Download It is this unfortunate blindness to the fact any situation described in a

Ordinary Language, Extraordinary Literature. A Speech-Act Approach
to Literary Theory
Asist. univ. drd. Maria ŞTEFĂNESCU
Universitatea “1 Decembrie 1918”Alba Iulia
The unfortunate blindness to the fact that any situation described in a literary text is and
should be regarded as hypothetical has rendered the first speech act approaches to literature rather
fruitless. The inability to conceive of the whole literature as an autonomous area of discourse makes
J. L. Austin lament over the alleged suspension of the “normal conditions of reference “ in the case
of literary works, and J. Searle postulate the existence of some uncanny horizontal conventions
purported to lift, “as it were, the discourse away from the world”(1). The aim of this paper will be
to present and discuss part of the problems encountered by some early attempts to build up a poetics
based on speech act theory.
In an article from a collection published as Philosophical Papers, Austin tries to answer the
question if we ever really go beyond words:
“To what extent do we use criteria that are not strictly linguistic? To what extent do
we study phenomena that are not simply language phenomena? [...] What we do [...]
specifically is ask ourselves in what circumstances we would use each of the
expressions we are looking at [...] Language serves as a go-between so that we can
observe the facts of life, which constitute our experience, and which we would be all
too inclined not to see, without it” (emphasis added;) (2).
This is rather ambiguous and Austin’s meaning quite difficult to make out: at first he seems very
close to Wittgenstein’s celebrated claim that “meaning is use”, but then he mentions language in
connection with “the facts of life”, i.e. with its referent, without however clarifying the issue
whether language only describes external reality or actually shapes the way we perceive the world.
A third hypothesis, strongly supported by textual evidence from How To Do Things with Words,
is advanced in S. Petrey’s book Speech Acts and Literary Theory. Petrey invokes such passages
as
“Stating, described etc. [...] have no unique position over the matter of being related
to facts, in a unique way called being true or false, because truth and falsity are
(except by an artificial abstraction [...]) not names for relations, qualities, or what
not, but for a dimension of assessment - how the words stand in respect of
satisfactoriness to the facts, events, situations etc. to which they refer’(3)
and
“ ‘true’ and ‘false’ [...] only [stand] for a general dimension of being a right and
proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this
audience, for these purposes and with these intentions”(4),
in order to claim that for Austin truth is a conventional construct which displays a certain social
variability and “the facts of life” are not so much reality as it is, but reality as it is perceived (or
performed ?) by a human community. Apparently this is a very elegant and convenient way of
solving the problem of reference in fiction: if all that matters is a ‘constative’ (i.e. collectively
performed) reality, one does not need to bother any longer about how to tackle literary texts because
in both fiction and actual life we only meet with conventional and consensually-determined
versions of the world.
But another fragment from How To Do Things with Words comes to ruin this neat picture:
“For example, if I say ‘Go and catch a falling star’, it may be quite clear what both
the meaning and the force of my utterance is, but still wholly unresolved which of
those other kinds of things I may be doing [...] The normal condition of reference
may be suspended or no attempt made at a standard perlocutionary act, no attempt
to make you do anything” (emphasis added;) (5).
Indeed, Petrey is right to identify here “a contradiction between theory and theorist” (6) and to
claim that Austin seems to forget his two capital insights, namely that the referent is not paramount
in language and that perlocutionary behaviour does not affect illocutionary identity. Moreover,
since what defines any illocution is precisely its conventional nature, it is very difficult to
understand why such a strongly conventionalized form of language as literature has, in Austin’s
words, “nothing to do with the illocutionary act”(7) Because, according to the English philosopher,
“a performative utterance, for example, will be in a peculiar way hollow or void if
said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy.
This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance - a sea-change in special
circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways - intelligibly used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use - ways which fall under
the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from
consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as
issued in ordinary circumstances”(8).
