R. Rawdon Wilson
“Wilson’s forcefully, at times passionately, written book has a dual purpose: first, to study how Shakespeare told stories and how he understood narrative; and, secondly, how useful contemporary narrative theory is to such an understanding. Swimming against the current tide of performance theory, Wilson addresses the central issue of narrative, which (he claims in his first chapter) is not only at the heart of all literary experience but also of our own personal lifeworld. In other words, here Shakespeare is studied as literature rather than as drama. . . . [Wilson] is on the whole responsive to a wide range of possible interpretations and approaches (mainly employing narratology, textual semiotics, and Bakhtinian theory, but also attending to the work of deconstructionists, poststructuralists, and new historicists), and intelligently questions their (and his own) methodological usefulness for, and limitations to, an understanding of Shakespeare.
“The last chapter, “Boundaries,” is a bold attempt to study the problems of his own methodology, the paradoxes and dilemmas inherent in narrative theory, through the lens of Hamlet. Contemporary narrative theory, Wilson claims, has finally supplied the tools to study, or at least more completely articulate, Shakespeare’s complex use of narrative, and reveal (again) how ‘problem-filled Shakespeare’s texts actually are’. At the end of the chapter, he argues that theory is best regarded as a ‘question-quest’ or as ‘hyperplay’: a mode of exploration which ‘follows paths rather than seeks destinations as such’, a kind of theoretical negative capability . This is an appropriate ending to a chapter that raises many questions about the limitations of narrative theory, especially the difficult issue of mapping interactive and overlapping semiotic domains and boundaries. . . . ‘Narrative seduces the vision’, Wilson confesses early on in his insightful book, and it makes us the plays differently. He’s right.” Irena R. Makaryk, “Review,” English Studies in Canada 23: 3 (September, 1997): 360-2. Http://www.carleton.ca/esc/index.html
“One of the most interesting and provocative of recent books on Shakespeare is Rawdon Wilson’s Shakespearean Narrative, a particularly well-researched and wide-ranging study that addresses the nature and functions of narrative in the plays and the long poems. With a strong interest in Renaissance writing and in contemporary literary theory, Wilson approaches Shakespeare as a Renaissance rather than Elizabethan figure, one whose intellectual range and writing strategies invite consideration in the larger context of Spanish and Italian, as well as English, traditions and practice. Thus, Cervantes, Ovid and Spenser, in addition to recent developments in narrative theory, are important components of this frame of reference and the study demonstrates in its critical practice the possibilities that it claims argument for an eclectic and pluralistic mode of analysis, for ‘seeing with a fly’s eye’. The result is a strong meditation upon narratology as well as an exploration of narrative processes in the works of Shakespeare.
“. . . . As Wilson argues narrative is a basic rhetorical strategy in the Renaissance and a fundamental mode of human understanding and representation. Involving sequencing, relationships, order and attempts at explanation, it invites attention to history, memory and the processes of construction, exchange and reception. In an appropriately eclectic manner, he provides an initial survey of narrative modes and effects by concentrating on Othello, Titania, Horatio and Iago as story-tellers, consolidating the illustration with precise reference to Don Quixote and The Faerie Queene. If there is indeed something special about Renaissance culture that produced its particular love of language and delight in narrative forms, it is also the case, even as the moods of play change from one text and one culture to another, that the opportunities for narrative invention and exploration, are manifold, irresistible and endemic in human culture.
“. . . . [Wilson’s] examination of narrative conventions and practice is attentive to the play of language and, acknowledging the inevitability of misreading, he subjects theories and interpretations to persistent questioning thereby holding the texts open always to new constructions. With an emphasis upon slips, tricks, riddles, disguise, deceit, duplicity and paradox in the texts, he explores the entrancing possibilities of ambiguity, uncertainty and different meanings within the narrative pathways that construct fictional worlds.” Brian Edwards, “Rereading Shakespeare,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 25: 1-2 (March-June/Mars-Juin, 1998): 187-97.
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CONTENTS
Preface 9
1. Narrative 15
2. Conventions 48
3. Voice 77
4. World 113
5. Character 148
6. Boundaries 183
Notes 220
Works Cited 228
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In Shakespearean Narrative, I wish to examine some of the claims made by recent narrative theory, especially (if not exclusively) narratology. I shall be interested in the problem of definition, but I shall be even more interested in the nature of narrative conventions, their range and variety. Above all, I shall explore the problem of innovation. What constitutes novelty, the brilliant lightening of the previously-unseen, in narrative? Must a storyteller invent a radically new convention to displace one that has been commonly in use? Or does a fresh use of an old convention add up to a significant narrative innovation? How well do theories of narrative bear up against the challenge of complex, innovative narrative practices? What follows in Shakespearean Narrative is, in part, a sustained meditation upon the promise of recent narrative theory. I shall continuously examine the claims of narratology against the practice of a great storyteller, Shakespeare. In doing this, I hope to see Shakespeare somewhat differently. Shakespeare has seldom been considered in terms of his narratives or, more specifically, his command of narrative conventions. A discussion of Shakespeare that focusses upon his narrative achievements may add little to the way one sees his stagecraft and his grasp of dramatic conventions, but it should add quite a bit to the understanding of a neglected dimension of his work, his narrative skills. There are thus two directions to this study: Shakespeare has not been often, and never analytically, considered strictly in narrative terms; narrative theory, as it has developed in the past thirty years, has never considered Shakespeare (indeed, it has largely been restricted to modern literature, as Genette wrote Narrative Discourse around an analysis of Proust, or to the history of the novel), nor many of his contemporaries.
