Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

The Doer and the Deed: Action as a Basis for Characterization in Narrative Author(s): Uri Margolin Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1986), pp. 205-225 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772759 . Accessed: 17/03/2011 01:35
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THE DOER AND THE DEED Action as a Basis for Characterization in Narrative
URI MARGOLIN
Comparative Literature, Alberta

Like most other literary-critical terms, "character," "figure" or "person" are polysemic and ambiguous. For the purpose of this essay, "character" or "person" in narrative will be understood as designating a human or human-like individual, existing in some possible world, and capable of fulfilling the argument position in the propositional form DO(X) - that is, a Narrative Agent (=NA), to whom inner states, mental properties (traits, features) or complexes of such properties (personality models) can be ascribed on the basis of textual data. This particular explication of the term has the advantage of capturing the reader's intuitive understanding of the term, while at the same time enabling a disciplined and explicit study of this phenomenon within narratology. The ascription of individual mental traits to an NA may be called "characterization," and the ascription of complexes of traits "character-building" or "portraiture." The two activities are logically and substantively different. The first is the primary one and is based on inference drawn from individual acts of the NA, details of his looks and setting, etc. (see below). Character-building, on the other hand, comes later and involves several additional operations. These include the accumulation of a number of traits from several successive acts of the NA, setting, or formal patterns; a generalization concerning their extent in terms of narrative time; the classification or categorization of these traits; their interrelation in terms of a network or hierarchy of traits; a confrontation of traits belonging to successive acts in order to infer second order traits such as "inconsistent"; and finally, an attempt to interrelate the traits or trait-clusters into a unified stable constellation (configuration, pattern, Gestalt, personality model) of some duration in terms of narrative time. Character-building consists of a succession of individual operations of characterization, together with second order activities of continual patterning and repatterning of the traits obtained in the first order operations, until a fairly coherent
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constellation or trait paradigm has been arrived at.1 The final character portrait of any NA can be formulated only once we have read the whole text. It is a static model, a paradigmatic, retrospective cluster of enduring traits. The various stages and operations of character-building require a separate study. In the present essay I shall limit myself to individual operations of characterization. The ascription of mental traits or properties to a NA is one of the operations whereby the reader constructs from textual data macrosemantic representational units or elements. In the case of characterization, this operation has the logical form of an inference, with reader-formulated characterization statements (=CS) forming its conclusion and reader-formulated statements about some other mimetic (representational) or formal elements of the text and their properties forming its premise or antecedent. Differently put, character or person is a signified, for which some other textual elements serve as signifiers. Within the (re)constructed narrative universe, characters and character traits are not primary. They presuppose other representational elements, such as actions, events and settings which are more fundamental as regards the ontology of the narrative universe. While there cannot be any narrative universe without actions and actants, there can be such universes which do not lead to significant mental traits or portraits. Another reason for this asymmetric dependency is that mental properties cannot be directly presented: they must either be explicitly stated or implied/suggested by those elements of the narrative universe which can be directly presented, i.e., actions and settings, and their properties. The statements which can form the basis or premise for characterization statements are of three kinds as regards their subject matter: (1) statements about dynamic mimetic elements: verbal, mental, and physical acts of NAs, including the verbal acts where a NA characterizes himself or any other NAs; (2) statements about static mimetic elements: NA's name, appearance, customs, habits, man-made and natural setting or environment; (3) statements about formal textual patterns, such as the grouping of NAs; the analogies, parallels or contrasts between them created by such groupings; repetitions or gradations, and various stylistic features associated with their introduction or occurrence (metaphors, metonymys). This last group of statements is allowable in the case of artistic narrative only, following a basic postulate of literary interpretation according to which forms of expression in artistic texts always carry semantic information and may parallel/reflect forms of content. The rules of inference governing the reader's transition from statements about the acts, appearance, and setting of a NA to CSs
1. For an excellent recent analysis of the process of character building, see Shlomit RimmonKenan (1983:36-40).

