Review

Author(s): Michal Peled Ginsburg

Review by: Michal Peled Ginsburg
Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 28, No. 4 (1991), pp. 450-455
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246810
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450 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

logue is followed, at the other end of the spectrum, by short commentaries

on five ways of "reading" opera, namely the (opera) house "reading," the
home "reading" of an operatic recording, the libretto- in-hand reading/
"reading," the supertitle "reading"/reading, and the libretto reading - the
latter of which constitutes the only perusal in a strictly literary sense. After
demonstrating, though far from conclusively, that specifically in opera
"words alone are seldom good" - to quote William Butler Yeats - the piece
ends on a "more ambiguous, prudent note": "While the words in opera
sometimes count for little, they never count for nothing. Even when (they
are) unintelligible, their existence . . . is an important component of oper-
atic reality. Above all, they are important as symbols of the human subjec-
tivity that lies at the heart of opera: whether actual or potential, they
identify operatic singing as an expression of will" (345).
Viewed as a whole, rather than as the sum of its parts, Reading Opera,
which unfortunately offers no information about the contributors* affilia-
tion and scholarly accomplishments, is little more than a florilegium. In
other words, where a systematically conceived volume designed as an
overview or handbook of Opernwissenschaft or, more modestly, librettol-
ogy would have been welcome (and is urgently needed), we have merely a
string of essays, some good and some not so good, which lack "das geistige
Band" that would hold them together.

Ulrich Weisstein
Indiana University

Fictional Truth. By Michael Riffaterre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society), 1990. xix+124
pp. + Glossary and Index.

In Fictional Truth Riffaterre analyzes what one may call the "truth effect"
of the traditional European novel. If critics in the past have tended to

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 28, No. 4, 1991.

Copyright © 1991 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 451

analyze the nineteenth and early twentieth-century novel in terms of its

realism, or referentiality, Riffaterre's claim in this book is that the novel's
"truth" is an effect of its fictionality: instead of mimesis we have semiosis,
instead of referentiality, rhetorical power and intertextuality. Once the
"shackles of referentiality" are thrown over, the question of whether the
reader does or does not acknowledge the accuracy of the representation
becomes moot. And since the truth of fiction does not depend on the
subjective experience of readers, it is "outside the realm of time and . . .
impervious to its ravages" (111).
Following a short introduction which summarizes the entire argument,
the book is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, "Truth in
Diegesis," Riffaterre articulates the main claim of the book. Opposing two
traditional ways of looking at verisimilitude - the one that sees it in terms
of relations between text and extra-textual reality and the one that sees it in
terms of relations among elements within the text itself - Riffaterre de-
clares that this opposition is "more apparent than real. In fact, exterior
referentiality is but an illusion, for signs or sign systems refer to other sign
systems: verbal representations in the text refer to verbal givens borrowed
from the sociolect, but such verbal givens are actually present in the text,
explicitly or implicitly, as presuppositions" (3). Thus the "truth" of the text
does not depend on the reader's own particular experience of reality which
is by necessity "subjective, idiosyncratic, and changeable" (6) determined
as it is by variables such as class, race, gender, age, upbringing, etc; since it
depends only on "grammar," the truth of the text is "impervious to change"
(6) and is equally available to all readers who know the language. Thus, for
example, in order to correctly evaluate the description of Morris Town-
send's behavior in James's Washington Square, readers do not have to have
direct experience of immoral behavior. The reader who has led "a sheltered
life" correctly understands the passage describing Morris's behavior in the
absence of Catherine and her father because there is "in the lexicon of the
sociolect, a collection of set portraits for the genus scoundrel, class of
money hunters, species of dowry snatchers" (12). And even the reader who
is innocent of all such cultural clichés will understand the passage in ques-
tion because this passage is in fact an amplification of a dictionary entry -
of the word "parasite"; "To recognize the truth of this, neither experience
nor previous readings are needed, only linguistic competence" (13).
This linguistic competence is, one can claim, also a cultural compe-
tence (hence, to some extent, "subjective, idiosyncratic, and change-

