressive society Atwood creates, cowitnessing takes on an existential,
not just therapeutic, function. One could paraphrase and explicate the
Handmaids attitude as follows: Even though I dont want to, I tell this
story. And because I tell this story, other people, besides the ones who
keep me imprisoned here, exist. In other words, whereas the Cartesian
intertext is egotistical: I think, therefore I exist; the Handmaids is rela-
tional: I tell, therefore you are. And it is relationship that is both forbid-
den in this totalitarian society and yet critical for the second circuit of
witnessing. The Handmaid deals with her dilemma by internally willing
this circuit into being. That is to say, through her belief that others, an
other is alive,
it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was
not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the over-
passing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each
before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the
faulting of the otherfaultings both in the creating of this shade whom
they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and
discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or t the precon-
ceivedin order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and
inconsistency but nothing fault nor false. (395; my emphasis)
Faulkners metaphor of marriage underscores the reciprocal nature of
listening and speaking required for the boys reconstruction of the story,
the co in cowitnessing, so to speak. The roommates immense labor
of imagination, in Arnold Weinsteins evocative phrase, is fueled by
their youth, by their ability to posit love as a motivating force in the story
they are telling, and by their ability to empathetically experience the
plight of the victims (1974: 147, 144). In thinking about the night Henry
renounces his patrimony, the boys are transformed and transported: So
that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through
the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of
them and then just twoCharles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry, the two of
them both believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning his father)
has destroyed us all (417). The roommates are able to testify to Henrys
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110
pain by giving him words: he has destroyed us all. Four young men
become two young men. But this kind of cowitnessing has a price.
For
if we allow ourselves to read between novels, as it appears Faulkner
wanted us to, then we can add that Quentin will actually pay with his life;
I refer of course to Quentins suicide, which in turn marks, if not trauma-
tizes, his own nuclear family in The Sound and the Fury.
Ecacious surrogate witnessing and the price paid for it are also
illustrated masterfully in Graham Swifts 1983 tour de force Waterland.
As in Absalom, Absalom! there are numerous dark secrets that aect
several generations. And as in Faulkners South, the larger forces of
history lock horns with individual destinies in the English Fens. Swift
foregrounds this connection even more explicitly than Faulkner by mak-
ing his protagonist a history teacher, one who will be sacked for hav-
ing connected my third circuit of witnessing by telling his students these
stories of history and individual fates. Tom Crick knows about the e-
cacy of storytelling from his parentshis father, Henry, whom he claims
descends from a long line of storytellers, and his mother, Helen, whose
work with veterans of the Great War teaches her that stories are a way of
bearing what wont go away, a way of making sense of madness (170). I
selected Helens precept for working with suering veterans as the epi-
graph of this chapter because it can serve as a goad to witnessing gener-
ally and because it foregrounds the activity necessary to transform trau-
matic memory: No, dont forget. Dont erase it. You cant erase it. But
make it into a story (170).
Indeed, the entire novel could be thought of as Toms institution of his
mothers precept. When his wife, Mary, steals a baby whom she believes
God has sent her, Tom has to become her surrogate witness, because for
Mary, the happening wont stop . . . shes still in the midst of events . . .
which have not ceased (24748). So he makes the events of their lives
into a story he tells his surrogate childrenhis appellation for his
studentsuntil he loses his job, at which point he tells the same stories
over and over again to himself (249). Like Quentin, Tom Crick is himself
implicated in the events about which he tells. Although there are no
indications that this testifying will help Mary (for example, 87), the com-
pleteness of Cricks story, his earnest attempts to put himself into his-
tory (4), the full recitals of Freddie Parrs murder, young Marys abor-
tion, Dick Cricks suicide, and Toms role in all three tragedies seem to
oer closure as the nal missing pieces surface at the books conclusion.
Testimony
111
A dramatic protest by the Holocaust Club during the school assem-
bly to bid Crick farewell testies to the fact that this circuit of surrogate
witnessing is indeed completed by Toms previously passive, uninter-
ested, young addressees. Their feelings crystalize into a sudden solitary
cry, strangely urgent and imperative, devoid of schoolboy insolence: No
cuts! Keep Crick! (252). Even though there is no indication that the
headmaster will reverse his decision to let Crick go, this desire for Crick
on the part of the students voiced through Price should be interpreted in
the context of the novel as a sign that they now understand the value of
Cricks kind of stories for the present and therefore for themselves.
Their newly discovered maturity (underscored by the phrase devoid of
schoolboy insolence) signals that Tom Cricks pupils have become apt
cowitnesses who will be capable of transmitting what they have received.
4. textual witnessing
The fourth circuit occurs at the level of the novels discourse (the form of
the telling of the events that make up the story). It involves the narrator-
texts (extrapolated to the authors) attempt to communicate the trau-
matic experiences of the characters within a novel to what Gerald Prince
has called a texts narratees or inscribed readers (1980). This circuit
encompasses circuits one through three. Actual readers who want to Talk
with the text will need to interpret textual witnessing as the statement
to which they are to respond. (The reply takes place through the fth
or sixth circuit, depending on the readers historical and cultural relation
to the text.) The deictics that signal the texts orientation to exchange
fall into two categories. Some texts make an explicit request for a cowit-
ness through pronouns of address, similar to the request for listeners in
my storytelling mode. Others use textual strategies like narrative indi-
rection, anachrony, ellipses, and repetition to mimic traumatic symp-
toms, thus calling for cowitnesses reply of interpreting them as such. (A
combination of both types is theoretically possible, in my view, but I
have not located an example.)
The most explicit request for cowitnessing to trauma I am familiar
with is made in Albert Camuss The Fall (La Chute 1956). On the one
hand, we could certainly analyze this novel under the second circuit of
witnessing: one character tells another about a traumatic event he has
experienced. Clamence does appear to address a Frenchman, his cher
Testimony
112
compatriote, in the bar, in the streets, and on the waterways of Amster-
dam. That this listener exists at the story levelthat he performs phys-
ical actions, asks questions, and makes commentscan be inferred from
many things Clamence says. To cite one of myriad instances, toward the
beginning of their acquaintance, Clamence asks, Are you staying long in
Amsterdam? A beautiful city, isnt it? Fascinating? Theres an adjective I
havent heard in some time (1956b: 6). The construction of the ow of
Clamences comments here implies that his conversation partner must
have replied to his query, A beautiful city, isnt it? with something like,
Amsterdam is fascinating. This novel has the feel of a conversation.
However, The Fall is not a quoted conversation. Not a single word
reproduced in the text emanates from anyone other than Clamence. The
novel does not quote someone saying, Amsterdam is fascinating. This
absence leads me to consider Camuss novel under the rubric of my
textual witnessing. Since the character of Clamence is also the narrator of
the whole text and his interlocutors position is carved out but vacant,
there is room for the position of the character of Clamences addressee
to be collapsed with the narratee of the whole discourse. Furthermore,
this narratee can be collapsed with the actual reader through the texts
incessant second-person address, vouvoiement (referring to the second-
person formal pronoun vous used throughout the original French text).
That is to say, the continued call to a you who does not actually reply
can prompt readers to take up the available second-person pronoun and
feel themselves addressed.
Her trauma is
never put into narrative form, is never communicated verbally by the
victim to a sympathetic listener (circuit two). When Ursulas mother rst
nds her after her disappearance, for example, the child is unconscious
and therefore mute: Its head hung like a wilted ower. Intact. It was still
breathing [Sein Kpfchen hing wie eine welke Blume. Unversehrt. Es at-
mete doch] (39).
3. surrogate witnessing
Given Marthas inability to testify for herself, it is not surprising that she
cannot serve as recipient of Ursulas story and that she cannot function
successfully as surrogate witness for Ursula to others. From the begin-
ning of her search for her daughter, her ineptitude is underscored by
descriptions of her as the trembling wench [Weib] and as a stam-
mering lunatic [Irre] (28). The childs body cannot testify to the crime,
since the mother is unable to cowitness by looking at the wounds. Mar-
tha had been equally incapable of seeing at the scene of the crime,
when she found her daughter in the trash heap the day before (40).
Furthermore, she and others around her can only speak of the crime
against the child through indirection, and even in their indirection they
do not name the sexual nature of the violence. The word rape (Ver-
gewaltigung) never appears in Kolmars text. The most explicit word any
character uses is Sittlichkeitsverbrechen (literally, morality crime, a
standard euphemism for sexual oenses), used once by a nurse to the
employee registering the childs arrival at the hospital (40). The crime
usually gets referred to as that or it, as in how on earth is that
possible (40). Signicantly, when Martha tries to imagine to herself
what happened to her daughter, she uses adjectives and adjectival nouns
Testimony
126
of ineability: that was indescribable, unimaginable . . . this unspeak-
able thing [diese Unsglichkeit ] (43). The crime against Ursula becomes
that which cannot be described nor even imagined; as such it cannot be
witnessed to either.
Mother
and daughters racial dierence is repeatedly foregrounded with ref-
erence to their skin color. Marthas skin carries an ivory tone [Elfen-
beinton] and Ursulas is darker: yellow, almost brown [gelblich, fast
braun] (18).
4. textual witnessing
Attempts at witnessing among the characters are made known to us
through the literary text, and it has beenand necessarily would be
impossible to discuss them without also discussing the way the text
presents the story. A clue to the profundity of Ursulas pain resides in the
indirect communication of her story to us, and a clue to Marthas child-
hood experience of sexual harassment as trauma is given by the lack of
direct quotation of her recollection of the event and its aftermath. In this
section, I focus explicitly on Kolmars textual strategies and how they
might be interpreted as signs of trauma. By proceeding in such a manner,
I am replying to the text-as-statement by cowitnessing. Strictly speaking,
the participants in the fourth circuit are the narrator and the narratee,
and my interpretation of it belongs to the sixth circuit.
The novels testimony is given in part by its narrative technique. Nar-
Testimony
129
rated in the third person with an internal, though not exclusive, focaliza-
tion through Martha, the story presumably communicates to the nar-
ratee (and by extension to the reader) what happens as Martha comes to
knowledge of events. But at crucial junctures the text abandons Marthas
view, creating gaps. This textual strategy accords well with descriptions
of traumas refusal to be simply located (Caruth 1995a: 9). The lacunae
in the text may mirror the lacunae created in the victim-characters
psyche by traumatic events, but as we have seen in Marons The Defector,
we can also read them as the texts performance of trauma. Conse-
quently, the narratee is not simply told what happened, because the text
cannot, or does not, simply oer a mimetic representation of trauma.
What would this look like anyway?
Kol-
mar similarly omits a narration of the violation when the child arrives at
the hospital; the text laconically states: Martha didnt speak, the others
delivered the word for her [ fhrten fr sie das Wort ] (40). We never
hear the wordthe sympathetic womens explanation of what hap-
pened. In other words, though a successful mimetic representation of
the event is posited as a possibilityindeed as a fait accompli in the
world of the storyit is not reproduced by the texts narrator for the nar-
ratee (and readers). During Marthas conversation with a lawyer whose
aid she seeks in her search for the murderer, the lawyer counters Mar-
thas view by saying: That isnt murder. Its, he quickly swallowed the
word [Das ist nicht Mord. Es ist, er verschluckte hastig den Namen]
Testimony
132
(96).
Presumably, the lawyer articulates the word rape, but like an-
other infamous rape in German literature, in Kleists novella Die Mar-
quise von O . . . , the text elides the crimein this scene the mention of
itby merely giving us a dash.
As with linguistic indirection and euphemism on the part of charac-
ters referring to Ursulas rape, these kinds of gaps and silences could be
attributed to decorum: an author simply doesnt describe the lacerated,
bruised body of a ve-year-old rape victim in a novel of this period.
But
I am also suggesting a metonymic interpretation: that the text itself is
performing trauma and therefore does not speak directly of the crime
that generates its plot. I do not mean that Kolmar did not know what she
was doing. Rather, I am suggesting that the numerous lacunae and forms
of indirection in the story draw attention precisely to the impossibility of
telling. By doing so, they point to the incommensurability of the crimes
and to the presence of trauma, not just to that inicted by an individual
perpetrator on the child and metonymically on the mother, but also to a
general pattern of urban violence perpetrated within the society de-
picted in the novel andpointing ahead to circuit vewithin the so-
ciety in which the novel was written, against it weakest members. That
Kolmar never released the text to nd a response among her contempo-
raries (a short-circuiting of literary-historical witnessing) I would claim
backs such a reading of A Jewish Mother as a story partially about ubiq-
uitous violence in the capital of the Weimar Republic and general fear of
testifying to it.
The existence of this pattern of trauma is further supported by the fact
that all the characters in the novel have referents for what has happened
to Ursula in their heads, though they do not (cannot?) articulate them.
With the very rst signs of the disappearance of the child, neighbors as-
sume the worst, lamenting, how can anyone do things to children [wie
blo einer Kindern was antun kann] (27; see also 26, 33, 40).
Another
factor connecting Ursulas story to ubiquitous violence in Weimar Berlin
is indeterminate culpability: the criminal is never caught or even identi-
ed, and Marthas own guilt, particularly with regard to administering
the sleeping potion, is never clearly argued for or against (14344). This
moral fuzziness facilitates extrapolating assignation of guilt and victim-
hood to Weimar Berlin society as a whole.
No extant letters elucidate Kolmars choice not to (try to) publish the text
immediately after she completed it. The explanation may be as banal as
her dissatisfaction with her ability to express herself in prose.
and
to external evidence like the marginalization of minorities during the
Weimar Republic or the increase in general violence, and sexual and
Testimony
135
racial crimes, as well as the plethora of other artistic works that simi-
larly speak of traumatic events.
My acts of noting
previous impediments to the reception of A Jewish Mother, even when I
cannot fully account for them, add in some small way to the linkage
between our world and Kolmars. Because one response to noting that
the fth circuit is broken is to reread the text for some hints about the
nature of the trauma that blocked its ability to witness to its contempo-
rary readers, I will conclude by returning to Kolmars novel.
One of the most obvious signs of Kolmars partial witnessing can be
found at the end of A Jewish Mother. Martha fantasizes that she has Ursa
in her arms once again and confesses to her, I once killed you, you joy;
God is just: he who touches you must die. The mother then enters the
water, pleasurably weighed down (in her mind) with the child, and the
novel concludes: Water splashed. The Spree closed and ran on (161).
But Marthas suicide is not the ultimate nale. After a blank space, the
book ends with the reproduction of a newspaper excerpt describing
The Daily Accident (Der tgliche Unfall). A twenty-eight-year-old
man was apparently run over by a truck driver who had lost control of his
vehicle. Although the man is rushed to the hospital, he expired shortly
thereafter from his severe injuries (162).
Kolmar provides no explanation of the placement of this newspaper
article and no prior mention of the victim, Heinz Kfer of Charlotten-
burgat least not by name. Since Marthas perspective has been the
controlling perspective of the novel, but Martha is dead at this point in
the discourse, the relationship of this article to the rest of the novel is
particularly mysterious; technically it cannot be something Martha saw
or read. Given the dramatis personae of the preceding story, a reader
might well wonder if this man is meant to be the elusive perpetrator of
Ursulas rape and if the inclusion of the article is a way to communicate
Testimony
138
that he met his deserved death. However, if victims are avenged, if there
is closure to this story, if there is healing for trauma, if God is just, as
Martha dies believing, the text and Kolmar do not state this directly. As
one critic suggests, making this connection is a task for the reader
(Balzer 1981: 182). Yet no explicit instructions for making this connection
are provided; nothing in the text proves, as another critic hypothesizes,
that he is the perpetrator (Sha 1991: 704; 1995: 194).
Indeed, the excerpt could be a way of demonstrating what kind of
violence was deemed worthy (and by default unworthy) of mention.
Marthas suicide does not merit an article, for example, whereas this
accident does.
Apostrophe
144
As the discursive instance precludes verbal reply, the interpersonal one
precludes consummation, facilitating what Judith Roof calls lesbian de-
sire for desire.
The
whole force that would have been destroyed by not apostrophizing
presumably derives from the idea of witnessing interaction (as opposed
to hearing narration) and specically from witnessing the intensity of
Apostrophe
148
the adversarial relationship between prosecutor and defender. That Cic-
ero and Tubero are adversaries is a fact known from the outset, but
presumably it is seeing this relationship performedenacted before
their eyesthat moves the audience.
Drama is also critical for Longinus, whose interest in apostrophe is
similarly raised by its ability to move those who hear it, not to a specic
judgment, but to a feeling of the sublime. Drawing on a wide variety of
narrative texts, Longinus suggests that apostrophe often makes the au-
dience feel themselves set in the thick of the danger (200, 201), as when
the Iliads narrator apostrophizes the epic audience about the quality of
a erce battle: You would say that unworn and with temper undaunted /
Each met the other in war, so headlong the rush of their battle (201; Iliad
XV, l. 697). Longinus implies that because the narrator hypothesizes how
the audience would describe the scene (You would say that . . .), they
have seen it for themselves. The issue of being transported to another
place is made more explicit by being thematized in Longinuss example
from Herodotuss account of his travels in Egypt. Though writing mainly
in the rst person and sometimes in the impersonal, Herodotus occa-
sionally narrates in the second-person singular, as in Book 29, from
which Longinus quotes:
You will sail up from the city of Elephantine and there come to a smooth
plain. And when you have passed through that place you will board again
another ship and sail two days and then you will come to a great city, the
name of which is Mero. You see, friend, how he takes you along with
him through the country and turns hearing into sight. All such passages
with a direct personal application set the hearer in the centre of the action.
(201)
Longinus describes the eect of the apostrophe by saying that Herodotus
takes you along with him. The audience members dont just hear
about the place, they see it for themselves. Longinus implies that lis-
teners take up the second-person singular pronoun as a call to them-
selves, that is, they identify with the you, even though it is heard in the
presence of many others who presumably also feel addressed. It seems
purposeful to me that Longinus takes up apostrophe directly after de-
scribing the ecacy of the historical present; both transform a narrative
into a current experience, a vivid actuality (201).
Based on even these limited examples, it is not hard to see why con-
Apostrophe
149
temporary commentator Jonathan Culler has distinguished apostrophe
from other gures by its troping not on the meaning of a word but on
the circuit or situation of communication itself (1981: 135). In addition
to the basic fact of address without verbal reply, surely the situations
praised by Quintilian and Longinus of (a) turning to address another,
with the intention of aecting those from whom the speaker has turned,
and (b) feeling personally called by an address that could call anyone
who hears it, count as odd communicative circuits. If those situations
count as communication at all, we could say that there are multiple
addressees or more than one trajectory of address operating simulta-
neously. To help us understand the issues of relationship, reversibility,
and identication raised by the rhetoricians examples, I continue with
more recent accounts of that preeminent sign of interaction: you,
expanding the discussion of the second-person pronoun presented at
the end of chapter 1.
