The positioned reader

1 On reading and analysis

Sometimes I am reading and sometimes I am analysing reading; it is physically, conceptually and in principle impossible to do both at the same time. If this claim is right, then there is a simple but significant consequence for the institution, tradition and discipline of literary study. What follows in this article is a defence of the claim and an explanation of what it means for us, with particular reference to the ethics of reading.

It is of course possible to move quickly, to toggle between direct reading and the higher-level activity of thinking about reading, but it is not possible for a human consciousness to do both simultaneously. It is physically impossible because in each case I will be looking at different aspects of the text and paying attention to different elements that are foregrounded within the apparent communicative context. Just as it is neuro-optically impossible to see figure-ground as ground-figure at the same time, so it is impossible to pay simultaneously equal attention to two different mental configurations of text. This is as much a physical impossibility as a conceptual one.

It is also conceptually impossible for further reasons, since the hard distinction between body and mind has fallen away in the age of cognitive embodiment. The world as a mental representation that I need to build when I am reading is a relatively direct one, in contrast with the framing world which I need to build in order to watch myself as a reader one world-level down from where I am as an analyst. Reader and analyst exist at different ontological levels, one containing the other, and one watching the other. The relationship is one-way: the analyst is aware of the reader, but the reader is not aware of the analyst above – as soon as I the reader think of the analytical level, I stop being a reader and become me the analyst.

Furthermore, and related to these ontological matters, it is impossible in principle, in theory to read and analyse at the same time. Reading is a direct form of consciousness, ‘pointed at’ the world of the text; thinking about reading is a form of self-consciousness, pointed at the reader. They are, by this directional definition, opposites. Both reading and analysis are directed towards an object, and (again for the physical reasons and the conceptual reasons already given) it is not possible to regard simultaneously two separate objects.

It might be objected that in fact we are dealing here with one human body and a single experiential process – that my reading self and my analytical self are simply like two of my personality traits rather than like two persons residing within me. This might be a reasonable objection if reader and analyst were equal, but in fact one is contained within the other; more crucially, one (the analyst) is dependent on the other (the reader) for its/his/my very existence.

The major consequence of this line of argument is to sustain a distinction between the natural everyday activity of reading and the scholarly and scientific activity of analysis. The vast majority of practices within institutional literary scholarship confuse the two. Literary critics mainly regard themselves as professional readers, offering interpretations and elaborating on cultural contexts, and ‘teaching literature’ in the sense of encouraging others to see the value in particular sets of literary works and readings. On the other hand, those – stylisticians, narratologists, empirical investigators of literary reading, corpus linguists, and others – who see themselves as engaging in a science of literature instead regard themselves as offering a more applied linguistic, anthropological and descriptive account of the activity of reading. Literary critics sometimes think that stylisticians simply treat literature as data; it is worse than that – for stylisticians, literary critics are data.

Maintaining the essential distinction between natural reading and reflecting analytically on the activity is not only important as a means of preserving any claim to a disciplined status for English studies, it is also vital in verifying that meanings and aesthetic effects are properly and accurately generated and described. It is furthermore an ethical matter, since it is dishonest to pretend that self-interested ideological positioning and subjective evaluation are equivalent to a descriptive or evidential account that aims at falsifiability or is open and transparent and available for accessible interrogation.

In this respect, it is the development of literary scholarship from a post-Victorian gentlemanly pursuit that is in fact the historical blip in a larger picture. Its history shows that textually evidenced literary analysis has for the most part occurred for millennia under the name of rhetoric. The original dimensions of rhetoric (Aristotle’s three Appeals in the Rhetoric I.ii (Aristotle, 1991)) rest on meaning and informativity (logos), the emotional appeal of the speaker articulated in their empathetic diction and delivery (pathos), and the credibility, authority and moral position of the speaker (ethos). All three of these dimensions are ‘appeals’ between the communicating author and the audience or reader to be persuaded of the worldview being presented: they are fundamentally a scheme for verbal communicativeness.