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about him are based on natural, not formal logic. They constitute a semiotic code for eliciting the significant value of actions and settings in terms of personological features. This semiotic code itself will consist of life-world and literary subsets or components. Some norms of psychological inference held by readers are cross cultural, originating in the reader's Lebenswelt and transferred to alternative universes, while others are specific to a period or social group and are transferred by its members to the interpretation of literary texts as well. The other subset of norms has its origin in literature itself. It consists of generic norms, associated with a particular type of discourse and different from the reader's real-world norms, and of period or movement norms. Finally, the text itself may contain explicitly specific norms of psychological inference, formulated by the author in a preface, or by an all encompassing third person narrator. Sometimes, though, no code of psychological inference available to the reader seems to be effective with regard to a given text, or the text seems to imply an inversion of its codes (Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange). In such cases, a strong feeling of duality of perception and of tension between expectation and nonfulfilment will be created and sustained, leading to the formulation of a new ad hoc set of rules by the reader, or to the exclusion of this text from the realm of texts amenable to psychological inferences according to any set of rules (most nouveau roman texts). The relation between premise and conclusion in the kind of pyschological inference discussed above requires a few more clarifications. In the first place, all mental properties are ontologically dependent: a NA can be said to possess psychological traits if and only if his acts, appearance, etc., possess some (nonmental) properties. The relation between CSs and their premises is, furthermore, plurivocal or one-many: applying the same inference rules to the same data can lead to the formulation of several equi-probable CSs about a given NA. This is most obvious when the features or traits inferred belong to "depth" features, that is, unobservable mental properties. The application of psychological rules of inference to the acts and settings of NAs is contextdependent. When the same rules are applied to agents different in role and status, or when the NA is in different situations, different pyschological predications will result. All entailments or inferences relating to NA's traits are weak implications, since the premise can serve at best as an incontrovertibly good reason for asserting the conclusion. But to assert the premise and deny the conclusion is never a logical contradiction. All personological inferences are in addition probabilistic, and depend for their validity on the particular set of inference rules being employed. These inferences are, in addition, defeasible and their validity can be negated by further textual information. Following these considerations, I can now propose a summarizing canonic form for reader-formulated CSs: "It is probable to a degree N (0 < N < 1) that

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the narrative agent possesses the mental properties lI, t2, TI3 to an extent ii at a given narrative spacetime point ti and situation siti." Each CS is inferred by the reader from a set of statements ascribing properties to this NA's acts, appearance or setting, with the aid of a nonuniversal set of substantive mentalistic inference rules (norms, codes) which are culture, genre or text dependent. In the rest of the present essay I shall focus on the mechanisms of one source of characterization inferences, namely, the NA's acts.2 1.0 It is universally agreed that the acts of Narrative Agents (=NAs) are one of the main sources for reader-inference about their psychological traits. An intimate relation between the nature of the act and its agent has long been assumed in moral philosophy, as well as in classical and modern rhetoric. This relation is as important in the interpretation of fictional discourse, where acts serve as signifieds with respect to the textual verbal surface and as signifiers with regard to the characteristics and personalities of NAs. Nonetheless, the transition from an act to the characterization of its agent is neither simple nor immediate, and involves several intermediary stages. These include the identification of the act, its components (manner, cause, aim and intention), and context (time, place and circumstances); the attribution of properties to it globally, to each of its components separately and to each component relative to the others; the juxtaposition of the act and each of its components with the contextual factors, and the attribution to them of further properties as a result; and, finally, the attribution of mental properties to the NA on the basis of the properties of his act and its components by way of transfer, motivation, etc.3 The order of the stages in this process is fixed, since each step logically presupposes all antecedent steps. I do not claim that all readers actually proceed this way or that they are even aware of the different stages and their relation of presupposition. What I shall be presenting is an explicit, consistent, and hopefully complete, modeling or reconstruction of the set of operations involved in this kind of characterization, in their logical sequence. Human acts are not immediate, elementary data to be identified and described per se but hypothetical, complex constructs posited by the reader from narrative data about the doings of NAs, after these data have been interpreted for their cultural and social significance. Acts must be identified, categorized and typified before they can serve as a
2. For a fuller development and substantiation of the statements made in this section, see "Characterisation in Narrative: Some Theoretical Prolegomena," Margolin (1983:1-14), 1983, 67, pp. 1-14. Neophilologus 3. My discussion in this section is greatly indebted to Nicholas Rescher's brilliant analysis, "Aspects of Action" (1962:215-219). Rescher suggests the following descriptive elements of an action: Agent (Who); Act-type (What); Modality (How: manner and means); Setting or Context (When, Where, Under WhatCircumstances); Rationale (Why: cause, aim, intentionality).