Nowhere in How to Do Things with Words is there any passage which could elucidate in an
unambiguous manner the meaning of the syntagm “in a peculiar way”: the various “non-serious”
and “not fully normal” uses of language in literary texts could be caused either by the suspension of
the ordinary conditions of reference (but in this case one has to reintroduce the distinction
constative vs performative) or, more likely, by language’s not being issued in “ordinary
circumstances” (apparently, literary language is believed to escape the net of social conventions
within which alone it can perform things). At any rate, Austin’s doctrine of the “etiolations of
language” brings to mind the case Plato made against literature and his disdainful banishment of
this trivial “copy of the copy”. It seems that any speech-act literary theory, if it decides not to
overlook Austin’s position altogether, has to go with S. Petrey and suggest that, maybe, the English
philosopher’s distinction between literary and “normal” language should be taken only as a
provisional step,
“exactly the same sort of rhetorical strategy deployed to set up the dividing line
between constative and performative”(9).
Whereas Austin’s treatment of literature comes down to several more or less casual remarks
scattered throughout How to Do Things with Words, J. R. Searle’s interest in the subject is much
more substantial and finds its climax in an article published in 1979, The Logical Status of
Fictional Discourse, meant to specify unequivocally the exact place of literature within speech act
theory. One can easily notice that the position already stated in his book from 1969 (“we need to
distinguish normal real world talk from parasitic forms of discourse such as fiction, play, action
etc.”(10); emphasis added) is reiterated in this new article where, after having mentioned
Wittgenstein’s tenet that literature is a separate language game, Searle concludes that “jocul limbii
nu este solidar cu jocurile de limbă ci parazitic faţă de acestea”(11).
Before tackling the main problem, Searle finds it appropriate to make two preliminary
distinctions between fiction and literature on the one hand and between fictional language and
figurative language on the other. It is not entirely clear what Searle meant by saying that
“ ‘literatură’ este numele unui set de atitudini pe care le luăm faţă de un segment de
discurs şi nu numele unei propietăţi a segmentului de discurs, deşi motivul pentru
care luăm atitudinile pe care le luăm va fi, desigur, cel puţin în parte, o funcţie a
propietăţilor discursului şi nu va fi în întregime arbitrar. Pe scurt, dacă o operă este
sau nu literară, cititorul trebuie să decidă, iar dacă o operă este ficţiune sau nu,
aceasta rămîne la decizia autorului”(12).
At first sight the definition seems a long overdue recognition of the fact that literature has a certain
specificity which requires on the part of the reader a participation (“a set of attitudes”) different
from that required by any other language game. But no further remarks in The Logical Status of
Fictional Discourse come to confirm such a reading; on the contrary, Searle changes the course of
his argumentation to the point that literature becomes a praise word only fit for those works,
fictional or not, which display unquestionable aesthetic value (the American philosopher states that
whereas Thucydides’ writings might be called literature, he is not sure whether Conan Doyle’s
novels should be applied the same label).
Content with the conclusion that the concept of “literature” is ultimately unanalysable,
Searle focuses on fiction and tries to explain the apparent breakdown of the constitutive rules for
asserting felicitously in the case of literary texts. He notices that
“discursul ficţional pune o problemă dificilă [...]: cum e posibil ca [...] atît cuvintele
cît si celelalte elemente ale unei povestiri să aibă sensul lor obişnuit şi, totuşi,
regulile care se ataşază acestor cuvinte şi elemente, determinîndu-le sensul, să nu fie
respectate; cum se întîmplă că în Scufiţa Roşie, roşu înseamnă culoarea roşie şi
totuşi acţiunea regulilor ce corelează culoarea roşie cu roşu nu este în forţă ?”(13).
If one is to understand Searle’s predicament, one needs to remember that he has split in two
Austin’s locutionary act and has given a privileged treatment to the propositional acts of referring
and predicating. Admittedly, at first Searle strives to avoid committing himself the descriptive
fallacy - in Speech Acts he warns against the confusion between reference and description and
argues that the referential act is only performed in a concrete situation of discourse, in the presence
of the two locutors and of a context specific to that situation which has nothing to do with any
previously and independently identified facts - but then he is more and more drawn to the
unacceptable generalisation that the sole context of reference is the real world. The first axiom of
reference - whatever is referred to must exist - is added tacitly the supplementary condition “in the
everyday world of experience”. As Searle argues, fictional language is “non - serious” precisely
because
“dacă autorul unui roman ne spune că afară plouă, [...] el nu este obligat în mod
serios opiniei că, în momentul scrierii, afară plouă cu adevărat”(14).
