Uskoton mieli ja tekstuaaliset petokset. Kirjallisen tajunnankuvauksen konventiot narratologisena haasteena

Abstract

Millainen on uskottoman romaanisankarittaren mieli? Kuinka kirjallisuuden vakiintuneet muodot vaikuttavat siihen, miten tulkitsemme todellisia ja fiktiivisiä mieliä? Onko toinen mieli vain lukijan fantasia? Uskoton mieli ja tekstuaaliset petokset pohtii kriittisesti kertomuksen ja mielten tutkimuksen ajankohtaisia kysymyksiä. Samalla se kartoittaa länsimaisen kaunokirjallisuuden uskottomuustraditiota.

Tutkimuskohteet ulottuvat 1600-luvulla julkaistusta Madame de La Fayetten Clèvesin ruhtinattaresta Gustave Flaubertin Madame Bovaryyn, Kate Chopinin feministiseen klassikkoon Heräämiseen ja lopulta tosielämän kertomussikermään, joka syntyi Clintonin ja Lewinskyn seksiskandaalin ympärille. Mitä yhteistä on Emma Bovarylla ja Monica Lewniskylla ja missä määrin lukutapamme tuottavat heidän välilleen yhtäläisyyksiä?

Teos tarjoaa seitsemän tapaustutkimuksen lisäksi moniulotteisen kuvan narratologiasta ja mielten tutkimuksesta strukturalismin ajoilta tämän päivän monialaiseen kognitiotieteeseen. Teoksen esittelemät ja kommentoimat teoriat ja metodit ovat kirjallisuustieteen lisäksi sovellettavissa kulttuurintutkimukseen, sosiaalitieteisiin ja lingvistiikkaan.

The study aims at developing new approaches to analyzing literary representation of consciousness: its evolution over the centuries, formal conventions and thematic effects. The research questions arise from the theoretical friction characterizing postclassical narratology: the reigning cognitive-narratological paradigm which equates literary and everyday sense-making is now being challenged by approaches highlighting the unnaturalness of literary mind construction. What is the literary mind and what is its relationship with a reading mind? The study offers a fresh and critical take on both paradigms by bringing along the thematic component, ignored by structuralist or cognitively oriented narratological analyses. Thus the act of (mind) reading is regarded both as an attempt to organize the narrative components and as a theme infiltrating literary conventions.

The study consists of seven narratological case studies conducted in the spirit of descriptive poetics: not only are given narrative theoretical concepts applied to individual texts, but the analyses are allowed to work on the theoretical framework itself. The common denominator for the analyzed texts is the theme of adultery or illicit romance. Thus the study also contributes to the literary historical tracing of adultery as a recurrent leitmotif in occidental narrative literature.

The first four case studies feature a diachronically ordered series of canonical adultery novels from the Western literary tradition: La Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de La Fayette, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) by Choderlos de Laclos, Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert and The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin. These novels have vitally influenced the later development of modern novelistic techniques for consciousness representation. Already such early exemplars of literary psychology point towards the tendency of literary consciousness representation to foreground the textual constructedness of fictional minds instead of providing the reader with a direct view into the character s thoughts or experiences. The minds of the transgressive heroines are determined by their origin as textual artifacts and by the roles they play in the development of a literary tradition. The fictional mind emerges from the contrapuntal relationship between themes and techniques. A veritable embodiment of the interpretive problems posed by the literary mind is observed in the uses of free indirect discourse, a narrative technique that hides the discursive agency behind represented thoughts, sensations and perceptions.

The remaining test cases represent recent variations of the same conventions: Sa femme (1993) by Emmanuèle Bernheim; two short stories, Privacy and Reunion , from the collection A Multitude of Sins (2001) by Richard Ford; and a set of non-fictional texts related to the Clinton Lewinsky media scandal: Monica Lewinsky s biography Monica s Story (1999) by Andrew Morton, the Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr s report of the legal investigation (The Starr Report 1998), Bill Clinton s autobiography My Life (2004) and a collection of poems clipped from the official testimonies of Clinton and Lewinsky, titled Poetry Under Oath (1998) and edited by Tom Simon. The recent fictional examples demonstrate how the themes of mind reading and mind construction already present in canonical adultery novels are shaped further by the use of unreliable narrators and focalizers usurping the discursive locus of the authorial narrator and transforming the minds of other characters into literary constructions. Structurally, such complicated layerings of literary minds often result in double or embedded free indirect discourse.

The concluding case study is an attempt to apply the notions of literary mind construction developed earlier in the study, and to test them against non-literary narrative material. Monica Lewinsky s, Bill Clinton s and Kenneth Starr s minds are located squarely inside the literary tradition of adultery. This analysis demonstrates that the literary conventions first developed and modified in novelistic discourse have become a frame of reading applicable to non-literary phenomena. Thus the literary mind is, ultimately, a reading mind. Furthermore, this intermedial analysis strives to provide a new common ground for the two strains in postclassical narratology: the unnatural approaches based on literary defamiliarization and the natural approaches searching for common prototypes in all storytelling.

The study criticizes the generalizing and reductionist tendencies in contemporary interdisciplinary narrative theory. To some degree, fictional minds are similar to actual human minds, and at the same time they are not. The challenging task for the literary analyst is to account for this double bind and its structural and thematic effects. Contrary to the dicta of unnatural narratology , the study claims that this irresolvable tension between naturalness and unnaturalness, between verisimilitude and textuality is not only a trait of experimental fiction, but, instead, can be found a the heart of canonized literary conventions. In fact, such constant movement between real life schemata and textual foregrounding is one of the major frameworks for reading narratives in general.

Although the study takes a critical stance towards many cognitive-narratological applications, its overall ethos also overlaps with recent studies investigating the dynamics between fictional minds and the reader s mental operations. The construction of the alien mind is regarded as a vital strategy (1) in the lives of the fictional characters, (2) on the level of narration and (3) in the actual reading process. Several recurring literary themes arise from this multi-level analogy. The case studies, together with the narratological commentary, work towards erecting a construction called the literary mind . Such a mind, created for the purposes of this particular study, reflects figural, narratorial and readerly minds. The study demonstrates how novelistic representation constantly risks collapsing these levels of sense-making into each other, while at the same time, paradoxically, it maintains the illusion of a well-structured hierarchy of voices.