The fictive reader

Non-diegetic narrative Diegetic narrative Narrative entity = Narrator narrator narrating self Actional entity = Actor character narrated self

5. The fictive reader

The fictive reader (narratee, French narrataire, Russian narratator³⁷) is the addressee of the fictive narrator, the entity to whom he directs his narration.

The term fictive reader is not entirely accurate, since only the image of the presumed addressee is meant. It is therefore more correct to refer to the fictive addressee.

a) Fictive addressee and fictive recipient

The fictive reader as addressee of a secondary narrative (i.e. an inner story) seems to coincide with one of the characters of the primary narrative (the frame story). For example, the sentimental traveler in Pushkin’s “The Sta-tionmaster,” to whom the abandoned titular hero tells the story of his ab-ducted daughter Dunya and who thus functions as the secondary fictive addressee, appears to coincide with the narrated self, that is, with the actor of the primary narrative. However, the equation fictive addressee in the secon-dary narrative = character in the primary narrative, an equation that forms the

37 On the English term narratee see Prince 1971; 1985; on the French narrataire, Genette (1972, 226) and Prince 1973a. The dichotomy narrateur–narrataire (by analogy with desti-nateur–destinataire) was first used by Roland Barthes (1966, 10). In Russian, the term nar-ratator has been coined for this entity (Ilyin 1996d).

basis for many essays on this entity (cf. Genette 1972; 1983), simplifies the facts in an inadmissible way. The fictive addressee is nothing other than the schema of the narrator’s expectations and presumptions and therefore can-not coincide functionally with the figure who, in the primary narrative, acts as the recipient of the secondary narrative, and who is concretized with par-ticular features by the primary narrator. The addressee to whom Samson Vyrin narrates the story of his daughter does not coincide with the senti-mental traveler who, as the narrated self, hears the story and, as the narrat-ing self, reports it many years later. The addressee is a mere projection of the stationmaster and the latter cannot know about his listener’s weakness for sentimental stories, nor will he have any idea about sentimentalist litera-ture; and when he laments his “poor Dunya’s” sad fate, the allusion to Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” appears only within the intellectual horizons of the sentimental traveler. The fictive addressee is, as such, only ever a projection of the particular narrator.³⁸ To speak of a fictive recipient is meaningful only when a secondary narrator addresses himself to a recipient who appears as a reader or listener in the primary narrative. However, the secondary fictive addressee coincides with this fictive recipient (the character in the primary narrative) only materially and not functionally, since being an addressee and being a recipient are separate functions.

The relations are presented in the following diagram, using “The Sta-tionmaster” as an example:

Level Narrator Actor Addressee Recipient

Primary

When a narrator engages in dialogue with his counterpart, it is important to distinguish whether his interlocutor is merely imagined or whether he exists as an independent, autonomous character in an overarching story. Only in the second case, when the counterpart possesses autonomy and alterity, is it a true dialogue. In the former instance, we are dealing with a staged dialogic monologue (see below, II.5.e).

38 This is why I cannot agree with the distinction, made by Alice Jedličková (1993), between the “fictive” and “projected” addressee.

b) Fictive and abstract reader

The fictive reader had already been described by Polish narratology before the advent of French Structuralism. Maria Jasińska (1965, 215–51) distin-guished between the “real” and the “epic” reader, whereby the latter corres-ponds to the fictive reader. The distinction between abstract and fictive reader was anticipated by Michał Głowiński (1967), when he contrasted a

“recipient in the wider sense” with a “recipient in the narrow sense.” In her five-level model of roles in literary communication, Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska (1971, 125) associates the “author” with the “concrete reader,” the

“transmitter of the work” with the “recipient of the work” (identified with the “ideal reader”) and the narrator with the “addressee of the narrative.”

Even in theoretical work, we can observe not only a confusion of the fictive and the abstract reader, but also a programmatic renunciation of this distinction. As mentioned above (p. 54), Genette (1972, 267) identifies the

“extradiegetic narratee” with the “virtual” or “implied” reader, something that Genette even considers a welcome economy in Ockham’s sense. Bal (1977a, 17) even calls the distinction between abstract and fictive reader

“semiotically insignificant” and Paducheva (1996, 216), with reference to Toolan (1988), declares that there is no need for a doubling of this sort: “In the communicative situation of the narrative, the narrator’s addressee is not a representative of the reader, but the reader himself.” This is certainly an inadmissible and unhelpful simplification.