Curiously enough, for Searle the only conceivable referent of the deictic afară is to be sought for in
the actual world. The same premise leads him to an ontological definition of fiction: fictionality is
an essence, given once and for all, and dependent only on authorial intention. While such a position
is always tenable, the question arises whether or not it is adequate to the study of literature. Of
course, one could be content with saying that any literary text is a patchwork, a mixture of reality
and fiction, or can go one step further, as Searle does, and devise a test for establishing what is and
what is not fictional in an artistic work: “Testul pentru a stabili la ce anume este obligat autorul este
ceea ce contează ca greşeală”(15). But then any reader of literature is expected to do a detective’s
job and engage in a thorough quest for mistakes and slips of the pen because the author has to
exculpate himself for every occasion when, for instance, he dares to describe a geographically
impossible situation from “real” London or “real” Paris. Yet, even if each and every sentence of a
literary text would be proven literally true-to-life (which is virtually impossible to check), this
would still have no consequences at all on the way a reader of literature approaches the text. Any
work of art, to the extent to which it is a work of art and not a scientific treatise, will be expected to
offer not a plain mimesis of existing facts but a symbolic representation of reality. No literary text
is merely descriptive and Amintiri din copilarie is, just like Doktor Faustus or any other
“thoroughly fictional” work, the proposal of a symbolic reality (in Cassirer’s sense of the word)
which allows the reader to perceive the empirical world from a vantage point that is not and cannot
be part of it.
With a view to understanding how fiction works, as compared to “normal real world talk”,
Searle takes an except from Iris Murdoch’s The Red and the Green and an article of E.
Shanahan’s and applies to each the adequacy conditions for felicitous assertions. Since Iris
Murdoch does not commit herself to the truth of her assertions, nor believes them, nor yet claims to
depict an actual state of affairs, Searle concludes that the fictional uses of language fail to observe
all the normal felicity conditions. Although T. Pavel probably exaggerates in his downright
rejection of what he calls “a set of idealized assumptions about our collective behaviour”(17) (his
critique is directed mainly against what he suspects to be a tendency to marginalize those
phenomena that do not fit the speech act framework and against the easiness with which the
existence and stability of conventions are taken for granted), he is right to draw attention to the
error hidden behind the attempt to comment on fiction as if the voice which narrates the story would
be that of the empirical author. Fortunately, the process of “dedublare enunţiativă”(18), which
Searle utterly fails to notice (he insists to refer to the flesh-and-blood “Miss Murdoch” as the voice
speaking in The Red and the Green), is given fair treatment by another representative of speech
act literary theory, S. R. Levin. Starting from G. Lakoffs’ insight that such “world-creating verbs”
as to dream or to imagine imply not only a ‘jump’ from an initial possible world to a different one,
dreamt of or imagined, but also a doubling of the subject (the first I in the example “I imagined that
I was there” is not the same as the second), Levin notices that a similar phenomenon takes place in
any process of artistic creation. The empirical author is set aside so that the I of the literary text “nu
mai este poetul care se mişcă, ci o proiecţie a lui, his persona”(19).
Since for Searle the previously discussed distinction does not exist, he concludes that Iris
Murdoch’s assertions are infelicitous and goes on to argue against what he regards as an untenable
assumption, namely that fictional texts contain a new category of speech acts, other than those
already identified in his or Austin’s version of the theory. As Searle puts it, it is not true that
“relatările din ziare conţin o clasă de acte ilocuţionare (afirmaţii, aserţiuni, descrieri,
explicaţii) iar literatura ficţională conţine o altă clasă de acte ilocuţionare (scrierea
poveştilor, a romanelor, a poemelor, a pieselor etc.”(20).
An avowed supporter of the “literal force hypothesis”, Searle claims that since the speech acts
performed in the utterance of a sentence are in general a function of its meaning, it could not be
possible for a sentence to be used in fictional utterances in order to perform speech acts completely
different from those determined by its literal sense simply because, in that case, each particular
sentence would have two or more different meanings, which is unacceptable.