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basis for the characterization of their agents. If A hits B, he may be punishing him, attacking him, training him in karate, trying to revive him from a state of shock, etc. If A utters the sentence "It is cold here," he may be stating his sensation or (as an indirect speech act) he may be requesting that the heat be turned on, complaining about discomfort, etc. The purely descriptive behavioral aspect is not the full human act, but only its empirical substrate. Actions are consequently intentional objects which come into their own only once the question "what kind of action is it?" is satisfactorily answered (see Van Dijk 1977, Ch. 6). However, there can never be one single answer to this question, since the same doing may be described in a variety of ways, depending on the level of abstraction of the interpretation, the aspect stressed, and the implicit evaluative criteria possessed by the reader. If we see A signing mortgage papers, we may say "he has just acquired a house" or "he has undertaken a financial obligation" or "he is gambling with his family's future." The three descriptions of the act are different, but may all be equally justified (example adapted from van Dijk 1977). Each description of the act will in turn lead to the attribution of different characteristics to the doer, even if all readers were to use the same codes and criteria. This last assumption is, of course, incorrect, since the codes or interpretation rules employed by readers in different ages/cultures for the interpretation of human acts vary considerably. The same doing will therefore, in the course of time, give rise to different, equally justified characterizations of it as an intensional object (=act), each based on a different code. This in its turn will ultimately lead to different characterizations of the doer (=NA) involved. At least one reason for the well-known plurivocity of reader's CSs precedes therefore any divergency in their psychological inference rules. It stems from the fact that the action statements which serve as the premise for the inference of CS are themselves already interpretation-laden. 1.1 The factors employed by the reader in any interpretation of human doings include at least frames, symbolic codes and literary ones. The first two are of a basic nature, but they are very seldom, if ever, explicitly formulated by the reader. Their force is weaker than that of necessary or sufficient conditions, and they probably act as a good reason or a central reason for interpreting certain doings as action of a particular type. Frames, or scripts, are conventionalized, standardized sets of information about some more or less distinct types of human situations and activities. They provide the reader with information about doings and objects which typically go together to construct a recognized type of act, e.g., "playing chess," "office routine." As such they serve as the reader's guide in reconstructing coherent and significant narrative acts and situations from sets of data about doings and settings provided by the narrative surface structure. The reader's interpretation is further guided by symbolic (semiotic) codes which ascribe

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standard cultural significance/status to certain phrases or gestures, giving them, for example, the status of a certain type of utterance, e.g., command, request, threat, refusal, insult, show of respect, etc. In literature, generic and even text-specific codes also play a vital role in determining the significance of the doings of narrative agents. Quite often, such literary codes will take precedence over the reader's own cultural codes, while on other occasions the relation between them is one of uneasy tension, leading to divergent interpretations of the same doing. The frames, and symbolic and literary codes available to the reader differ for each period and culture. Sometimes they may not be adequate for a full decoding of the action of a given narrative. All this may lead to divergent, sometimes incompatible interpretations of the same act, or to radically incomplete interpretations of it. Once acts of the NA have been satisfactorily identified, the reader may proceed to the next stage: the attribution of properties to these acts. However, very few properties can be attributed to acts as such without reference to their constitutive elements on the one hand and their context on the other. Acts may vary considerably as regards their internal composition, but all have at least the dual aspects of manner and matter, what is being done (said, thought) and how it is being done (said, thought), "style" and substance. The global identification and description of these components is the reader's first task. As regards the manner, both proxemics/kinetics and linguistic stylistic, have developed a typology of codified expressive means whose occurrence may, in and by itself (and irrespective of the substance of the act) indicate mental traits, attitudes or dispositions of their user (e.g., politeness, anger, rudeness). For verbal acts, these means include elements from all levels of the language system, from intonation to lexicon. As regards the matter of substance, verbal and mental acts can be further decomposed into the topic of the discourse, i.e., the objects and states of affairs referred to, and its propositional content, i.e., what is being said about this topic. This "content" may also include commentary in the strict sense: analysis, generalization andjudgment (see Chatman 1980, Ch. 5). Naturally, the propositional content of a verbal or mental act is itself reconstructed (abstracted, paraphrased, topicalized) by the reader from the set of linguistic utterances ascribed to the NA, and belongs to the propositional, nonverbal level of narrative. Since human beings, in social life and in narrative alike, are supposed to be able to act purposively, one would wish to determine the status of the act as voluntary, conscious and intentional or not. If the act can be considered conscious and intentional, its definition will also depend on information about the intentions, aims, wishes, goals, purposes and beliefs of the agent. In literary narratives, such intentions may sometimes be available to us with certainty via privileged, direct access to the agent's mental processes, secret diaries, etc., or via the pronouncements of an omniscient, reliable narrator. Whenever this kind of information is not