Although I can oer no proof that such arguments were made in re-
sponse to literary developments in their respective countries, it is cu-
rious that the work of both German philosopher Martin Buber and
French linguist Emile Benveniste on the second person as the pronoun
of relationship were published at particularly triumphant moments of
the anti-communicative idea of lart pour lart : Bubers in 1923 at the
height of German Modernism and Benvenistes in the 1950s during the
gestation of the nouveau roman. Buber contrasts use of the second per-
son, what he calls the ability to say Du (Thou), with use of the third
person, insistence on saying Es (It). While the latter, according to Buber,
reveals a notion of the world as something to be experienced, the former
signals an attitude of being in relation with another subjectivity and thus
of acknowledging anothers personhood (1955: 9, 12). Benvenistes argu-
ment about Relationships of Person in the Verb can be heard as an
echo, or conrmation, of Buber when he explains that, When I get out
of myself in order to establish a living relationship with a being, of
necessity I encounter or I posit a you, who is the only imaginable
person outside of me (1971: 201). It follows that to say you is to
bestow personhood on the referent of the you. U.S. American literary
critic Barbara Johnson makes a similar point about rhetoric and relation-
ship in the context of what many consider the most abstract of theoret-
Apostrophe
150
ical movements, Deconstruction, by formulating this principle in her
article Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion as the ineradicable ten-
dency of language to animate whatever it addresses (1987: 191). Johnson
shows how certain rhetorical strategies are not trivial pursuits, but mat-
ters of life and death, because of the relationships they create.
Address, animation, and relationship are inextricable. Even in Ben-
venistes narrowly grammatical terms, every use of the second-person
pronoun necessarily implies a relationship to an I: you is necessarily
designated by I and cannot be thought of outside a situation set up by
starting with I (1971: 197). Only the grammatical rst and second
persons can actually be in relation to one another and thus merit the
designation person. The I-you pair belongs to a correlation of sub-
jectivity (201), whereas the so-called third person is outside this cor-
relation and expresses the non-person (198).
Benveniste expands
this idea of intersubjectivity by describing the reversibility of rst- and
second-person pronouns:
I and you are reversible: the one whom I denes by you thinks of
himself as I and can be inverted into I, and I becomes a you.
There is no like relationship possible between one of these two persons
and he because he in itself does not specically designate anything or
anyone. (199)
For Buber, Benveniste, and Johnson, then, the mere use of the second
person animates the other through recognition of the personhood of that
other and hence of the possibility of relationship and interaction be-
tween speaker and interlocutor. Switching roles could be counted as
a normal consequence of the attitude behind addressing another, ac-
knowledgment of anothers subjectivity. Ciceros you animates Tubero
at a point when the audience is not expecting Tuberos subjectivity to be
at issue, a point when, as Quintilian senses, their relationship is brought
to life in front of the audience in a way that it would not be if Cicero
reported on Tubero as him, a third- or non-person. Once Tubero has
been animated through address, I surmise that the audiences atten-
tion is further stimulated because his (conventionally required) silence
goes against the anticipated reversal of positions in the relationship
between I and you inherent in the act of addressing. In other words,
though Quintilian does not point to this issue, the forceful eect of
apostrophizing on the audience must also partly derive from what in the
Apostrophe
151
light of these twentieth-century theories must be considered a peculiar,
restricted enactment of relationship: Tubero is in the courtroom and
hears what Cicero says to him, but he may not respond at that point,
and thus the question of his response to Ciceros thrust, to this initial
part of their inter-action, hangs in the air. Indeed, one could hypothe-
size that absence of the addressees response raises the tension in those
who hear the address and the silence, perhaps even making them feel the
urge to respond themselves.
Another set of Benvenistes observations about the nature of pro-
nouns will aid us in understanding the animational principle made ex-
plicit by Johnson and that is necessary for our pursuit of the eect
of apostrophe. The rst- and second-person pronouns, Benveniste ex-
plains, are empty signs that do not refer to any extrinsic reality but rather
to the instance of enunciation; such pronouns (and other shifters like
this, now, here, and so forth) are used for the conversion of lan-
guage into discourse (220). The rst-person singular pronoun can be
used by any speaker to refer to the individual who utters the present
instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I (218). Sym-
metrically, Benveniste denes the second-person singular as the indi-
vidual spoken to in the present instance of discourse containing the
linguistic instance you (218). I and you are thus empty signs made
full (animated) through the instance of discourse. But I want to draw
attention to an implication of this view of I and you that Benveniste
doesnt mentionthe emptiness of you (potentially) allows all who
hear it to feel addressed; this appears to explain why hearers of Ho-
mers and Herodotuss you respond as if themselves specically ad-
dressed by it. Though such slippage only seems warranted in the absence
of any other signs designating the addresseea rare caseits very pos-
sibility may cause a residual identicatory eect in many (all?) uses of the
second person. That is to say, every hearers ubiquitous experience of
being called you probably also contributes to the audiences stirring
when Cicero apostrophizes Tuberoand Kate Esther. I suggest we refer
to this as the subliminal invitation of the second-person pronoun. I
will develop this point thoroughly, since it accounts for an important
dimension of the Talk quality of my literary examples.
The rst step in my argument derives from Benvenistes explanation
of the advantage of having the empty sign I: If each speaker, Ben-
Apostrophe
152
veniste warns, made use of a distinct identifying signal (in the sense in
which each radio transmitting station has its own call letters), there
would be as many languages as individuals and communication would
become absolutely impossible. Language wards o this danger by in-
stituting a unique but mobile sign, I, which can be assumed by each
speaker on the condition that he refers each time only to the instance of
his own discourse. This sign is thus linked to the exercise of language
and announces the speaker as speaker (220). Here, as elsewhere in his
work on pronouns, Benveniste implies a symmetry between I and
you. But I want to challenge the notion that I and you are equally
unique and mobile.
Though, as we have seen, Benveniste is careful to dene the second
person as the individual spoken to in the present instance of discourse
containing the linguistic instance you (218), the pronoun itself cannot
anoint an individual as addressee. One can become the speaker by utter-
ing the word I, but one cannot become the intended addressee by
hearing you. To put it otherwise, one individual cannot utter the I
that makes another individual the speaker, but one individual can hear
the you that makes another individual the addressee. In most Western
languages at least, there has to be some element other than you in the
utterance or in the communicative situation that makes clear which
you is being addressed. The nonsymmetry of I and you is again
instructive: I can only refer to the one speaking it unless additional
information is given, as in quoting: and then she said, Im leaving. In
the case of you, a name (Tubero), a description (accuser), a tone of
voice, a glance or glare, or a physical touch might all serve to designate
the individual spoken to. In the absence of such specications, nothing
prevents whoever hears the you from taking it upfrom considering it
as direct addresseven though this hearing doesnt make her into the
person the speaker intended to address.
Think of someone shouting hey, you in a crowded department store.
Most people within hearing range will turn toward the voice, even if they
have no reason to think someone could want to communicate with them,
because, for example, they are strangers in town or because they havent
done anything wrong. Similarly, to borrow Benvenistes radio metaphor
to make a dierent point: uttering you is more like a radio signal that is
diused into general airwaves and picked up by all radios within range of
Apostrophe
153
the signal than a telephone call that dials a specic number. To be sure,
even in the case of a phone call, anyone in the house can pick up the
receiver, so the caller must still ask for the person to whom she wants to
speak. There is another commonplace situation that substantiates the
claim that the pronoun you always carries an appellative force for
whoever hears it, whether the speaker intends this or not. In the course of
conversing, a speaker uses you in a generalizing way or to mean the
speakers self: you hate to visit your parents when theyre not taking
your advice. A certain awkwardness arises instantaneously if the speaker
realizes that she does not want to insinuate anything about the conversa-
tion partner with regard to this particular issue. So the speaker imme-
diately corrects herself, replacing you with I or one, hastily re-
formulating the previous statement by saying, I hate to visit my parents
when . . . This familiar experience reveals our awareness of the potential
for a listener to feel addressed despite accepted uses of you that do not
signify the interlocutor. It seems that the only way to guarantee that a lis-
tener does not identify with the second-person pronoun is not to use it.
Toward the
eavesdropping side, I would place texts like Jane Rules This Is Not for
You, since the level of identication with the you on the part of the
actual readers is likely to be eeting and subordinate to other kinds of
responses, like curiosity about the relationship between the apostro-
phizer and the apostrophized, who are both named, characterized, and
acting out a specic story in a specic setting. The Talk of these texts
most closely resembles the communicative situation of Ciceros apos-
trophe to Tubero discussed by Quintilian. Toward the other end of the
continuum, I would place texts like Italo Calvinos If on a winters night a
traveler, where apostrophizer and apostrophized are unnamed and min-
imally characterized (at least initially) to maximize the level of identica-
tion between actual readers and the texts you. Longinuss examples
from Homer and Herodotus can guide our understanding of Talk in
these texts since readers have to be willing to consider themselves ad-
dressed. For actual readers to perform the role of the apostrophized, the
narratee in these literary texts must necessarily be scripted as some kind
of reader in the act of reading. Hence the possibilities of sustaining such
narration are limited. Full occupation of either end of the spectrum falls
outside the range of what I am including under my apostrophic mode,
since this kind of Talk requires awareness of the perturbations of the
conversational equation of addressee = hearer = recipient = respondent
discussed above. My Talk is never actual exchange, as it is never only
eavesdropping. The context of reading this kind of literary text implies
that you can never be uniquely addressed, as you can never be com-
pletely free from interpellation. As a reader, apostrophic talk ction is
always simultaneously for you and not for you. That is to say, even at
Apostrophe
157
moments when the identication might feel strong, you are meant to
notice that the role doesnt quite t, and inversely, even when you feel
like you are eavesdropping on something addressed to another, you are
meant to realize that the message is intended for you too.
With this schema in mind I want to return to prose ction. First I will
present some literary-historical evidence for the eects of using the
second-person pronoun through the example of actual readers reac-
tions to Michel Butors 1957 new novel, Change of Heart. Then I will
illustrate the range of apostrophic Talk by presenting several texts that
occupy dierent locations on the spectrum just proposed. I begin with
Gnter Grasss 1961 novella Cat and Mouse, which must be placed even
closer to the eavesdropping pole of my continuum than Jane Rules
This Is Not for You, since it clearly starts out as a story about two named
characters and contains only the intermittent use of apostrophe. Next I
discuss Julio Cortzars short story Grati, which falls somewhere
near the midpoint between the two poles, since on the one hand, there is
a distinct story, and on the other, both apostrophizer and apostrophized
remain unnamed, inviting readers to assume the narratee position. I
close by considering two texts that try to eect complete reader identi-
cation by constructing (parts of ) the story as actual contemporary
reading experiencesJohn Barths Life-Story and Italo Calvinos If on
a winters night a traveler, the novel that launched my search for talk
ction.
Reading Readers Reading Butors Change of Heart
When Michel Butors third novel, La Modication (Change of Heart ),
pushed its way into the French literary scene in October 1957, one as-
sumes its fate was as unknown to its author as the protagonist Delmonts
is to himself when he pushes his way into the train compartment of the
Paris-Rome express:
Youve put your left foot on the brass groove and with your right shoulder
you try in vain to push the sliding door a little bit further.
[Vous avez mis le pied gauche sur la rainure de cuivre, et de votre paule
droite vous essayez en vain de pousser un peu plus le panneau coulissant.]
Despite its banal plot of a bourgeois Parisian businessman trying (and
failing) to leave his wife for his mistress, the novel received much initial
Apostrophe
158
critical praise, winning the Thophrast-Renaudot prize before the years
end.
To understand what all the fuss was about, I want to briey review the
narrative mode of Change of Heart. As can be detected in the short quote
above, Butor narrates the events of his protagonists trip to Rome and
back again in the present tense, using the pronoun vous (the French
second-person plural/formal pronoun you). In contrast to This is Not
for You, there are no explicit signs of the narrator, though many early
reviewers understood, with or without having read Benveniste, that the
existence of the you implied an I.
Second,
and just as important to my mind for an adequate appreciation of Grasss
accomplishment, a consideration of how Pilenzs you implicates actual
readers suggests that Grass is inviting Germans to examine their own
role in the Second World War. But I, like Pilenz, mustnt get ahead of
myself (1974: 64; 1994: 61). I need to review certain elements of the
complicated plot to begin to clarify the signicance of the apostrophes.
Approximately fteen years after Joachim Mahlkes disappearance
during the last year of the Second World War, Pilenz, a former school-
friend, sets out to write the story of cat and mouse. Pilenz has been
urged to write by his confessor, Father Alban, and he displays some sense
of a larger audience who might read his text, though he never directly
addresses either of these audiences. In his writing, he recounts Mahlkes
feats: summer explorations of a half-sunken minesweeper in the Danzig
harbor, school (fashion trends, gym class, and most importantly the
theft and eventual return of the Iron Cross of a visiting alumnus of their
high school, a prank for which Mahlke is transferred to another school),
and military service (Mahlkes aair with the training commanders wife,
his discovery of an underwater partisan ammunition dump, his receipt
Apostrophe
164
of his own Iron Cross for destroying so many Russian tanks, and his
desertion). Pilenz attributes all Mahlkes exploits to his friends need to
compensate for an obtrusive Adams apple and to win the love of the
Virgin Mary. Despite repeated claims that he is telling Mahlkes story, the
adolescent Pilenz was not a distant observer to Mahlkes struggle for
acceptance. In his narration Pilenz hints about undermining Mahlke. He
draws a cats attention to the movement of Mahlkes Adams apple during
a break in a ball game, scrutinizes him in church, and mimics his cloth-
ing and posture. Although the cats attack serves as the symbolic frame of
reference for their relationship, the act that compels Pilenz to write is his
role in Mahlkes (nal) disappearance, for it was Pilenz who suggested
that Mahlke hide in the sunken minesweeper of their adolescent summer
games, when Mahlke goes awol after being denied the privilege of other
military heroes to speak to the students of his original high school. To
Pilenzs knowledge, Mahlke never surfaces from that dive.
Pilenz wonders to what extent he is responsible for Mahlkes various
decisions, declaring that he writes to exculpate himself: I write, because
that has to go [ich schreibe, denn das mu weg] (my translation; 1974:
67; 1994: 64).
Other apostrophes
seem to be triggered by Pilenzs narration of scenes in which he refused
to talk to Mahlke; that is, although he didnt talk to Mahlke at a point in
the past when Mahlke might have appreciated a friendly contact, he
apostrophizes him years later while writing about those moments. These
apostrophes function as compensation for negligent past behavior.
Furthermore,
Pilenz credits Mahlke with the ability but not the volition to act, since a
more literal translation of the last part of the passage would be, he knew
to make no answer to my noise.
With these pieces of evidence for Pilenzs growing awareness that his
story and his life are in Mahlkes hands, readers can receive the full im-
port of Pilenzs conclusion. The last section of the novella begins with
the question, Who will supply me with a good ending [Wer schreibt mir
einen guten Schlu]? (1994: 109; 1974: 111). This question could be inter-
preted as another sign of Pilenzs inadequacies as a writer and of his
Apostrophe
169
reluctant conclusion that he cannot save himself by writing Mahlkes
story. Having reached the point in story time when Mahlke is absent,
Pilenz is not sure how to proceed. After describing the many ways in
which the story of cat and mouse is not over for him, Pilenz asks
another question. This one is addressed to Mahlke, for the narrator
apostrophizes him one last time:
Must I still add that in October 1959 I went to Regensburg to a meeting of
those survivors of the war who, like you, had made Knights Cross? They
didnt let me into the hall. Inside, a Bundeswehr band was playing, or
taking a break. During one such intermission, I had the lieutenant in
charge of the door page you from the music platform: Sergeant Mahlke is
wanted at the entrance. But you didnt want to surface [Aber Du wolltest
nicht auftauchen]. (my translation; 1974: 112; 1994: 109)
This nal apostrophe oers the most explicit example of how, I be-
lieve, Grass wanted readers to Talk with his text. Through my analysis of
apostrophe in rhetoric and through historical reader response to Butors
Change of Heart, I have suggested that even in instances where the
apostrophized has a name and a story, the audience that overhears that
address is constrained to reply. As Quintilian argues about Cicero, the
gure may be eective because the audience is more easily moved by
witnessing the acting out of a relationship than by hearing it narrated.
Additionally, as at least some evidence from readers of Butor implies,
readers respond emotionally because they feel called by the you. I have
suggested that to Talk with apostrophic texts, readers have to be open to
both types of listening and to both types of responses. As I hope to have
Apostrophe
171
convinced my readers above, actual readers of Cat and Mouse gain a
deeper understanding of the relationship between Pilenz and Mahlke by
paying attention to the complicated enactment of it. By noting when
Pilenz switches to apostrophe, as well as by overhearing what Pilenz
wants to say to Mahlke, one comes to understand Pilenzs combination
of love and hate for his missing friend. I also want to argue that through-
out the text, Grass is trying to reach his readers. Like his narrator, he
write[s] toward you [schreibe in Deine Richtung] (my translation;
1974: 63; 1994: 61). Grasss choice of verb form in the very last apostrophe
of the text particularly challenges readers to respond. In the sentence
You didnt want to surface [Du wolltest nicht auftauchen], wolltest can
be the (second-person singular) simple past indicative form of the verb
to want, but it can also be the present-tense subjunctive. Considering it
a simple past, as in the translation and analysis above, I take it to apply to
Mahlke. But as a subjunctiveyou wouldnt want to surfacewe could
take it as Grasss challenge to his actual readers to consider their own
actions vis--vis the same issues that are raised for Pilenz and Mahlke:
What were readers roles in the German war eort? What kind of ending
to the story of Nazism do they want to write? When will they want to
surface?
Interpreting the last apostrophe as a subjunctive addressing readers
invites consideration of the political and social context of the novellas
publication. Grasss metaphor of diving and surfacing is particularly
appropriate for the period in which Cat and Mouse appeared (1961), a
time when Germans had immersed themselves in economic reconstruc-
tion and had not yet surfaced to examine their own past. I take Pilenz-
Grasss last question as a challenge to do so. To Talk with the text in this
way is for Cat and Mouse to become more than an entertaining story
about German adolescents during the war, more than a story about
someone else dealing with a sense of guilt: it becomes a call to all Ger-
mans to reckon with the Nazi past. It is a testament to Grasss social
conscience that he recognized the necessity of such a national reckoning
years before the revelations of the Auschwitz trials and the violence of the
student riots would shock the nation into looking back.
And it was
literary genius to plant a seed for that reckoning with his use of apos-
trophe in Cat and Mouse.
Apostrophe
172
Waging Political Resistance with Apostrophe
in Cortzars Grati
Although the geographical and chronological leap between postwar Ger-
many and the Argentine Dirty War may seem large, the artistic and
political distance between Grasss Cat and Mouse and Julio Cortzars
short story Grati (1979) is small.
This
situation does not seem to preclude a sense of intimacy between the
characters; I would go so far as to say it fosters it in this kind of society.
Intimacy is created by the animating and relational power of apostrophe.
Grati both tells of and itself enacts relationship and hence, in the
context of the Dirty War, it performs resistance. The story proposes the
apostrophic structure of communication that is not fully reciprocal, the
as if structure of the addressees potential response, as the most ef-
fective strategy against authoritarian repression.
How does this indirect address structure function? The storys open-
ing suggests that the you-protagonist began his scribblings on the walls as
a mere game (un juego). The narrator even comments that he wouldnt
have liked the term grati, because it was so art critic-like (34). It
sounds too abstract, but it is insisted upon nonethelessthe story is
called Grati after allbecause abstraction is needed in the dangerous
world of this junta. The protagonists drawingslike untagged second-
person pronounsinvite relationship in a society governed by a junta
that is deadly serious about enforcing alienation. Like an apostrophic
address, the seemingly nonpolitical drawings trope on the situation of
communication, not on the meaning, to paraphrase Cullers denition of
apostrophe (1981: 135).