This tripartite and integral connection between meaning, emotion and authority persisted as the foundation of rhetoric in education largely into the European middle ages. The influential 16th-century thinker Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, see Ong, 2004) recast the scheme into five ‘canons’ of rhetorical skill: inventio, memoria, pronuntiatio, dispositio and elocutio. The first three of these (invention, memory and delivery) are concerned with the creative and performative skills of the producer. Dispositio (the organisation of ideas) might be understood as the meaningful content of the text (a proto-narratology), and elocutio can be seen as covering the combined stylistic patterns of lexicogrammatical choices (Cockcroft, 2002). It is noticeable that the emphasis across all five of these dimensions has shifted away from classical and medieval forms of rhetoric by demoting aesthetics and ethics in favour of informativity, tempered only by performance. It could be argued that with the rise of print, writing and eventually mass literacy over the centuries between 1500 and 1900 (see Ong, 1982), the sense of creative performance gradually fell away entirely from the analysis of text. Certainly by the mid-20th century in critical theorising on both sides of the Atlantic, the emphasis was on the content and style of the text, with the only remnant of rhetoric as a current discipline existing as elocutio – an investigation centred on style and reinventing itself variously as New Criticism, French structuralism and contemporary stylistics (Wales, 2011). By then, systematic analysis was all about informativity (meaning or logos) – with aesthetics (pathos) and ideological positioning (ethos) left in the domain of non-systematic literary criticism.

Of course, the history of European stylistics (including stylistique and Stilistik) has developed over the last half-century by gradually reversing the New Critical prohibitions on discussing the intentional and psychological fallacies in literary reading (Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1954a, 1954b), and thereby opening up the field again to pathos and ethos. Reacting to the crude biographical criticism and wild psychic speculation that passed for literary scholarship in the 1920s and 1930s, the ‘intentional fallacy’ set a new standard that eschewed impossible surmising on authorial intention, in favour of a focus on the text itself. However, its strong legacy well into the later period of modern stylistics has been a neglect of questions of deliberateness, artistic choice, creativity, authority and credibility. Stylistics was too easily characterised in consequence as a pursuit that was opposed to history, society and even common humanity (Barry, 2007, 2009). Wimsatt and Beardsley’s (1954b) ‘affective fallacy’ has been less observed as a dogma in contemporary stylistics, though matters of readerly engagement, artistic texture, imagination, feeling, satisfaction and individual appreciation have tended to remain only implicit in stylistic practice until fairly recently.

2 The place of ethics in rhetoric, narratology and cognitive poetics

I see the development of a cognitive poetics – in which insights from cognitive science are applied to literary reading – as part of a longer evolution within stylistics. Innovations in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis enriched the discipline, and the ‘cognitive turn’ (Steen, 1994) is simply the most recent advance in the field (alongside computational corpus techniques). Most of the contributions in the two early key editions in ‘cognitive stylistics’ (Semino and Culpeper, 2002, followed by Gavins and Steen, 2003) focused on explaining meaning and interpretation, but dealt with matters of aesthetic judgement and value only implicitly or in passing, and hardly mentioned the ethics of reading at all. Similarly, my own cognitive poetics textbook from that period (Stockwell, 2002) focused almost exclusively on the ways in which we could account for meaning and informativity between literary texts and readers. In the decade since then, there has been a resurgence of understanding of the usefulness of a cognitive science of aesthetics (Hogan, 2003; Stockwell, 2009a, 2009b, 2011a), to the point at which this research programme is a rich area of current activity. But systematic cognitive poetic work on the ethics of reading has been relatively neglected, with the exceptions set out in the following paragraphs.

Once the prominence of literature as a rhetorical act of communication is reasserted, many of the standard practices of literary scholarship in the institution are revealed for their partiality and pointlessness: pure linguistic formalism, de-textualised cultural studies, speculative biographical assertion, whimsical erudite meanderings around allusions and matters of esoteric and exclusive taste. As a corrective to much of this sort of thing, the work of James Phelan (1996, 2005) stands as a descriptive and analytical account of the ethical relationship between reader on the one hand and author, narrator and character on the other. The fact that this is a personal relationship as well as an ideologically valued one serves finally to reunite aesthetics and ethics with informativity:

Because the approach sees ethics as part and parcel of rhetoric and because it pays attention to the how as well as the what of representation, the approach works through aesthetics in order to arrive at ethics. (Phelan, 2004: 630)

