Sportive Thoughts

This is a republication of an essay I wrote in Winter 2007, "Fictional Utterances".

The aim of this paper is to see what is “ordinary” about fiction starting from JL Austin’s take on “ordinary language.” There is a slight difficulty in meeting this aim, since Austin is primarily concerned with the real life function and use of language and not whatever can be said about the functions and usages of language in fiction. In fact, Austin curiously calls acting, fiction, poetry, quotation, and recitation instances of “etiolation”—a term that could only mean a blanching of the language. I think he might say this because he thinks fiction does not have the same illocutionary force as non-fiction. In non-fiction we can list the highest function of language as the conveyance of truth in many cases, and the efficacy of our speech in others. Efficacy, one might say, is Austin’s purpose—the health and happiness of our general discourses. And it is in that route I wish to direct Austin’s work to the health and happiness of our fictional discourses. My intuition is that whatever we might call ordinary in fiction works similarly to but not the same as the ordinary use of language in real life; and so I will find where the similarity lies.

On the term “ordinary language” Austin writes “experience has been derived only from the sources available to ordinary men.” Those sources can be added to and language can develop to encompass those situations.  The thought here is that what we see is what we get, and where we see it is where we build our understanding. As competent speakers we begin with the way in which we talk about what is present and at hand, or what was, or what could be (this last with some difficulty). The stuff we come into contact with in our daily lives act as sources for our understanding of the world; and, as we increase that amount of stuff we also increase the amount of understanding that we have—or so the story goes.  The classic example is having so much snow that, like the Inuit, we gain special words for each type of snow; but we do not want to go so far as to say that, living in Florida, we would have less ability to comprehend snow than the Inuit. On the contrary, we can still modify our language to describe new additions to our world of experience. Such is why Austin states that “ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.”  The Last Word never reaches our ears because of the ability to modify language—but neither is that to say language is so pliable that it is arbitrary.

We might think here of Godel’s 1st Incompleteness Theorem, and observe that a list of all the things that can be proved by a formal system will never be finished, since, in layman’s terms, the formal system needs some way of proving its own ‘self.’ Hence, listing off all the things that can be said according to the ordinary grammar and usage of English (or any other language, for that matter) will inevitably leave something out that is said or will be said and understood as something sayable. That is, somebody can conceivably say something that had little usage in the language and be readily understood. The sentence “That’s cool” has a certain meaning to it that can be modified in a certain way. To say, “That’s cool” in 1955 while listening to Miles Davis play in San Francisco means something utterly different from saying “That’s cool” in a 21st century high school or Elizabethean England. The question is how ready this understanding will be, what makes a new saying ready to be heard? I think fiction is the key to making sense of this.

Austin rightly recognizes that fiction presents special problems for the ordinary language philosopher; what occurs in fiction does not occur in the ordinary world. That’s not to say that fiction represents the impossible; it is just that, every time Hamlet comes to its conclusion, nobody in the audience dials 911 and ambulances do not rush to the scene. That is all we should mean when we say that fiction is not real. The special nature of fiction is to give us a glimpse of a world we do not inhabit, or inhabit only partially; fiction is an experience passed from the artist to us via his art, but only insofar as it remains art and never becomes real.  Thus for an ordinary language philosopher, the ordinariness of language might be lost to the craft involved in artistic expression.  However, this ordinariness might be preserved in simple cases where what is said fictionally serves to remind us of how things work in the real world. Austin, to this effect, uses an anecdote about a donkey to talk about the ordinary language distinction between “by mistake” and “by accident.” That example, a footnote on pg 133, is the first instance of ordinary fiction—I want, for better or for worse, to work with more advanced examples.

The central question of this paper might seem, then, to be re-stated as thus: what places us in a position to believe that fiction can tell us something about how to proceed in understanding if it is not simply ordinary language usage, but something somewhat different? That is to say, language does not become completely “etiolated” when used in non-ordinary ways. The difference between a real murder and a murder in film noir (The Naked City or Adam’s Rib or Casablanca) is the difference between reality and fiction—not between a full and a somehow weaker event. Accepting this, language can be divided between language that is used to show something and language that shows something. On the one hand, we have speech acts that tell us something about the world, and on the other there is something quite different, namely, speech acts that really do something about the (fictional) world. Given that difference, it seems possible to form a bridge from ordinary to fictional speech. The difference must be on the side of the listener and what he is expected to hear.

It seems to follow from these two categories, especially the second, that all fictional language counts as utterances under Austin’s definition. This seems about right; because (1) we can call the author of the text the utterer, and (2) because a fictional statement, in and of itself, cannot be said to be true or false. Something said about fiction can be true or false (“Quixote marries Dulcinea in the end” is false), but talking about how fiction is talked about is not my concern. To make the assertion that all fictional language is made of utterances sound less strange, then it might help to keep the author under consideration; we identify the author as the utterer of the fiction in the pretensive case, and the orchestrator of the fiction in the fictive case.

I imagine fictional utterances to be categorized into two main groups, each group with a specified listener and a varied effect on that listener. The first group I would call the fictive utterance. The fictive utterance is an utterance that alters the plot, setting or tone of the fictional situation; thus fictive is meant to show the author’s concern over the creation of the fictional situation, as if the author were creating a world.  When uttered, the fictive makes this alteration along the conventional lines of the genre in which it operates. In a crime story, for example, the culprit is named or a suspect is identified, and thereafter the plot proceeds with a pursuit after the named individual. This naming has the effect of changing the events depicted from an investigation to a chase. For the most part, these fictive utterances are character directed; that is, their primary effect is on the characters within the fiction.

