This approach to literature might reveal why Biblical narrative seems never completely at horne within the category of literature, since the act of writing sacred scripture cannot be understood as mimetic in this sense. Speech acts such as the promise of land, or the Sinai covenant, claim to be real world speech acts, in some sense, and not parasitic. The major criticisms of this initial attempt to understand the nature of literature with the help of speech act theory, have pertained to the difficulty of separating the literary from the nonliterary, as well as fiction from nonfiction.
More recent attempts to develop this aspect of the "centrist" program have attempted to circumvent this problem by breaking down these distinctions, rejecting the concept of mimesis, and defining more precisely the features of the generative speech act which gives rise to these verbal forms.
Mary Louise Pratt, who has been the first to move toward a comprehensive, systematically developed speech act theory of literature, takes Ohmann to task for attempting to distinguish literary discourse from ordinary discourse. Her study of sociolinguistic investigations of "natural narrative" i. These similarities, "derive from the fact that at some level of analysis they are utterances of the same type. They occur in novels not because they are novels i.
The pressing question to which this leads, of course, is what kind of global speech act is a likely candidate to fulfill this large role, if not the act of mimesis? To answer this question Pratt locates the narrative in the context of the authorlreader relationship and seeks to understand, in a broad sense, what occurs in an event of narration. In contrast to asserting or representing, a narration involves, "verbally displaying astate of affairs" Pratt: , that is, transmitting a message which has a special relevance to the hearer that exceeds that of simple assertive or representative speech acts.
This endows the narratives with the quality of"tellability," which "characterizes an important subclass of assertive or representative speech acts that includes natural narrative, an enormous proportion of conversation, and many if not all literary works. Such "display texts" evoke the participation of the readerlhearer in quite significant ways: The author invites his addressee s , "to join hirn in contemplating it and evaluating it, and responding to it.
His point is to produce in his hearers not only belief but also an imaginative and affective involvement in the state of affairs he is representing and an evaluative stance toward it" Pratt: Ultimately his aim is to elicit an interpretation of a problematicevent which is supported by a consensus of hirnself and his hearer. Pratt considers this type of verbal activity to be "crucial to our wellbeing in the world," since "one of the most important ways we have of dealing with the unexpected, uncertain, unintelligible aspects of our lives is to share and interpret them collectively" Pratt: Introduction: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism 7 This linkage of 'literary' speech acts with pre-literary oral discourse corresponds to the way most Biblical scholars today trace much Biblical writing back to an origin in oral tradition.
The blurring of the lines between fiction and fact which is characteristic of this type of oral speech also corresponds to the intermixture of legend, myth and history which carried over from the oral to the written stages of the biblical tradition. Pratt's approach would thus suggest that Biblical narrative should be analyzed more in terms of the function served by the telling or 'displaying' of these texts in the religious life of the community, and less attention given to establishing whether they are his tory, fiction, or some combination of the two.
Having defined the type of global speech act which gives rise to narrative, Pratt proceeds to fi11 in the conventionalliterary context shared by authors and readers wh ich makes this type of speech act felicitous. To do this she draws on a variety of sources. They extend from the conventional factors which shape the audience's wi11ingness to enter into a one-way discourse with no opportunity to respond Pratt: , to the assumption created in the reader by the "pre-selection and pre-paration" which the publication process engenders , to the "conversational maxims" of speech act philosopher H.
Grice, which provide a means of analyzing the implications or "implicatures" in Grice's terminology of dialogue ff. Many of these observations regarding the contextual conventions are especia11y applicable to the context of Biblical writing; for instance, the wi11ingness to give up the privilege of responding takes on religious meaning when the writing is sacred, and the pre-selection process becomes the process of canonizationl With this array of conventions set in place to define the external context of the narrative speech act, Pratt can then turn to the analysis of the speech acts internal to specific narratives.
While indicating that the constituent elements of the natural narrative have their counterparts in the fictional, 'literary' narrative, it is the conversational maximsof Grice's Cooperation Principle which she finds the most fruitful for analyzing the micro-structure of the narrative text. On the basis of the Cooperative Principle Grice maintains that the coherence and continuity in ordinary dialogue are made possible by the partners' adhering to certain implicit conversational maxims: 1. Quantity-the contribution of each contributor must be informative but not overly informative; 2.