Naturally, the nearer the fictive narrator to the abstract author from an axiological perspective, the more difficult it is to clearly separate the ideo-logical positions of the fictive and the abstract reader. Nonetheless, the dif-ference between the abstract reader as presumed addressee (or the ideal recipient) of the author and the fictive reader as the addressee of the narra-tor remains in force. The border between the fictive world, to which the fictive reader belongs, and reality, to which, despite all virtuality, the ab-stract reader belongs, cannot be crossed—unless in some narrative paradox.

There is another essential difference to be considered between the fic-tive reader and the abstract reader as ideal recipient. Works with a disposi-tion to funcdisposi-tion predominantly esthetically require a reading that realizes this disposition; that is, they create an ideal recipient who adopts an esthetic mindset. In this mindset, the reader will not only react to the work in an everyday way, but also observe its fabric and structure and—aside from his or her ethical or ideological reaction to the story s/he is being told—

appreciate the interplay of factors contributing to the work’s esthetic value.

An esthetic mindset can naturally also be suggested to the fictive reader, if, for instance, the narrator sees himself as an artist and ascribes esthetic value to the narrative. To the extent, however, that the narrator is dissociated

from the author in this regard, his fictive addressee will also be different from the author’s ideal recipient in the mindset he brings to the narrative.

The abstract reader is often compared to a “role” into which the con-crete reader could or should slip. But the abstract reader, as the presumed addressee or desired recipient, is not, in most cases, created as acting, but as watching or listening to the communication occurring between the fictive entities narrator and addressee (or recipient). Lets us look, for example, at the words with which Rudy Panko, the narrator of the forewords to Nikolay Gogol’s Village Evenings near Dikanka, bids farewell to his fictive reader:

If I recall right, I promised to put one of my own stories in this book. And it’s true, I was going to do so, but then I found that I would need at least three books this size for one of my stories. I thought I might print it separately, but I changed my mind. Because I know what you’re like: you’d only laugh at me, old man that I am. No, I won’t stand for that! Farewell! We won’t meet again for a long time, maybe never. What of it? After all, little do you care. Give it a year or two and none of you will ever remember or spare a thought for old Ginger Panko, the bee-keeper. (Gogol, VE, 95)

The role of this snooty, insensitive person who laughs at the old narrator and leaves him without regret is one which the concrete reader will not want to take on and, moreover, is neither suggested nor designed for the abstract reader. As we know, Gogol wrote for a public that had developed a taste for the “Little Russian” and appreciated folk tales highly, as well as the skaz style associated with them.

c) Explicit and implicit representation of the fictive reader

The fictive reader, just like the fictive narrator, can be represented in two ways, explicitly and implicitly.

Explicit representation occurs with the help of pronouns and grammati-cal forms such as the second person, or with well-known forms of address such as “gentle reader” etc.³⁹ The image of the reader created in this way can be equipped with more or less concrete features. Let us take Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin as an example. When the narrator, who as-sumes various identities, appears as the author, his addressee becomes an expert in contemporary Russian literature and an adherent of Pushkin:

Friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan!

The hero of my novel, without preambles, forthwith, I’d like to have you meet.

(I, 2, V. 5–8; Pushkin, EO, 96)

39 Variants of the reader addressed in this way are investigated by Paul Goetsch (1983).

The hero, narrator and fictive reader are connected by the topos of Peters-burg:

Onegin, a good pal of mine, was born upon the Neva’s banks, where maybe you were born, or used to shine, my reader!

There formerly I too promenaded—

but harmful is the North to me.

(I, 2, V. 9–14; Pushkin, EO, 96)

The presence of the fictive reader is activated by the anticipation of ques-tions:

But what about Onegin? By the way, brothers!