Searle’s argumentation is questionable on several counts, its most obvious flaw being the
confusion between author and narrator. To put on the same level such speech acts as stating,
describing, asserting, explaining etc. and others like writing a poem or a novel or a story and to
attempt to compare them means to overlook the very important fact that in a literary text the former
are performed by the narrator or by the characters and only the latter (if they exist at all, which
Searle doubts) should be ascribed to the author. A basic distinction has to be made here between
three different cases: the speech acts performed by the characters within the fictional world created
by the text, which pose no problems for the theory because they observe all the ordinary felicity
conditions, the speech acts performed by the narrator which sometimes have an equivocal status,
and the speech acts produced by the author, which have nothing whatsoever to do with any sentence
that happens to be uttered within the text (they are macro-speech acts like “to write a novel, a poem
etc.”). As far as this third category is concerned, Searle’s position is ambiguous: on the one hand he
finds its existence implausible, but on the other he puts forward his plea for the paramount
importance of authorial intention in the writing of fiction precisely on the grounds that a text is
recognized as a novel or a poem because its creator labels it as such (ultimately this amounts to
admitting that the author does perform the speech act of writing something specific). But even if he
accepted this much, Searle would still be reluctant to concede that far from being parasitic uses of
language, fictional illocutionary acts should be put on an equal footing with all the more “ordinary”
ones.
Two solutions have been offered by other representatives of speech act theory for the
difficult task of describing the specificity of fictional illocutions. Both posit the existence of an
underlying performative verb in the “deep structure” of a literary text and both suggest that the
successfulness of this performative depends on whether or not the readers accept to take part in an
imaginative game of make-believe. According to Ross Chambers,
“The ‘performative’ underlying aesthetic discourse could [...] be something like ‘I
offer myself for interpretation’ or ‘I invite you to interpret me’ - supposing, however,
that such a speech act can be attributed to the message itself (becomes its own
sender) and that the receiver here designated by ‘you’ can be conceived as a
perfectly indeterminate whom it may concern”(21).
In S. R. Levin’s opinion, the aesthetic performative should be ascribed to the author and so the
sentence underlying every literary work will be something like “I imagine myself in and I invite
you to conceive a world in which...” followed by the respective novel or poem or whatever.
Although there are some problems with postulating the existence of implicit performatives, the
solution - or, at least, the idea that all artistic texts are based on a “literary transaction” - is very
important and seminal. The most obvious advantage of positing an unexpressed “I imagine myself
in ...” comes from the fact that, since it includes a performative verb, the sentence will no longer be
subjected to an inquiry about its truth-value (the question whether the world described in the text is
true or not becomes irrelevant and the only justified concern remains the felicity of the speech act).
The second performative verb, to invite, accounts very well for the perlocutionary effect that any
literary text has or attempts to have on the reader who, in Coleridge’s celebrated phrase, is expected
to consent to a “willing suspension of disbelief”; if the perlocutionary effect is not achieved, the
reader has either not understood or not accepted the illocutionary force of the underlying
performative phrase, with the consequence that the literary transaction does not come off.
Since Searle’s version of speech-act literary theory does not allow for the existence of
fictional illocutionary acts, the solution it offers is to claim that the author of a literary text pretends
(without, however, intending to mislead) that he performs a series of speech acts, most of which
belong to the category of representatives (assertions, descriptions, characterizations, explanations
etc.). In the same manner, by pretending that he refers to real persons and narrates stories about
them, the author creates fictional characters. The question that arises immediately is: how can one
describe this mechanism which makes possible such an unusual form of pretense ? After confessing
that the existence of fiction appears to him as a most curious, even amazing aspect of human
language, Searle puts forward his theory about how it comes into being:
Găsesc util să consider că aceste reguli [conform cărora enunţarea se realizează ca
aserţiune sinceră şi nondefectivă] ca reguli ce corelează cuvintele (sau propoziţiile)
cu lumea [...]. Ceea ce face posibilă ficţiunea, [...] este un set de convenţii
extralingvistice, nonsemantice, care rup conexiunea dintre cuvinte şi lume, stabilită
prin regulile menţionate anterior. Consider convenţiile discursului ficţional ca fiind
un set de convenţii orizontale care rup conexiunile stabilite prin reguli verticale. Ele
suspendă cerinţele normale stabilite de către aceste reguli [...]. Pretinsa realizare a
actelor ilocuţionare care constituie scrierea unei opere ficţionale, constă în
îndeplinirea în realitate a actelor de enunţare cu intenţia de a invoca convenţiile
orizontale care suspendă obligaţiile ilocuţionare normale ale enunţurilor” (22).