Phelan goes on to emphasise the importance of ‘the concrete particularities of individual texts (Phelan, 2004: 650), though his own approach is illustrative of his narratological typology rather than stylistic in the European tradition. Where detailed textual analysis occurs in the recent American tradition, it tends to be a form of ‘close-reading’. Phelan’s colleague Peter Rabinowitz (1992) has argued that such attention to minute detail is unnatural and serves to create a hard and undesirable distinction between a reader reading naturally and the sort of intense reading engaged in during close-reading. However, this position (also echoed more recently by Eagleton, 2008) falls foul of the same mistake with which I began this article: there is a confusion of the separate roles of natural reading and analysis. It ignores the extent to which a detailed analysis illuminates featural effects that might be vague, hard to articulate or define, very subtle or faint, or at the very edge of or even below the level of consciousness, but which nevertheless have an effect in the overall reading experience. In any case, rigorous and disciplined stylistic analysis is not close-reading, in the same intuitive, impressionistic and amateurish sense.

More significantly, Rabinowitz’s position would collapse the different roles of reader and author/narrator/character, which need to be differentiated in order to preserve the integrity and usefulness of Phelan’s model (see also Rabinowitz, 1987). Phelan (2004) draws out the ‘axes of distance’ between reader and author/narrator/character, along spatial, temporal, intellectual, emotional, physical, psychological and ethical dimensions. He gives examples for all of these, but they can also be stylistically specified by the categories used within deictic shift theory (Duchan et al., 1995; McIntyre, 2006, 2007) and cognitive poetics, as set out in the analytical part of this article. The fundamental nature of the ethical dimension, however, depends on that basic alterity of self and other identified by Levinas (1981, and applied to literature by A Gibson, 1999; Newton, 1995 and Nussbaum, 1990). Levinas and his followers insist on the importance of the interpersonal act of communication rather than the recorded trace of the fixed message (a preference for ‘Saying’ over the ‘Said’, in his terms). Within a more formalist or text-bound approach, this would render problematic the displaced relationship of author and reader typical of literature, but a cognitive poetic approach that is based in situatedness (Barsalou, 2009) rearranges the work of Levinas with Phelan’s ethical turn and stylistic analysis in a rather neat alignment. Situatedness in cognitive linguistics asserts the online, uniquely assembled nature of a singular occurrence of discourse, and its place in more general structures and schemas.

Crucially, this approach treats a reader as a natural object and reading as a natural phenomenon, and applies a superordinate analysis to these things. Phelan (2004, see also 2001, 2006) is careful to be precise about this, in identifying a flesh-and-blood reader, an authorial audience (an ‘implied reader’), a narrative audience (an apparent reading position), and a narratee (a narrator-defined ostensible addressee). It is clear that, while texts bring their ethical impositions (see later in this article), readers also have their own dispositions that are most strongly effective in the flesh and gradually weaker as authorial audience, narrative audience, and narratee respectively. The history of narratological theory on the reader has generally fallen into two patterns. Most approaches have modelled the reader as a character-type: the mock reader (W Gibson, 1950), perfect reader (Leavis, 1952), implied reader (Booth, 1961; Iser, 1974) or ‘ghost’ (Margolin, 2007), the informed reader (Fish, 1970), superreader (Riffaterre, 1971), real reader and virtual reader (Prince, 1973, 1982), ideal reader (also Prince, 1973; see also Culler, 1975), narratee (Prince, 1973 again; Chatman, 1978), model reader (Eco, 1979, 1990), or even the interpretive community (Fish, 1980) or readerly identity theme (Holland, 1975). All of these risk repeating the fundamental flaw of old-fashioned psychology which regards personality as fixed and consistent rather than adaptable and situated. Alternatively, narratologists have modelled the reader by methodology: a sort of captive reader (Richards, 1924, but see West, 2012), aggregated reader (in Miall’s 2005, 2007 work), an empiricised reader (under the scrutiny of van Peer et al., 2007), or even a partial return to an introspective reader in some of my own work (Stockwell, 2011b, 2011c). The pendulum of analysis across this history has swung from the notion that texts drive all interpretations, or that readers are absolutely free to construct any interpretations; where the complex interplay of imposition and disposition have been accounted for, the analysis has tended to be rather vague or impressionistic. Moreover, literary works tend to be selected for demonstration and illustration that are easiest to prove the point, or that are highly open in terms of their interpretability.