For the
truly attentive reader, what this opening line eects is both a seduction to
feel addressed and a realization that the call is not quite accurate. In the
terms of conversation analysis introduced earlier, the addressee is con-
structed as a reader, and therefore all readers are hearers who are invited
Apostrophe
183
to become recipients. This resembles the apostrophes analyzed by Long-
inus. In Gomans framework, the matter raised by the text-as-statement
concerns the very issue of reading, and the orientation to this matter, the
reply, is the self-conscious performance of the role of you-narratee by
hearer-readers. To Talk with the text, one allows oneself to be seduced,
while recognizing that the seduction succeeds because one is playing the
role of the seduceable.
To better understand this kind of performance, we need to consider
what constitutes complete identication of actual readers with the you.
I propose to call this limit case the irresistible invitation of the second-
person pronoun, as opposed to the merely subliminal one discussed
earlier. I suggest that there are some (if few) sentences that when read
would necessarily constitute the actualization of the utterance by any
reader. The most obvious example would be the statement, You are
reading this sentence. To read it is to do what the sentence says you are
doing. You cant resist it; if you read it, you are accomplishing what it
says. Elsewhere I dubbed such sentences literary performatives, in
homage to Oxford School philosopher J. L. Austins concept of the per-
formative.
On the other hand, any specic reader may or may not have been getting
caught up in the story. For those who have, the sense of complete identi-
cation with the you may last through the end of the sentence. But it is
highly unlikely that any actual readers say to themselves at this moment,
This sentence sounds somehow familiar. And so these readers lapse
into the strategy of positing a you-protagonist for whom these other
statements do apply. For most of us esh-and-blood readers, there is a
rapid alternation between reading about life and reading as lifeby
which I mean reading as what is happening to us at the moment of
reading (you have now read about thirty pages). As I proposed about
reading Barth, the exact tsthe literary performativescan promote
greater awareness about what ts and what doesnt, but also about the
texts strategy to create those ts. Therefore, I would like to proceed by
considering features that determine degrees of identication with you,
moving from aspects of Calvinos novel that promote the widest possible
reader identication with you to those that more unambiguously re-
strict such identication. Then I will consider what Calvinos purpose
might be in making actual readers self-conscious about the process of
reading his novel.
As suggested by my previous quotations from If on a winters night a
traveler, actual readers and the characterized you share the activity of
reading. In fact, the Reader and the actual reader both read fragments of
novels with the same titles. At the moment the narrator of the frame
story reports that the Reader begins a new novel (usually under the
illusion that he has found the continuation of the last one he was read-
Apostrophe
187
ing), actual readers turn the page and nd a segment with the same title.
Any reader of Calvinos novel is reading some of the same material that
the Reader-protagonist is reading.
Also inviting identication with the you of the frame story are the
narrators several strategies revealing how little he knows about you
and implying that he is everymanor rather every reader. (My apparent
tolerance for the sexist generic will become clearer below, where I argue
that the narratee is, in fact, a male reader, a general male you [141].) In
the opening sequence, the narrator encourages you to get comfortable
for settling down to read Calvinos new novel by proposing many pos-
sible reading positions: Find the most comfortable position: seated,
stretched out, curled up, or lying at. . . . In an easy chair, on the sofa, in
the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a
hammock (3). The narrator is ignorant about the type of furniture
you have in the space in which you nd yourself. Presumably, one
of the options listed will appeal to an actual individual reader who will
then experience pleasure, perhaps in the plethora of options but perhaps
more particularly in discovering the one that applies to the position s/he
is in at that moment. Such a discovery does not constitute the execution
of a literary performative, however, since, most importantly, it does not
apply to every reader but also because, as in the novels opening sen-
tence, there is a chronological discrepancy (presumably you are already
in that favorite reading position, not in the act of nding it). Still, the
passage might solicit a moment of recognition for some readers: thats
me; Im in that position. And this sense of being able to locate features of
ones own experience in the ction may promote ones general sense of
performing the text. This use of inventories also underscores the fact that
many possibilities do not t, diminishing that readers sense of being
uniquely addressed but enhancing awareness of playing a role, since
some of those mists will apply to other readers trying to perform the
same text. Such awareness can be likened to that of early radio listeners
or listener-viewers of talk shows who sense that they are part of a large
audience responding to the call of the host to you listeners out there.
Calvinos narrator sometimes promotes identication by describing a
specic experience presumably almost every reader has had or could
imagine having. One scenario that seems widely applicable is of being in
a bookstore and feeling accosted by books one is not planning to buy but
Apostrophe
188
feeling pressured to buy them because they fall into categories like the
Books Youve Been Planning to Read For Ages, the Books You Want To
Own So Theyll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books That Fill You With
Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justied (5).
An analogous appeal to every reader, characterized or esh-and-
blood, is made through gnomic pronouncements about reading. A sa-
lient example occurs in the opening of the fourth chapter of the frame
story: Listening to someone read aloud is very dierent from reading in
silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one
who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is dicult to make
your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes
either too fast or too slow (68). This passage, which continues in a
gnomic manner for another paragraph, is relevant to the characterized
reader in the frame story because he has just been read to. But its aptness
is not limited to him on this occasion or specically to his recent reading
experience; it is apparent to actual readers as well. This is the you that
can mean I, you, one, anyone. In other words, the you of this
passage could refer to the novels Reader and to any reader of Calvinos
novel, as well as to anyoneany youwho reads. It could even refer to
the narrator, enhancing a sense of commonality between speaker and
listener. All such gnomic pronouncements contribute to a sense of being
addressed by the text and therefore of being able to perform it, though
perhaps less than the strategies looked at so far.
Similarly contributing to identication between actual reader and in-
scribed reader is the extent to which the latter remains uncharacterized.
The narrator does not give his narratee a name, neither a proper name,
nor in the rst chapter a generic title.
So that
even if Calvinos narrator intends to leave open to any reader the pos-
sibility of identifying by not specifying the characterized yous age,
status, profession, and income, gender cant be avoided; it is gram-
matically encoded in Italian, as it is in most Western languages.
In the continuation of this passage, the narrator makes his most spu-
rious claim of all: For a second-person discourse to become a novel, at
least two yous [due tu] are required, distinct and concomitant, which
stand out from the crowd of hes shes and theys (1981: 147; 1979: 148).
However, despite the seeming symmetry of the pair, Lettore and Let-
trice, it is simply not the case that this novel is narrated to two yous.
The Lettrice is only addressed directly in the singular at three points in
the novel, all in the seventh chapter, and two of those instances in pas-
sages without story content. There are two other passages in a true
second-person plural, the rst when the Lettore and the Lettrice be-
come lovers (154) and the second at the very end, when they are in bed
as husband and wife.
In these types
of hypertexts, the user is manipulating information about the narrative,
not the events in the narrative. On the other hand, I would include
hypertexts whose format consists of original or previously published
stories that readers can order or reorder or write or rewrite.
Interactivity
200
I will proceed from here and conclude my study by describing some of
these interactive stories and the extent to which they Talk. I have
selected and arranged my examples to give a sense of the variety of
hypertext stories and the increasingly complicated role of the reader
in producing them. However, even when the technologies at issue are
not fully tapped, they provide for so many ways of engaging response
that I do not pretend to exhaustively typologize interactive literature.
There are simply too many things in cyberspace. Furthermore, there will
doubtless be numerous hypertexts created and circulated in the time
between the writing and the publication of this book. My goal here,
therefore, is to shed some light on the idea of interactive Talk from the
perspective of narrative literature, not from the perspective of computer
engineering. Before turning to examples of interactive stories that are
currently circulating, I want to consider one more text that, like Rubi-
ners spoof, falls outside my denition and yet provides a kind of train-
ing ground for understanding the Talk of hypertext.
Assembling Cortzars Hopscotch
Julio Cortzars 1963 novel Rayuela (translated into English as Hop-
scotch, 1966) has been called an ancestor of hypertext,
labeled, for
example, a protohypertext (www.duke.edu/eng169s2/group3/dnorris/
intro.html ) and a paper hypertext (web.uvic.ca/ckeep/h0117.html ),
and even scholars who have not considered it in the light of hypertext
have remarked the active role of the reader, suggesting that readers
participate in the assemblage of the novel (Simpkins 1990: 61). Like any
other print novel, it appears between two covers with a predetermined
number of pages (155 chapters in three sections for a total of 573 pages in
the American translation, an Avon paperback edition). The title of the
book, as many of its numerous constituent parts, foregrounds the idea of
a game and, with its concomitant active role for the reader, of turn-
taking. Following the title and copyright pages, Hopscotch presents a
Table of Instructions (Tablero de direccin) that amplies the gaming
idea introduced by the title: In its own way, this book consists of many
books, but two books above all.
Once visitors have responded by clicking, the next lexia of the Phan-
tom Tollbooth appears, this one narrated in the second person, present
tense: You nd yourself driving along a country highway, and looking
back, see no trace of the tollbooth or your house. That visitors are
supposed to identify with you is reinforced by the end of this lexia (as
well as the part of statement in the previous lexia: you are going to be
Milo): You now have a choice: Drive along the road paying careful
attention, or lay back and relax. This sentence is followed by a small
blank space and then:
Choice #1
Choice #2
The matter that has been raised by the text this time is selection of
narrative action. Visitors next turn involves (a) making a choice (drive
and pay careful attention or lay back and relax), (b) coordinating the
choice laid out in the lexia and the specic deixis indicating how to make
the reply: Choice #1 or Choice #2, (c) physically manipulating the cur-
sor over the desired choice, and (d) actually selecting that choice by
clicking. If visitors select the rst choice, the hypertext produces another
lexia lled with your adventures in Dictionopolis, including nding a
dog named Tock, exploring a Word Market, and meeting a creature
called a Spelling Bee (all are plot and character elements from the novel).
Reading through the paragraph, the visitor will arrive at another binary
choice: Trust the Spelling Bee or Dont trust him, and then a conrma-
tion that The choice is yours followed again by: Choice #1 or Choice #2.
To backtrack: if a visitor decides to opt for the second original choice
(lay back and relax), the text also replies to the visitors turn, but in
rather a dierent tone, seeking a slightly dierent kind of answering:
Dont you want to try something new?!! Get your fat rear in gear and
press the Back button on your browser just above the location! In
other words, instead of giving a new sequence in the narrative, the visitor
is berated for having made a bad choice and is instructed on how to take
a turn that will result in facing the previous options once again. Or to
put it another way, in a turn somewhat analogous to Hopscotchs ping-
ponging between chapters 131 and 58, the Phantom Tollbooth website
is looking for an answering that involves continuation of the Talk.
Interactivity
208
The actual mechanism recommended for taking ones turn at this
stage is not the underlining but the back arrow found in the options
menu (computer functions) of most websites, above the web address of
the site being visited (location).
Sec-
ond, it eectively transforms the notions of an author, a text, a
Interactivity
217
reader to a point where we can no longer consider it in the framework
of Talk I have developed in this study.
I submit that the novels and stories considered in this study have done
just that. Talk ction taps numerous emotions through a format that
creates absorbing relationships between you and the text. The variety of
replieswhether a sense of responsibility to pass on stories that sustain
communities of my storytelling mode, or of helping to enable testimony
to trauma of my witnessing mode, or of performing a role with which
one can and cannot identify of my apostrophic modeleads me to be-
lieve that literary Talk produces distinctive kinds of pleasure. These plea-
sures ensue in part from recognizing the cultural work that writing and
reading accomplish, and they assure me that prose ction wont be dis-
appearing anytime soon.
219
Notes
preface
1. Douglas Biber points out that whereas for twentieth-century linguists
speech is considered primary over writing, the lay view is that written,
literary language is true language (1988: 6). Robin Lako reports on fears of
the triumph of illiteracy because of the resurgence of the oral and suggests
that nothing of value will be lost by it (1982: 257, and my discussion of
Lako in chapter 1). The work of Sven Birkerts illustrates this paranoia.
And then there are academic views that not only take the end of print
culture as a given, but celebrate it (e.g., Case 1996). Mitchell Stephenss
recent study, The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word (1998) oers hope
of a more balanced assessment of shifts from literacy, particularly toward
the visual, which cant be my subject here.
2. Marshall McLuhans idea of the whole world as a single global village has
been rightly criticized for glossing over real dierencesespecially with
regard to access to technologythat exist in various places. While speci-
cally aiming not to ignore cultural dierences, I use McLuhans phrase to
emphasize that there is indeed no place on earth today that has not been
touched in some way by technology. In this sense, all cultures of the world
do participate in secondary orality, though, granted, not in the same fash-
ion. As Brian Stock puts it, Societies do not evolve at the same rate nor in
the same way under the inuence of given media of communications
(1990: 9).
3. I have argued this point more fully in Kacandes 1997: 9.
4. The standard phrase is talk in interaction, that is to say, the role of talk in
accomplishing interpersonal tasks. I modify the phrase to reveal one of its
premises: that talk itself is interactive.
5. Whereas Nobel literary prizes have been awarded to two Greek poets,
George Seferis (1963) and Odysseus Elytis (1979), no Greek novelist has
been so distinguished.
1. secondary orality
1. On the idea of conversation as the foundation for other forms of communi-
cation, see Mannheim and Tedlock 1995: 1; Nofsinger 1991: 2, 45, 107;
Zimmerman and Boden 1991: 18; Goodwin and Heritage 1990: 289; Chafe
Notes to Pages 37
220
1994: 41, 49. The polemical idea that all language is produced dialogically is
anathema to certain branches of linguistics that consider the individual
actor to be the source of the parole and language to ow from active
speaker to passive recipient. Goodwin and Heritage nger Saussure for
bracketing out the interactive matrix that constitutes the natural home for
language (285). Despite his inclusion of the conative function, Jakobsons
model, commonly cited by literary scholars, also propagates a notion of
active addresser and passive addressee (1960).
2. For a helpful overview of Gomans rich career, see Burns (1992).
3. West and Zimmerman (1982) and Goodwin and Heritage (1990) oer con-
cise reviews of the development of conversation analysis and its basic
principles.
4. For a convincing explanation of why such statements are so unnatural, that
is to say, why we are highly unlikely to ever hear a sentence like this in
spontaneous conversation, see Chafe 1994: 17, 84, 108.
5. On the idea of language games, see, for example, Wittgensteins Blue and
Brown Books (1969: 77). Discussions of Wittgensteins notion can be found
in Baker and Hacker (1980: 47) and Harris (1988: 2526). For an early use
of the concept by Goman, see Encounters (1961: 3436); for a full deploy-
ment of the idea to understand talk, see Forms of Talk (1981, esp. 24).
6. Of course, there could be intermediate outbursts of applause or catcalling
that register response to part of the statement.
7. See Jenny Mandelbaums concept of shared storytelling (1987; 1989; also
Nofsinger 1991, esp. 160).
8. See Goodwin and Heritage 1990:291. The list of such specications is al-
most endless, but some examples include Goman on radio, which will be
discussed below (1981: 197327); Greatbatch and Heritage on the television
news interview (Greatbatch 1988; Heritage and Greatbatch 1991); Hopper
on telephone conversations (1992); Atkinson and Drew on talk in judicial
settings (1979); Byrne and Long (1976) or West (1984) on patients and
doctors; and Whalen and Zimmerman on citizen calls to the police (1990).
9. The use of e-mail is now changing the nature of interpersonal communi-
cation once again. However, e-mail should not be viewed as a simple re-
turn to written communication. Sherry Turkle, among others, shows how
e-mail and the related interaction in MOOs (multiuser domains or dimen-
sions [MUDs] of the Object Oriented variety) must themselves be regarded
as a new form that makes use of written and oral communication strategies
(1995).
10. On the dependence of secondary orality on literacy, see Ong 1982: 136.
Although it is not directly relevant to this discussion, the global dissemina-
Notes to Pages 812
221
tion of communication technologies allows some cultures and subcultures
to jump from a primary to a secondary orality without themselves passing
through a fully literate phase. Also, some commentators are beginning to
speak of a new literacy or of a post-textual literacy, by which they want
to reference the way digital processing has proliferated the circulation of
images and (nonverbal) sound that future educated classes will need to be
familiar with as well (Marko 1994).
11. Chafe never mentions braille, but my assumption is that touch would
function similarly to sight in his argument.
12. For a caveat on the dichotomy spontaneous/nonspontaneous, see Lako
1982: 241.
13. Recent fossil research into the size of the hypoglossal canal suggests that
humans may have developed the ability to speak even earlier than pre-
viously assumedas early as 400,000 years ago, perhaps 350,000 years
prior to any known human drawing (Wilford 1998).
14. From playing certain video games, some children have learned to shoot
accurately without ever having held an actual gun in their hands. In at least
one of the cases of school violence in the United States in the late 1990s, the
student gunman is known to have never red a gun before the day he stole a
pistol and red eight shots, hitting eight people and killing three of them.
According to Dave Grossman, a former Army ocer, professor at West
Point and the University of Arkansas, and author of On Killing: The Psycho-
logical Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995), when Michael
Carneal was shooting, he red one shot at each kid. He simply red one
shot at everything that popped up on his screen. To appreciate the eec-
tiveness of video games as teacher, Grossman oers the comparison to
professional law-enforcement ocers who on average hit fewer than one in
ve shots (as quoted in Caruso 1999). Though I would argue that even this
chilling example should not lead us into the trap of categorically condemn-
ing recent technologiesit takes a very long time for changes in mental
hard-wiring to be passed on to large portions of the human population
we ignore their eects at our peril.
15. This phrase serves as the subtitle for Ongs 1982 book Orality and Literacy.
For his hypotheses about the way writing structures consciousness see 78
116; on the psychodynamics of orality, see 3177.
16. It is interesting to note that Marconi, the inventor of radio, envisioned it as
a superior alternative to the telephone for point-to-point communica-
tion. It took about twenty-ve years for its broadcasting potential to be
fully realized (Douglas 1987: xvi).
Notes to Pages 1315
222
17. As quoted in Douglas 1987: 308. It is fascinating to me that some late-
twentieth- and early-twenty-rst-century commentators are making simi-
lar claims for the latest round of communication technology. Citing such
innovations as caller identication for screening phone calls and inter-
net software that allows downloading without banner advertising, Boston
Globe columnist John Ellis predicts, Soon all of us will have technology
that will allow us to block out all messages and interruptions we choose not
to tolerate (1999: 45).
18. Jane Shattuc mentions that while doing research for her book, The Talking
Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women, all she had to do was enunciate the words
talk show, and her interlocutors would react strongly (1997: vii).
19. On the other hand, I dont want to deny the existence of some more direct
technological inuence, for example, that of the telephone and telephone
answering machine on Mariella Righinis La Passion, Ginette (1983) and
Nicholson Bakers Vox (1992).
20. On the age children (babies) learn to view television, see Allen 1992b: 132
and Lemish 1987: 3357. I nd it particularly revealing about U.S. society
that more households now have television sets than telephones. For these
and other statistics on numbers of viewers of television in the United States
and around the world, see Allen 1992a: 1. Given that in a single day 3.5
billion hours around the world will be devoted to watching television,
Allens assessment that except for oral storytelling, television is the most
prolic and important narrative medium in the world today, seems a
reasonable hypothesis (1992a: 1, 26). As an example of intermedia inu-
ence, see E. L. Doctorows argument about the way demands of the lm
industry have changed the length of contemporary novels (1999).