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452 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

able")- This becomes clear in the next example, the description of Darcy's
estate, Pemberly, in Austen's Pride and Prejudice: "We may think that the
one specific notation [in this description] about changing perspectives
signals a return to the picturesque, to objective mimesis. Far from it: this
was a standard requirement for tasteful buildings, and the description of
these varied vantage points therefore expands the word beautiful into a
sentence once again" (17). The passage is not a mimetic representation of
an actual landscape or architecture but rather an amplification of a dictio-
nary entry - the word "beautiful"; in order to understand that we have to
know the eighteenth-century English aesthetic code where, for example,
varied vantage points are a standard requirement for tasteful landscaping.
But Riffaterre's claim here, as in the case of James, is that recourse to the
sociolect or to a cultural code is always available to all readers since "such
verbal givens are actually present in the text, explicitly or implicitly, as
presuppositions" (3). Pre-knowledge of the cultural code is not necessary
because the text always contains the code (the code exists always and only
in texts) and is, in fact, one of the instruments for our learning of that
code, for our acceptance of its truth. The relation between the text and
the code or the sociolect is then circular: the text is understood according
to a code which it institutes and to which it gives the status of a code.
Such formulation of the relation between code and text has a lot to
recommend itself but it cannot account (among other things) either for
differential responses to the text or for changes within the code.
The second chapter, entitled "Fictionality Declared," deals with some
of the ways by which fiction points out its own fictionality. Riffaterre's
claim here is that there is a "constant coincidence between textual fea-
tures declaring the fictionality of a story and a reassertion of the truth of
that story" (30). Whereas critics in general explain the presence of contra-
dictory signs - signs of fictionality, signs of truth - as a compensatory
move whereby the narrative "makes up for the loss of verisimilitude" (31),
Riffaterre's claim is that the signs of fictionality themselves* "point to a
truth invulnerable to the deficiencies of mimesis or to the reader's resis-
tance to it" (33). They do so by displacing verisimilitude.
A case in point is humor which, as Riffaterre points out, permeates the
traditional novel (37). Humor belongs to the category of signs which
point to the text's fictionality because it "betrays authorial intrusion or
indicates a narrator's viewpoint incompatible with verisimilitude" (xv -
xvi). But Riffaterre's claim here is that humor, while constructing an

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 BOOK REVIEWS 453

artificial, far from verisimilar narrative, implies at the same time another
story of which the humorous narrative is an artificial transformation: the
humorous narrative "cannot be understood or the point of veering away
from the straight story cannot be seen without the reader's mentally
rebuilding or hypothesizing a pretransformation text" (xv). As with the
Russian Formalists' notion of sjuzhet - the way in which a certain se-
quence of events is being told in a narrative - which immediately con-
jures up a notion of fabula - of the way in which events in fact took place
and of which the sjuzhet is the literary, artificial, manipulation - here too
the actual narrative, precisely to the extent that it is perceived as con-
structed and artificial, immediately evokes an image of a real, "pre-
literary" story and thus generates the truth of the narrative: "Humor,
then, rests on the existence of another way of saying or of being that exists
prior to the application of its distorting system or lexical grid to that
representation. This assumed préexistence . . . now turns into a presuppo-
sition of objective reality" (41). This description of the relation between
humor and narrative truth depends, then, on an understanding of humor,
of style in general, and of rhetorical tropes, as distortions of a "natural"
sequence, with the difference, however, that this natural sequence does
not have the status of an extra-textual referent but rather of a textually
generated presupposition. One can say that the "original," "natural" ver-
sion is produced by its secondary, artificial "revision" which grants it its
status as original and natural. The master trope of narrative will then be
catachresis.
We understand by now that for Riffaterre all truth in fiction is produced
by semiosis - by the reference of one sign system to another sign system -
and that all these sign systems are in fact to be found in the text itself. In
the third chapter Riffaterre discusses what he calls symbolic systems, that
is, "sign systems that are embedded in the fictional text, yet [are] clearly
differentiated from it" and "provide a metalinguistic commentary that
points to the truth of the context surrounding them" (53). Two such
systems are the sustained metaphor and the subtext. In fact, the concept
of subtext includes all the elements which are crucial for Riffaterre's entire
argument. The Glossary at the end of the book defines subtext as "a unit
of significance"; it is "a unit of reading that is a hermeneutic model"
helping the reader to "perceive and decode the significance of long narra-
tives. . . . The story it tells and the objects it describes refer symbolically
and metalinguistically to the novel as a whole or to some aspect of its