I beg your patience:

his daily occupations in detail I’ll describe to you

(IV, 37, V. 1–4; Pushkin, EO, 192)

The implicit representation of the fictive reader operates with the same in-dexical signs as the representation of the narrator and is equally based on unintentional self-expression. In general, the representation of the fictive reader is built up on the representation of the narrator, insofar as the former is an attribute of the latter (similar to how the image of the abstract reader belongs to the characteristics of the abstract author; see above, p. 51).⁴⁰ The markedness of the fictive reader depends to a decisive degree on the mark-edness of the narrator: the more marked the narrator, the more likely that he will evoke an image of the counterpart he addresses. However the pres-ence of a marked narrator does not automatically imply the prespres-ence of an addressee manifest to the same degree.

In principle, every narrative creates a fictive reader (just as every text creates an abstract reader as assumed addressee or ideal recipient), since the indexical signs that point to his existence, no matter how weak they may become, can never disappear completely.⁴¹

One of the characteristics of the narrator reflected in the text is, as al-ready implied, his relation to the addressee. Two operations that

40 In his influential work, Gerald Prince (1973a) discusses the “signaux du narrataire,” insofar as they go beyond the “degré zéro du narrataire.” This zero status was the object of such fierce criticism (cf. Prince 1985), that Prince 1982 eventually renounced it. On the other hand, Prince (1985, 300) dismisses as “trivial” another valid argument: that the supposed

“signaux du narrataire” could just as well be seen as the “characteristics of the narrator”

(Pratt 1982, 212).

41 By saying this, I mean to correct my previous thesis (Schmid 1973, 29; 1986, 308), which said that a fictive reader could be completely absent from a narrative text, a thesis that has attracted much criticism, e.g. from Roland Harweg (1979, 113).

ize this relationship are relevant for the representation of the fictive reader:

appeal and orientation.

Appeal is the demand, usually expressed implicitly, made on the ad-dressee to form a particular opinion of the narrator, his narrative, the nar-rated world, or some of its characters. The appeal is, in itself, a mode of ex-pressing the presence of an addressee. From its contents emerge the atti-tudes and opinions the narrator assumes in the addressee and those which he considers possible. The appeal function can, in principle, never reach absolute zero; it is present even in statements with a predominantly referen-tial function, even when in a minimal form: “Know that …” or “I just want you to know that …”

One type of appeal is the impression. The narrator attempts to use it to present himself in a particular way to his counterpart, to elicit a reaction that can take on either a positive form, as admiration, or a negative one, as con-tempt. (An intentional negative impression is characteristic of Dostoevsky’s paradoxical monologists.)

What is meant by orientation is the alignment of the narrator with the addressee, without which no comprehensible communication can occur.

The orientation on the addressee can naturally only be reconstructed to the extent that it affects the mode of representation.

Orientation refers, first, to the codes and norms it is presumed the ad-dressee shares, which can be linguistic, epistemological, ethical and social.

The narrator need not share the norms assumed in the addressee, but he cannot but use language comprehensible to the addressee and must take into account the presumed scope of his knowledge. It is to this extent that every narrative contains implicit information about the image that the narra-tor has of the abilities and norms of his addressee.

Second, the orientation can consist in the anticipation of the imagined addressee’s behavior. The narrator can imagine the addressee as a passive listener and obedient executor of his appeals, or, alternatively, as an active interlocutor who independently judges what is narrated, poses questions, expresses doubts and raises objections.

For no other author of Russian literature (and perhaps of any literature) does the fictive reader play so active a role as for Dostoevsky. In Notes from the Underground and “A Gentle Spirit,” the narrator speaks literally every word “with a sidelong glance” (Bakhtin 1929, 96), i.e. aligned on the fictive listener. The narrator, who wants to win his listener’s admiration, leaves behind unmistakable traces in the text of his appeal (especially of impres-sion), and his orientation: he wants to present himself in a positive or nega-tive way to the reader or listener (impression), pays attention to his counter-part’s reaction (orientation), guesses his critical replies (orientation), anti-cipates them (impression), attempts to rebut them (impression), and clearly