21. In radio, of course, the announcer is making it possible for listeners to
know whats happening at a game they cannot attend and see for them-
selves. Action override on television as well as viewers in a stadium listen-
ing to a radio broadcast of the game they are watching make apparent the
additional value of being part of a group that shares a given experience. In
these instances the announcers superior knowledge of the players and the
game may further enhance watching the game as an end in itself, but it also
bonds two consciousnesses that are experiencing the same thing (see Chafe
1994: 281).
22. On direct address in cinema, see Lawrence 1994.
23. This is not surprising given that Gomans data derive mainly from the
1950s and early 1960s, the period that gave birth to the form the broadcast
industry calls talk radio. Though Goman does not remark it, radio prior
Notes to Pages 1520
223
to the 1950s rarely involved audience participation apart from letters read
and responded to on the air (Munson 1993: 7).
24. Goman does mention parenthetically the existence of phone-in shows
and even remarks the strengthening of the eect of direct address through
the image of the announcer/host looking into the camera, but he does not
discuss the television talk show genre directly (1981: 23536).
25. Munson points out that relative to other forms of radio, talk radio is an
expensive format (1993: 3). But the form began to ourish, despite its
expensive production cost, when stations and sponsors realized its attrac-
tiveness to potential advertisers precisely because a lot of people were
listening. According to James Ledbetter (1998), commercial radio is the
most protable communications medium in America today, with prots in
the range of 30 percent (as opposed to 812 percent for newspapers and 1
2 percent for books). In the (expensive) world of television, the talk show
is relatively cheap to produce and reaps huge prots (see Shattuc 1997:
16, 66).
26. See Morse 1985; Heritage and Greatbatch 1991; Kozlo 1992: 80.
27. Consider, for example, the continued popularity of the Oprah Winfrey
Show even after she moved away from sensationalist topicswhich some
critics have claimed is the only attraction of talk shows.
28. In any case, it is the reason I will not take up the content of the shows here;
for such analyses see Levin 1987; Munson 1993; Laufer 1995; Shattuc 1997.
29. Morse even calls it a ctional form of dialogue (1985: 15), though I would
suggest that this formulation eaces the reality eect.
30. Consider the case of Jenny Joness talk show in which the show was held
responsible for manipulating a guest in ways that lawyers claimed led to
him murdering a gay man who revealed his attraction to him on the show
(see Bradsher 1999).
31. Putting Habermass notion of the public sphere more fully into dialogue
with Ongs analysis of the transition from literacy into secondary orality
would probably produce fascinating results; unfortunately, I can only sug-
gest it here.
32. Radio and television developed their very forms on the basis of com-
mercial logic to encourage mass consumption. As Allen bluntly explains:
Within the context of American commercial television, at least, the princi-
pal aim of broadcasting is not to entertain, enlighten, or provide a public
service; it is to make a prot. . . . The economic value of this system,
measured strictly in terms of revenues generated by broadcasters, is more
than $25 billion per year in the United States alone (1992a: 17). An interest-
ing development is the promotion of serious literature by television,
Notes to Pages 2025
224
most notably, through talk-show host Oprah Winfreys book club. Al-
though exact before and after gures are hard to come by, Bayles suggests
that generally, every book [Oprah] has recommended has experienced a
signicant bump in sales, and many have become runaway best sellers
(1999). Carvajal reports that writer Melinda Hayness rst novel received a
second printing of 750,000 copies (up from an initial printing of 6,800)
after Mother of Pearl was designated Oprahs summer 1999 book selection.
33. Goman 1981, McLuhan 1964, and Munson 1993 all comment explicitly on
the critical role played by the invention of the microphone, which could
pick up the nuances of the human voice.
34. Lakos denition of oral coincides well with Ongs: participatory mys-
tique, the fostering of a communal sense, and a concentration on the
present moment (Ong 1982: 136).
35. Lako is well aware that there are nonspontaneous oral forms of discourse
and spontaneous written ones, but she builds her argument on the domi-
nant associations we have developed with writing and speech (1982: 241).
36. In addition to the characterizations of Ong, Chafe, and Goman consid-
ered above, see Philipsens idea of the communal function (1989: 79).
37. As far as my research can uncover, the term narratee was introduced by
Gerald Prince in his study Notes toward a Categorization of Fictional
Narratees (1971). Grard Genette appears to have come to the same term
at approximately the same time, using the French equivalent, narrataire, in
Discours du rcit (1972: 265). In the foundational 1966 volume of Com-
munications, Roland Barthes (1819) and Tzvetan Todorov (14647) de-
scribe the function within narrative that the term narratee is meant to
cover, but without using the term.
38. I follow Shlomith Rimmon-Kenans suggestion that we not think of narra-
tors as absent or present but rather as characterized by dierent forms
and degrees of perceptibility (1989: 89). Prince oers the terms primary
and secondary to distinguish between narratees who hear or read the
entire narration and those who hear only part (1973: 18792).
39. Gomans suggestion to think about participants in communication as
enacted capacities rather than necessarily single, distinct, embodied
individuals could address the concerns of Rimmon-Kenan (1989: 88), Sul-
eiman (1981: 92) and Warhol (1989: 30) about implied authors and im-
plied readers, since as enacted capacities, implied authors and im-
plied readers would not need to be consistently distinguished from real
authors, narrators, real readers, and narratees (Rimmon-Kenan 1989: 88).
40. Julio Cortzars novel Hopscotch leads Scott Simpkins to a similar observa-
tion (1990: 61). I will take up this case in chapter 5.
Notes to Pages 2636
225
41. This issue returns us to an earlier observation that the participants in Talk
are not symmetrical. While a real reader can regard a move as an answer-
ing, my participant-narrator obviously cannot. Since authors are sentient
beings, it is at least theoretically possible to discover whether they would
consider a particular reply as an answering, whereas narrators cannot even
theoretically be consulted.
42. Landow makes a similar point when raising the issue of cultural changes
that will occur in response to the invention of hypertext (1992: 3031).
43. See Feather 1985, 1988; Plumb 1982; Raven 1992; McKenzie 1976, to name
just a few.
44. See also Tedlock 1983, Duranti 1986, Haviland 1986.
45. As I stated in my preface, I am trying to oer an alternate way of looking at
the development of twentieth-century narrative literature. Therefore, I am
using post-Modernist here not as a reference to a literary style or period
but rather as a shorthand for what came after the (Modernist) triumph of a
noncommunicative conception of literature.
46. Exceptions include highly characterized rst-person narrators who self-
consciously set out to tell a story of someone they have known, for exam-
ple, Serenus Zeitbloms account of his friend Adrian Leverkhn in Thomas
Manns Doktor Faustus (1947).
47. For other eorts to expand the traditional notion and concept of deixis, see
Green 1995. My thanks to David Herman for bringing this volume to my
attention.
48. I will mainly use the term second person due to its familiarity and as a
matter of convenience to indicate the pronoun of address. As several of
the studies of individual texts show, it is sometimes the third-person pro-
noun and sometimes the rst-person inclusive that invites exchange. See
Fludernik 1993: 219 and 1994a: 286.
49. Naturally, the activity is more complicated than this; I will lay out the many
factors involved in playing Calvinos game in chapter 4.
2. storytelling
1. This is reply not in the sociolinguistic sense of reply introduced in my
previous chapter, but in African American scholar Robert Steptos intertex-
tual sense of whole texts that answer the call of certain preguring texts
(1991: x).
2. I treat this fascinating communicative situation of apostrophe in chapter 4.
3. The idea of the Talking Book as a trope probably needs even further inves-
tigation to determine how widespread a cultural realm actually relies on it.
In my own haphazard reading I have come across one even earlier scene of
Notes to Pages 3640
226
an illiterate German watching a monk read that has several common fea-
tures, although obviously not the dimension of race (see Grimmelshausen,
Die Abenteuer des Simplicissimus 1669).
4. For information about versions of the tale of the Talking Book, see Car-
rettas notes to Equiano (1995: 25455). And for additional information as
well as a more sustained argument about the use of the anecdote as a trope
in early African Anglo-American writing, see Gates (1988: 12769).
5. I quote from the Newport, Rhode Island, reprint of 1774 based on the
original printed in Bath (American Antiquarian Society Readex Micro-
print; Worcester, Mass., 1959: 1617).
6. I would count Modern Greek literature as a minor literature in the context
of European literature, and African American literature as a minor lit-
erature in the context of Anglo-American literature. See Kacandes 1990;
Jusdanis 1991; Jones 1991.
7. Although this is not an explicit task I assign myself here, this argument
intervenes in previous debates about African American and Modern Greek
literature and about sentimental literature in general that count bridges
to extratextual realities and relations as signs of inferior literary produc-
tion. In showing how these texts use of reader address serves a relational
agenda, I am implicitly arguing for the creative power and inherent worthi-
ness of these novels and their projects.
8. The Greek war for independence from the Ottoman Turks is usually con-
sidered as beginning in March 1821, with the Metropolitan of Patras Ger-
manoss call for an uprising in the Peloponnesus, and as concluding with
the 1829 Treaty of Andriople, which ends the Russo-Turkish war and
obliges the Ottomans to accept the decisions of the Conference of London
concerning Greece. Within the novel, Luks recounts initial violence in
Smyrna in 1821 that precedes the Russo-Turkish war and forces the Greek
population mainly to ee and then battles in the islands of the eastern
Aegean for the next three years.
9. For this reason I disagree with Beatons characterization of the novel and its
role for Modern Greek literature (1994: 6061).
10. Viklas 1881a: 198; 1881b: 231. Future references to and quotations from the
novel will be to Gennadiuss English translation (1881b). I will refer to the
Greek original (1881a) only when the exact sense is not communicated
clearly enough by Gennadius. Transcriptions of the Greek follow the guide-
lines of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Lukss marriage to Dspina at
the end of his narrative is one of several examples of complying with a liter-
ary convention that also serves an extraliterary, cultural, communal agenda.
Notes to Pages 4048
227
11. Gennadius translates this as you, of course, since by the late nineteenth
century, English no longer employs the intimate second person (thou) in
common speech and writing (see Brown and Gilman 1960: 26566).
12. On addressee as peer, see 1881b: 1920; on reaching the younger genera-
tion, see 1881b: 11718.
13. See, for example, Warhol 1995: 67.
14. The idea of connection expressed here is foregrounded by the preceding
passage in which Luks describes the sense of solidarity that Greeks in his
part of the Ottoman empire (the eastern Aegean islands) felt with the
insurgents who staged the rst naval revolts in distant (western) areas.
15. One thinks again of Chafes contention that a major dierence between oral
and literate communication is simultaneity vs. disjuncture of production
and reception (1982: 37 and 1994: 4243).
16. In quoting this passage I am following the typesetting of the original Greek
text where Viklas places the rst apology about digressions in one para-
graph and then this idea about reader protocol in another. Gennadius
groups the rst two sentences quoted here with the previous paragraph,
starting a new paragraph with the idea of the child and nurse. I follow
Viklass original structure since it better reveals the linking of digression
and reader address.
17. Warhols analysis of engaging narrators is again relevant here (1989).
18. My thanks to Mary Lou Kete for this point.
19. This request reveals how much Luks understands about reading, in this
case about the power of readers imaginations.
20. See Longinuss analysis of this phenomenon (1927: 201). I take up Longinus
and the idea of placing the reader in the narrated scene in chapter 4.
21. As I mentioned in my preface, Greek culture has known writing for millen-
nia, and in Lukss mercantile expatriate community, we can assume most
people are literate. But oral communication had traditionally been used for
the most valued (cultural) information.
22. Indeed this conceit is an integral part of the rise of the novel form. See
Robinson Crusoe (1719), Pamela (174041), and Clarissa (174849) for a few
examples from the English tradition, or The Scarlet Letter (1850) from the
American. E. T. A. Homanns Die Abenteuer der Sylvesternacht (1814),
or Chamissos Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814) are exam-
ples from a continental tradition.
23. The veritable explosion of Modern Greek prose ction in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century should not be linked directly to Viklas
or to this novel; rather, it should be considered part of a widespread call for
Greek nation-building at this time.
Notes to Pages 4959
228
24. See Gates 1983: xxivlii; Bell 1987: 47; White 1993: 4145; Stern 1995.
25. See, in particular, Gatess comparison of Our Nig to Bayms analysis of
sentimental novelistic features (1983: xlili). More recent discussions, how-
ever, challenge Gatess assessment. Stern maintains, for example, that Our
Nig must no longer be seen in exclusively sentimental terms (1995: 447)
and even argues, convincingly in my view, that Wilson takes aim at do-
mestic sentimentalists (449). Stern produces much evidence for its closer
kinship to gothic ction. Mitchell, too, sees similarities to gothic novels
(1992: 8).
26. Almost a century earlier Gronniosaw felt similarly compelled to write and
sell his personal story only at the point when he could no longer support
his family in another way (1774: 3).
27. Gates suggests that the most remarkable feature of this preface is Wilsons
anticipation of objections to her text by Northern abolitionists. Hers is not
meant to be an attack on Northern whites at all. Rather, she can (safely)
criticize her white, Northern mistress because that mistress was imbued
with southern principles (1983: xxxv). While I share Gatess admiration for
the way Wilson juggles her attacks on Northern racism with mitigation of
oense to abolitionists, in my view, she most denitely intends to criticize
Northern white abolitionists for Northern behavior.
28. It is unclear to me why Gates assumes this writer is a man (xx). If anything,
we might assume this writer is a woman, since the other two endorsers are
women.
29. See White 1993, esp. 3438. White also makes it clear that Wilson could not
characterize them as abolitionists in her text because that would present
too much of a risk to herself from the still-living Hayward family members.
30. Eric Gardners preliminary research on original readership for Our Nig
oers some support for my hypotheses (1993: 227, 241).
31. There is clearly much more to be said on the subject, including Jacks use of
the term and the narrators specic comment: How dierent this appella-
tive sounded from him; he said it in such a tone, with such a rogueish
look! (70).
32. White makes a similar point (1993: 40).
33. This is, of course, one of the examples eluded to earlier of the word nig-
ger being used by whites in a derogatory manner.
34. To be sure, much more could be said about Christians and Christianity in
the text.
35. Gardners preliminary research uncovered no original black owners of Our
Nig (1993: 240). Gardner also points out that there were few blacks in
Milford, New Hampshire, where the most (traceable) copies were sold
Notes to Pages 6269
229
(233). On the other hand, Boston, the town in which it was printed, did have
a growing black community that was literate, but it had no proven readers
of Our Nig (244).
36. In the wedding ceremony of the Eastern Orthodox Church the couple dons
crowns, in current custom usually looking like wreaths, which symbolize
their new roles as king and queen of creation. Although originally pub-
lished in 1963, Tachtsss novel achieved fame with its second edition (by
Erms) in 1970 (1985a). There have been two published English transla-
tions: one by Leslie Finer rst published in Great Britain as The Third
Wedding (1966) and another by John Chioles published in Greece as The
Third Wedding Wreath (1985b). Quotations and references in my text will
refer to the Chioles translation since it sticks closer to the original; I include
page numbers to the Erms Greek edition (1985a) only when there is a point
that cannot be discerned in the translation.
37. See my comments on Greek oral storytelling in the preface, as well as in
Kacandes 1992; also Tannen 1980, 1982a.
38. Ongs analysis of conict in oral culture is relevant here. Specically, he
suggests that oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraor-
dinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle
(1982: 43).
39. See Nofsingers point that conversation is a way through which we make
relationships (1991: 162) and Mandelbaums similar arguments about the
function of storytelling (1987, 1989).
40. I have placed in brackets an addition Chioles makes to the original, ex-
plaining for the English-speaking reader who Spanodis was.
41. I dont think its coincidental that these scenes take place at a food distribu-
tion center. Food and stories, the linking implies, are vital to life, especially
in a city where tens of thousands of people had recently died of famine.
And both food and stories, in this society at least, come through relation-
ship with other people, who, like Ekvi, have already learned the lesson that
what people do is more important than who they supposedly are. (Ekvi
had learned to judge people by their character, not their reputation or
wealth, through the behavior of her supposed friends when her husband
deceives her and abandons her for her own cousin, 7591.)
42. In Ongs terms, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle
(1982: 44).
43. The complete integration of so many anecdotes into one life story makes it
dicult to pinpoint beginningsor endings for that matter. In the retro-
spection of her narrative, Nna actually identies an earlier incident when
Dimtris is arrested as the accessory to a murder as a kind of prelude, a
Notes to Pages 6987
230
sort of dress rehearsal of the breakdown that [Ekvi] was to experience for
the last time during the Occupation, for Nna experiences a cessation in
Ekvis ood of stories (1985b: 165). But since in the nal performance
Ekvi and Nna trade roles, I contend it is this sequence that readers experi-
ence as the beginning of Ekvis end.
44. Because Dimtris has had so much trouble with the law, he feels that his
sister has betrayed him by marrying a policeman, whommerely by virtue
of his professionhe considers his persecutor. Ekvi understands this
logic, but rst tries to defend her daughter to her son, especially since the
marriage has already taken place.
45. Within a Christian framework, this mention of three days foregrounds a
resurrection.
46. In the original Greek, they, the subject of the sentence, isnt even specied
with a pronoun; its just implicit through the third-person plural verb form;
and what they did is equally unspecic, the Greek aft meaning merely
those things. So Ekvis answer to Nnas question about what she should
tell Thdoro is particularly ambiguous.
47. See, for instance, the passage in which Nna has the listener ask her why she
didnt have an abortion when she found out that her husband was cheating
on her with her own brother (48).
48. We rst learn the date (1999) in the outer frame from the communal we
(10) but then also from a reference Cocoa makes within one apostrophe to
where they are and to a day when they were there together before Georges
deatha day when Cocoa heard voices telling her, Youll break his heart
(223). Information about the island and its history is given throughout the
book but most explicitly in parts of the paratext: a map, a family tree, and a
bill of sale for Sapphira.
49. I put words such as conversations, overhear, and say in quotation
marks because none of what George and Cocoa say transpires audibly, yet
the narrator tells us that we readers hear it.
50. The paratext, like the communal we of the narrating voice, is an impor-
tant aspect of the revoicing performed by Mama Day. The paratext is, as we
have already discussed, a critical part of nineteenth-century slave nar-
ratives. The content of the documents Naylor includes emphasizes that
blacks here are authorizing themselves. Furthermore, I read Naylors com-
munal we as a revoicing of the singular rst person of so many by now
canonical texts in African American literature, such as Johnsons Auto-
biography of an Ex-Colored Man, Wrights Black Boy, and Ellisons Invisible
Man. Its as if Naylor is saying: enough of the individual, now its time for
the community to tell its story.
Notes to Pages 8892
231
51. Fowler suggests a somewhat similar emphasis, but she frames the novel
more negatively as revealing the destructive powers of possessive love
(1996: 101).
3. testimony
1. Benjamins observations about the eects of modern battle resonate with
Freuds, whose encounters with soldiers who fought in the Great War
pushed him to connect war neuroses and accident neuroses, developing in
the process a formal theory of trauma (see Caruth 1996: 5867).
2. My term witness narrative should not be confused with Cohns term
witness biography (1989: 21n. 13; see also N. Friedman 1955: 117475) nor
with Stanzels term peripheral narration (1984: 2059) in which a rst-
person narrator tells the story of someone she knew or knows. Witness
narratives as I am dening them here are not necessarily narrated in the
rst person.
3. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Benjamin, a cultural commenta-
tor, had connected similar interpersonal and mass phenomena decades
earlier. It took the medical and, specically, the psychoanalytic community
quite a while to achieve this same insight. I follow Brison (1999) and Her-
man (1992) in limiting my investigation to traumas intentionally inicted
that is, by other humanssince they aect survivors sense of self and
therefore of interpersonal relations in particular ways.
4. See also Herman 1992: 121; Caruth 1993: 24 and 1996: 11; Frederick 1987.
5. Janets stature in the early twentieth century can be gleaned from the fact
that it was he, not Freud, who delivered the inaugural lectures for the
opening of the new buildings of the Harvard Medical School in November
1906. (Janet 1965 is a facsimile of the 1929 edition of these lectures, origi-
nally published in 1907.) Although Janets work was largely forgotten dur-
ing the middle of the twentieth century, there has been renewed interest in
him due to the way neurobiology has borne out in great part his schema for
how trauma works.
6. The phrase ide xe goes back at least half a century before Janet starts to
use it for this technical psychological phenomenon (see entry for ide
xe in Le Grand Robert de la langue franaise 5 [1989]: 343). For Janets
usage, which is at rst much more general and becomes more restricted,
see 1889: 42835; 1898: 2; 1911: 239312; 1925: 596.
7. Brison has objected to Caruths analysis of trauma as unclaimed or
missed experience, suggesting that at least in the case of a single trau-
matic event, the event is experienced at the time and remembered from
that time, although the full emotional impact of the trauma takes time to
Notes to Pages 9295
232
absorb and work through (1999: 210). Brison agrees with Janet, Caruth,
Wigren, and others that the absorbing and working through are facilitated
by narrating to supportive others.
8. For a few of Janets discussions of Irnes case see 1911, 1925, 1928, 1965. Van
der Kolk and van der Hart also recount Janets work with Irne (1995; esp.
16064).
9. English translation by van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 161, from Janet
1928: 2078. There is a slightly dierent version of Irnes protestations in
Janet 1965: 38.
10. The terms fabula and sjuzet come from Russian formalism. Narratology
oers a plethora of terms to express the distinction between what is com-
monly called in English story and discourse; see Genettes story and
narrative (1980: 27) and Rimmon-Kenans story and text (1989: 3).
11. Janets formulation seventy years prior is strikingly similar (as quoted in
van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 17071).
12. Leys disagrees with van der Kolk and van der Harts assessment of the role
of the recovery and narration of traumatic memory in Janets actual treat-
ment of hysterics (1994: 65860). For the strides that neurobiology has
made in understanding the processing of traumatic memory, see van der
Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 174, and M. Friedman et al. 1995. For recent
psychotherapeutic approaches, see Foy 1992; Wigren 1994; Kleber et al.
1995; Marsella et al. 1996.
13. Irne told Janet, Im afraid when you make me remember that. Its a fear I
cant get over (1911: 541). One striking illustration from more recent clini-
cal and lay literature about overcoming fear and telling the story, as a result
of proper social support, comes from Agate Nesaules A Woman in Amber
(1997). As a child, Nesaule was one of millions of persons displaced from
their homes in Eastern Europe (in her case Latvia) toward the end of World
War II. In several opening scenes of her memoir, it becomes clear that
Nesaule can only tell when she feels that she is genuinely safe with a
completely interested interlocutor, like her lover, John, or her therapist,
Ingeborg. John, for example, requests to hear about her childhood by
saying, I really want to know. Please tell me (9). Ingeborg notices and
wonders about Agates sadness, displaying an attention and calm accep-
tance that make Agate feel safe enough to tell (2324).
14. Note the dierence in trying to tell this kind of story from the ones that
needed to be passed on in texts of my storytelling mode. Even if some of the
events in Ekvis life or of those leading to the death of George are trau-
matic in the colloquial sense, they are accessible and concrete to those
Notes to Pages 96102
233
involved in a way that stories of trauma are notperhaps precisely because
they found genuinely interested listeners.
15. I want to draw particular attention to my choice of the word enabler
rather than the word addressee, which is used in accounts of communica-
tion such as Jakobsons (1960: 353), in order to reference the special kind of
nonpassive listening noted above in psychotherapeutic accounts of wit-
nessing to trauma. Hartman, commenting on Laubs work, describes lis-
tening as the midwife role (1996: 153), another metaphor that indicates
that this role is one of enabling a process.
16. About the psychoanalytic process, Laub even says, hardly anything of all
this gets explicitly said in words (Felman and Laub 1992: 63). Van der Kolk
and van der Hart report on the research of Southwick and colleagues who
use injection of yohimbine to induce people with ptsd to immediately
access sights, sounds and smells related to earlier traumatic events (1995:
174). Consider, too, Leyss observation that Janet did not restrict himself to
the positive construction of stories, but also used hypnosis to access and
excise events (1994: 65862).
17. In the case of the last two circuits, a researcher might uncover relevant
literary-historical material outside of the novel itself that leads to interpret-
ing the text-as-statement of trauma.
18. My use of the prex trans (transhistorical/transcultural) is meant to refer
to the otherness of these reader-cowitnesses in this most distant (from the
trauma) circuit of witnessing, not to some kind of superior or universal
ability to know the trauma. It may well be their distance, however, that
allows such readers to recognize a literary phenomenon as a sign of histori-
cal trauma.
19. Robert Jay Lifton, another prominent analyst of trauma, even suggests that
World War II and the Holocaust are a certain kind of survivor reaction . . .
to World War I (Caruth 1995b: 13940).
20. The messiness of this intertwining is useful to me, since it counteracts
some of the seeming impropriety of using a framework as organized as a
typology of circuits to approach a phenomenon as inscrutable as trauma.
21. Focalization refers to the relationship between the vision, the agent that
sees, and that which is seen (Bal 1985: 104), and as Bal points out, who sees
is not necessarily the same agent as the one who speaks (101). This passage
is narrated in the third person, but we see and hear what Stephen sees
and hears.
22. In another example of these connections, the narrator ponders her child-
hood linkage of a Jewish boy and the white snake (1980: 13536).
Notes to Pages 102110
234
23. Wolf s novel was rst translated into English with the infelicitous title A
Model Childhood. While the German word Muster of the original title is
polysemous and allows for both the ideas of a model and a pattern, it is
clear from the text that any idea of model is meant ironically.
24. Though the Handmaid never names her addressee, there are numerous
hintsfor example, her chagrin about an illicit aairthat she addresses
herself to her husband Luke, who had been separated from her when the
family was trying to escape Gilead (22425), before she was forced to
become a handmaid.
25. Kartiganer describes the novel as Faulkners supreme attempt to realize
the paradoxical dream of maintaining a hold on the past while achieving a
creative autonomy in the present (1995: 53).
26. Gerald Langford, collator of the original manuscript and the published
book of Absalom, Absalom! emphasizes that Faulkner altered his original
design to give Quentin a much bigger role, indeed to make him the pivotal
gure (1971: 3).
27. Brooks, too, remarks this shift, saying that Quentin enters the Sutpen
story through the meeting with Henry at Sutpens Hundred (1984: 296).
28. Weinstein makes a similar observation about Compsons detachment
(1974: 13940). See also Brooks 1984: 291.
29. On the intensity of seeing without processing, Michael Herr comments
about his experiences as a Vietnam War correspondent: The problem was
that you didnt always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years
later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there is your
eyes (1978: 20). On the paradoxical operation of seeing trauma, con-
sider also Caruth 1996: 2829.
30. We are reminded again of Langfords discovery that many of Faulkners
revisions of Absalom, Absalom! move Quentin center stage, transforming
him from one of four narrators who just report to the pivotal gure
(1971: 3). Brooks calls Quentin the better artist of the narrative plot (1984:
296). I want to shift the emphasis yet a bit further, suggesting that Quentins
role is testimonial, not just structural or aesthetic.
31. Laub and other members of the psychotherapeutic community warn
against listeners losing their sense of self. Although the listener has to feel
the victims victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, says
Laub, that listener must also retain separateness to fulll his or her function
as an enabler. Listeners must not become the victim, lest they risk their
own traumatization (Felman and Laub 1992: 58). In a context at once more
literary and philosophical, Trezise describes how, in Charlotte Delbos None
of Us Will Return, the invitation to readers to witness by identifying is
Notes to Pages 112120
235
coupled with a challenge to the very possibility of such identication
(1997: 11).
32. I discuss this phenomenon more thoroughly in the next chapter.
33. According to Lottman, Camuss biographer, this nal paragraph was added
to the novel at the urging of Jean Bloch-Michel, a friend of Camuss who
feared that otherwise the ending of this novel would sound too much like
the ending of The Stranger (1979: 563).
34. Janet describes traumatic symptoms as one of the consequences of in-
adequacy of action at the time when the event took place (1925: 663).
And he discusses generally the concept of changing an element in the
traumatic world of the suerer in a chapter called Treatment by Mental
Liquidation (1925: 589698). See also van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995:
17579.
35. Depending on the identity of the reader, such an act would complete circuit
ve (for Camuss contemporary readers) or circuit six (for later or foreign
readers).
36. For additional facts about the development of the Camus-Sartre debate
and rupture, see also Lottman 1979: 495507. Lottman oers as well the
recapitulation of some contemporary (1956) interpretations of The Fall as a
long-delayed reply to Sartres 1952 attack on Camus (565).
37. See Alco and Gray 1993: 263 who warn similarly against readers/analysts
setting themselves up as the experts who know better than the victim.
38. See Byland 1971: 6272; Balzer 1981: 16566; and Lorenz 1993. Shas ap-
proach to the prose texts distinguishes itself somewhat, since she reads
them as allegories of the artist, though she, too, strives to illuminate the life
through the texts (1991: 691; 1995: 189214). It is symptomatic that a dic-
tionary entry on Kolmar as late as 1993 does not even mention her dramatic
or prose works (see Dick and Sassenberg 1993: 21920).
39. I will discuss the titling of this book again when I take up the issue of
publication. I note here that the novel was written quickly in 193031 and
rst published posthumously in 1965. The rst page of Kolmars typescript
does not bear a title (see reproduction in Eichmann-Leutenegger 1993: 117),
but the title must have been indicated by Kolmar as Die jdische Mutter
[The Jewish Mother] somewhere elseon a title page?in the typescript
(see Woltmann 1995: 155). In any case, Kolmars sister Hilda insisted on the
name Eine Mutter [A Mother] when the novel rst appeared in 1965 (Ksel
Verlag), since she feared the original title could encourage antisemitism
(Woltmann 1995: 285n. 151). The second (1978), and all subsequent edi-
tions, as far as I know, have been published with the title Eine jdische
Mutter [A Jewish Mother]. The question of the protagonists relationship to
Notes to Pages 121123
236
Judaism is a complicated one that should not be given inadequate treat-
ment here. The analysis that follows, however, reads Kolmars Jewish pro-
tagonist and her daughter as marginalized by their society and as self-
consciously aware of their dierence from those around them because of
their Jewish background.
40. All quotations from the novel are given in my own translation. The page
numbers in parentheses refer to the (German) Ullstein Tachenbuch edi-
tion of 1981. Kolmars language has a strange tone to a German ear. It may
sound antiquated to some, but I hear it as awkward. Kemp calls it a late-
Expressionist style (as quoted in Woltmann 1995: 157), and Smith says it
lacks condence and is inconsistent (1975: 30). I think the tone is one sign
of the texts performance of trauma, so my translations try to render both
the sense and something of the stilted tone. A competent English transla-
tion of the novel and of Kolmars novella, Susanna, came to my attention
after this chapter was drafted (Kolmar 1997). Since exact linguistic formula-
tions are important to my analysis, I have retained my translations, which
stay closer to the original than the published translation.
41. The DSM-IV emphasizes that ptsd can be caused by harm to oneself or by
witnessing or learning about unexpected death or harm to a family mem-
ber or close associate (1994: 424). Caruth describes the trauma to the
parent of a dead child as the trauma of the necessity and impossibility of a
proper response (1996: 100).
42. An inside view of a childs inability to witness verbally to events to which
her body is testifying so glaringly is given in Dorothy Allisons painful novel
of incest, abuse, and abandonment, Bastard Out of Carolina; see especially
the interaction between the twelve-year-old protagonist and the sheri at
the hospital after the child has been beaten and raped by her stepfather
(1992: 29598).
43. In German, the words for child and girl have a neuter gender (das Kind,
das Mdchen), so the use of it and its is not necessarily unusual. And
yet, there are other choices (e.g., she and her). Therefore the use of
it helps underscore Ursulas inanimateness. The word doch (here trans-
lated as still) to indicate Marthas previous thoughtpresumably that the
child is dead and therefore not breathingis one sign that much of the
novels discourse is ltered through Marthas consciousness. In narratolog-
ical terms, Martha is the focalizer. This aspect of the text is signicant for
my fourth category, textual witnessing, and will be discussed below.
44. Wigren observes that trauma victims are often actively silenced (1994:
417).
Notes to Pages 124128
237
45. Culbertsons (adult) analysis of and testimony to her own sexual violation
as a young child grapple with this problem of putting bodily trauma into
words in a way that communicates the dilemma to others (1995).
46. Again, on the issue of seeing and trauma, refer to Herr 1978: 20, and
Caruth 1996: 2829.
47. We do not know Lucies background. However, it would be consonant with
the antisemitic dynamics of the novel if Lucie, as a German-Gentile child,
can speak and name the crime, and Martha, the German-Jewish child,
cannot.
48. One should also consider this scene under the rubric of my fourth circuit,
additionally interpreting the indirection and euphemism as deictics calling
for a reply of cowitnessing to the text-as-statement of trauma.
49. These issues of diction are relevant to circuit four as well. Wigren notes
how it was initially impossible for two of her patients to name what had
happened to them. To heal, Wigrens patient Hugh needed to learn to say
that he had lost his leg, a fact for which he had corporeal proof, yet one that
he had not processed before starting therapy. Similarly, Kathi could not call
what had happened to her sexual abuse (1994: 41821).
50. See, too, Marthas refusal of sympathy and aid from her parents-in-law (49)
and her repeated rebus of her neighbors succor (e.g., 4243).
51. Any number of the essays in the chapter on The Rise of the New Woman
in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Kaes et al. 1994: 195219) could be
read for Weimar attitudes toward single and working women. For example,
shortly before Hitlers takeover (approximately when Kolmar was writing
A Jewish Mother), commentator Alice Rhle-Gerstel laments that before
the new woman could evolve into a type and expand into an average, she
once again ran up against barriers . . . and she therefore found herself not
liberated, as she had naively assumed, but now doubly bound (218). For
the complexities of Jewish self-hatred, especially with regard to German
Jews, see Gilman 1986: 270308, and for interpretations of Kolmars view of
her Jewishness, see Lorenz 1993 and Colin 1990.
52. Though Elfenbeinton is light and not necessarily derogatory in and of
itself, it did connote Eastern, and therefore what would have been con-
sidered at the time racial dierence.
53. It is on the basis of such evidence that I cannot agree with Sha that
Marthas isolation is by choice (1995: 202).
54. Many mental health professionals have tried to raise awareness of the dan-
gers of secondary traumatization (Felman and Laub 1992: 5758). Com-
menting on societys lack of understanding and support for victims, Frieze
observes that society tends to have rather negative views of victims of both
Notes to Pages 129132
238
sexes (1987: 118), and Frederick comments that victims may be treated as
if they are mentally ill on the one hand, or have factitious symptoms on the
other (1987: 84; see also 74). Wigren, too, comments on the frequent
tragedy of trauma victims being denied the social contact they need to
recover (1994: 417).
55. Caruth speaks relevantly of traumas indirect relation to reference (1996:
7).
56. Although they do not use narratological terminology or draw the same
conclusions, Balzer (1981: 172) and Sparr (1993: 82) also note that A Jewish
Mother is rendered primarily from Marthas perspective.
57. The one crime that is narrated directly in the novel is Marthas admin-
istration of the sleeping powder to her child. But this is the transgressive act
that remains the most ambiguous ethically. It is interesting to note that
Martha keeps waiting for someone to appear at the moment she prepares
the fatal draft, someone who would seemingly prevent her from carrying
through with her plan (59). Even though the specter of Medea is raised in
one early ashback (8), the text never directly charges Martha with infan-
ticide. Despite the fact that Martha comes to consider herself Ursulas
murderer, it remains unclear whether Ursula would have died even without
the sleeping powder. One hint to the moral valence of Marthas act resides
in a conversation with her husband years earlier that Martha recalls after
Ursula has diedbut, interestingly, before the text relates Marthas admin-
istration of the sleeping powder, an issue of narrative order that accords
with the indirect textual witnessing. It seems that the couple had read
a newspaper report of a mother who had killed her own son because of
his homosexual liaisons. Friedrich Wolg found this mother inhuman and
her action unconscionable. Martha, in contrast, says she understands her:
When one loves ones child, one can do anything. One can let oneself be
killed by it. And one can also kill it (5657).
58. In a separate paragraph, the text does reproduce some excerpts from the
article. In accordance with the overall pattern of focalization, the words
rendered are presumably the words Marthas consciousness is actually able
to take in when Frau Rokaempfer thrusts the newspaper toward her. But
the words we read by no means constitute enough of an explanation of
what happened to warrant the barkeepers assessment of precisely, com-
pletely correctly described (45).
59. Note Kolmars choice of the word Name, which implies naming, rather than
just Wort. I take this as a subtle reminder of the power of naming a crime
explicitly. For more on this power, see the conclusion of this chapter.
Notes to Pages 132135
239
60. One exception that springs to mind are the vivid descriptions of violence
done to characters in Dblins 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, though
there, too, fascinating indirections are employed alongside more explicit
narration, for instance, the Newtonian language in the ashback to Idas
beating (8586) and the biblical refrains from Ecclesiastes interjected into
the depiction of Miezes murder (see esp., 31017). In terms of decorum,
perhaps it makes a dierence that crimes in Dblins novel are perpetrated
mainly against adult women (and some men), whereas in Kolmars the
central crime is perpetrated against a very young girl.
61. The function of newspaper crime-reporting in shaping the consciousness
of the populace in this novel as well as in other novels of the period war-
rants a separate study, one that I believe would elucidate and support my
larger thesis of ubiquitous trauma in Weimar Berlin.
62. For this reason, I do not think it was frivolous for Kolmars American
translator to have changed the title to A Jewish Mother from Berlin. Al-
though they do not point to the same kind of evidence, Smith and Sha
recognize a critique of urban life in Kolmars novel (Smith 1975: 3233; Sha
1995: 204).
63. Documentation of this supposed abortion has not been published to my
knowledge, but the verication of its occurrence seems to have come from
Kolmars sister Hilda. Smith also remarks on the child-loss fantasies that
plagued the author throughout her life and that nd expression in this
novel and in many of her poems (1975: 3132).
64. It should be noted that Langs movie could be analyzed similarly to my
analysis of A Jewish Mother. It, too, testies to violence perpetrated against
the marginalized in Weimar society.
65. Much is made over Kolmars comment to Hilda in a letter that what she is
writing is just prose, not verse (5 March 1942 in Kolmar 1970: 136). But I
think Kolmars quotation marks around just, together with the fact that
she is reporting about a story she is writing under abominable conditions,
should make us more cautious about drawing conclusions about the au-
thors general evaluation of her prose writing (contrast my view with Shas
1995: 189).
66. In addition to Ursulas rape and the fact that all the neighbors seem to have
in mind precedents for violence against children, one could mention Mar-
thas discovery of antisemitic literature in the living room of the home in
which her lover Albert Renkens lives (15354).