Quality-the contribution must be truthful, based on evidence, and not knowingly false; 3. Manner--contributions must avoid obscurity, ambiguity, unnecessary prolixity, and must be orderly Pratt: The Cooperative Principle mayaiso be transgressed in ways which Grice has reduced to standard types: unintentional failures, and various knowing transgres- 8 Semeia sions that he terms violations, opting out, clashes, and a type of violation which deliberately "Routs" a maxim in a way that does not actually jeopardize the Cooperative Principle , The concept of tellability generally conforms to the maxim of Relation though it requires going considerably beyond the mere exchange of information Pratt: But what of the maxim of Quality, which requires truthfulness?
Because of the explicit conventions governing the pubHcation of fictional narratives, the non-fulfillment of this maxim does not constitute a violation, as it would in a non-fictional display text, since it is impossible to He about a manifestly fictional assertion. This maxim would explain why achanging concept of 'truth' in the reading community would lead to serious difficulties in the interpretation of narratives such as those in the Bible, which have no original publication conventions to make clear the nature of their truth claims.
Rather than outright violation of the maxims, the fictional display text "Routs" maxims like that of Quality. Pratt can conclude then that "the literary speech situation is such that at the level of authorlreader interaction, all Grice's types of nonfulfillment except Routing either cannot arise or tend to be eliminated in the process of a text's becoming a work ofliterature" It is because of the implicit observance of the maxims within the real world literary context that they can be Routed so Ragrantly and often in the literary work itself.
When the Cooperative Principle is applied to the inner narrative speech acts, one is dealing then, not with the actual author who is communicating through his production of display texts, but with the author implied or expressly signified as in first person narratives by the concrete discourse of the text, i. This division, which occurs chieRy, according to Pratt, in "imaginative literature, " requires her to return to the theory of mimetic speech acts to explain the relation between the speech acts of the implied author or fictive speaker and that of the actual author.
A sharp difference thus exists between the degree and type of non-fulfillment possible for the actual author, and that permitted to the implied author. Here again Pratt's analysis illuminates the sharp difference between Biblical writing and at least some types of 'literature' in that the constraints governing the actual author apply as weIl to the 'implied author' perhaps because of the important social and religious functions of the Biblical narrative. In this selection, a golf game is recounted by the retarded Benjy, who is the fictive speaker.
Through the fence, between the curling Rower spaces, I could see them hitting.
They were coming toward where the Rag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the Rower tree.
Then they put the Rag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the Rower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away. Pratt points out that, at the level of the fictive narrator, at least two of the maxims of the Cooperation Principle are violated: the maxims of Quantity and Manner.
With respect to the maxim of Quantity, Benjy fails to provide a crucial piece of information which furnishes the causal link between the events he describes, namely, the golf ball. The maxim of Manner is violated by the use of vague, indirect wordy descriptions which take six clauses to say what could be said in single brief sentence, "they putted and then teed off at the next hole" Pratt: This massive violation of the Cooperative Principle by the fictive narrator can take place without destroying the relation with the reader because, at the level of the actual narrator who is creating a display text, the reader perceives it as an intentional Houting which has significant implied meaning, coming as it does, at the very beginning of the novel: "Faulkner is implicating not that golf is a silly waste of time, but that among other things, the speaker of the story has some cognitive or perceptual impediment, that this fact is relevant to our understanding of what follows, and that he intends us to share, contemplate, and evaluate Benjy's view of the world and contrast it with our own" Pratt: , While a great many fictive works, especially in the modern period, make use of mimetic violations which cause the fictive author's discourse to deviate from the Cooperative Principle and from the discourse of the actual author, the traditional nineteenth century novel constitutes an unmarked case in which this deviation does not occur.
This mayaIso provide one important reason the Biblical narrative is so often considered to belong to the category of realistic narrative writing. In interpreting novels of the unmarked variety, there is no secondary level of implied meanings beyond those implied by the discourse of the 10 Semeia fictive speaker and the characters. The use of this method to analyze such novels would thus focus upon the speech acts internal to the fictional discourse.
Pratt does not provide examples of this type of analysis, but concentrates instead upon the more current examples of deviance. Pratt initially rejects Ohmann's attempt to separate literature from real world discourse on the basis of its mimetic character since the worldcreating function of the "display text" is not affected by its factuality or fictionality, nonfictional narrative accounts being as world-creating as fictional Pratt: But since the basic reason for reliance upon the concept of mimesis previously was to account for the fictive content of literary speech acts, her reintroduction of this idea has to have a different genesis, i.