The pretensive utterance is what has an influence on the audience’s emotions, thinking, and reception of the work. In this, it can be said to be audience directed, although the orchestration of effect on the audience is etiolated than that conducted in the fictive. What must happen with the pretensive utternance—and the motivation giving it is name—is that the audience must be made to pretend with the author or actors. But the use of “pretend” here is somewhat different from the way in which Austin might use it; on pg 208 of “Pretending” Austin writes, “Prae-tendere in Latin never strays far from the literal meaning of holding or stretching one thing in front of another in order to protect or conceal or disguise it.” Austin goes on to point out that while this Latin use is “still an important feature” in English, “we donn not any longer explicitly refer…to that which the pretender is hiding or dissembling.” Hence, in English, when we say “he is pretending” it is left implicit that something is hidden the pretense. (Why else, then, would we say “false pretenses” instead of just “pretenses”?) I think it is safe to say that this something is reality; in other words, the pretense implies a reality that is not at issue in the utterance. (The clowns will not harm you.) The pretensive utterance imposes listening on the audience; they can take it—that is, take part in the fiction as an audience—or they can leave it and stick with what reality gives them (Videogames are the newest fiction media, but I ask, why play Madden NFL if it is healthier and more fun to play real football outside, with some friends? But of course, part of the incentive for fiction is that it enables things to happen that otherwise would or cannot.)

Austin’s own examples Lecture VIII support what I have tried to do with fictional utterances. The objection might be raised that taking phrases from complex sources as evidence of what I want to prove. Austin, after all, starts with much simpler phrases that have the immediate structure of performatives; phrases like “I promise” and “I give.” But the examples on pgs 101-102 are not as straightforward:

(Locution) He said to me, “Shoot her!” meaning by “shoot” shoot and referring by “her” to her.
(Illocution) He urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her.
(Perlocution a) He persuaded me to shoot her.
(Perlocution b) He got me (or made me, etc.) to shoot her.

What makes the entire speech act fit into Austin’s project is its ability to go from the locution to the illocution; when someone says “Shoot her!” it is a performative because does not stop at the moment its sense and reference have been understood. The speech act keeps going, so to speak, since saying something is only half the task—the utterance must be heard too. In hearing there is uptake, consequences, and response. The illocution is picked up, it (rather mysteriously) has an effect, and (also mysteriously) “invites by convention a response.”  Despite his urging on pg 104, the things going on here look like they can work very well in fiction, especially on the side of the pretensive utterance.

    Let us look here at the passage that Derrida onerously attaches himself to in “Signify Context Event”. Austin says on pgs 21-22 of How to Do Things with Words, in answer to the question of completeness in his early classification of performatives, that there are “certain kinds of ill which infect all utterances.” This I take to also include fictional utterances—the very utterances Austin excludes from his analysis:

[A] performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance—a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration.

Why is that? When Bessanio reads aloud Antonio’s letter asking for help in The Merchant of Venice, the last line says, “if your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter” we hear something like what Cavell calls a passionate utterance. That is, Antonio’s plea for help is supposed to work out of its illocutionary force; Bessanio’s friendship for Antonio allows him to respond. Yet something strange does happen when this letter is read on stage as part of the play. We hear the same plea, but we do not rush to Antonio’s help mainly because there is no Antonio for us to help—we can only watch, and we are meant only to hear so that we know what it is that we are watching. In this sense, the plea is “etiolated” or blanched; it does not carry its full effect.

    The implication, however, of the pretensive utterance is that it does have an effect on us, albeit a different one. This effect is why The Merchant of Venice can be so uncomfortable a play to watch no matter the skill of its performance: Antonio is asking the audience to aid all Christians who, like him, are at the mercy of usurers—and if his love is not enough to persuade us, then the letter of the law will not help. It is at most message of anti-Semitism and at least a call for conversion (which is still anti-Semitic, though arguably less acerbic); for this reason the play is not very popular. Most audiences do not (thankfully) play along with this premise, preferring instead the truncated love story of Bessanio and Portia as the highlight.

    Now let us look at another example, this one from Casablanca. Rick Blain (Humphrey Bogart) says to Captain Renault (Claude Rains), “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.” They have both decided to take an active part in the Résistance in Morocco during WWII, having murdered a Nazi officer and helped a political prisoner escape. The illocutionary force from one character to the other is something of a “commissive” where the force of the utterance is to declare their intentions to take part in sabotage against the Nazis. None of Austin’s verbs are used, but we can readily recognize this moment as a vow or covenant. Again, as in our example from The Merchant of Venice, the full force of the utterance is a little pale. We do not jump up and shake Bogart’s hand and offer our help, even if we want to. It is also easy enough to find the pretensive in this example: the audience is asked to identify with Bogart and take part in the friendship.

    What, then, could I say makes our fictional discourses happier and healthier? On the one hand, utterances in fiction must exhibit a similar structure as those in real life. That is, when a character in a book makes a promise, the reader expects that character to keep the promise. True, as Austin says, the promise made in the book will not have the same outcomes or consequences as a promise made in real life; we may be upset that a Dimitri Karamazov cannot be trusted, but there is nowhere to go with this upset. So the fictional utterances work the same way, but without the same import; moreover, breaking some on the conventions provides some titillating storytelling. The excitement to be found there is in the realization that utterances in fiction must have a kind of effect on the audience. This starts when the audience takes part in the pretending, understanding that what is going on is not real yet still begs attention. The attention put into the fiction allows the author to convey added meaning to what is being written, acted, depicted, etc. Therefore, we can say that what makes our use and understanding of fiction more effective is to follow the very ordinary advice to represent reality and know your audience.