Judgment, Progression, and Ethics in Portrait Narratives: The Case of Alice Munro's "Prue"

Abstract

Judgment, Progression, and Ethics in Portrait Narratives:The Case of Alice Munro's "Prue" James Phelan Over the past twenty years, there has been much good work done on narrative ethics by critics such as Martha Nussbaum (1990), J. Hillis Miller (1987), Wayne Booth (1988), Adam Newton (1995), and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002, 2005), to name just a few. One of the common features of this work is the contention that narrative and ethics are intertwined phenomena, that narrative is an excellent site for explorations of and inquiries into ethics. Narrative, in this view, is a way of thinking about ethics and ethical action. In this essay, I want to extend some of my own work on these issues, work that I have elsewhere called "rhetorical literary ethics" (Phelan 2004) by looking at the relation between rhetorical form and ethics in a hybrid genre that I call portrait narrative, with Alice Munro's "Prue" as my test case. As I describe the hybrid form, I shall explain what I mean by both rhetorical form and rhetorical ethics, and I shall argue for the central place of narrative progressions and narrative judgments in our understanding of form, ethics, and their interrelation. Furthermore, I shall use my account of the portrait narrative and of the interrelation of rhetorical form and rhetorical ethics in order to elucidate Munro's significant experiment with the short story in what we might call the post-epiphany age. I begin with an approach to three possible qualities of literary texts, narrativity, lyricality, and portraiture, and with the significance of progression and judgment for each. Just as two texts we call narratives may have different degrees of narrativity, so too may two texts we call lyric poems have different degrees of lyricality, and two we call character portraits have different degrees of portraiture. The larger point, which will prove significant for the claims I want to make about hybrid forms, is that my accounts of narrativity, lyricality, and portraiture are [End Page 115] not meant to apply perfectly to individual texts but, rather, are meant to articulate the properties (both textual and experiential, as I shall argue) by which we determine degrees of narrativity, lyricality, and portraiture. By progression I mean the synthesis of the textual mechanisms that generate and guide a narrative's movement from beginning through middle to end with the trajectory of the audience's response to that movement. By judgments I mean decisions of three kinds that an implied author guides —to greater and lesser degrees from one narrative to the next —the authorial audience to make and that often overlap. The three are (1) interpretive judgments about how to understand a particular character, event, or narrational act; (2) ethical judgments about the values displayed by characters, narrators, and authors; and (3) aesthetic judgments about not simply the beauty but rather the overall quality of the experience that the narrative offers us. The ways in which progression and judgment interact leads me to the ways in which my rhetorical approach theorizes narrativity, portraiture, and lyricality.1 A rhetorical understanding of narrativity is tied to both the rhetorical definition of narrative (somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose that something happened) and the concept of narrative progression. From this perspective, narrativity is a double-layered phenomenon, involving both a dynamics of character, event, and telling and a dynamics of audience response. The phrase "somebody telling ... that something happened" gets at the first layer: narrative involves the report of a sequence of related events during which the characters and/or their situations undergo some change. As I have discussed elsewhere (Phelan 1989), the report of that change typically proceeds through the introduction, complication, and resolution (in whole or in part) of unstable situations within, between, or among the characters. These dynamics of instability may be accompanied by a dynamics of tension in the telling —unstable relations among authors, narrators, and audiences; the interaction of the two sets of dynamics, as in narratives that employ unreliable narration, may have significant consequences for our understanding of the "something that happened." [End Page 116] Turning to the second layer, the dynamics of audience response (or...