67. The documentation of the Weimar period as violent is legion. On margin-
alization of minorities see, for example, Hancock 1991 and Milton 1992 on
Roma-Sinti. On general urban violence and sexual crimes, see Linden-
Notes to Pages 136144
240
berger and Ldtke 1995 (esp. the essays of Crew, Rosenhaft, and Brcker)
and Tatar 1995. As for artistic treatments, I have already raised the obvious
examples of Dblins Berlin Alexanderplatz and Langs movie M. One
shouldnt ignore visual artists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix, to name
just two of the most prominent.
68. For more on the relationship between Lasker-Schler and Kolmar, see
Lorenz 1993.
69. On why there is such interest in remembering the Holocaust now, at such a
historical distance from the events themselves, see Felman and Laub 1992:
84. See, too, Hartman 1996, esp. 114; Flanzbaum 1999; and Novick 1999.
70. An additional, if small, indication of Kolmars increasing popularity is that
in recent years, entire panels on Kolmar were included in the annual meet-
ings of the German Studies Association and the Modern Language Asso-
ciation in the United States.
71. My thanks to Monika Kallan for pointing this out.
72. On making the bridge between individual trauma and the society in which
it occurs, see Herman 1992 and Minow 1993.
73. For more on the power of language, see the scene in which Martha rst
begins to rethink her decision to give Ursula sleeping powder; she tries to
undo the thought by saying out loud, No! (144).
74. I do not mean to exclude the possibility that an individual writer or reader
might receive psychic relief from writing or reading such a story.
4. apostrophe
1. There are several situations within the novel that could be applied to the
overall discourse situation. For instance, at one point Kate reects that
perhaps her current writing is so easy because of previous letters shed
written to Esther to which she received no answer (176). Similarly, the
narrative mode can be likened to the period in their relationship when
Esther poses questions to Kate on postcards from abroad with no return
address (2067). And toward the conclusion of the novel, Kate describes
her behavior as a private sance (281).
2. Judith Roof explicates Rules novel as the paradox of a desire fullled by its
unfulllment, by remaining a desire, a question. Paradoxically, then, in its
nonfulllment, the desire for desire is fullled (1991: 169). While I do nd
Roof s assessment of Kate supported by a more thorough reading of the
novel than either she or I provides, what I ultimately miss in Roof s analysis
is attention to how the narrative technique, what I describe below as nar-
rative apostrophe, eects this desire for desire.
Notes to Pages 144146
241
3. Roof makes a similar point (1991: 169). See, too, Barbara Johnsons brilliant
analysis of the idea of not for you in Adrienne Richs poem To a Poet
(1987: 19596).
4. I have adapted the phrase narrative apostrophe from classical philologist
Elizabeth Block, who uses the phrase only to describe the Homeric and
Vergilian narrators addresses to characters and to the epic audience (1982:
8, 11, 13). Brian McHale uses the term narratorial apostrophe just for
the former (narrators to characters 198485: 100). Heinrich Lausberg, the
compiler of one of the most comprehensive handbooks of literary rhetoric,
does connect the gure of apostrophe with reader address in prose ction,
though there is no indication that he applied apostrophe toor was even
aware of the existence oftexts narrated primarily in the second person
(1960: 379; 1998: 339). To my knowledge, I was the rst scholar to connect
the gure of apostrophe with such texts (Kacandes 1990; 1993; 1994). On
the other hand, there is a lengthy tradition of general critical interest in
second-person narration aroused by the increasing number of novels and
stories written in this mode (for a list of such texts and of scholarly work
about them, see Fludernik 1994b). In 1965 Bruce Morrissette identied
narrative you as a new literary genre. Prince helped the study of such
texts along by coining the term narratee, the person to whom the narra-
tive is addressed (1971, 1973). Genette seems to have come to the French
equivalent (narrataire) at approximately the same time (1972) and later
coins the phrase narration la deuxime personne (second-person narrat-
ing) to describe whole texts written in this mode (1983: 92). Fludernik
oered a clear denition for the phenomenon as ction that employs a
pronoun of address in reference to a ctional protagonist (1993: 217), also
clarifying that the term second person ction is a misnomer of sorts,
since in several languages pronouns of address are not necessarily the
second person (1993: 219). Evidence that literary critics have hardly n-
ished with the subject is oered not only by this chapter but also by the
studies of Capecci (1989); Richardson (1991); Wiest (1993); and an entire
issue dedicated to the subject in Style (1994, 28.3). My own approach is
distinguished from these by my use of the structure of apostrophe to ac-
count for the way narrating with a pronoun of address inevitably involves
the audience of actual readers.
5. My thanks to Robyn Warhol for this graceful formulation.
6. Thus one application of the term was reserved for any strategy that involves
changing the subject, or in Quintilians words, that divert[s] the attention
of the hearer from the question before them (book 4, section 2.38 in vol. 3,
p. 398). See also Lausberg on metabasis (1960, 1998, section 848).
Notes to Pages 146156
242
7. For denitions of apostrophe see Block (1982: 89); Lausberg (1960, 1998,
sections 76265); and Perrine (1975). All draw heavily on Quintilians ex-
planation (1960; esp. book 4, section 1.6370 in vol. 3, pp. 39699; and
book 9, section 2.3839 in vol. 2, pp. 4145), as well as on that of Long-
inus (sections 2627; 1982: 200205). Henceforth, I will refer paren-
thetically just to page numbers in the Loeb Classical Library editions of
Quintilian and Longinus.
8. This distinction is emphasized through the grammar of the original Latin.
The verb form Quintilian uses to describe what happens by apostrophizing
is the present indicative, signaling the hard reality of Ciceros act, whereas
the verb form Quintilian uses to describe the hypothetical situation (no
apostrophe) is the pluperfect subjunctive, diminishing the act through
distance from reality and the present. My thanks to James H. Tatum for
this point.
9. The phrase, preeminent sign of interaction, is Ann Banelds (1982: 120);
see also McHale (1983: 19; 1987: 223).
10. It should be noted that Benveniste makes these points in the service of
arguing the lack of symmetry between the so-called three grammatical
persons. Providing convincing evidence from numerous languages, Ben-
veniste shows that the third person really refers to what is absent and
therefore unavailable to be considered in its personhood. Even in the case
of third-person forms used for direct address (e.g., the current German
Sie-form or the more antiquated Er-form), Benveniste argues the imper-
sonal nature of the usage: the third person can serve as a form of address
with someone who is present when one wishes to remove him from the
personal sphere of you by reasons of respect (His Majesty) or of scorn,
which can annihilate him as a person (1971: 200).
11. For additional evidence that this is the case, see Schirins analysis of the
phrase you know in American English as [enlisting] the hearer as an
audience (1987: 284).
12. See Culler (1981: 135) and Warhol (1989: vii), who mention embarrassment
and annoyance experienced by most readers of the apostrophic you.
13. Baneld distinguishes between addressees and hearers (1982: 120, 128, 129),
but as far as I know only the eld of conversation analysis maintains a
tripartite division.
14. In a previous proposal for a typology of uses of the second person (Ka-
candes 1994: 33537), I used reversibility between the I and you as
the criterion of organization; in that instance I was trying to account for a
much wider range of texts and techniques.
Notes to Pages 157159
243
15. First English translation by Jean Stewart, published in 1959 by Simon and
Schuster. All translations in this section are my own from the original
French reviews of the novel.
16. As Bernard Dort commented, the idea of a man choosing between his wife
and mistress is a hackneyed story (1958: 121). Butor admitted as much,
though he thought of this as an aesthetic advantage, not a hindrance. The
banality of this theme served me well, Butor explained to Paul Guth in an
interview shortly after the appearance of the novel: Its the subject of
three-quarters of contemporary novels. Therefore I was able to project
some original light on it (Guth 1957: 4).
17. Emile Henriot rst used the phrase Ecole du regard to refer to similarities
between Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor (1957: 7).
For a history of the term nouveau roman, see Sturrock (1969, esp. 12).
On the popularity of La Modication see Raillard (1968: 192); Van Rossum-
Guyon (1970: 41); and Lydon (1980: 100).
18. Pingaud, for example, comments that every you presupposes a hidden I
(1958: 98; see also Krause 1962: 59). There are, in fact, a few instances of I
toward the conclusion of the novel, but these can be interpreted as quoted
interior monologue and need not represent the sudden appearance (and
then disappearance) of the enunciator of the discourse.
19. The sentence begins: Si vous tes entr dans ce compartiment. In French,
as in other Romance languages, participles and adjectives after the verb to
be must agree with the number and gender of the subject. Here entr is
singular and male. Revelation of gender and number through grammar is
critical to my reading of Calvinos text and will be taken up below.
20. One of these early dissenters is Pierre de Boisdere who insisted in his
December 1957 review for La Revue de Paris that nothing in Change of
Heart testies to any innovation in the realm of the novel. In making this
judgment, he appears to have interpreted the narrative mode as an interior
monologue, thereby dismissing it as absolutely no longer a novelty (171).
21. Particularly insightful studies include Leiris (1963), Morrissette (1965), Pas-
sias (1970), Van Rossum-Guyon (1970), Steinberg (1972), and Qurel
(1973).
22. In great part because of the publication of Change of Heart much research
has been done on this mode. And while intermittent uses of the second
person (excluding dialogue) have appeared in Western literature at least as
far back as Homers poignant apostrophes to heroes at Troy and to the
faithful Eumaios in Ithaca, even sustained narration in the second person
something Bruce Morrissette credits Butor with inventing (1965)goes
Notes to Pages 161164
244
back much further than Butors experiment. I count Hawthornes short
story The Haunted Mind (1835) as the earliest literary example of an
entire narrative told in the second person (that is, with no explicit signs of a
rst-person narrator); in Europe, the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger should
be acknowledged for exploiting the mode brilliantly in her story narrated
from death to birth entirely in the second person, Spiegelgeschichte
[Mirror Story] (1947). Fludernik cites the interesting nonctional exam-
ple of the French Duke of Sullys memoirs Les Oeconomies royales (1662), in
which the Dukes (Maximilien de Bthunes) four servants at his behest
write a history of his life and tell it to him, addressing him in the act (1994a:
29798). That the discourse situation continues to fascinate is conrmed
by a recent use of it in the French movie The Dreamlife of Angels (La Vie
reve des anges), in which one of the protagonists writes in the diary of the
girl in whose room she is squatting: You have been in an accident. Your
mother is dead. You are in a coma in the hospital.
23. Leiris is referring to the practice of book publishing in France (and else-
where): one needs to cut open the pages of a new book in order to read it.
24. Grass had already published poetry and some drama. He won the coveted
prize of Gruppe 47 in 1958 based on prepublication readings from The
Tin Drum, his rst major commercial success.
25. Most critics assume the story is essentially about Mahlke, disregarding the
discourse (including apostrophizing) that relates it. Reddick, for example,
plots his analysis around stages in Mahlkes development (1974). Other
critics who assume one can talk about Mahlke without reference to Pilenzs
relationship to him include Leonard (1974: 26), Miles (1975: 86), and Piirai-
nen (1968: 1011). Notable exceptions include Rimmon-Kenan (1987: 179)
and Keele (1988: 66), who argue that the real story is about Pilenz and
his relationship to Mahlke. Still, Rimmon-Kenan relegates Pilenzs acts of
apostrophizing to a footnote, creating what appears to be an airtight mur-
der case against him (179). A few other critics notice that Pilenz addresses
Mahlke, but they do not analyze the act for what it reveals about the
relationship (Bruce 1966, Behrendt 1969, Schwarz 1971, Botheroyd 1976,
Neuhaus 1979, Gerstenberg 1980).
26. The standard English translation by Ralph Manheim is generally very
good, capturing well the idiosyncratic narrating style of Pilenz and the
slang of the schoolkids. Occasionally, however, as in this passage, he takes
liberties that obscure the point I am trying to make.
27. The most notable example of Pilenzs renarrations is how it came to pass
that the cat jumps on Mahlkes throat (see the novellas opening). From
other hints about this event in the novella, it appears that the third and last
Notes to Pages 164168
245
version of the story is closest to the truth, that is, that Pilenz grabbed the cat
and showed it the sleeping Mahlkes moving Adams apple.
28. This might remind us of Johnsons analysis of Shelley: that he apostro-
phizes the wind not in order to make it speak but in order to make it listen
to him (1987: 187; my emphasis). As for Pilenzs jealousy, its particular
manifestations (attention to Mahlkes Adams apple, to his penis, to anyone
who shows interest in him or in whom Mahlke shows interestlike the
Virgin Mary) clearly point to homoerotic feelings. This is a fascinating
aspect of the novella, but one for which I dont have space to present all the
evidence.
29. I disagree with Rimmon-Kenan (1987: 180), Ryan (1983: 98), and Ziol-
kowski (1972: 247), who interpret Pilenzs act of erasing the image as insin-
cere, aggressive, and even a symbolic murder. The image expressed such
ridicule of Mahlke, and Mahlke himself reacts so angrily, that one can only
assume its disappearance was a relief to him and that he would have been
grateful to whoever had erased it.
30. See, for example, the quotation of a conversation by all the boys about what
Mahlkes problem might be. At the moment the boys tell Pilenz to ask him
whats up, the narration of the scene breaks o, and, instead of reporting
a conversation between himself and Mahlke that took place in the past,
Pilenz apostrophizes him in the present moment of the discourse (1974: 21
22; 1994: 20). Similarly, in narrating the rst time an alumnus hero gives a
speech to the boys at the high school, Pilenz reports Mahlkes words of
distress in discovering that the requirements for receiving a Knights Cross
have been increased. But instead of quoting his own words of comfort to
Mahlke, Pilenzs narration breaks o (reinforced by a blank space between
this paragraph and the next), and when his discourse resumes, it is in
apostrophe to Mahlke, as if to make up for not having reassured him then
(1974: 42; 1994: 40).
31. Compare this to several scenes in which Pilenz apostrophizes Mahlke and
then puts words into his mouth by imagining what Mahlke was thinking. In
the most striking instance of this use of apostrophe, Pilenz has Mahlke
think that everyone is staring at his Adams apple (1974: 43; 1994: 4041). It
is interesting to note that the quoted hymn in the latrine scene is itself an
apostrophe to the Virgin Mary; in that context, Pilenz plays audience to
Mahlkes call to the Virgin.
32. There are numerous additional details that incriminate Pilenz, like the fact
that, at the moment Mahlke dives into the wreck, Pilenz has his foot on the
can opener that Mahlke will need in order to open his provisions, or that he
Notes to Pages 168172
246
promises Mahlke that he will return the same evening, whereas he returns a
full day later.
33. The German verb bewirken is more emphatic than the translators choice
of made since it denotes eecting, causing, or producing an eect.
34. Manheim takes numerous liberties with this passage. Although he conveys
the events, he does not convey the rhetorical strategies that, in my opinion,
are so crucial to a proper understanding of the passage and to a great extent
of the book. For example, he turns the initial question into a statement I
may as well add . . .; and he uses two sentences to render Grasss brilliantly
crafted single nal sentence: But you didnt show up. You didnt surface.
In addition to spelling out the ambiguity of Grasss formulation where
surfacing references both the dive of the last time Pilenz saw Mahlke and
his contemporary hope that Mahlke will surface out of the crowd, he misses
Pilenzs attribution to Mahlke of volition: you didnt want to surface. This is
important to my point that Pilenz concedes that Mahlke, not he, is in
charge.
35. In this regard, Cat and Mouse functions like the apostrophe in Gwendolyn
Brookss poem The Mother; in Johnsons analysis: As long as she [the
persona] addresses the children, she can keep them alive, can keep from
nishing with the act of killing them (1987: 192).
36. It was through publication of the protocols of the trials of numerous per-
sonnel associated with the death camps at Auschwitz in 196566 (known in
Germany as the Frankfurter Prozesse because the trials were held in
Frankfurt) that most Germans had the brutality and bestiality of Nazi
behavior forced into their consciousnesses. Peter Weiss used the trial tran-
scripts to create his brilliant, if damning, play, The Investigation (Die Er-
mittlung). See, too, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs analysis of
German postwar society, The Inability to Mourn (Die Unfhigkeit zu trau-
ern) (1967; 1975). Although there were numerous prods for widespread
student unrest in 1968, calling the older generation, and specically, the
government and students parents, to a reckoning with the Nazi past was
certainly one of them. See, for example, numerous interviews with children
of Nazis who were students in the late 1960s in Sichrovskys Born guilty
(Schuldig geboren) (1987; 1988). Many analysts would count a true reckon-
ing with the Nazi past as occurring only with the historians debate (His-
torikerstreit ) of the 1980s (see Maier 1988, Evans 1989, and Baldwin 1990).
And some would argue that such a general accounting has yet to occur.
37. The original title of Cortzars story is Gratti. However, to avoid con-
fusion, I will use its English spelling (which coincides with the original
Italian) throughout. All quotes will be from the excellent English transla-
Notes to Pages 173180
247
tion of Gregory Rabassa (1983), with mention of the original Spanish only
to point out features that are not transmitted by the English.
38. I will take up this phenomenon in the analysis of If on a winters night a
traveler, pausing here only to mention that in Spanish, as in Italian and
Greek, the conjugated form of the verb is sucient to indicate the number
and person of the subject of the sentence. This leaves room for some
ambiguity, since, for example, in the third person, the verb, unlike the
pronoun, will not in and of itself reveal gender. Adjectives or participles
that are in agreement with the subject, however, will do so.
39. The text hints that the impetus for the womans construction of the mans
actions may have stemmed from an actual encounter. When the woman is
being arrested, the mise-en-scne implies not only that he saw her but
also that she may have glimpsed him running toward her, prevented from
reaching her (and sure arrest) only because of the fortuitous interference
of a car (36). One can presume the arrestees wonderment at the strangers
risky behavior and that it may have prompted her to assume that he was the
grati artist whose drawings shed been seeing and answering.
40. Compare Susan Stewarts analysis of grati (in nontotalitarian states) as a
crime in mode of production . . . not a crime of content (1987: 174).
41. Roemer also notices this inversion (1995: 26). Though she doesnt discuss
Cortzars story, Taylor describes torture as an act of double inscription by
the state, writing bodies into the nationalist narrative and writing on bod-
ies to turn them into cautionary messages for those on the outside (1997:
152).
42. See Culler on the way apostrophizing creates a timeless present (1981: 149).
43. The storys second publication (in Sin censura, Peridico de Informacin
Internacional, Washington-Paris) was also illustrated, according to Prego
(1990: 269n. 3), but since I was unable to locate what must have been the
inaugural issue of this periodical I cannot conrm my suspicion that the
images were those of Tpies.
44. With regard to the storys critical neglect, consider Alazrakis article on
Cortzars recent short stories in which he literally mentions every story in
We Love Glenda So Much except Grati (1983). Note, too, the absence of
Grati from Yovanovichs chapter on Cortzars short ction (1991).
Oddly, even a study of La novela hispanoamericana en segunda persona
(Gnutzmann 1983) does not cite the story, though its author does discuss
Cortzar and other short stories, albeit not those as short as Grati (e.g.,
Fuentess Aura; 106). The only analyses I have been able to nd that do
more than merely mention the story appear in Peavlers mainly excellent
overview of Cortzars career (1990: 9091), though there it is under the
Notes to Pages 181183
248
rubric of The Realistica group he deems less satisfying aesthetically
(93); and in Rhl-Schulzes general study of alienation in recent Argentine
ction (1990: 23637). Rhl-Schulze makes several interesting points but
draws a conclusion opposite mine that the form proves lack of communi-
cation and thus failure and alienation. The glass is half-empty from her
point of view and half-full from mine. A tantalizing but very short essay by
Roemer begins to adumbrate some similar positions to those I take here
(1995).