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forthcoming, our identification of the act will perforce be tentative and incomplete. The context of human acts consists of (at least) the agent and patient and situation of the acts: situation Act

Agent

Patient

Agent and patient alike have to be specified for social status and role, including factors such as age, sex, social class, education, position and authority. The situation must furthermore be located in narrative time and place, whether analogous to "real" historical time and place or purely imaginary. This is important especially for realistic novels. If a NA claims the earth is flat, his characteristics will be very different if the action is placed in 1200 or 1900. The same goes for location in narrative space: e.g., nation and region. Situation also involves the type of social interaction or circumstances in which agent and patient find themselves, e.g., train ride, official banquet. If the action takes place in an imaginary universe vastly different from our own, it may also project types of situations not encountered in our social reality, e.g., encounters with demons, robots, Martians. To make social sense of them, the narrative may provide us with explicit guidelines or we may use some already familiar generic conventions (e.g., chivalric romance). Otherwise, we will have to construe these situations tentatively as we go along, learning how to make sense of them and what behavioral norms seem to apply to them. "Situation" means, finally, distinguishing the roles standardly assigned to agent and patient in the pattern of social interaction in which they find themselves, e.g., clerk and applicant, their institutionalized interrelations and standard role expectations. Agents may of course conform with or deviate from such expectations. Most mental, verbal and physical acts may be reflexive, e.g., when a person imagines something to himself, argues with himself or mortifies his own flesh. Nevertheless, the basic opposition agent: patient is preserved here too, since the NA is simultaneously playing two different communicative roles. We may ask on such occasions how the person involved (subject) views himself as object and derive many important psychological characterizations of him from it, e.g., Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. 2.1 Some physical acts, once identified, can be characterized in isolation and serve immediately as a source of characterization of the doer as well. These involve primarily acts with general, codified, contextfree symbolic significance: bowing deeply for respect, tearing out one's hair for despair, smiling for friendliness, etc. The same holds for some simple codified types of verbal acts such as welcoming phrases. Apart from these, one may characterize in isolation each component of verbal

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and mental acts, then juxtapose components pairwise and infer further properties of the act from this juxtaposition. We thus have manner, topic, propositional content and comment in isolation and the pairs: manner-topic, manner-propositional content, manner-comment, topiccontentcontent, propositional topic-comment, propositional comment. A wide range of predictions can be made of each act, even in isolation, once all relevant coordinates are taken into account. I will now provide some examples of the way acts are characterized by these various factors or pairs of factors. The examples are selective and do not exhaust all possible dimensions. Components of manner with significance for characterization include levels of style, epithets, forms of address, registers of speech (formal, intimate) and many more as studied by affective stylistics. All of these expressive means can be tagged and the tags directly transferred to the speaker, e.g., rude/polite, firm/hesitant and so on. organized/disorganized, calm/emotional, Topics by themselves are not significant for characterizing the act in which they occur, but the pair topic-propositional content is. For every topic discussed by a NA, one can ask about the particular selection of items effected by the speaker, the relative weight and detail given to each, the proportion between the details and their organization (additive, hierarchical). From these, one may draw conclusions about the cognitive qualities of the speaker: superficial/deep, able to single out the main points/lost in trivialities, stresses the positive/negative side, one-sided/broad-minded, etc. One may also enquire into the basic categories and polarities according to which the speaker/thinker organizes the universe of his experience, and infer from them about the subject's being rational or superstitious, a believer or sceptic, etc. Comments are an optional component of an utterance, but even so, their absence may be striking and a source of psychological inferences. A good example is Chekov's story "Lament," in which a cab-driver tells his passengers without any comment, of the death, the day before, of his only child. The comment (generalization, analysis,judgments) must of course be confronted in the first instance with the topic and propositional content, leading to characterizations such as "appropriate" or "irrelevant/non-sequitor," "mild/ruthless," which in their turn lead to the ascription of similar properties to the utterer. In the case of judgments, the reader must first infer the criteria employed by the NA. Their comparison with those held by the reader himself leads to further characterizations of the NA as moral/immoral, rigid/flexible, etc. The manner, once characterized in isolation, may be juxtaposed with the matter or substance of the utterance. If a NA speaks in an emotionless and detailed manner about his own pending execution, one may make inferences about him (e.g., stoic, resigned, alienated), which could not have been made on the basis of manner or matter alone. The comparison of the content of a comment or judgment with the manner in which it is made may also lead to further characterizations of the speaker, e.g.,