3 Preferred readings, position and space

If you were only to read literary critical commentary and theory, but had never read any literary texts, you might gain the impression that the hallmark of English literature was its ambiguity, ambivalence, and openness to multiple possible interpretations. Further, that ‘open texts’ (Eco, 1972) were fundamentally more highly valued and likely to become canonised than relatively ‘closed texts’ that allowed little readerly creativity and engagement. Of course, the institutions of literature (universities, literary societies, newspaper and magazine reviews, and the culture industry in general) have tended to privilege polyvalent and irresolvable works ever since modernism, and have even posed a theoretical scheme in the various forms of post-structuralism to formalise it and impose its value-system on older works of literature.

However, a simple descriptive survey of the historical range of literary texts quickly demonstrates that, in fact, those works with definite and recoverable ‘messages’ are by far in the majority. This is unquestionably true of almost all pre-modernist literature, where a religious, cultural or ideological point is central to the appreciation of the work. Intimations of ambivalence or subversion in the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton or even Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brontës or Gaskell are usually awkward but ingenious impositions of post-modernist pluralism. It is of course entirely possible to read any literature from these ages in your own historical terms, but it is almost always necessary to set aside or reinterpret in a peculiar way some aspect of the text’s organisation that would otherwise look like a fairly definite if implied authorial intention.

This is not an argument for a correct historically positioned reading nor a return to a mystical private knowledge of authorial intention. I have no idea what was in George Orwell (or even Eric Blair’s) mind as he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, but there is no question what I am supposed to think as a consequence of reading the novel. Furthermore, almost no reader (apart from mischievous anonymous online ones) reads Nineteen Eighty-Four and thinks Winston Smith got what he deserved from a Party system that is attractive and desirable. It is not that there is a single correct reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but – borrowing a notion from sociolinguistics (Pomerantz, 1984; Sacks, 1987; see also Bilmes, 1988) – there is definitely a preferred response. Preferred and dispreferred responses are terms designed to understand the nature of turn-taking in conversation analysis (a discipline at the confluence of sociolinguistics and pragmatics). Usually such analyses concern face-to-face interaction, where the context surrounding the participants is known in some detail to the analyst. When someone initiates a conversational turn, it is usually clear what the intended pragmatic force (the illocution) is, and interlocutors usually demonstrate by their responses that they have successfully reconstructed this illocution. In live conversation, when things go awry or there is a misunderstanding, it usually leads to an explicit correction by one person or the other. Initiated turns often carry a contextually dependent preferred response: ‘Nice weather!’ (preferred positive response); ‘How are you?’ (preferred non-committal positive phatic response). Where there is not a single preferred response, a preferred range is normal: ‘What time is it?’ (answer relevant to the time); ‘Are you coming out with us?’ (either the answer ‘yes’ or an apologetic ‘no’ are more preferred, and in that order, than any other responses). The nature of the preference is encoded pragmatically in the linguistic form of the utterance, in context.

For the displaced situation of most literary reading, the context is minimal, and so the text-drivenness of the stylistic form is even more essential to the reader’s evaluation of a preferred response to the text as a whole. It is not surprising that literary utterances (whole texts) are read with a view to estimating a preferred response, since this is the default model of human communication. In short, readers assume that there is a preferred reading of a literary text, which they impute to the author’s intention. They often short-circuit this model in claiming to know what the author intended.

To repeat: most literary works have an encoded, text-driven preferred response. I am aware that in analogising this notion from conversation analysis to literary response I am scaling up across discourse structures, but it seems to me that the evidence for a similar pattern is overwhelming. It is true of the vast majority of canons, from university literature curricula to online lists of favourite reads (see Greenblatt, 2008; Grossman, 2007). The BBC’s ‘Big Read’ project (BBC, 2005) compiled a list of the UK’s top 100 favourite books, and almost all of them feature an easy-to-follow plot and easily discernible theme or point: featuring Heller’s Catch-22, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, du Maurier’s Rebecca, as well as many children’s and young adults’ books that even more obviously are didactic or strong on a moral position (Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at number 1, Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, or Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example).