45. In the only statement I could nd by Cortzar on this story, he comments
on its mechanism of horror that, like Kafkas Trial or Orwells 1984 or his
own Segunda Vez, is about el horror sin causa denible, sin causa pre-
cisable (as quoted in Prego 1990: 189). That indirection had become an
unavoidable modus vivendi for Cortzar is apparent in remarks he made in
Mexico in 1983 about (still) being in exile: I have always been interested in
returning to Argentina. What happens is that in Argentina there was and
still is a government that is very interested in my not returning. And as I
have the well-deserved reputation for being crazy but not stupid, I have
taken care not to return to Argentina at a time when I could have entered
without problem because no one would have impeded me, but I am sure
that I would not have left alive. . . . If anyone wants to return to Argentina, it
is the person speaking to you. I am profoundly Argentine, and I always will
be (as quoted in Zamora 1983: 64n. 15).
46. Calvinos novel was originally published in 1979 as Se una notte dinverno
un viaggiatore; the English translation by William Weaver appeared in
1981. Quotations will be provided mainly from the English translation but
also from the original when grammatical features of the Italian are of
interest.
47. Note that for her analysis, Claudia Persi Haines translates the opening
words as you are starting to read (1984: 43). This provides for a more
felicitous utterance, since it is true that the esh-and-blood reader is in the
process, that is, is starting to read. But this is an inaccurate translation of
the original; the Italian idiom stare + per + innitive refers to imminent
action, not to progressive action. Therefore Weavers translation You are
about to begin (3) is more precise.
48. On the other hand, see Tani, who suggests convincingly that Calvino is
punning on the literary-historical term Nouveau Roman (New Novel)
(1984: 133), a pun that wouldnt be invalidated with time.
49. Austins foundational lectures on the performative were delivered at Har-
vard in 1955 and were subsequently published in 1962 by two disciples
(Urmson and Sbis) as How to Do Things with Words. On the idea of the
Notes to Pages 183191
249
literary performative, see Kacandes 1993. Note that in revisiting my own
argument, I have decided to restrict my application of the term literary
performative to only those utterances that are necessarily enacted when
read by any reader.
50. I owe this striking counterexample to Carol Mullen (1987: 10).
51. Note that this is one example of how talk ction undermines Chafes con-
tention that writing is desituated. In Barths passage the immediate physi-
cal and social situation (Chafe 1994: 44) in which the text is received does
matter.
52. See Davies (1981), LeClair (1982), Lively (1982), and Updike (1981), espe-
cially with regard to their exasperation. Wood warns his reader not to
[convert] all its apparent misses into clever hits (1981: 25); while Mullen
(1987), Phelan (1989), Salvatori (1986), myselfand Tani (1984), in a more
limited waybase our analyses on the assumption that the actual reader is
supposed to notice the mist and use it as a goad to reect on ones reading
strategies. This is what I like to think Calvino was referring to when he said,
the reader is meant to see himself at the same time that he reads the book
(my translation; interview with DiMeo 1981: 11).
53. Someone with a higher demand for precision than I have could consider
this a mist similar to the opening line. Or, if one does not follow the
standard practice of reading from beginning to end and in jumping around
lands on this line, then, too, it would be infelicitous.
54. I say only some of the same material, because the Readers fragments
occasionally seem longer than ours. With regard to the rst novelIf on a
winters night a traveler (the title of our entire novel but also the title of the
rst novelistic fragment we and the Reader start to read)the Reader is
described by the narrator as reading repeating signatures (the technical
publication term), and whereas we get a description of him reading the
repeating signatures, we do not read the repetitions ourselves. Davies sees
this as a defect, attributable to the high costs of printing. He thinks Calvino
should have insisted with Einaudi (the Italian publisher) on actually re-
printing the pages of the rst incipit (1981: 773). But Davies misses the point
that this is one of many techniques that force us to recognize the dierence
between our reading and the Readers.
55. This is my hybrid from Brown and Fords terms title and generic rst
name (1964: 236). Calvinos Reader is (humorously) a kind of occupa-
tional title that also functions like a generic rst name (Brown and Fords
Bud and Mack)hence my combination: generic title.
56. Phelan is led astray by Weavers English translation when he claims that use
of the second person allows Calvino to address both sexes (1989: 135). This
Notes to Pages 191194
250
is not an accurate assessment of the original Italian text. For the same
reason, Marie-Laure Ryans argument about the gender morphing of the
narratee-reader needs to be modied (1999: 134).
57. I noted above a similar phenomenon in the opening of Michel Butors La
Modication and in Cortzars Grati. English does not reveal gender so
readily; in Beardsleys terms, it does not exhibit universal referential gen-
derization (1977: 117). Remarkably, the rst-person novel Sphinx by Anne
Garrta (1986) never reveals the gender of the narrator, a grammatical coup
for a French text.
58. Although Judith Fetterly does not discuss second-person texts per se, she
was the rst to comprehensively describe the process of immasculation
that occurs when women read. Compare her comments on women reading
American ction with what I have pointed out above: In such ctions the
female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which
she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that
denes itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against her-
self (1977: xii). Schweickart comments similarly that a crucial feature of
the process of immasculation is the woman readers bifurcated response.
She reads the text both as a man and as a woman. But in either case, the
result is the same: she conrms her position as other (1986: 50). For this
reason, Weavers translation of Lettrice as Other Reader strikes me as
particularly apt, even though it is not literal.
59. For an overview of discussions of the phallocentric claim that he and
man are generic appellations for person, see Smith (1985: 4853). See
also Baron (1986, esp. 13941); Lako (1975, esp. 43); MacKay (1983, esp.
39); McConnell-Ginet (1979, esp. 7880); and Martyna (1983).
60. Although it might seem at rst glance that the narrator wants to further
objectify the Lettrice through specication (that is, the opposite of keeping
her in the abstract condition of pronouns), his intent to resuscitate her is
further emphasized by his pun on the word frame. To put her in the
frame would be to put her into the story of the Reader for the rst time,
since in this particular novel with embedded novels, the diegesis is the
cornice, the frame. In a second-person narrative, to put someone into the
story is to address him or her. And this the narrator is nally doing with
Ludmilla.
61. I have to disagree with the many critics who consider the two readers on
equal footing; see Tani who refers to them as a team of detectives (1984:
130), or Haines, who calls them two kindred spirits (1984: 49), or Orr who
describes their reading as a dynamic activity performed together (1985:
218). By paying close attention to the text it is possible to discover that they
Notes to Pages 194201
251
do very few things together; furthermore, several passages that would ap-
pear to refer to both the Lettore and the Lettrice are actually focalized
through the male reader, thus we often have the formulation you and
Ludmilla (91) rather than a true second-person plural. Some instances
when an actual second-person plural form is used turn out to be the
Lettores fantasies, e.g., when he imagines kissing Ludmilla in the pro-
fessors oce (72).
62. A more accurate translation of the Italian would be husband and wife,
though Weavers translation (man and wife) supports my argument that
readers are meant to pick up on the larger issue of sexism.
5. interactivity
1. See http://schiller.dartmouth.edu/hr/ (or e-mail Otmar.K.Foelsche@dart
mouth.edu) to access the numerous German classical texts in Annotext, a
multimedia environment for teaching texts (1989) for use on the Mac-
intosh in connection with HyperCard. Prepared texts, special glossaries,
and other materials exist for Goethes Faust, Part I and Die Leiden des
jungen Werther, Lessings Minna von Barnhelm, and Lenzs Die Soldaten,
among others.
2. Most accounts of hypertext trace the idea of nonlinear access of textual
material to a 1945 article by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic Monthly that
predated digital computers. These same accounts credit Ted Nelson with
coining the term hypertext in 1965. Various research teams were actively
engaged in developing hypertext systems in the 1960s and 1970s. However,
systems for microcomputers dont appear until the 1980s: Brown Univer-
sitys Intermedia in 1985, and Apples HyperCard and Schneidermans
HyperTies for pc in 1987.
3. It is interesting to note that Cortzar added a sentence after this in the
second Spanish edition, making it even more explicit that the reader is
supposed to choose one of these two books: El lector queda invitado a
elegir una de las dos posibilidades siguientes: (Cortzars emphasis). This
sentence was not added to subsequent publications of the English transla-
tion.
4. The attentive reader will already become wary, because concluding at chap-
ter 56 would mean not reading about one third of the book; this would not
be normal.
5. For example, one could analyze what has become a rather infamous pas-
sage in chapter 79 about female readers, who are limited, and male
readers, who can function as accomplices of the author (406).
Notes to Pages 202216
252
6. See, too, Whalley, who talks about the myth of linearity, or how, in the
light of hypertext, so-called traditional texts get set up as purely linear
when in fact such texts can be written to weave an entirely non-linear
pattern of association in the readers mind (1993: 9).
7. There are hypertexts that allow for viewing more than one lexia at a time,
but this is not the case here.
8. Similar arrows can be designed into the website itself.
9. Specic lexias and websites can be bookmarked by the browser so they
can be easily and directly accessed at another time.
10. There is a certain similarity of tone, character, and action set up by this
rst lexia that reminds me of Jay McInerneys 1984 second-person novel,
Bright Lights, Big City. Several strands of Gav and Pelosos Interactive
Story continue in this vein: young man, addicted to fast living and drugs,
searches for adventure, nds it hollow and his life a waste, etc. I note,
however, that at least one of the strandsI dont claim to have seen them
allquickly makes it clear that the you-protagonist is a woman.
11. My own limited understanding of Unreal was greatly enhanced by an
article about it (Herz 1998) and by e-mail and phone contact with several
acionados of the game found on-line who generously described to me
their experiences of playing Unreal, but who prefer to remain anony-
mous. My choice of Unreal as opposed to some of the even more popular
games, like Quake has to do with the fact that, to my knowledge at least, it
was the rst commercially successful game to make the reprogramming or
redesign of it relatively easy for nonprogrammers by including editing
tools.
12. One of my informants explained that he was involved with a group of
Unreal players who designed a jetpack so that players could y instead
of run. This would not cause the game to break out of my Talk frame-
work. But the same informant told me that he had friends who had used the
Unreal editor, the game engine, to create a completely dierent kind of
interactive experience, like a virtual tour of Notre Dame. That tour would
have no narrative relationship to Unreal, in my view, and thus would not
be a reply to a move of the original game as statement. It is an inter-
action, but not one that ts within the framework I have developed in
this book.
13. I suggest that MUDs (multiuser domains or dimensions) and MOOs
(MUDs of the Object Oriented variety) similarly represent a new category
of experience. For this reason and because there is such ne work that tries
to describe this experience (Turkle 1995; Haynes and Holmevik 1998), I will
not pursue the genre here.
Notes to Page 217
253
14. See Turkle for insightful comments on how related technologies aect
personal identity (1995).
15. To be sure, there are some interactive games that already tap other emo-
tions besides competition (Caruso 1996). One that should be cited here is
Ceremony of Innocence (produced by Real World) in which the reader-
players reply involves moving the mouse not to harm or kill an opponent
but to manipulate fantastic images painted on envelopes or cards. Once
one nds the key to these images, the envelope opens or the card turns
over and reader-players can read the next installment of a story. I hasten to
note that it could be argued that the reader-players actions do not in and of
themselves involve the representation, the events, or the time sequence of
that story and thus may not meet the criteria I used to restrict this consider-
ation of Talk in hypertext. Furthermore, the game is based on the pre-
viously published Grin and Sabine (book) trilogy of Nick Bantock
(1991, 1992, 1993). In this context, I would like to mention an Australian
project called Juvenate, which at the time of this writing was not yet
widely circulating, but which specically takes as its goal departure from
cinematic and video game experience. In terms of emotions, its vague
plot involves exploring myths about illness. See Hutchinson 2000.
255
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Index
abolitionists. See Wilson, Harriet: cri-
tique of abolitionists by
absent addressee. See Goman, Erving:
on present-absent addressees
action override, 14
addressivity (Bakhtin), xiii
adjacency pair, 4, 5. See also conversa-
tion analysis; turn-taking system
aesthetic attitudes toward novel, 26
African American culture, 34, 36, 3839;
and literature, 226 n.6 n.7, 230 n.50.
See also Mama Day; slave autobiogra-
phy; Wilson, Harriet: Our Nig
Aichinger, Ilse: Spiegelgeschichte
(Mirror Story), 244 n.22
Allen, Robert C., 15, 222 n.20, 223 n.32
Allison, Dorothy: Bastard Out of Car-
olina, 236 n.42
analepsis, 124
Angelou, Maya, 61
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 67
Annotext, 251 n.1. See also hypertext
answering. See Goman: on statement
and reply
apostrophe, 74, 7677, 1036, 14196;
denitions of, xvixvii, 146, 149; ef-
fects of, 14749
applause, xiii, 56, 13, 7273, 220 n.6
Argentine Dirty War. See Cortzar,
Julio: Grati
Arguments, 159, 162
art for arts sake, xiv, 2829, 149, 225
n.45
Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaids
Tale, 1056, 11719, 139, 140
Aury, Dominique, 158
Auschwitz, 69, 116, 133; trials, 171, 246
n.36
Austin, J. L.: How to Do Things with
Words, 183, 185, 248 n.49
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, xii, 33,
8788. See also addressivity
Bal, Mieke, 233 n.21
Balzer, Bernd, 138
Baneld, Ann, 242 n.9 n.13
Barjon, Louis, 159, 160
Barth, John: Life-Story, 146, 157, 184
85, 186, 189
Barthes, Roland, 162, 202, 224 n.37; S/Z
202
Beardsley, Elizabeth, 190. See also lin-
guistic genderization
Benjamin, Walter, 89, 96, 98, 99, 115,
120, 140, 231 n.1 n.3; The Storyteller,
8990, 140
Benveniste, Emile, 31, 14954, 158, 189,
193, 242 n.10
Biber, Douglas, 219 n.1
Biochip5s and wdszo6cs The Phan-
tom Tollbooth Interactive Story,
2059, 210, 211. See also hypertext
Birkerts, Sven, 219 n.1
Bliven, Bruce, 13
Block, Elizabeth, 241 n.4
Bogosian, Eric, 17, 18
Boisdere, Pierre de, 243 n.20
Bolter, Jay, 19899
Booth, Wayne, 28, 162
Brison, Susan, 231 n.3 n.7
Brooks, Gwendolyn: The Mother, 246
n.35
Brooks, Peter, 234 n.27 n.30
Buber, Martin, 88, 14950
Butor, Michel, 181, 243 n.16 n.17; Change
of Heart, xvii, 146, 15762, 163, 170,
172, 181, 189, 209
call-in, 15. See also radio; talk show
Calvino, Italo, 195; If on a winters night
Index
278
Calvino (cont.)
a traveler, ixx, xiixiii, 11, 32, 146,
156, 157, 182, 18596
Camus, Albert: The Fall, 11114, 115, 139;
LHomme rvolt, 115; The Plague, 115;
The Stranger, 235 n.33
Caruso, Denise, 217
Caruth, Cathy, 91, 92, 9495, 96, 125,
129, 131, 135, 137, 140, 236 n.41, 238 n.55
Ceremony of Innocence, 253 n.15. See
also interactivity: and video games
Chafe, Wallace, 89, 206, 221 n.11, 227
n.15, 249 n.51
characterizing genderization, 190. See
also linguistic genderization
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 91
Chatman, Seymour, 24
chatroom, 9
Chodziesner, Gertrud. See Kolmar,
Gertrud
La Chute. See Camus, Albert: The Fall
Cicero: pro Ligario. See Quintilian
Cohn, Dorrit, 231 n.2
communal function. See under language
Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disor-
der. See ptsd
Conrad, Joseph, 32
conversation analysis, 36; and distin-
guishing among addressees, hearers,
and recipients, 31, 15455. See also
turn-taking system
Cortzar, Julio, 17981, 248 n.45, 251 n.3;
Grati, xvii, 146, 157, 17281;
Hopscotch, xvii, 200205, 206, 209,
224 n.40; We Love Glenda So Much,
179, 247 n.44
The Craft of Fiction (Lubbock), 28
Cugoano, Ottobah, 36
Culbertson, Roberta, 94, 98, 103, 122,
125, 140, 237 n.45
Culler, Jonathan, 149, 174, 242 n.12, 247
n.42
cultural studies, xixii, xiv, xvii
cyberspace communities, 21314, 216
17. See also hypertext; interactivity
Davies, Russell, 249 n.54
Deconstruction, 150
deictics, 30, 33, 61, 95, 111, 133, 145, 201,
204, 208, 225 n.47, 237 n.48. See also
Benveniste, Emile
deixis. See deictics
Delbo, Charlotte: None of Us Will Re-
turn, 234 n.31
Deleuze, Gilles. See literature: minor
dialect, 23
dialogue, 31
direct address: in grati, 177; in novels,
33, 63, 80; in radio, 1415; in televi-
sion and lm, 15, 223 n.24
Dirty War. See Cortzar, Julio: Grati
Dblin, Alfred: Berlin Alexanderplatz,
239 n.60 n.67
Doctor Laura (Schlesinger), 19
Doctorow, E. L., 222 n.20
Donahue, 17
Dort, Bernard, 16162, 243 n.16
The Dreamlife of Angels, 244 n.22
dtv (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag),
136, 137
Du Bois, W. E. B., 55
Duke de Sully: Les Oeconomies royales,
244 n.22
eavesdropping, 9, 156, 157, 162, 195
Eichmann-Leutenegger, Beatrice, 134
Eine jdische Mutter. See Kolmar,
Gertrud: A Jewish Mother
electronic chatroom, 9
electronic word processing, 9, 10
Ellis, John, 222 n.17
Elytis, Odysseus, 219 n.5
e-mail, 220 n.9. See also hypertext; in-
teractivity
enabler, 96, 98, 135, 233 n.15
enacted capacities, 6, 24, 198, 224 n.39.
See also participants
Equiano, Olaudah, 36
Esprit, 159, 161
Estang, Luc, 16061, 182
Esta, 3940
Index
279
ethnography of speaking, 2
ethnomethodology, 2
face-to-face interaction, x, 3, 11, 15, 18,
20, 30, 145, 216. See also Goman,
Erving
Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!