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cynical or compassionate (a pessimistic prediction uttered in a concerned, worried manner or in a casual, indifferent way). All acts and all components of all acts acquire additional, sometimes very different properties when related to contextual features. The same act of speech, e.g., threat, when made by a king to subjects and by subjects to king, will endow each speaker with different properties. Many speech acts, like asking a question or giving an instruction, may lead to only few and indefinite inferences about the speaker when seen in isolation. But all speech acts (and mental ones as well) acquire definite characterizations in context, relative to the maxims and norms of appropriateness applicable to his context. Finally, failing to act or forebearing (the zero-element of praxeology) as well as acting the wrong way, are perceptible and significant only with respect to a situation and an action of a certain type of its norms, which dictate/expect/exclude any person or at least of some role-bearers who find themselves in this situation. A manner considered rude and inconsiderate in an adult will not be so construed when the agent is a small child. Table manners are considered appropriate/inappropriate relative to culture setting. A comment considered brilliant for a seven-year-old child will be seen at best as average when ascribed to an educated adult, etc. In principle, each component of an act can be confronted with three contextual factors (agent, patient, situation) for further characterization. Moreover, any predication made of an act, or any of its components in isolation, may be modified, overruled or replaced by different, sometimes even incompatible predications once the act, or its components, are confronted with contextual factors. Properties of acts are contextdependent, even if the same rules and criteria are invariably employed, and the context is the predominant factor in any qualification of any act. At most, one may distinguish between properties which can be ascribed to acts unless a specific context bars this ascription, and properties that can be ascribed to acts only under specific circumstances. An act for which no contextual information is provided in the text can therefore be characterized only in a severely limited, radically incomplete way. Properties are ascribed to acts with regard to contextual factors on the basis of behavioral maxims (norms) or standards of behavior. Such norms are of two kinds: deontic, stating what actions and manners of action are obligatory, permissible or excluded for a given situation/ role, and prohairetic (G.H. von Wright's term), stating preferences or rank order among those acts and manners possible in a given situation/ role. Behavioral norms also include standards of appropriateness (propriety) concerning the matching of the manner and matter of acts, stating in what specific way and with what intensity a particular act may/must be carried out under standard circumstances. Behavioral norms pervade all facets of social conduct in our Lebenswelt and constitute its fabric. Insofar as we regard the set of NAs in a fictional pos-