In other words, the fictional uses of language are socially irrelevant and consequently devoid of any
illocutionary force of their own. As far as the play between the vertical and the horizontal
conventions is concerned, Searle mentions the existence of an agreement between the author and
the reader which controls the degree to which the vertical rules may be overlooked. Then he notices
that
“to the extent that the author is consistent with the conventions he has invoked or (in
the case of revolutionary forms of literature) the conventions he has established, he
will remain within the conventions”(23).
At this point, one cannot but ask oneself, together with S. Petrey, “how can readers apply Searle’s
concept of authorial suspension of illocutionary conventions when all they know is that it applies
when it applies ?”(24).
Openly reluctant to suspend his disbelief, Searle the reader, discovers a very strange
opposition between fictional and serious discourse within the literary text. In his opinion, the incipit
of Ana Karenina (about all the happy families resembling each other, unlike the unhappy ones) is a
serious non-fictional sentence which commits Tolstoy to its truth. Quite obviously, Searle’s
hypothesis is extremely vulnerable: first of all he does not explain how he came to “take it” that
precisely that particular sentence from Ana Karenina is non-fictional (or, maybe, all the sentences
belonging to the narrator are to be taken as non-fictional ?); then he does not pay any attention to
the fact that the novel’s opening remark is in tight thematic connection with the rest of the book,
which proves that fictional and “serious” discourses cannot be separated in spite of their alleged
illocutionary discontinuity. Moreover, Searle’s sui generis “close reading” makes him miss once
more the distinction between author and narrator with the consequence that, if his hypotheses were
right, one could not distinguish between reliable and unreliable narrators, nor could analyse such
literary works as Th. Mann’s Doktor Faustus where the author ironically distances himself from
his narrator’s opinions.
Searle begins his concluding remarks about the logical status of fictional discourse with the
question: “why bother?”. Indeed, why should anyone pay so much attention to or try so hand to
account for some aspects of language which are not in keeping even with the basic requirements for
the felicitous performance of a speech act ? Searle’s answer, that
“acte serioase de vorbire [...] pot fi transmise prin texte ficţionale chiar dacă actul de
vorbire transmis nu este reprezentat în text. Aproape orice operă de ficţiune
importantă transmite un “mesaj” sau “mesaje” [...] prin text, însă nu [...] în text “
(23).
proves that, in the end, he concedes that literature must have same kind of cognitive value after all.
But the uncomfortable final conclusion (“nu există încă o teorie generală a mecanismelor prin care
astfel de intenţii ilocuţionare serioase să fie transmise prin ilocuţii pretinse” (24); (emphasis added)
does not take one very far from the point of departure and, although it gets to the core of the
problems encountered by Searle’s version of speech act literary theory, it leaves them entirely
unresolved.
References:
1. J. R. Searle, Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1977, p. 79
2. apud Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Acts. Don Juan with J. L. Austin or Seduction
in Two Languages, Cornell University Prees, Ithaca, New York, 1983, p. 75
3. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1975, pp. 148-149
4. ibid., p. 145
5. ibid., p. 104
6. S. Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory, Routledge, New York and London, 1990, p. 52;
see, for the whole discussion, cap. “Saying, Doing and Writing”
7. J. L. Austin, op. cit., p. 104
8. ibid., p. 22
9. S. Petrey, op. cit., p. 53
10. J. R. Searle, op. cit., p. 78
11. J. R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse”; apud. Poetica americana. Orientari
actuale, studii critice, antologie, note, bibliografie de M. Borcila si R. McLain, Ed. Dacia, Cluj,
1981, p. 218
12. ibid., p. 211
13. ibid., p. 210
14. ibid., p. 212
15. ibid., p. 222
16. J. R. Searle, Speech Acts, p. 66
17. T. Pavel; apud. W. Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthroplolgy,
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1993, p. 310
18. M. Borcila, prefata la Poetica americana. Orientari actuale, p. 76
19. ibid.; see, for the whole discussion, pp. 76-77
20. J. R. Searle, The Logical Status ..., p. 215
21. apud. S. Petrey, op. cit., p. 81
22. J. R. Searle, The Logical Status ..., pp. 218-219
23. apud. S. Petry, op. cit., p. 67
24. ibid.
25. J. R. Searle, The Logical Status ..., p. 224
26. ibid., p. 225