Traditional accounts of Shakespeare have normally stressed, for no doubt excellent reasons, the problems of theatre, dramaturgy, dramatic conventions, stage history and, to a lesser extent, the problems of intellectual background, the milieu of the late Renaissance and the incessant changes within it. The argument thus develops a double-edged movement: narratological strategies are employed to develop an explanatory model for Shakespeare and Shakespeare's narrative performance is used to test the scope and fruitfulness of these strategies.
Shakespeare is a great narrative artist. He wrote many narratives that, often possessing transfixing force, display a remarkable command of narrative conventions. If he had never written a single play, he would continue to live in the mastery of narrative that is evident in works such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Indeed, it is only because he does understand the conventions and purposes of narrative so well that he is able to write the plays that make it so difficult to think of him as a narrative artist. Shakespeare's plays contain many narratives: in the most urgent moments, characters interrupt the dramatic action to tell stories that evoke a different action, a different place and time, even an absent fictional world, and they do this with an extensive and varied range of the storyteller's traditional skills. Moreover, in several important respects, Shakespeare's plays are narrative. These may sound like strange, to some ears even outrageous, assertions. Everyone knows that Shakespeare was a working dramatist, a man of the theatre, an actor himself, whose plays are marvellously actable, a playwright with very practical objectives and concerns, perhaps a businessman with a hard eye cast towards his profits. He belongs to the theatre, to the world of acting companies, to the stage, to the fast-paced, turbulent flow of Elizabethan tavern life, of literary exchange and contest that was carried on, thoughtless of posterity, in kaleidoscopic swirl.
Everyone knows this, common knowledge transmitted by English departments, and there should be little need to discuss it further. Yet it is a very partial account. It leaves many things poorly explained. The conceptual intensity and scope of the plays have never been adequately accounted for by this hypothesis. (And hence have arisen the various "heresies" that elevate claimants, Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, to take Shakespeare's place.) Above all, the obvious narrative elements can be overlooked, or underread, but they cannot be given a full, satisfying reading on the hypothesis of his practicality, work-a-dayness, acting company mentality, or his supposed dedication to entertainment. In this study, I shall examine both the narrative elements in Shakespeare's plays and the bearing of his narrative poems upon his dramatic art. The argument is directed towards understanding Shakespearean narrative both as a complex system of conventions and as a socio-cultural event. I do not intend to deny that Shakespeare was a playwright, a man of the theatre, or even a practical man with multiple business interests. I have nothing so giddy in mind. I want only to explore in considerable depth what narrative means in the plays. The implications of finding complex, highly developed narrative, even an immensely sophisticated grasp of what may be called (in today's lingo) narrativity, are far-reaching. Approached as problems in narrative craft, the plays do not look as they once did when they were merely plays. Narrative seduces the vision.
Shakespeare's narrative has encountered a pedagogical and critical destiny rather like that of the Gentleman in King Lear or, perhaps better, the Second Clown, the "Other," in Hamlet: ignored, cut and forgotten. Even though he wrote two narrative poems, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, both of which may be called "masterpieces in the old sense of the word," a third minor narrative (if one accepts the authenticity of A Lover's Complaint), and sonnets which have struck obsessive critics as telling, obsessively, a story of some kind, there seems never to have been a major scholarly effort to discuss all of Shakespeare's narrative within a single perspective. What has been missing is a systematic analysis of Shakespeare's use of narrative in all its several aspects and in its pervasiveness, including the specific conventions that structure the narratives embedded in the plays. One reason that no such explanatory model has been developed would seem to be the orthodox disinclination to grant that the plays are themselves extremely narrative both in structure and in detail. Behind that disinclination lies the scholarly refusal to consider narrative (what it is, how it works, its conventions, its effects: narrative qua narrative) as an area for analysis, a possible field for conceptual discussion, when it occurs within drama. It is as if narrative and drama excluded one another; as if narrative, subordinated to the purposes of the drama containing it, ceased to be what it is.
Dr. Johnson initiates, and still best represents, the tradition in Shakespearean criticism that sees the narrative elements in Shakespeare's drama as slowing, or even breaking, the forward movement of the dramatic action. Narrative, or "narration" in Johnson's own word, impedes the action and generally functions, when it is present, as an alien body in the plays. "In narration," Johnson writes,
Shakespeare affects a disproportionate pomp of diction, and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in a few.
