Rhetoric, Communication, Fiction

Abstract

Rhetoric, Communication, Fiction Richard Walsh (bio) The subtitle of James Phelan's target essay directs us towards a "rhetorical poetics of narrative," and this is a theoretical orientation with which I am in strong sympathy. I agree with the principle that "Narrative is ultimately not a structure but an action" (2); it is a mode of communication (and behind that, a mode of cognition—but even there, a semiotic articulation of meaning, for one's self, that is continuous with communication more narrowly understood). This shared premise has large implications and, like Phelan, I am invested in pursuing them, though with nothing like his sustained energy and industry. However, the key move of this essay, its appropriation of Chatman's narrative communication model, seems to me a misstep, and indeed contrary to the logic of a rhetorical approach. [End Page 99] On the face of it, a "communication model" ought to be very amenable to rhetorical theory, but their superficially congruent interest in communication hides a basic inversion of conceptual priorities between the two. On the one hand, rhetorical approaches to narrative give primacy to the communicative act, which takes place in some cognitive environment shared between the communicator and the recipient of that communication (I am avoiding narratologically loaded terms). Of course, among the things such a narrative act may represent or report is some other narrative act; the shared context of narrative logic providing for the communication itself will also substantially provide for the intelligibility of any such represented narrative act, and indeed any further narrative acts presented within that represented narration—it is a recursive form. The communication model, on the other hand, is founded upon a structuralist conception of narrative in which there is a something—the story—articulated in a certain form—the discourse. The story/discourse model gives conceptual primacy to the content plane (Chatman 22–23), and so conceives of narrative as a representational orientation towards an object in the first instance, and only secondarily a communicative orientation towards another subject. This, too, is a recursive model, but it propagates in the opposite way: instead of generating evermore representational levels of narration, it generates evermore transmissive levels of mediation. Phelan expresses some skepticism about the story/discourse distinction, and I certainly back his implied dissent from "the majority of narrative theorists" ("Authors" 5) on this point—perhaps with more enthusiasm than he would wish: I think the story/discourse distinction is fundamentally at odds with the conceptual orientation of rhetorical approaches. But Phelan would also evidently like to dissociate the story/discourse distinction from the communication model, and I do not think that is possible. His reason is that he would like to incorporate characters, which Chatman locates squarely in the category of story, within the communication model's discursive framework; in my view, this move itself confirms and compounds the communication model's illegitimacy from the perspective of rhetorical theory. What do the arrows in Chatman's diagram of the communication model signify? In Phelan's own author–resources–audience (ARA) diagram, this is a relatively straightforward question, despite the fact that the arrows there go in both directions: it is a model of the way authorial communicative purposes are conveyed through certain resources to an audience. The arrows [End Page 100] going back in the opposite direction signify the audience's agency in this process, through interpretative attention to those resources, and considerations about this effort in turn influence authorial choices. I would not frame it in those terms, but I might make an analogous point by drawing upon the terminology of relevance theory and noting that ostensive-inferential communication is likewise a conceptual hybrid of authorial ostension and audience inferences (Sperber and Wilson 54). Of course, a relevance theory account of communication would also reframe the category of "resources" as the shared cognitive environment, which the author changes and the audience evaluates in order to maximize the relevance of the consequent contextual effects (142). This way of putting it makes explicit what Phelan's list of resources tacitly acknowledges, which is that the parameters of the communicative act are not exclusively textual or representational. In Chatman's communication model, however...