recognizes (orientation) that he does not succeed in doing so. This type of narrative, whose addressee is imagined as an active interlocutor, is assigned by Bakhtin, in his “metalinguistic” typology of discourse,⁴² to the type “ac-tive double-voiced word” (or “word with orientation toward someone else’s discourse”), i.e. a word, in which two contradictory points of meaning can be recognized simultaneously, that of the speaker and the anticipated evaluative position of the addressee. In contrast to the “passive variety of the double-voiced word,” where “the other person’s discourse is a com-pletely passive tool in the hands of the author wielding it,” in the active variety “the other’s words actively influence the author’s speech, forcing it to alter itself accordingly under their influence and initiative” (Bakhtin 1929; tr. 1984, 197).

d) Narration with a sidelong glance at the fictive reader (A Raw Youth) Dostoevsky’s novel A Raw Youth provides an example of the fictive reader exerting a strong influence on the narration. The twenty-year-old Arkady Dolgoruky, reporting his adventures of the previous year, addresses himself to a reader who is conceptualized as neither an individual nor as the bearer of an ideology. The essential feature of this imagined entity, who, for the young narrator, becomes a representative of the adult world, is mockery of the young man’s immature opinions. The alignment on this reader can be seen in the impressive function, which is particularly noticeable in the pas-sages in which Arkady writes about himself, about his ideas and actions.

The impression’s characteristic feature is the shift from a neutral representa-tion focused on its object to a more or less agitated auto-thematizarepresenta-tion, ac-companied by a certain affectation of lexis and syntax, as well as by rhetori-cal flourishes. Arkady wants to make an impression, to be acknowledged. It is in the impressive function that the appeal is expressed to the adult reader to take him, the youth, seriously. The appeal for recognition is manifested in verbal flourishes that palliate reality as well as in those which portray the actual situation as having been worse than it was. In this pejorative por-trayal, we discover, alongside the desire to make an impression by having the courage to portray himself negatively, the diametrically opposite en-deavor, something which provides the basis for the structure that Bakhtin called the “word with a loophole”:

For example, the confessional self-definition with a loophole […] is, judging by its meaning, an ultimate word about oneself, a final definition of oneself, but in fact it is forever taking into account internally the responsive, contrary evalu-ation of oneself made by another. The hero who repents and condemns himself

42 On this typology see in English: Morson & Emerson 1990, 121–268.

actually wants only to provoke praise and acceptance by another. (Bakhtin 1929;

tr. 1984, 233)

The attempt to influence the reader encounters, in the narrator’s imagina-tion, a counter-reaction in the addressee. This is because the narrator imag-ines his counterpart as someone who does not accept the way he portrays himself and who reacts to his confessions with mocking, sobering objec-tions. It is for this reason that, in this narration, the constant orientation on the interlocutor’s reaction comes into effect alongside the appeal function.

By examining the way the reader’s anticipated critical replies are rebut-ted in Arkady’s narrative, we can differentiate various forms of orientation.

The orientation makes itself known in general terms in changes to the style and to the way the story is told. When Arkady writes in a more adolescent way than might be expected from an intelligent, educated twenty-year-old not entirely unpracticed in writing, when he slips into the brash, jargon-filled teenage tone characterized by stereotypes and hyperbolic statements, or when he shows off with defiantly apodictic claims, he has, as it were, looked over his shoulder at the reader and attempted, with false self-confidence, to nip all possible objections in the bud. This type of orientation is present, for instance, in Arkady’s introductory remarks to his narrative:

I cannot resist sitting down to write the history of the first steps in my career, though I might very well abstain from doing so … I know one thing for certain:

I shall never again sit down to write my autobiography even if I live to be a hundred. One must be too disgustingly in love with oneself to be able without shame to write about oneself. I can only excuse myself on the ground that I am not writing with the same object with which other people write, that is, to win the praise of my readers. […] I am not a professional writer and don’t want to be, and to drag forth into the literary market-place the inmost secrets of my soul and an artistic description of my feelings I should regard as indecent and con-temptible. (Dostoevsky, RY, 1)

The orientation on the reader shapes the argument, the register, and the

The orientation on the reader shapes the argument, the register, and the