The website The Blue Pyramid (2011) lists over 1000 ‘best books of all time’, based on a weighted scoring of suggestions from readers’ lists, and again this canon features books overwhelmingly with a clear point or message. Even when authors select their own best books of all time (see Zane, 2007), the list is similarly dominated not by texts rich with a freeplay of meaning or ambivalence, but by those with a strong plot and explicit moral positioning or ideology: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, Lolita, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and so on. Where such texts are claimed to be ambivalent, the claim is usually made not by natural readers but by literary critics deliberately recuperating and reappropriating the text.

It is important to note that preferred responses are not always acquiesced responses: Lolita is read by literary critics as a clever irony on the paedophile mind and by some horrified non-scholarly readers as a defence of child-abuse, but in both cases a specific, not polyvalent intention is ascribed to the author (or narrator-author). All readers recognise a preferred response, even where the clear message of the text is not one that they would agree with ordinarily. Many (liberal) readers of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead understand the political and ideological point that is being made, while being aware that their own hostile feelings are a dispreferred response (see Jeffries, 2010).

Of course, for some texts (like Nineteen Eighty-Four) the ethical dimension is highly salient and foregrounded. Such texts tend to be regarded as explicitly moralised and didactic: More’s Utopia sets the poor contemporary state of Europe against a vision of a better economic and administrative system; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels dramatises a series of absurdities in society, thought and morals; HG Wells’ The Time Machine extrapolates class-division and exploitation into the deep future, and so on. Many such works are religious, political or science fictional by genre, but even more realist or naturalistic works can also be generally regarded as ethically pointed. Aside from academic readers who have an eccentric institutionalised predilection for wilfully innovative readings, the vast majority of natural readers are able to discern a textualised preferred reading and impute it to their mind-modelled schema of the author’s intention.

The nature of an ethical dimension in literary reading is dependent on at least two interlocutors (imputed author and reader) – usually occupying positions separated in space and time in a split discourse world (in text world theory terms: see Werth, 1999 and see Werth, 199 and Gavins, 2007). An ethical sense is motivated by a world-switch, since in crude terms ethics is always the comparative difference between what is and an alternative world. That alternativity can be modalised in various ways (what ought to be, what must be, what might be, what I would like it to be), time-displaced (what used to be or will be), reported (what they say is the case), or metaphorised (what a parallel world is or is like). World-switched negations are also a cause of ethical comparison (what is not), though it is possible to see all forms of world-switch as being ontologically negative in essence: all world-switches are not the matrix world we began with. Indeed, negation might be regarded as a basic absolute function arising from every transition across a world boundary away from the reader’s own discourse world, with these other aforementioned world-switch triggers functioning as specifications of that basic alternativity.

The movement that a reader undergoes by engaging throughout a literary work can be mapped as a transformative effect. From start to finish of a text, a reader is likely to adopt several different permutations of attitude and sets of knowledge and feelings towards the text-worlds in hand: a single reader over the duration of a text-reading can be regarded as being composed of several successive enactors (to shift a text-world theory term usually reserved for instances of a character up to the discourse world level, see Gavins, 2007: 41; see also Emmott, 1992, 1997, 2003). In Stockwell (2009a: 162–166), I traced the development of different enactors of the reader in the process of reading Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife – where a reader was pushed to adopt distinct ethical positions in relation to the time-shifting character’s life. A reader’s gradual understanding of the character’s odd situation eventually enables us to set aside the usual social attitude to a man engaged in a romantic relationship with a woman who at several points is portrayed as a young girl.

This readerly adjustment through several iterations of readerly enactors is consistent with a general approach to personality in cognitive psychology that emphasises its plasticity and situatedness, rather than its fixity (see Gibbs, 2003). The adjustable and protean nature of the reader’s relationship with characters can also be operationalised into a stylistic tool by the notion of a deictic braid (Stockwell, 2009a: 127–131), understood as a complex bundle of deictic dimensions that serve to define the ethical positioning of reader and character:

Perceptual deixis (encoded in pronouns, demonstratives, definite articles and definite reference, and verbs of mental states and emotions, etc.)

