Candice:
A few stray thoughts in response...
<snip>
In those 19th-C novels that feature an
explicit reader (as in "Reader, I married him"), the
actual reader (who could conceivably be implicit or
explicit) must be further subsumed by a state of
implicit _duplicity_, would you say?
<snip>
It's a vestige, I think, of a form of oblique address and, as you say, it
pops up regularly in Thackeray, Dickens et al. The narrator uttering such
words is in turn the weakened descendent of the dramatic Prologue or Chorus,
framing and introducing what's narrated. But in Brontė, as with Defoe before
her, character and narrator fuse together.
Three factors seem to be interacting: privacy, presence (animacy: who feels
more *real*, more *really there*) and genre.
Outside literary genres, what I'm calling here oblique address ('Would Sir
like another bread roll?') seems to me to preserve the privacy of the
addressee by ensuring that the two interlocutors do not (entirely) occupy
the same conversational space. So it's a form of linguistic politeness. A
bit like leaving visiting cards or being (or not being) 'at home'.
As to genre, choruses in drama also seem to me to mediate (but in more
fundamental ways) between two different spaces: that of the audience on the
one hand, whom they partly represent; that of the characters, one of whom
they are, on the other. So privacy goes both ways. And since they often also
speak for some higher power, such as Fate or the Divine, supplying further
information, and since Fate in principle is more animate (of a higher order
of being) than either the mortals in the audience or the characters on the
stage, the privacy of both sides is disturbed.
In *The Spanish Tragedie*, it is Revenge which plays this mediating,
overarching role: 'Heere sit we downe to see the misterie, / And serue for
Chorus in this tragedie.' Push onward to the 19th C, to (say) *The Pirates
of Penzance* and the chorus, heavily denatured, nonetheless still introduces
a tiny wobble, the hint of a freeze-frame, into the onward flow of time and
self regard ('I am the very model of a modern Major-General ... He is the
very model of a modern Major-General') simply by changing the pronoun.
Am I saying something useful? I don't know. Anyway, here's a second
thought...
<snip>
Finally, I want to think some more about your notion
of un/ratification and of a world that exists to be
overheard, if I've read you correctly there(?).
<snip>
At the beginning of *Tom Jones*, Fielding rejects 'a private or eleemosynary
treat' in favour of 'a public ordinary'. You are entitled to be a reader,
in other words, whoever you happen to be. Richardson's approach is
different. Thus *Pamela* is after the fact of a sequence of private letters,
just as Wittgenstein's *language* is after the fact of the *deed*. So in
Richardson's case the reader is on the one hand an unratified participant
with respect to the correspondence and, on the other, a _ratified_
participant (as with Fielding) with respect to the world of the novel:
although the letters are undated they are sorted and numbered with some
added textual apparatus ('In answer to the preceding' and so forth).
Both Richardson's and Fielding's fictional worlds do indeed enjoy a parallel
existence of some sort. However, both are of a lower order of being compared
to the reader's world because the narrator gets in the way, in the case of
Fielding, thus postponing presence, and because (postponement in fictional
time in Richardson's case) the events recounted happened before the writing
of the letters.
In the case of lyric address, which is where I've been trying to get to all
this while, the worlds don't exist in parallel but _compete_. Or this is how
it feels. In Sterne there is also a competition: the sheer effluxion of time
overwhelms the world of writing *Tristram Shandy* and the author's own death
leaves *A Sentimental Journey...* incomplete. In lyric, however, it is the
stopping of quotidian time (Jakobson called the sonnet a 'stationary poem';
it's not the only example); the silence compelled upon the reader (Genette
describes what Eluard calls 'l'evidence poetique', the *obviousness* of
poetry, as 'a _state, a degree of presence and intensity' brought about by
'that margin of silence' around it); its wilful (solipsistic, performative)
creation of a new reality out of metaphor, and its frequent refusal to act
other than as the only voice in the world, by talking to itself, talking
about itself and answering itself, all these are the outward (readerly)
counterparts of the poem's continued growth; before one's eyes as it were.
One final note. *Ratified participant* and its converse come, I believe,
from Erving Goffman, who feeds into politeness theory. Poetry, I think, is
very _im_polite. That's one of the things that's important about it.
CW
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'What's the point of having a language that everybody knows?'
(Gypsy inhabitant of Barbaraville)