He continues to put this judgment into a perspective, now integral to the ideology of orthodox Shakespearean studies, that sees drama as superior to narrative. It is more active, more virile one suspects, and altogether more exciting. Shakespeare's talents, and perhaps his obligations as well, were concentrated, for Johnson, in his dramatic genius alone. "Narration," Johnson adds
in dramatic poetry is aturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action; it should therefore always be rapid, and enlivened by frequent interruption. Shakespeare found it an encumberance, and instead of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendour.
Since Johnson there has been a nearly overwhelming disposition to ignore, even to disprize, the narrative aspects of Shakespeare's plays or to assimilate the embedded narratives, naturalizing them as "lines," "speeches" or "declamations," to the model of drama. In this respect, as in others, Johnson has set the tone for subsequent scholarship: Shakespeare has been insufficiently admired for his narrative craft.
Yet this is surely a strange attitude. The presence of narrative within drama, separately and distinctively constituted and manifesting its own (nondramatic) conventions, is widespread and, perhaps, only what one would expect in Renaissance writing. Narrative towers over both the literary practice and the critical disputes of Shakespeare's age. As epic, Ovidian epyllia, history, romance, pastoral, (always and everywhere) allegory, hagiography, anecdote and yarn, biographical, geographical and exploratory report, and ultimately the novel, narrative dominates Renaissance literature. Narratio, the second and major move in a forensic oration, comprises the fundamental act of collocating incidents into an effective sequence so that a compelling case may be made. It is not merely a rhetorical strategy for Renaissance theorists, but a basic mode of human thinking. Complemented by the resources of analogy, narratio makes available one of man's few handles upon reality. Leonard Cox, writing in the 1530's, observes in The Arte or Craft of Rhetoryke that the narratio or "tale wherin persones are praysed" is a statement of "lyfe and doynges after ther fasshyon of an historye."
It locates the sequence and continuity of human life and orders life-events into a chain of significance. Similarly, though with greater reach, in The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham writes that
no kinde of argument in all the Oratorie craft, doth better perswade and more universally satisfie than example, which is but the representation of old memories, and like successes happened in times past. . . . the Poesie historicall is of all other next the divine most honorable and worthy, as well for the common benefit as for the speciall comfort every man receiveth by it.
Whether as forensic narratio or as more widely focussed in poetry for human enjoyment and enlightenment, narrative was seen as ordering life, establishing significance and keeping alive past deeds. It was memory's tongue. (From Chapter 1.)
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Narratives do not all perform the same tasks nor do they all display the same characteristic regularities. Shakespeare's narrative exhibit an amazing flexibility and range. In each narrative there are a number of different conventions, but no narrative shows the full range that Shakespeare employs throughout his writing. It is the width of this spectrum, and the seemingly limitless capacity within it for transformation and transposition, that (partly, at least) contributes to Shakespeare's amazing fluidity. Consider the following parable.
I am walking down a street with a friend who is an engineer. We turn a corner and discover, parked in a vacant lot, a saucer-shaped UFO. "What is that?" I ask. My friend, smug in her specialized knowledge, replies that it would be impossible to explain to someone who is not an engineer. "Study engineering," she says, "and then maybe I can explain it." I go away, determined to understand the UFO, and study the whole history of engineering. I learn about levers, wheels, axles, valves, internal combustion, servo-mechanisms, printed circuits, logicboards and so forth. Unhappily, all my studies do not lead to understanding. The UFO that had been parked on the vacant lot remains inexplicable. Then one day, walking once more, I encounter the same UFO. This time the door is open and an intelligent-appearing creature invites me aboard. It explains to me how the vehicle works. Suddenly, the entire history of engineering is clear. I understand its development and even where it may go next. But its history, before I had leapt beyond it, had not prepared me for what had been coming.
There is a UFO-like quality to all great art. Works of art have had histories, not merely a context but a body of relevant skills as well, but these histories have not made anyone ready for new art. Nothing in the history of English drama quite prepares us for Shakespeare. (Just as nothing in the history of romance narrative prepares us for Cervantes, or at least for his Don Quixote.) Having read Shakespeare, the antecedent history of drama takes on a fresh clarity. T. S. Eliot observes, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that each new, original work of art changes the tradition out of which it has arisen. It re-orders the structure of that tradition. Shakespeare certainly has this transformative, UFO-like, effect on his antecedent traditions.
If one thinks of all the conventions present, not merely distinctively narrative, but also poetic and rhetorical, then the sheer
number of structural components constructing any given narrative passage in Shakespeare may be very large. The embedded narratives of the plays, as well as the two narrative poems themselves, manifest complex overlayerings of conventions. The overlayering of different
components, on the levels of language, poetic structure, metaphor, action, and character has usually struck his students as (by one name or another) Shakespeare's fundamental distinctiveness. In a writer whose language is normally intricate and fused, the presence of multiplex narratives, built upon an overlayering of conventions, might be only what the reader should expect. Nonetheless, since it is a characteristic of the narratives, overlayering is the point from which to begin, and perhaps the point with which to end as well. Consider the opening stanza of The Rape of Lucrece:
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire,
Which in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire
And girdle with embracing flames the waist
Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste .
What I have chosen to call "convention" went by other names in Shakespeare's age (trope, device, invention), but it does generally describe what Harry Levin, in tracking the term's spoor, calls the "mechanical details" of artistic creation. The "mechanical details" of Lucrece's opening stanza, its structural components or characteristic regularities, are deceptively complex. What conventions predominate in this stanza? Or, putting the question with the honesty of anticipated results, what conventions can I discover in its foreground?
In the first place, it is possible to distinguish poetic, rhetorical and narrative conventions. The stanzaic form itself is rhyme royal, traditionally appropriate for heavy or lugubrious topics, and the metre follows the requisite iambic pattern except for the initial trochaic substitutions. In the second place, several rhetorical figures structure the action. False desire is a personification, an allegorical type of the kind that inhabits The Faerie Queene and many earlier texts, but also, since the "trustless wings" that bear Tarquin to Lucrece are clearly evil, a demonification. The wings are "trustless" because they will lead to situations in which the personification, false desire, cannot be trusted, not because they are likely to fail in mid flight. Warping the effects of a cause back upon itself as to create its proper epithet is a rhetorical trope known as hypallage. Those treacherous wings also constitute a synecdoche and the stanza generally resonates with parts, descriptive or characterological fragments, that reach out towards their hidden, but monstrous, wholes. The hiding, lightless fire links forward both to Tarquin's act in raping Lucrece and to its consequence, the revolution that brought the Roman monarchy to destruction. The "pale embers" where the fire hides may also be taken as synecdochic, though they are most obviously metaphoric, since they designate an anatomical part of Tarquin but also foreshadow the moral and civil ruin at the poem's close. However, the rhetorical figure that stands out most vividly from the stanza is that of paradox, of conjoining dissimilars. Heather Dubrow remarks that while many readers of Lucrece have observed that it abounds in antitheses, "they have been prone to ignore how often the contrasts in the poem in fact assume the form of syneciosis," the "strange harmony" of contraries. The poem, she continues, "contains enough oxymora to satisfy even a sonneteer." Rhetorical tropes of antithesis, contraries, opposition and purely verbal paradox recur throughout Shakespeare's writing, as they do in most writers of the Renaissance (Dubrow's ironic jab at the "sonneteers" aims directly at the most apparent convention of the Petrarchan sonnet, its elaborate structures of verbal paradox), but they are seldom simply the virtuoso display of rhetorical mastery. Rhetoric, Patricia Parker writes with reference to a central chiasmus in The Comedy of Errors, is not "just decoration but structural analogue and interpretive tool."
Much the same should be said of the rhetorical tropes in the initial stanza of Lucrece. They anticipate, as structural analogues, both the narrative's pivotal event (the elliptic rape) and its tragic consequences (loss of honour, life and power: the dreadful ruins of human hope) and they provide interpretive tools for what succeeds. The privative "lightless" conjoined to fire creates an oxymoron, a particularly overt mode of syneciosis, that looks both ahead to the eruption into visible flames and backwards to the moment, belonging to the story but told only in Shakespeare's "Argument," in Ardea when, in the boastful conversation with Collatinus about wives, the fire had been lit in Tarquin's loins. The anticipatory paradox is recapitulated in the image of the lightless fire lurking "to aspire." Furthermore, that lightless fire, which will in several ways, finally aspire into flames, sounds homophonically in the name of the city, Ardea, from which Tarquin is riding. Though the historical name of a Latin city state, Ardea, as few members of Shakespeare's original reading audience would have missed, resonates paronomastically with the words for burning and passion (ardens, ardeo). F. T. Prince, the Arden editor of Lucrece, comments that the line, "Which in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire," is "good in itself," but shows "how the stanza encourages prolixity." Prolixity (or copia) might rather seem to be the point. Since strucutural analogies reinforce each other, there are no theoretical prescriptions as to how many, or how soon, they should begin. Lanham makes what is the strong case, in opposition to Prince, concerning Shakespeare's language in Lucrece: it "makes sense only if rhetoric, and more especially feudual rhetoric, is the subject of the poem." Finally, the epithet with which the stanza ends, giving to Lucrece "her emblematic character of Chastity," sums the moral purpose of the story, underscoring what had so often been said, if not always, about Lucrece. Sidney, distinguishing "right poets," who have "no law but wit," from those who are "wrapped within the fold of the proposed subject," adduces the example of Lucrece: the right poets "bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see, as the constant through lamenting look of Lucretia, when she punished in herself another's fault." Thus the epithet, "chaste," although it refers immediately to Lucrece's reputation for modesty and conjugal chastity which had partly roused Tarquin, setting "the bateless edge on his keen appetite," also alludes to the the development of the narrative, its abrupt but revolutionary close, to the story-matrix itself and to the symbolic import of Lucrece's name, what she would come to represent in future tellings and retellings.
