Fiction, pretense, and narration - critique of 'The Logic of Literature'

Style, Spring, 1998 by David Gorman

Let us begin with first-person narrative. It is situated outside the system of fiction without, for all that, being an actual utterance. It is not an actual utterance because it has no "real" utterance-subject. But no more so is it a self-engendering mimesis: it indeed possesses an utterance-subject who is a pretended subject. This implies that every first-person narrative presents itself as an actual utterance, appears as a "historical document" (312). It is thus subject to the structural laws of the actual utterance, and notably to the subject-object polarity: "the first-person narrator does not 'engender' that which he narrates, but narrates about it in the same manner as in every actual utterance: as about something which is the object of his statement, and which he can only present as an object" (317). First-person narration is not a mimesis of reality but a speech act: it is a "reigned reality statement" (313). But if it is subject to the structure of the actual utterance, this means that the forms of fictionalizing representation are forbidden to it: no verbs of feeling applied to the third person, no free indirect discourse, no monologue, and no dialogue, at least when these are situated in a receding past (for instance, in fictional memoirs). Hamburger goes even further, since she adds that these techniques of fictionalization can have no place at all in a first-person novel, not only insofar as they apply to the third person, but "even where the I-Narrator is himself the case" [German ed., 275]. Of course, in varying degrees most first-person narratives violate these rules (especially those concerning dialogue and the absence of verbs of feeling related to the I-Narrator): this fact is nothing other than an index of partial fictionalization, evidence of the bastard status of a good number of first-person narratives.

Contrarily to fiction, the reigned first-person narrative does not find itself in a categorical opposition to the system of actual utterances: the distinction between a veridical narrative in the first person (for instance an autobiography) and a reigned narrative that closely imitates serious speech acts can only be drawn from context, that is, from exterior knowledge and not from internal traits. Thus first-person narratives do not form a true part of the system of literature [Dichtung]; it is not a canonical genre, but simply a "special [i.e., mixed] form."

If first-person narrative is outside the "system of literature," the status of lyric poetry is more complex. Repeatedly, Hamburger opposes the lyric pole to the epic-dramatic in affirming that together they encompass the entire space of the system of Dichtung. Thus Dichtung will be constituted by fiction and lyric poetry: this explains why the latter is discussed immediately after the epic-dramatic genre as an entirely separate genre and is not included in the "special forms." Hence lyric poetry should also find itself in a categorical opposition to actual utterances. Yet lyric has nothing to do with fiction, and Hamburger insists on the fact that we situate lyric poetry "on an entirely different level of our imaginative life" (5): it creates no acting persons, fictive I-Origines, but it is the utterance of a subject, the "lyric I." Since the system admits of only two terms (if we except the bastard pole of the reigned actual utterance), there is no choice but to maintain that lyric poetry produces true actual utterances, so that the "lyric I" is a real utterance-subject: "The much-disputed lyric I is a statement-subject" (234). But if this is the case, how can it still form a system with fiction?