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sible world as forming a human-like social group, we also tend to apply to them such norms. Standards of behavior inevitably include an element of evaluation and judgment: praise or blame for the agent are attendant upon the observance or nonobservance of these standards. Behavioral norms differ markedly in their degree of generality (all or some situations/agents), an'd their domain of applicability (a culture, a genre, one literary work). As we have already observed, any deviation in behavior from the expected mode is more perceptible than conformity with it, and failing to act when action is prescribed is more marked than acting according to general prescription. But whether it is action, deviation or forebearing, acts can be fully characterized only with regard to the ordered triplet (situation, role, maxim). When the manner of an utterance is compared with the situation in which it occurs, it can be anywhere from neutral/unmarked, e.g., a vulgar remark in the context of a tavern, to striking, when the same remark is made on a formal occasion. In the latter case, immediate further predications are made of the utterer, e.g., provocative, crude, lacking self-control, etc. Manner may also be viewed with regard to the social identity and roles of speaker and listener, e.g., the various impacts of the use of tu/vous in different situations. Depending on the identity of the interlocutors, the use of the same pronoun will in each case be indicative of different attitudes of the speaker towards the listener. If we know with certainty about a NA's knowledge or beliefs about a topic he is speaking of (= situational information), we can further qualify his discourse as + truth, + complete, + sincere, and in case the negative prevails, draw from this further inferences about his psyche: dishonest, afraid to commit himself (trying to gloss over unpleasant facts, etc.). Comments may be appropriate or not to the person making them, the listener and the situation, hence notions such as "tactless" and "indiscreet." Even though one can infer little about the uttered from his very choice of topics in isolation, more can be said once the situation is specified. To discuss cancer is by itself neutral. To do so in front of a person dying of the disease may be either crude and cruel or an expression of genuine concern, but at any rate not an indifferent act for the speaker. Small children discoursing about world politics, economics or sexual questions always evoke quick, often amused reaction on the part of the reader, who proceeds to attribute to them properties such as naivete, precocity, etc. This would not happen were the speakers adult. Sometimes it is not the choice of topic, but details of the propositional content which acquire extra significance in view of the situation, e.g., disclosing sensitive details in front of strangers, hence speaker deemed to be a poor judge, an "incurable chatterbox," etc. Sometimes, the choice of details mentioned or not mentioned is noticeable in view of the speaker's status, role, or position, e.g., "the child is very sensitive to have noticed that" or "it is strange that a person with his experience did not notice that - maybe his mind is beginning to fail him."

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Mental acts share many features with verbal ones, especially in narrative, where they must unexceptionally be verbalized in the form of inner speech. But they do have some unique properties as well. First, unlike physical or verbal acts, they cannot have any immediate external recipient/patient other than the ego. Mental acts taking place in the presence of other(s) can lead to reactions on the part of the other(s) only if they are translated first into external action on the part of the ego. If they are not, it is only the reader and the omniscient narrator who can carry out inferences about them and their agents. Mental acts involve ep ipso mental states or traits of their agents. They also involve imaginings (Vorstellungen), which do not correspond to any external events within the narrative universe (dreams, fantasies, wishes), and which, in the context of literary interpretation, have always been considered indicative of deep mental traits, to be decoded according to some symbolic code (of the reader's culture, the genre or text). The types of mental acts occurring in a given NA can - even before any reference to action - characterize this agent psychologically according to his predominant type of activity (emotion, ideation, recollection) and general level of mental activity. Finally, knowledge of mental acts or states, including intending, is indispensable for any attribution of insincerity, duplicity or pretence to the NA, since they all imply discrepancy between mental properties inferable from a public act and those implied by the private, mental one. 2.2 Our discussion of acts and their properties has so far been limited to the simplest case: one agent, one act, one situation in isolation. The pattern of narrative action, however, is more complex, since neither acts nor agents exist in vacuo. Acts, in life or literature, do not occur in isolation. The significance of any act may depend on antecedent acts of the same agent and/or patient and on the position and function of this act in the total sequence of actions and events. In fictional narratives, more than in factual ones, sequences of actions are supposed to be unified, significant and teleologically directed. A doing which in isolation may acquire the label "murder" may, in the light of antecedent events, be recognized instead as "revenge," thereby entailing very different characteristics of the doer. A general discussion of sequential interrelations between acts in narrative (e.g., as forming a stochastic chain) is beyond this essay, especially as the question relates primarily to character-building, not characterization. Here we shall limit ourselves to two cases only: the make-believe and the erroneous act and the juxtaposition of two acts or agents. 2.2.1 All inferences from an act to the mental properties of its agent at the time of the act can be annulled if we discover later on, from the agent himself or from the narrator, that the agent was pretending, insincere or deceiving while carrying out the act. In making a true or false