In the third place, the complex overlayering of conventions includes two that are specifically narrative. First, the initial stanza invokes what must be considered as a fundamental convention of narrative: it moves, analeptically, backwards and, proleptically, forwards in story-time. The whole story-matrix is represented, however sketchily, in the backwards and forwards movements of the initial stanza. The conventions for reordering story-time (the chronological order of the narremes) are among the most distinctive features of narrative discourse. Second, although the narrative begins in the middle of the action, catching Tarquin, "all in post," rushing from Ardea to Collatium, the story-matrix is explicit. The first stanza anticipates the subsequent narrative in this respect: Shakespeare plays off his highly elaborated, amplified, narrative against both the story, well-known and often retold, and the various preceding narrative versions. (What are often taken as specifically narrative conventions, sudden beginnings and the in media res construction, though primarily narrative, characterize drama as well. For that matter, an argument, an exposition or a description might begin suddenly.) Setting a narrative version of a familiar story against the story itself, assuming that its motifs are easily recognizable, is a fundamental act of narrative reflexivity. Shakespeare plays this line often. Hamlet turns upon the possibility of different versions of the same story. In Henry V the Chorus narrates a concurrent version of the play's action. Romeo and Juliet begins with a narrative in the sonnet-prologue which then is retold several times more, in the dramatic action and in stories that characters tell one another. In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare allows an implicit contrast between his amplified version and other prior texts. After all, the story was known from Ovid's Metamorphoses, from Golding's translation, from countless prior versions, including the ekphrasis on the walls of Malacasta's castle in Book III of The Faerie Queene. Like a challenge from the author to his readers, the "Argument" that begins Lucrece retells the story in a "passage of English prose modelled on Latin," and it does so in a form that is very different from the following narrative and that is much closer to the story-matrix since all the essential narremes are sequentially related. It simply does not reflect "the Shakespearean version it prefaces." It might even seem that the discrepancies "form part of the poem, an intended juxtaposition between the received version of the story and the version Shakespeare chooses to tell." This seems like a fruitful way to read the difference between the "Argument" and the narrative. The contrast suggests a mode of play, a reflexive act that calls attention to the elaborated version, that is very much part of the narrative exchange. One convention that no other literary mode executes as well, not even drama with its capacity to include pantomime, dumbshow, puppet-show and (variously) plays-within-plays, is the narrative self-inscribing of other, alternative, versions of a story.
. . . . All stories can be told in many different ways, for a variety of diverse effects, and all stories can be made to reflect one another or even to contain one another. One narrative recalls another (whether in the play of allusiveness or across the implacable fields of intertextuality), bears upon another, can even become another, as the story of Troy becomes, in being contained by, a part of the stories of Hamlet and Lucrece. The transnational, narrative-suffused background of the Renaissance, its collective memory stocked both by ancient tales and their many versions and by idiosyncratic contemporary anecdotes, provided a context in which the boundary-crossing of stories, both across actual national frontiers and across conceptual borders, could sink in, take root and flourish. Stories moved from the margins of society to its center, as new historicists continually point out, the internal borders more uncertain, less rigid than they had once been, admitted narrative cross-flows and gave scope to (in Greenblatt's phrase) narrative improvisation. However one looks at the Renaissance, it seems to have been a period partially defined by its categorical fuzziness, the tremulousness of boundaries, both as a result of the swirling novelities, in exploration and in science as well as in literature, and of the confluence of older traditions, classical and biblical. McAlindon is surely right in arguing that English writers (at least) of the Renaissance learned and benefitted from the presence of cultural oppositions, conceptual antagonisms of many kinds. In such a background, stories travel with the ease, the sprezzatura even, of flying-carpets.
Lucrece seems a particularly unmistakable example of the cross-boundary and infolding possibilities of story-telling. Perhaps it is this narrative complexity that leads Ian Donaldson to remark that Lucrece "raises more questions than it manages to answer." One of the questions that Lucrece raises, unnoted by Donaldson, concerns the purposes of narrative in Shakespeare's plays and the relation of those plays to the intricate narrative poem with which he makes such a forceful claim to literary mastery. The narrative infoldings of Lucrece, in which conventions, even linked networks of them, overlayer each other, publish the mark of all Shakespearian story-telling. Narratives cleave ears: they catch, hold, transfix, illude and frequently delude their narratees. These transactions, pervading Lucrece, point forward to the important, if normally underread, role of narrative in the plays. (From Chapter 2.)