10610, 113, 119, 139
Felman, Shoshana, 98, 115, 135
Ferren, Bran, 217
Fetterley, Judith, 250 n.58
ction: eect of movie industry on, 222
n.20; in sense of pretense, 1, 8, 11, 22;
in talk ction, 32, 145; in talk shows,
17
Le Figaro littraire, 159
Fish, Stanley, 30
Flaubert, Gustav, 28
Flint, Christopher, 27
Fludernik, Monika, xii, 241 n.4, 244 n.22
focalization, 76, 100, 129, 233 n.21, 236
n.43, 238 n.58
Frederick, Calvin Je, 238 n.54
Freud, Sigmund, 91, 92, 231 n.1 n.5
Frieze, Irene, 237 n.54
Gaius Caesar, 147. See also Quintilian
game: speech as, 4, 220 n.5; novel as,
200; video (see interactivity; Un-
real)
Gardner, Eric, 60
Garnkel, Harold, 2
Garrta, Anne: Sphinx, 250 n.57
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 3738, 4849,
5253
Gav and Pelosos Interactive Story,
21014. See also hypertext
gender: experience for reader, ix, 192,
195; and grammar, 158, 173, 187, 190
92, 243 n.19, 247 n.38, 250 n.57; mor-
phing, 250 n.56. See also linguistic
genderization
generic masculine, 192
generic title, 188, 189
Genette, Grard, 46, 65, 224 n.37, 241 n.4
Gennadius, John, 4048, 58. See also
Viklas, Dimtris
Germany: Federal Republic, 135; Na-
tional Socialist, 1012, 116, 117, 120,
133, 134, 136, 137, 162, 163, 171; Weimar
Republic, 116, 117, 11920, 127, 13236,
139, 237 n.51, 239 n.61 n.64 n.67
Gilman, Sander, 237 n.51
global village, xii, 219, n.2
Goman, Erving, 26, 1418, 24, 25, 29,
60, 72, 85, 88, 222 n.23, 223 n.24; on
present-absent addressees, 16, 18, 32;
on statement and reply, xiii, 4, 155,
160, 183, 184. See also turn-taking sys-
tem
Gordimer, Nadine: Burgers Daughter,
101, 1036
grati, 172, 175, 176, 177, 247 n.40. See
also Cortzar, Julio: Grati
Gratti. See Cortzar, Julio: Grati
Grass, Gnter: Cat and Mouse, xvii, 146,
157, 16271, 178; The Tin Drum, 163,
244 n.24
Greece: as (residualUN/secondary) oral
culture, xix, 39, 227 n.21, 229 n.38;
War for Independence, 3946, 60, 75,
226 n.8, 227 n.14; and WWII, 3536,
62, 6566, 69, 75, 229 n.41. See also
Modern Greek
Grisham, John, 20
Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw,
3638, 48, 55, 64, 228 n.26. See also
Talking Book
Grossman, Dave, 221 n.14
Guattari, Flix. See literature: minor
Habermas, Jrgen, 19, 223 n.31
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 66
Hartman, Georey, 96, 119, 233 n.15
Haviland, John B., 3435
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Haunted
Mind, 244 n.22
Haynes, Melinda: Mother of Pearl, 224
n.32
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 32
Index
280
Henriot, Emile, 160, 161, 209, 243 n.17
Herman, Judith, 90, 91, 96, 113, 135;
Trauma and Recovery, 90
Herodotus, 148, 151, 154, 155, 156, 182
Historikerstreit (historians debate), 246
n.36
Holocaust, 99, 136, 240 n.69; survivors
testimony, 94, 96, 97, 119
holocaust of Southern racism, 107
Homer: Iliad, 148, 151, 154, 156
Hymes, Dell, 2
hypermedia, 199. See also hypertext; in-
teractivity
hypertext, 197217, 225 n.42; clicking in,
2067, 211; cursor in, 206, 207; deni-
tions of, 198, 199; deictic equivalents
in, 31; e-mailing in, 209, 213; hot links
in, 209, 210; linearity in, 202; origins
of, 251 n.2; underlining in, 206, 211.
See also interactivity
Hypertext Faust, 199. See also An-
notext
ide xe, 92, 93, 231 n.6. See also mem-
ory: traumatic
Iliad. See Homer
immasculation, 250 n.58
interaction vs. message content, x, xix,
1, 14, 17
interactive Talk: as assembling, 200
205; as co-designing, 21417; as co-
writing, 21014; as sequencing, 205
10
interactivity, xvii, 197217; in MOOs
and MUDs, 220 n.9, 252 n.13; and
movies, 217; and stories, 199, 200,
20514; and video games, 198, 21417,
221 n.14; and websites, 20514, 215.
See also cyberspace communities
interpretive community, 30, 75
irresistible invitation of you, 183. See
also literary performative
iterative narrative, 65
Jakobson, Roman, 35, 40, 220 n.1, 233
n.15
James, Henry, xiii, 28
Janet, Pierre, 9193, 113, 140, 231 n.5, 232
n.11 n.12, 233 n.16, 235 n.34; patient of
(Irne), 9293, 94, 100, 232 n.13
Jea, John, 36
Jeerson, Gail, 2
Johnson, Barbara, 14950, 151, 164, 241
n.3, 245 n.28, 246 n.35
Jones, Gayle, 33
Joyce, James: Ulysses, 100
Juster, Norton: The Phantom Tollbooth,
205
Juvenate, 253 n.15. See also interac-
tivity
Kacandes, Irene, 241 n.4, 242 n.14, 249
n.49
Kafka, Franz, 23, 114
Kartiganer, Donald, 234 n.25
Katz und Maus. See Grass, Gnter: Cat
and Mouse
Kindheitsmuster. See Wolf, Christa: Pat-
terns of Childhood
King, Debra Walker, 60
Kolmar, Gertrud (Gertrud
Chodziesner): A Jewish Mother, xvi,
99, 11617, 11940; The Poetic Work,
119; Susanna, 134, 135, 136; Woman
and the Animals, 136
Kozlo, Sarah, 15
Lake, Ricki, 18
Lako, Robin Tolmach, 2123, 26, 219
n.1, 224 n.34 n.35
Landow, George P., 198, 202, 206, 225
n.42
Lang, Fritz: M-Eine Stadt such einen
Mrder, 134, 239 n.64 n.67
Langford, Gerald, 234 n.26 n.30
language: evanescence of, 9; communal
function of, 84, 224 n.36; phatic func-
tion of, 40, 85; conative function of,
220 n.1; inection in, 190; interac-
tional conception of, 23; second-
person pronoun in, 152; tempo of, 8,
227 n.15. See also Benveniste, Emile;
deictics
Index
281
Lasker-Schler, Else, 136
Laub, Dori, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 107, 135,
140, 233 n.15 n.16, 234 n.31
Laurel, Brenda, 199
Lausberg, Heinrich, 241 n.4 n.6
Ledbetter, James, 223 n.25
Leiris, Michel, 15960, 161
Levin, Murray Burton, 17, 20
lexia: dened, 202
Leys, Ruth, 232 n.12, 233 n.16
Lifton, Robert Jay, 233 n.19
Limbaugh, Rush, 16
linguistic genderization, 19091, 192,
194, 243 n.19, 250 n.57
linguistics 2, 3, 146, 220 n.1. See also so-
ciolinguistics
listenership: responsibilities of, 6188;
in trauma, 107
literacy gap, 3961
literary performative, 18385, 186, 187,
190, 192, 205, 249 n.49
literature: close reading of, xii; minor,
39, 226 n.6; sentimental, 41, 49, 226
n.7, 228 n.25; social status of, x, xi, xiv
Longinus, 14749, 155, 161, 182, 183, 227
n.20
Lottman, Herbert R., 113, 235 n.33 n.36
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(Eliot), 197
Lubbock, Percy, xiii, 28
Lucente, Gregory, 195
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 28
Mama Day (Naylor), xv, 34, 38, 7588
Mann, Thomas: Dr. Faustus, 225 n.46
Marconi, Guglielmo, 221 n.16. See also
radio
Maron, Monika: The Defector, 11415,
129
Marrant, John, 36
masculine as universal, ix, 250 n.59
McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 19192
McHale, Brian, 241 n.4
McInerney, Jay: Bright Lights, Big City,
252 n.10
McLuhan, Marshall, xi, 1314, 16, 216,
219 n.2
McMeans, Orange Edward, 12
media, 10, 14, 15, 217, 222 n.20, 223 n.25,
223 n.32. See also McLuhan, Marshall;
Ong, Walter; radio; television
memory: habit, 92; narrative, 91, 92;
traumatic, 9293, 113, 124
Metaxs, 6566, 67, 68
microphone, 8, 9, 224 n.33
Minow, Martha, 135, 138
mise en abme, 47, 177, 178
Mitwissen, 126
Modern Greek: language, 48; literature,
xixxx, 39, 48, 219 n.5, 226 n.6 n.7
n.9, 227 n.23. See also Tachtss,
Kstas: The Third Wedding Wreath;
Viklas, Dimtris: Luks Lras
Modernism, 28, 29
modernity: role in talk shows of, 20
La Modication. See Butor, Michel:
Change of Heart
Moerman, Michael, 3
MOOs and MUDs. See interactivity
Morrissette, Bruce, 241 n.4, 243 n.22
Morse, Margaret, 223 n.29
Munson, Wayne, 18, 223 n.25
narratee (also narrataire): denitions
and history of, 24, 224 n.37 n.38, 241
n.4; role of, in talk ction, 25, 111, 112
narrative apostrophe: dened, 14445,
241 n.4; as performance, 18196; as
political resistance, 17281; as resusci-
tation, 16271; spectrum of identica-
tion of, 15657. See also apostrophe
narrative witnessing, 95140, 145; cir-
cuits of schematized, 97; interper-
sonal, 1058; intrapsychic, 99105;
literary-historical, 11516; surrogate,
10811; textual, 11115; transhistori-
cal-transcultural, 11619. See also
testimony
narratology: and models of communi-
cation, 2426; story vs. discourse, 93,
232 n.10
narrator: degrees of perceptibility of,
224 n.38; rst-person, 225 n.46, 231
Index
282
narrator (cont.)
n.2; rst-person communal, 7688,
230 n.50; role in talk ction of, 2425;
speaking objects as, 27; engaging, 39;
traditional omniscient, 189
Naylor, Gloria: Mama Day, xv, 34, 38,
7588
Nazi Germany. See Germany: National
Socialist
Nesaule, Agate, 232 n.13
Netzer, Klaus, 158
New Criticism, 28
Newton, Adam Zachary, 11213
nouveau roman. See under novel
novel: history of, 2629, 227 n.22;
nouveau roman, 149, 158, 182, 243 n.17,
248 n.48
Ong, Walter, 1012, 23, 33, 37, 62, 221 n.15,
224 n.34, 229 n.38 n.42. See also pri-
mary orality; residual orality; second-
ary orality; technologizing of the word
Oprahs Book Club, 224 n.32. See also
Winfrey, Oprah
oral culture. See orality vs. textuality;
primary orality
orality vs. textuality, xixii, 7, 10, 2123,
3638, 6288, 219 n.1
oratory. See rhetoric
Otten, Karl: The Empty House, 134, 136
paratext, 46, 58, 87, 158, 230 n.48 n.50
participant, 4, 5, 6, 18; in talk ction,
2425, 225 n.41
party. See participant
percepticide, 175
performative, 183, 185. See also Austin,
J. L.; literary performative
phatic function. See under language
Philipsen, Gerry, 84
philosophy, 2, 146
Picon, Gaetan, 15859
Pingaud, Bernard, 159, 161, 243 n.18
postmodern, post-Modernism: deni-
tions of, 29, 196, 225 n.45
post-textual literacy, 221 n.10
Pouillon, Jean, 159
Pratt, Mary Louise, xii
pretense. See under ction
primary orality, 7, 10, 11, 1617, 33, 37
39, 62. See also orality vs. textuality
Prince, Gerald, 30, 111, 199, 201, 224 n.37
n.38, 241 n.4
print culture: threats to, xi
ptsd (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder), 9091, 11415, 233 n.16, 236
n.41
public sphere, 19
Pynchon, Thomas, 21
Quake, 252 n.11. See also hypertext
Quintilian, 147, 149, 15051, 154, 155, 156,
158, 161, 170, 241 n.6, 242 n.7 n.8
quoted dialogue, 31
quoted interior monologue, 125, 129, 139
radio, 1221, 15253, 221 n.16, 222 n.23;
all-talk, 15; announcing, 1415, 222
n.21; early experiences of, 1213, 187.
See also talk show: radio
Raillard, Georges, 159
reader address, 29, 4045
reader-response criticism, 2930
reader response in talk ction, 25
reading process, 21, 4344, 74, 160, 192,
2045. See also Talk
Reddick, John, 244 n.25
referential genderization, 190, 191. See
also linguistic genderization
residual orality (Ong), xx, 229 n.38
rhetoric, 144, 14656, 241 n.4; political
consequences of, 150, 171, 181
Ribero, Mike, 217
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 224 n.38
n.39, 244 n.25
Rittner, Carol, 136, 137
Robbe-Grillet, Alain: Jealousy 159, 243
n.17
Rhl-Schulze, Barbara, 248 n.44
Roma-Sinti, 239 n.67
Roof, Judith, 144, 240 n.2, 241 n.3
Roth, John K., 136, 137
Index
283
Rubiner, Michael, 19798, 200
Rhle-Gerstel, Alice, 237 n.51
Rule, Jane: This Is Not for You, xvii, 141
46, 151, 156, 157, 158, 165, 192
Sacks, Harvey, 2
Salptrire, 91. See also Janet, Pierre
Sartre, Jean Paul, 235 n.36
Saurraute, Nathalie: Tropisms 159
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 220 n.1
Scheglo, Emanuel, 2
Schirin, Deborah, 242 n.11
secondary orality, 132, 19596, 219 n.2,
221 n.10; denitions of, x, 1, 6, 7, 11;
link to talk shows, 21; self-conscious-
ness in, 11, 12, 19596, 201; as spoken-
written wor(l)d, 6, 8, 2123, 29
Seferis, George, 219 n.5
self-talk, 1, 6; in literature, 1015
Se una notte dinverno un viaggiatore.
See Calvino, Italo: If on a winters
night a traveler
Sha, Monika, 119, 138, 235 n.38, 237
n.53, 239 n.62 n.65
Shattuc, Jane, 1720, 26, 222 n.18
shifters, 151. See also deictics
Simon, Claude: The Wind, 159, 243 n.17
situatedness (Chafe), 9
slave autobiography, 4950
Smith, Henry A., 236 n.40, 239 n.62 n.63
soap-operas. See under television
sociolinguistics: borrowings from, 30;
developments in, 23
Sparr, Thomas, 134
speech: central function of, 23; human
development of, 221 n.13; initial move
in, 30. See also language; Talk
speech-exchange system. See turn-
taking system
Spitzer, Leo, 160
spoken-written wor(l)d. See under sec-
ondary orality
Stanzel, Franz, 231 n.2
Stephens, Mitchell, 219 n.1
Stepto, Robert, 4950, 61, 225 n.1
Sterne, Laurence, 26
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1, 2
Stewart Susan, 247 n.40
Stock, Brian, 219 n.2
storytelling, 23; bedtime, 4143; deni-
tion of, xv; as mode of talk ction, 29,
3388, 145; in novels, 3132; in oral
cultures, xviiixx; in relation to de-
velopment of novel, 27; in relation to
trauma, 90, 9294, 95, 11011. See
also Benjamin, Walter
story vs. discourse. See under narratol-
ogy
sublime, 148
subliminal invitation of you, 151, 155
56, 182, 183
Suleiman, Susan R., 224 n.39
Swift, Graham: Waterland, 89, 11011,
114
Tachtss, Kstas: The Third Wedding
Wreath, xv, 34, 38, 6176
Tal, Kali, 98
talk: denitions of, 26; as distinct from
conversation, 5; eects of hearing
more, 7, 1011. See also Talk
Talk: as collaboration, 197217; deni-
tions of, xiiixiv, 23, 7273, 133, 140,
145, 15556, 17071, 17881, 183, 185,
19596, 2012, 205; as interaction,
xiii, 132, 219 n.4; modes of, xiv; as
performance, 14196; as sustenance,
3388; as witnessing, 89140
talk explosion: denitions of, x, 1, 8. See
also secondary orality
talk ction: denitions of, x, 1, 23, 29;
pleasure of, 217; as turn-taking sys-
tem, 2426
Talking Book, 3638, 48, 225 n.3, 226 n.4
talk show, x, 2, 1121, 187, 223 n.24 n.30;
audience size for, 20; denition of, 15,
18; expense of, 223 n.25; radio, 1121;
television, 1121, 222 n.18
Tannen, Deborah, xviiixx
Tpies, Antoni, 17980
Taylor, Diana, 172, 175, 180, 247 n.41
technologizing of the word (Ong), 10
Index
284
telephone, 7, 9, 12, 13, 153, 221 n.16, 222
n.19
television: news interviews, 6, 16; prot,
223 n.32; rhetorical mode vs. cine-
matic mode of, 15; soap operas, 15,
21314; viewing, 14, 222 n.20, 222 n.21;
talk show, 1121, 222 n.18
testimony, xvxvi, 23, 89140. See also
narrative witnessing
text-as-statement, 24
This Is Not for You (Rule), xvii, 14146,
151, 156, 157, 158, 165, 192
three-way announcing. See radio: an-
nouncing
Todorov, Tzvetan, 224 n.37
Tompkins, Jane P., 29
To trto stefni. See Tachtss, Kstas: The
Third Wedding Wreath
trauma: denitions of, 89, 9091; heal-
ing of, 9294, 135, 140, 237 n.49; na-
ture of, xv, 231 n.1; secondary, 110, 128,
234 n.31, 237 n.54; seeing and, 109,
130, 234 n.29, 237 n.46; symptoms of,
xvi, 90, 122; text as, xvi, 9597, 11115,
138. See also narrative witnessing: tex-
tual
traumatic memory, recall, reenactment.
See memory: traumatic
Trezise, Thomas, 98, 140, 234 n.31
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), x, xiii, 26
T. S. Eliot Interactive (Rubiner), 197
Tubero. See Quintilian
Turkle, Sherry, 220 n.9, 253 n.14
turn-taking system, xiii; application of,
to prose ction, 2426; denitions of,
36; examples of, xiii, 56, 220 n.8; in
hypertext, 208, 21213; in video
games, 21516; visual form of, 17578.
See also Talk
Tziovas, Dimitris, 10, 26, 66
Die berluferin. See Maron, Monika:
The Defector
underlining. See under hypertext
Unreal, 21417. See also hypertext; in-
teractivity
Van der Hart, Onno, 9192
Van der Kolk, B. A., 9192
video games. See under interactivity
La Vie reve des anges. See The Dream-
life of Angels
Viklas, Dimtris: Luks Lras, xv, 34,
3948, 58, 5960, 63, 87, 158
virtual reality, 199
vouvoiement, 112, 158
Warhol, Robyn, 2728, 29, 39, 224 n.39,
227 n.13 n.17, 242 n.12
Waterland. See Swift, Graham
websites. See under interactivity
Weimar Republic. See under Germany
Weiss, Peter: Die Ermittlung (The Inves-
tigation), 246 n.36
Wenzel, Hilda, 116, 13335, 235 n.39
Whalley, Peter, 252 n.6
Wiesel, Elie, 98
Wigren, Jodie, 94, 101, 138, 140, 236 n.44,
237 n.49 n.54
Wilson, Harriet: Our Nig, xv, 34, 4861,
75, 158, 228 n.25 n.35; critique of aboli-
tionists by, 51, 53, 5759, 228 n.27
n.29; and use of words Nig and
nigger, 5155, 228 n.31 n.33
Winfrey, Oprah, 16, 18, 19, 20, 223 n.27,
224 n.32
Winnett, Susan, 185
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 220 n.5
witnessing: circuits of, xvi, 95. See also
narrative witnessing
witness narratives: dened, 90, 231 n.2;
examples of, 99140
Wolf, Christa: Patterns of Childhood,
1013
Wolfe, Thomas, 21
Woltmann, Johanna, 135
Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway, 100
word-processing, 9, 10
285
In the Frontiers of Narrative series:
Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion
by Irene Kacandes