These dimensions, taken together, can help to explore and calibrate the nature of the ethical relationship across world-boundaries.

4 Deictic positioning in three novels

For illustration, here is the celebrated end of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre:

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present. …

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest – blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character – perfect concord is the result. …

My Edward and I, then, are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise. Diana and Mary Rivers are both married: alternately, once every year, they come to see us, and we go to see them. Diana’s husband is a captain in the navy, a gallant officer and a good man. Mary’s is a clergyman, a college friend of her brother’s, and, from his attainments and principles, worthy of the connection. Both Captain Fitzjames and Mr Wharton love their wives, and are loved by them. …

The final passage above aims at a closing positioning of a reader with shared values. As Phelan (1996) points out in an analysis of this novel, a reader is positioned between the narrative audience of Jane’s account and the authorial audience of Brontë’s novel. However, the text hardly ever offers us opportunities for noticing the compositional level (ourselves as authorial audience). We can locate this positioning by examining the strands in the deictic braid. In the first two sentences of this closing passage, the famous much-quoted direct address in terms of perceptual deixis risks alerting the reader to the novelistic texture of the current enterprise, but it is immediately followed by the conversational syntactic inversion of the textual deixis (‘A quiet wedding we had’). The illusion of a direct access to Jane (and relative neglect of Charlotte) is maintained, as it has been throughout the novel. Although at first, as an authorial reader at discourse world level, Charlotte Brontë and I co-construct the text-world of Jane’s narrative, my relationship with Jane is mainly enriched if I know that it was originally published as an ‘autobiography’, ‘edited’ by the pseudonymous Currer Bell. The mode of autobiography diminishes deictic distance and creates a single, one-step vector across a text-world boundary. Throughout the novel, there is not a great deal of explicit compositional embedding; instead, the pace is a slow function-advancing evolution of the matrix ‘Jane’ text-world across the novel, as she grows from orphan girl to mature woman. Cumulatively, the quality of her mind becomes very rich and direct, and authorial interventions or distractions are very rare.

Here in the closing passage, my final relationship with Jane is defined by the temporal switch over 10 years, where I follow her perspective as the authoritative evaluator of her own life. The perceptual deictic shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ in the middle paragraph serves to blend the personalities of Jane and Edward Rochester, and the sense of social balance and harmony is effected by the relational deixis and ideological encoding that presents Christian value and earthly happiness in balance. Overall, this is a morally sympathetic positioning.

Jane Eyre has been read as a proto-feminist work (see Martin, 1966; and see Gilbert and Gubar, 1979 as well as many others), where the preferred ideology is replaced with what is surely a dispreferred one: such appropriations are of course common throughout history, but it is important I think to recognise that their dispreferred textual status is the consequence of their anachrony. Just as with feminist recuperations of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale or Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, part of the vivid sense of reappropriation stems from the fact that these are strongly dispreferred readings from the texts themselves. Interestingly, all the prequels, sequels, adaptations and loose rewrites of Jane Eyre (all dispreferred responses to the original), all depend for their ideological differences on viewpoint shifts to different deictic centres: Bertha, Rochester, or Adele, Jane’s imagined grown-up daughter.

Where Jane Eyre can be regarded as a relatively directly vectored text-driven impositioning of the reader, Emma involves a more indirect positioning, usually characterised as a consequence of Jane Austen’s irony. Here for comparison is the end of the novel.

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. – ‘Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! – Selina would stare when she heard of it.’ – But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

As in general with Austen, ironic intent (which we can gloss as the imputed preference for an ironic response) is signalled by a register uplift at the social deixis level: ‘parties’, ‘particulars’, ‘detailed’, the closing passive construction, and the redundant hyperbole of ‘very’, ‘extremely’, ‘very’, ‘most’ followed by the small deictic shift outwards to the observing group mind of ‘the small band of true friends’.