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Tentacular and spectacular, narratives are everywhere in the plays. The stories that are told emphasize the problem of verification: the recessed or absent story may be either true or false, but, if false, it may well be so in direct proportion to the brilliance and persuasiveness of the narrator's skills. Shakespeare's canon creates a galaxy of dramatic worlds in which characters frequently stop to tell their stories, or someone else's story; worlds in which every character is, potentially at least, a story waiting to be told; in which every story evokes a world different, partially or radically, from the world of the dramatic action. Shakespeare creates self-enclosed narratives, though often from fragmentary tokens, each one of which projects a distinct world, and binds them together within the boundaries of dramatic action by the "ligatures of self-reference." The force of narrative to create worlds, and to make narratees "see" these absent alternatives, flows, as Shakespare seems to have understood it, from its capacity to dilate story, to hold its hearers spellbound, kept from play and from the chimney corner, and to transport them, within the playful labyrinths of voice and ear, to other times, spaces and worlds. Narrative's plural worldhood pervades Shakespeare's plays. (From Chapter 3.)
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Boundaries exclude and enclose. They indicate closure. (What had been possible on one side is no longer so on the other, what had been possible before will no longer be so after.) They also provide the opportunity to cross. They block, but also indicate the presence of, paths. One may divide any notional area, any semiotic space or configuration, along the edges of conceptual differences. Seemingly endless, the possibilities mark out innumerable particular ends. Imagine a chess board. The rules constitute boundaries that, insofar as it is a question of playing chess, are necessary. The knight does not corkscrew itself into the bishop's diagonal move. The same game_space sub_divides, according to different rules, into a number of sharply defined areas. Now consider the ghostly demarcations of other games that also inhabit the game_space: games that could be played, and can be imagined. Checkers is there, of course, but so are other games, including private fantasies of children, forgotten variants of chess, faery chess and games as yet unplayed. Consider it steadily enough, then even the Royal Game of Ur might begin to emerge from the pattern of squares. Since notional areas crowd in upon each other, a principle of parsimony seems called for: entia rationis, such as proliferating boundaries, should be methodically shaved. Keep a sharp razor on the desk. Yet boundaries provide one of the characteristic metaphors of narrative theory. Texts seem to divide along many frontiers. Not only do they divide from the extra-textual world, but they do so in many ways: the author's lifeworld, the actual world of the text's claim to represent space and time (the historical and/or empirical world of the Odyssey, say, or that of Don Quixote), the intellectual history that stretches back beyond the specific use of a concept in a literary text. Texts seem also to divide internally into diverse domains. Different characters are sometimes said to possess their individual domains, as areas for action and development, and different plots certainly divide the fictional world into separate domains. Questing within a fictional world is always in question. Keep a sharp razor, but be wary of using it too often.
Each theoretical perspective possesses a number of privileged metaphors which are largely inseparable from its major preoccupations. Romantic criticism and its numerous inheritors, such as biographical criticism, speak in organic metaphors of growth, maturation, flowering, wholeness and perfection. Another distant inheritor, New Criticism, preserves Romanticism's array of metaphors, but adds distinctive turns of its own. The integrated wholes that New Criticism typically discovers comprise paradoxical double strands: esthetic certitude flowers out of ambiguous incertitude, often held in mature perfection by nothing more substantial than a fluttering tone. Formalist criticism in the Russian mode organizes its investigations of texts around both mechanistic metaphors (function, structure, concinnity) and isolating ones (motif, device, code). Marxist criticism metaphorizes literature as systematic exchange between distinct levels: reflection, production, consumption, commodification and class (as ground of consciousness, identity, or mere disparity). Deconstruction has seized upon metaphors of transgression and doublesidedness: hymen, pharmakos, erasure, invagination. Its metaphors point to textual phenomena that are always already two things, at once opposites divided by permeable membranes that permit mutual transgression. Generally, poststructuralism's metaphors embrace puns, riddles, puzzles, paradoxes and aporia to show that literary texts can never be constricted to single manifestations of ideological principles nor to reductive claims concerning genres and conventions. Genuinely heuristic metaphors underscore the co-availability of contradictory terms. Excluded middles are retrieved and (re)placed squarely within textual foregrounds. Poststructuralism speaks in other metaphors of openness and fields: networks, threads (tangled, perplexed, wound and unwound, followed and lost), wefts, weavings, de-weavings, ruptures, chiasmic zigzags, labyrinths. Unlike either Romanticism or structuralism, with their images of esthetically integrated and closed texts, poststructuralism's metaphors project an open and unstable text.
Latter-day structuralisms, such as narratology and textual semiotics, prefer metaphors that indicate a stable text and a regular, unimpeded flow of traffic between signifiers and signifieds. Its characteristic metaphors make available domains, frontiers, boundaries, scales (of both distance and complexity) and maps. Its maps reveal both external and internal relationships. It can clearly map the boundaries between characters, separate plots, levels of diction, shifts in voice, degrees of embedding, and the apparent uncertainties that radiate from multiple signification, such as irony. Yet if one begins to read according to the splintered mosaics of poststructuralist theory, then certainties will become uncertainties, boundaries will tremble and collapse, enclosures will split open and explicit ideological location will turn out to be the illusive play of random position. [i] No one concerned to map the internal relationships between narrative and dramatic conventions, or between distinct embedded narratives, would want anything other than a careful, lucid and parsimonious cartographic style.