Jonathan Culler suggests that this peculiar reversion to the concept of mimesis was occasioned by the desire "to seek in all novels something that resembles areal act by a real person" Culler Though Pratt has eliminated the dichotomy between the fictive and the factual internal to literary discourse, she still posits areal, factual author outside of it. Just as the distinction between literary and real world discourse led Ohmann to rely upon the concept of mimesis, so now Pratt's distinction between the actual author and implied author finally forces her to do the same. Culler, however, reflecting Derrida's position, argues that "there is a sense in which all speech acts are imitation speech acts.
To perform a speech act is to imitate a model, to take on the role of someone performing this particular speech act" Culler If the exclamatory assertion which gives rise to the display text is also an imitation, then the concept of mimesis becomes self-cancelling because ubiquitous, and the focus of the analysis must broaden to include the writing subject. Pratt's positing of a closed, historical subject outside of the discursive process is a sign of what Culler calls a "powerful humanistic ideology," which she assurnes but does not question.
In his view, Pratt's speech act theory leads the most consistently to the view that, "literary narratives are But this would, of course, collapse the distinction between the fictive and the real both with regard to the narrative and to the author. With respect to the Biblical narrative, where both the actual author and the original situation of communication must be very tentatively reconstructed historically, and where there may be minimal deviation from the maxims, it is easier to eliminate the concept of mimesis as Culler suggests, and to view biblical narratives as "real world narrative display texts.
She means by these terms, "rules which users of the language lassume to be in force in their verbal dealings with each other" Pratt: 8. Rancher Re sets out to delineate those rules which are "necessary" for the performance of non-defective i. The question with regard to the literary speech act is whether Pratt's "appropriateness conditions" are constitutive rules whose violation would cause a breakdown of an exclamatory assertion, or whether they are merely regulatory.
Michael Rancher, in his perceptive critical review of Pratt's book, objects that her appropriateness conditions, such as "tellability" , are "loose, merely regulative and customary" and not constitutive Hancher This criticism points to a deeper problem, however, regarding the role of intentionality vis-a-vis rules and conventions within speech act theory itself. While Pratt bases her work initially on the theoretical base of Austin and Searle, in developing her system of appropriateness conditions she seems far more influenced by Grice, for whom intentionality rather than constitutive rules plays the decisive role.
Searle complains, apropos an early paper by Grice, that, "One might say that on Grice's account it would seem that any sentence can be uttered with any meaning whatever, given that the circumstances make possible the appropriate 12 Semeia intentions: Searle Although Searle gives a prominent place to intention in his speech act theory, he also argues that, "Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention" Searle Pratt thus seems to have moved from a Searlean viewpoint to a Gricean viewpoint without clearly dealing with the change this implies in the status of constitutive rules.
Without rules that are genuinely constitutive and generative of literary speech acts, the appropriateness conditions that Pratt brings together, while descriptively illuminating the social context of literature, lack the rigor to account for internal narratological and semantic structures see Margolis On the one hand, Searle holds that these rules can be followed unconsciously, even as phonemic rules operate with little or no conscious awareness or intentionality Searle 41, On the other, he insists on the fundamental role played by intentionality in the production of illocutionary force: "In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect" SearIe A certain ambivalence- appears in an argument which makes intentionality, which is a conscious factor as Searle uses it here, an integral part of what can be an unconscious constitutive rule.
According to E. Hirsch this unresolved tension in speech act theory between intentionality and conventionality is simply another manifestation of the perennial conflict between the intuitionist and positivist poles of hermeneutics, which it has failed to overcome Hirsch One must then ask whether constitutive rules, which for Searle SearIe 51, 52, , ftn.
This is a question which speech act theory has not raised, but it is at the root of the ambivalence regarding intentionality and conventionality or 'constitutivity'. The operation of intentionality requires a "full" subject as a given, which then Blls the forms of language with a certain intended meaning.
As Frank Lentricchia says interpreting Paul de Man , "Speech act theory depends upon the metaphysical notion of the subject as the coherent center from which acts are directed" Lentricia The logic of intentionality thus tends to relativize the forms it uses and subordinate them to intentions.
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The concept of constitutive rules, however, suggests that there are conBgured acts of speech which produce meaning in their occurrence which transcends and subordinates the Introduction: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism 13 intentions of the language user. To the extent that such acts of speech might be constitutive of human subjectivity itself, intentionality would fall into a fundamentally secondary, derivative position. Any discussion of speech acts at this fundamentally constitutive level would engage the same issues raised in Biblical studies by the concept of "word-event" Sprachereignis developed by the 'new hermeneutic' to be discussed in my article below.
This problem is fundamental to the complex relationship that obtains between the actual and implied authors.