The narrative voice here is an enactor of Jane Austen, and throughout the novel the vector quality has been constantly flexing by shifts into characters’ minds and perceptions – these are rarely complete or absolute, but are rendered as the ‘dual voice’ or ‘blended’ form of Free Indirect Discourse. It is worth pointing out here that FID cannot really be blended, since this would be prohibited by a figure-ground integrity at the boundary of text-world switching – there is edgework to be done here, but a blend is ontologically implausible. The several examples of FID in this passage (and the novel overall) are not examples of blends between Austen’s and Mrs Elton’s minds; rather the phenomenon is a vectored view of Mrs Elton’s belief world seen via the imputed enactor of Jane Austen. Such a vector model of deictic braiding captures the quality of irony in FID quite well. The novel represents an example of a rather particular and rigidly delineated positioning.

It might be argued that it is easy to demonstrate impositional texts when dealing with 19th-century novels or earlier, didactic literature. However, even modern works tend to exhibit preferred responses (even where, in the cases of surrealism, absurdism, or post-modernism the preferred response is confusion, chaos, vagueness or instability). Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) starts thus:

The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:

‘All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.’ (Vonnegut, 1963: 16)

Almost 200 pages later, with the world frozen in an icy apocalypse, the novel ends like this:

He was sitting on a rock. He was barefoot. His feet were frosty with ice-nine. His only garment was a white bedspread with blue tufts. The tufts said Casa Mona. He took no note of our arrival. In one hand was a pencil. In the other was paper.

‘Bokonon?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I ask you what you’re thinking?’

‘I am thinking, young man, about the final sentence for The Books of Bokonon. The time for the final sentence has come.’

‘Any luck?’

He shrugged and handed me a piece of paper.

This is what I read:

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity, and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

This novel presents dry irony directed not at any obvious satirised target but in general at human stupidity and our numerous capacities for destruction: it is a subtle, complex position. The authorial voice throughout is intricate, complex and difficult. It is narrated by John/Jonah, but in a style that is very familiar across other novels as the voice of Kurt Vonnegut. The opening textual deictic self-reference (on p. 16) places the asserted truism within ‘scare quotes’ – the religion of Bokononism makes a virtue out of necessary untruths, with an obvious though vaguely defined equation to literary fiction itself at the compositional level. Textual and compositional deictic features are foregrounded and prominent throughout the novel.

Throughout, also, the Hemingwayesque sparse style allows a great deal of unmediated direct speech: most of the novel consists of direct speech dialogues. DS is a conceptual vector across a text-world boundary into the speaker’s world, which – when it occurs embedded within a narrative fiction – is not ‘direct’ at all between reader and the speaking-enactor. The novel is thus composed of many indirect and multi-faceted vectors across many different belief worlds.

An ambivalence to religion allows a (small) range of preferred responses: the necessity of lies, the dry humour in horror. The book is ‘about’ the ‘history of human stupidity’, and the reader is positioned in such a deflected way that specifics are always generalised. So the particular real histories of the atomic bomb and the fictional history of the apocalypse by ice-nine are connected. The preferred response (the ‘message’) is that human stupidity will lead to something like nuclear catastrophe, imperialism, environmental breakdown, or the collapse of civilisation because of a foolish response to natural disaster or accident. The readerly positioning aims at a sense of complicity in this attitude – in the final sentence of the extract, even across all these embedded edges, there is an appeal to shared, scurrilous knowledge in the final phrase.

5 Positioning cognition in rhetoric and sociolinguistics

It is not enough to notice that a reader has been positioned ethically in relation to a literary work and its matrix world; it is essential to observe and analyse how that positioning has occurred, and how the text’s imagined minds and the reader’s actually situated mind have arrived at a certain place. Phelan’s rhetorical typology sets out the broad permutations for readerly ethical positioning, but the subtleties in any particular reading can only be captured by a rigorous and properly analytical stylistic exploration. The image of a deictic braid is a useful way of conceptualising the thread of the relationship (which is also an emotional one, perhaps) between reader and the other minds that a reader is encouraged to model. The vector of this thread can usefully be measured across world-boundaries, and deflections from various fictional minds who mediate or populate the text-world can be evaluated for their overall significance. Focusing on deictic shifts – their moments of transition and periods of maintenance – is a particularly precise operational tool for this analysis.

The implications of this approach require a plastic, flexible, adaptable model of the reader which emphasises the communicative act of literature (the Saying not the Said), an integration of emotional value with ethical positioning, and a disposition to learn the sociolinguistic lessons of applied linguistics and discourse analysis even when dealing with matters of cognitive science in literature.