A parsimonious map of boundaries might stake its initial claims upon commonsense or intuition (no boundaries unless most readers can see them or agree to them once pointed out); it might trace only contours that could be seen to exist already according to some other designation. Thomas Pavel's Move_grammar for English Renaissance drama traces salient boundaries, but it does so only by re_drawing what other models of the same literary texts would also admit: sequences of events, or plots, and characters, or narrative agents, who decide, act, or make moves. When the definition of what is being studied has been changed, Wallace Martin writes, "we change what we see; and when different definitions are used to chart the same territory, the results will differ." Thus Pavel's Move_grammar re_draws a traditional chart of dramatic plot (a sequence of characters' decisions, actions and their consequences, say) into a more abstract configuration, invoking prior definitions from Game Theory, of Problem, Move, and Solution, but it does so within the scope of a linguistic model that promotes a distinction between deep structures and surface manifestation: the Move_grammar will "generate narrative structures" which are "independent of their linguistic manifestation." That is, Pavel claims for his analytic method a capacity to map the fictional worlds of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays according to their distinguishable domains, but not according to their textual features as such. It does not follow that Pavel, because the same territory has been traced before and may be studied through other maps, is only refining what has already been known. The basic definitions with which he begins, from linguistics, Game Theory and the structuralist tradition, change what we see and make the familiar territory of English Renaissance drama both strange and new.
A literary text constitutes the nexus of many boundaries. Borders, both interior and exterior, divide it along perceptible lines of difference. In the geo_physical metaphor of boundaries, difference will equal distance or, to put the proposition inversely as Pavel does, fictional "distance appears to boil down to difference." Whether "difference must be kept to a minimum" in order to make distance manageable is another question: Pavel seems to make the "principle of minimal departure" a constraint upon the creation of fictional worlds; it could also be taken, embodying methodological parsimony, as a constraint upon critical analysis and description. A literary text's boundaries will have been seen, clearly or unclearly, prior to an explicit mapping. The most highly analytic semiotic tools, for example, will incise differences that even untrained readers, already familiar with the text's language, can perceive. Thus description, as Genette argues, marks one of the interior frontiers of narrative: a difference that indicates a shift from one aspect of narrative to another (from events to uneventful details), but nonetheless aspects that can function co_presently. It is, perhaps, one of the most easily mapped internal boundaries in a narrative. Physical description is difficult to miss.
In Shakespeare's plays there is a perceptible difference between the give_and_take of characters in dialogue and the voices of single characters, whether in soliloquy or not. This difference may be marked as a rhetorical border between dialogue and monologue or, as it was often in the eighteenth_century, between drama and declamation. Considering Shakespeare's use of declamation, Dr. Johnson thought that it, or narration (his preferred term), was always Shakespeare's weakest suit, an occasion to intrude an alien element into drama that, disproportionate pomposity supplanting action, necessarily trips up drama's forward_flow. It may also be marked as the difference between drama and narrative or that, following Aristotle, between telling a story in the voices of its characters or in that of a narrator. Once this degree of remapping has been undertaken, then it will also be possible to note that, since the characters in a dramatic narrative are seldom the same as those in the encompassing dramatic action itself, the embedded narratives contain several interior boundaries. For example, characters within an embedded narrative, being different both from the characters within the drama and from the voice who narrates their actions, evoke separate spheres of action and even, if these spheres are sufficiently different from those in the encompassing drama, wholly distinct semiotic domains. Not only do the characters have stories to tell, but there are always other characters who are willing to listen. They are transformed into attentive narratees who may believe, or disbelieve, but who never refuse to hear. Embedded discontinuously within the dramatic action, narrative explodes strikingly. A boundary, separating the dramatic action from the abruptly_present narrative world, emerges where it had not previously existed, almost, one might say, before the eyes. It is a boundary that may be crossed from the world of the dramatic action, but not conversely. However, the centripetal power of the narrative often casts so strong a spell that the characters in the containing world of the dramatic action find themselves drawn across its boundaries, as if compelled into a magic circle. Figures of rapt attention, of patient but devouring ears, are everywhere.
. . . . Questions about reading also lead to the hypothesis that literary texts instruct their readers in how to read them. Reading may be a game, but, if it is, it is one for which the rules must always be learned freshly. Rereading becomes both the goal and the standard of reading (as opposed to the romantic flush and exuberance that first readings urge) according to which the text opens itself progressively, exposes more secrets, allows its rules to be more tightly grasped. "Those who fail to reread," Barthes writes, "are obliged to read the same story everywhere." Rereading multiplies the text"s "variety and plurality," it recaptures mythic time, it defeats the claims of a "primary, naïve, phenomenal" reading and, above all, it transforms consumption into play. Yet, as the question about primitive textual levels reveals, there is no demonstrable sequence, no series of logical steps, through which sophisticated rereading takes place. How (then) is fictional worldhood achieved?