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type of statement, the NA may have deliberately lied, withheld information, or made statements without corresponding knowledge or beliefs. When uttering other types of speech acts, the NA may have been "faking" an expression of gratitude, love or anger, while his feelings (emotions) were otherwise. Irony is the one case of insincerity in utterances which has always attracted the attention of scholars, but it is definitely neither a unique nor a special case. In fact, pretending is nothing but "trying to appear what one is not, seeming to be what one is not" (Anscombe 1958:407). A corrected characterization of the agent with regard to an insincere act can be constructed by the reader in stages. First, he has to determine the true intentions of the agent at the time of the act; then to ascribe to the act properties based on the speaker's true intention; and finally, to ascribe to the act further properties stemming from the difference between its pretended and true nature. A politician may make false declarations of support and friendship for another politician, while his true intentions (goals, plans) are to discredit this other politician and acquire his position. The "true" nature of the act is political cynicism, power hunger, unscrupulousness, and the confrontation of the act's assumed and true qualities reveals it to be an act of perfidy and deception. The properties ascribed to the act's true nature as well as to its position vis-a-vis its pretended nature can now be ascribed to the NA too, as his "true nature" at this point. Further properties can of course be hypothesized by the reader in order to motivate such duplicitous behavior, but not before situational factors are taken into account. A person may lie under interrogation, for example, in order to protect his family from torture or in order to implicate innocent people! Mistakes, oversights, errors of judgment and inadvertent acts are somewhat different, since it is not pretending to do something without actually doing it which occurs here, but rather a failure to carry out acts as intended or desired. Otherwise, the same stages of analysis apply. 2.2.2 Juxtaposition of the mental properties revealed by a NA in two simultaneous or successive acts involving the same topic or object immediately leads to the ascription of second order mental properties to this agent. Such relational properties form the first step from individual acts of characterization to character-building, whether the juxtaposition reveals accord or discord between the sets of properties pertaining to each act. They involve in the first place formal properties or consequential/nonsuch as consistent/inconsistent/contradictory more substantive on further and predications amplifyconsequential, also often and formal the them, judging them, e.g., ones, specifying ing stalwart, fickle, opportunistic, etc. When the two acts are simultaneous mental(mental-physical; mental-verbal; verbal-physical, and also derived by comparing verbal-physical), the second-order properties and contrasting the properties of each of the acts in isolation - may

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range from "candid" to "internally split" to "fake" ("smile and smile and be a villain"). Simultaneous acts with altogether different topics give rise to predications such as "absent-minded," "acting unawares" or "alienated from everything around him and acting mechanically." When the two confronted acts are successive, the derivation of any second order properties can proceed only after the reader has determined whether or not the NA's knowledge and beliefs about the topic/ object and/or his situation have changed from one act to the next. We thus get two cases (consistency or inconsistency) in view of changed in view of a changed situaknowledge, and consistency/inconsistency tion. If knowledge, situation and NA's properties are unchanged, then these properties are simply generalized from one situation to the next. If mental attributes are altered although neither knowledge nor type of situation have changed, the change may remain unmotivated. If it is also generalized for many topics/objects and has no clear temporal direction, we can predicate of the NA ultimate inner contradictions, instability, lack of any firm convictions. If the change in mental attributes is a directed vector (goes only one way), one may speak of change of personality: crisis, development, degeneration, etc., motivated by internal factors, mechanisms or events (identity crisis, illumination, etc.). The reader may sometimes decide that the qualities manifested by the later act, especially if it is of brief duration, are not "really" applicable to the NA, that they are a freak, accident, slip, etc. This will normally happen when the reader has already predicated and stabilized some traits about a NA, which he feels are basic and enduring. The simplest two agent system involves the reaction of B to an event, happening, or act of A. Reaction is itself an action which characterizes its doer, but when it is triggered by an act of A, it must also be judged relative to this act, as primary situational factor, with the aid of norms of situational appropriateness. We thus get the easily scared person, the over-reactor, the obtuse person who can never be offended, the stoic whom nothing could shock, and many more. A proper and complete characterization of any reaction will require of course that we relate the reactive act to each factor of the initial act and its context. Impact has a somewhat different logical syntax. It may serve to characterize primarily the source of impact rather than its recipient, e.g., "she inspired joy and optimism in all those who met her." The more general and anonymous the recipients, the more we are inclined to see in them a standard or norm of correct assessment of the sources of impact. If, on the other hand, the recipient is specified for person and situation, the impact may be individual-subjective, a reflection of his individual bent of mind. Finally, if we are told authoritatively what the source's attributes are, then the ones attributed to it by any given NA serve solely as indication of this agent's psyche and mode of perception (standard, correct, or not).

