Fiction is not a lie, even when it does not tell the truth. Fiction has meaning and conveys important information. Furthermore, telling, listening to, reading, and creating stories are basic human impulses. Barbara Dancygier builds on these premises and spends the rest of her book examining the linguistic tools that fiction uses to convey meaning. The book is complex, presenting many details, and it is hard for a reviewer, especially one who is a folklorist rather than a linguist, to capture all of its important points.
Dancygier begins with an overview of scholarship, especially those works which lead up to the two approaches she will use, namely, mental-spaces theory, and blending. She discusses the relationship between literary analysis and linguistic analysis and shows how attention to language can aid in the understanding of a literary text. Fiction is a way of sharing information, she argues, and when writing was not available, oral storytelling expanded the capacity of memory and thus allowed more information to be shared. Drawing on David Herman, she states that narratives are “tools for thinking” which “help in the organization of experience.” Of the types of information shared, mental acts and emotional states are best conveyed through fiction.
Chapter 2 deals with narrative spaces, how these spaces are related to one another, and how story emerges as one reads and moves back and forth from one narrative space to another. Mental-space theory assumes that meaning is grounded in perception and sensorimotor experience. This implies that narrative spaces are either time planes (the present, the past, the imagined future) or locations, something like scenes where action takes place or fictional zones (stories written by the protagonists of the narrative, scenes imagined by them). The relationship between narrative spaces can be complex, and Dancygier provides charts showing how narrative spaces are related one to the other in specific works of fiction. Anchors often link narrative spaces and facilitate the reader’s movement. An anchor can be something like a photograph which is discussed in each of the narrative spaces of a particular novel or other work of fiction. Such a photograph appears in Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin, and this chapter of Dancygier’s book deals extensively with this work. As the reader journeys through a novel, seeing the anchor from different points of view, an understanding of the events presented in the various narrative spaces takes shape, and this is what the author calls emergent story.
The narrators of stories can be of many types, and this is the subject of chapter 3. A novel can have an off-stage narrator who does not partake in the events being told. And there can also be narrators who tell stories of what happens to them. A narrator can address the reader directly as “you” – or address no one. There can be multiple narrators, each of whom has a different perspective on the same event. Stories can be embedded within stories, presenting multiple viewpoints, and each viewpoint, according to Dancygier, is a characteristic of its corresponding narrative space.
The representation and compression of viewpoint is the subject of chapter 4. Speech can be represented in fiction, and so can thought, and a character can report on the actions and words of other characters. When reporting their own perceptions, narrators might describe scenes or persons not as they are, but as they are seen, either through the distortion of something like an old-fashioned camera lens which turns things upside-down, or as they are altered and colored by emotion and memory. The perceptions of more than one character in a novel, including their personal thoughts and views, can be conveyed through another character reporting what had happened or what was said. This presentation of multiple viewpoints through a single narrator is what Dancygier calls compression.
Chapter 5 deals with referential expressions. Whether a character is referred to in the third person or refers to him or herself in the first person, shifts the narrative viewpoint, and sometimes that shift can occur abruptly, often to indicate a shift from a description of action to a description of the character’s thoughts. Similarly, the use of nouns, the use of proper nouns, like the names of characters, and the use of pronouns all affect the way the story line is presented and read.
Since the presentation of fictional minds is the primary purpose of fiction, Dancygier devotes chapter 6 to drama because, in drama, the conventions used to present what characters think are the most obvious. In plays characters speak to inanimate objects such as daggers and vials of poison. They engage in soliloquies to let the audience know what they are thinking. Often the thoughts of characters are underscored visually, and a monologue about the descent from power may be simultaneously enacted by having the speaker descend down a staircase. Imagined objects or beings such as ghosts are made concrete, not by linguistic means, but by having an actor playing the dead person appear on stage so that the audience sees what one character sees and others do not.
Chapter 7 goes back to the novel and talks about the presentation of speech and thought, the linguistic clues that show the reader how the events of the story are perceived and by whom. As in drama, the thoughts of characters are often presented as speech, imagined dialogues that show what the character in question would like to say or how he or she would like to react. Chapter 8 concludes the book, arguing that the story of a novel is not so much contained in the work of fiction itself as in the process of reading. Narrative meaning emerges in the process of interpretation by the reader who is guided by linguistic forms toward a dynamic perception of the work.
Although this book is devoted almost exclusively to written narratives in general and the novel in particular, it does offer a great deal to folklorists. As I was reading it, I kept thinking that I wanted to go back to the various narrative texts that I have worked with over the years to check things like the use of pronouns and the use of tense. Do oral narratives present fictional minds the way novels do, or is there a difference between oral and written text precisely in the way that speech and thought are presented? According to Propp, folktales lack character development. Is this a function of the language of tales? Bakhtin is famous for his contrast between epic and the novel. Should this contrast be re-examined on the linguistic level? Close reading of texts is becoming more and more in vogue in folklore scholarship, and this book encourages such an approach.
While I did profit from reading this book, I found it problematic in several ways. One problem is that no work of fiction is examined in full. Individual sentences or very short passages are discussed, sometimes in a larger context, but there is no analysis of a novel in its entirety. The closest that we come to a discussion of a complete text is the presentation of a narrative anchor in Atwood’s Blind Assassin. Linguistic analysis of folkloric minutia will certainly be of interest to linguists, and others will surely learn from such work, but will folklorists want to do such work themselves? The other problematic feature is the use of various linguistic conventions. While the charts are helpful in guiding the reader, other conventions are not. The book suffers from a tendency to use abbreviations: STR = speech/thought representation, MN = main narrative space, SV = story viewpoint space. Linguists may be used to such abbreviations, but I found them distracting and annoying and repeatedly had to go back to try and figure out what a particular abbreviation stood for. Such problems are minor, of course, and this book certainly provides folklorists with food for thought.
Work Cited
Herman, David, ed. 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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[Review length: 1332 words • Review posted on December 12, 2012]