The problem of world-building unhooks into several interdependent questions. Will all readers construct fictional worlds in similar ways? Will these, or any of them, resemble in any manner what scholars presume to have been the author"s own imaginative creation of his/her world? Will there be any necessary conditions to this process? At what point, if ever, will the reader reach the extra-textual world? Is there a boundary, a recognizable edge, between the fictional world and the actual world? Will the reader end there? Or will she begin from there? Must the reader reconstruct the author"s actual lifeworld before the fictional world? Is it a circle? Is imagination or reason most important in world-building? How could one ever know? (Perhaps there are discovery procedures, methods of investigation, that someone engaged in empirical research concerning reading might employ to determine the relative importance of imagination and reason.) Many of the questions about reading that emerge from the self-consciousness of theory seem to indicate the extreme difficulty in establishing definite sequences and stages. If much that goes on in reading is synchronic, functions always already available once reading begins, then, reasonably enough, one might draw the conclusion that imagination edges out reason as the fundamentally important condition of world-building. Reason establishes logical sequences, metonymies of increasing definity; imagination plays among the possibilities of co-presence, metaphors of increasing complexity. The evidence to close the question, alas, is nowhere in sight.
Fictional worldhood results from surprisingly little. It is as much the upshot of imaginative experience as it is of the texts (considered only as words and syntax) that underform this experience. Fictional worldhood is to texts as semantic meaning is to actual words--an in(de)finitely larger context of significance that rests upon, but does not exhaust, a purely linguistic substratum. Imagination posits "non-actual states of affairs, it enables us to consider what alternative states of affairs could be the case." It creates hypotheses, suppositions, daydreams and fictions that can be connsidered, suspended before the mind"s-eye for contemplation or actively engaged for excitement, at once seriously and playfully. Are worlds, then, playthings? Are texts, as Kendall Walton argues, simply props for the imagination? Props shape the imagination (a stump becomes a bear in a children"s game of make-believe, say); they are the "generators of fictional truths, things which, by virtue of their nature or existence, make propositions fictional."
One line of questioning seems to support this explanatory model. Another suggests that fictional worlds vary in complexity according to the number of "semiotic domains" they contain. (The internal diversity of fictional worlds depends less on the number of "props" than on their different kinds.) Short texts, incorporating few textual details, may be experienced as vast, but other texts, swollen with the giganticism of naturalistic detail, may be experienced as relatively truncated, narrow and spatially cramped. The difference stems from the fact of internal textual distinctions (distinct semiotic domains), boundaries that may seem, in reading, to grind against one another. The fictional world of one of Borges" stories, Thomas Pavel argues, "may exceed in size the worlds of Remembrance of Things Past." Mere quantity of detail does not bear a direct correlation to the experiential size of a fictional world. Indeed, quantity of detail will work to limit the imagination, creating an "opacity to inference," and cause an experiential blockage. This approach argues for the stability of literary texts, for certain predictable upshots from the linguistic substratum, and deals gingerly with the imagination. It remains a continuing question, much explored, still-to-be explored, how fictional worldhood comes into being. How much is imagination? How much is the funded experience of previous reading? How much is logic? How can one ever learn what the imagination is anyway? What would constitute empirical evidence?
And (finally) what for? Is this splitting of theory into questions, an armoury of queries, truly the best way to deal with it? What should one do about the claims of that other theory: the lumpish hedgehogs, the almost-gurus with magic names, their incantatory totalizations and their exclusionary claims? Suppose that theoretical models have more uses than theorists allow. Just suppose it for a moment: think it as a hypothesis, an imaginative construct. Suppose that theories may be, as I have argued, split apart into an indefinite number of questions. On the one hand, the critic gives up the satisfactions of consistency, of airtightness and rotundity; on the other, she gains a versatile range of queries and puzzles (often at sharp angles to one another) that will refocus both her teaching and her criticism. The obligation to understand theory is still there: one must grasp the model before it can be split apart. The exclusionary claims of different theoretical models may be, I think, ignored. Models are cognitive instruments that do not need to be in competition (but may be made so), still less struggle, with one another. (From Chapter 6.)
Further references
Edward Milowicki and [Rawdon] Rawdon Wilson, “Ovid’s Shadow: Character and Characterization in Early Modern Literature.” Neohelicon XXII: 1 (1995): 9-47.
Edward Milowicki and [Robert] Rawdon Wilson, “Ovid through Shakespeare: The Divided Self.” Poetics Today 16: 2 (summer 1995): 217-52. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/poet/
Edward Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, ”Troilus and Cressida: Voices in the Darkness of Troy.” Reading the Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama. Ed. Jonathan Hart. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. Pp. 129-44, 234-40.
Edward Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare.” Poetics Today (forthcoming). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/poet/ http://spinoza.tau.ac.il/Porter/poetics.htm
Rawdon Wilson, Shakespearean Narrative. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995.
http://www.english.udel.edu/udpress/syind.html
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