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454 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

significance" (131). One particular case of subtext is what the French call
"mise en abyme. " The relation of the subtext to the text can be either
metaphorical or metonymical; in either case it "actualizes the relationship
of referentiality": "Relative to the subtextual gloss on the narrative or
developing a moment, an event, or a character in it, that narrative has
assumed the function of a referent. The narrative is to the subtext as an
object is to its sign" (28). As in the case of humor or other signs of
fictionality, the subtext generates the truth of the text by referring to it:
"the referential gesture pointing to the text amounts to the surmise that
whatever the text narrates is either anterior or exterior to the subtextual
sign system and therefore equivalent to an authority for whatever the
subtext tells us" (28). The circular relation between text and subtext,
whereby the subtext provides us with the hermeneutic model for under-
standing the text and yet derives its authority and truth from the text
itself, is similar to the circular relation between text and code; they both
exemplify the "tautological derivation" which Riffaterre's sees as underly-
ing "fictional truth."
The subtext, by providing a metalinguistic gloss on the text, fulfills the
function of referentiality. Since it also remains distinct from the text, or
from verisimilar, consecutive, narrative (forming "pockets of radically
different language around which narrative consecution may still be circu*
itously pursued but whose own mode of expression is alien to consecution
itself' [68]), it involves the reader in a hermeneutic task: that of bridging
the gap between two discourses. To make this task possible, the text
constructs systems of equivalencies between these two discourses (what
Riffaterre calls "overdetermination"). Whether this overdetermination is
produced by substitution or by syllepsis ("a two-faceted word or phrase
equally, although differently, relevant to both discourses, that of verisi-
militude and that of metalinguistic symbolism" [70]), its effect is the same:
it presents the reader with two incompatible meanings, thus forcing him/
her to repress one meaning, leaving, however, the repressed meaning
latently present in the reader's mind. The similarity between this "latent
presence" (109) and the psychoanalytical unconscious is the grounds for
Riffaterre's final chapter, "The Unconscious of Fiction." The unconscious
of the text, as we can expect, is not an extra textual reality (the author's
or the reader's psyche); it is textual or intertextual. The reader does not
need to have a special expertise in order to discover this unconscious
because clues for the presence of the intertext are provided by the text.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 455

What enables the reader to gain access to this unconscious meaning "is
the presence of ungrammaticalities in the mimesis, of unacceptable
images - in short, of faults or rents in the fabric of verisimilitude" (102).
What is crucial, however, is the final conclusion from this diagnostic of
the hermeneutic process: "As a result of this tension or polarization that
makes the said and the unsaid work together against all logic and at the
expense of mimetic referentiality, readers find themselves compelled to
perform a hermeneutic procedure not unlike analysis but whose first effect
is that they have a sense of unlocking, of uncovering. This is equivalent
to a pattern of truth, whether or not consistent with actual truth, and
with or without truth content; on this model readers are made to perform
an exercise in truth finding" (1 10). Thus what generates the "truth effect"
of fiction is not fiction's resemblance to reality, not even a certain "truth
content," but rather the fact that narrative compels the reader to perform
an interpretative act which conforms to a pattern of truth finding (at
least, this is one way of understanding the uncharacteristically vague
formulation "This is equivalent to a pattern of truth"). If mimesis is
banished from the text, it seems to return in the reading process: we
mimic in the act of reading the pattern or structure of truth finding.
Where this "pattern" comes from (is it simply there, in the world, as an
incontrovertible fact? is it peculiar to a certain culture? is it, perhaps,
produced by our habit of reading fiction?) remains an open question.
This is a short book which covers a large theoretical ground and sup-
ports its claims through close readings of concrete passages from Austen,
James, Balzac, Dickens, Trollope, Meredith, and Proust. It should be of
interest to anyone working in the field of narrative and narrative theory.

Michal Peled Ginsburg

Northwestern University

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