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3.0 Of all verbal and mental acts occurring in narrative, reporting and explicit characterization occupy a unique position, as they are constitutive of all narrative and shared by NAs, authors and readers. There cannot be any interpretation of narrative by the reader which does not include these two kinds of statements. All authors of narrative, whether real or implied, produce statements whose logical form is that of report sentences. In fact, a fictional narrative is, from its first to its last word, a huge macro speech-act of reporting, put down on paper by the author and assumed to be uttered by an implied author or the author's second self (see Martinez-Bonati 1980). Within this macro speech-act, other speech-acts of varying scopes and types, including further reports, are embedded to a very high degree. Internal narrators and NAs quite often report and characterize for themselves, for each other, and for the implied reader or narratee. 3.1 Reporting, in the context of fictional narrative, may be informally defined as the uttering of a NA of statements which are true or false within the possible narrative world referred to by this NA (or any other world compossible with it) and whose topics are the doings of NAs which exist within this world, including the reporter himself, as well as events or happenings concerning these NAs. In the same context, describing may be informally defined as the uttering by a NA of statements which are true or false in the possible world he is referring to, and whose topics are properties or states of NAs within this world, including the describer himself, as well as the properties and states of their contexts. The distinction between events and existents, do and is, is of course a mere convenience, not a logical absolute (see Chatman 1980, Chapter 2). Characterization statements (CSs) are a subset proper of descriptive statements, restricted to the mental properties of NAs. The reporting situation may be represented as follows. Person A reports overtly (speech, writing) or subvocally (in his mind) to himself or to any other person B, at space-time-situation point Sjtj, about the physical, verbal, or mental acts of A, B, or any other person(s) C (Benveniste's nonperson, the absent) at space-time situation point Siti. J > i, that is, reporting may be simultaneous with or later than the act reported. Wishing, planning, projections into the future are characterized by J < i, and are therefore not true or false in the strict sense, but rather probable or not, relative to the state of the possible world at the moment of reporting. Any reporting statement may contain optionally a comment on the reported acts or events by way of analysis, interpretation or evaluation. One may say succinctly that reporting is the production by a NA of narrative propositions (in the logical, nonlinguistic sense) which are true or false in the universe of the narrative and whose topics are acts or events of the speaker, his listener or any other NAs in this world. As with all true or false statements, one immediately enquires about the knowledge, beliefs, information and

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evidence concerning the reported acts which are available to the reporter. What is the extent of this information (full, partial) and what is its status (observational, certain, indirect, conjectural)? By narrative convention, one particular speaker in each narrative, "the omniscient narrator," can possess full and certain information about the mental states and acts of others and report them with certainty. For all other NAs, such reporting is inferential, based on physical or verbal acts of the person(s) being reported and hence conjectural and refutable. By another narrative convention, the reader often has unmediated access to mental acts of NAs, including obviously the act of subvocal reporting, e.g., collections, facts registering on one's consciousness, etc. Each speaker/reporter is assumed to have full access to any information concerning his own acts, past and present. Any report of one's own past acts which is incomplete/untrue is hence in need of explanation. If the reporting is done to one's own self, e.g., reminiscing, the explanation may itself be in terms of psychological features: forgetfulness, suppression, inability to face the truth, etc. A report, according to our scheme, is a second order verbal or mental act, whose topic and propositional content consist of a full first order act, complete with its context. Whenever there is an act, there is also an agent who can be characterized on the basis of this act. This applies to the act being reported, but also to the act of reporting itself. Every act of reporting has consequently a dual focus, and manifests a tension between two possible foci of interest: the enonce and the enonciation (see Kahr 1977, inspired by Benveniste). In the context of characterization, we distinguish between the implications we draw from the reported acts about the psychology of their doers (including the reporteras-doer) at the time of the act, and the implications we draw from the act of reporting about the psychological nature of the reporter himself at the moment of reporting. This second focus introduces a new angle into our discussion. In principle, any NA on any level of narration from a marginal figure to an all-encompassing implied author - can be characterized on the basis of his acts of reporting. In fact, for a psychological characterization of an unobstrusive ("undramatized" -Wayne Booth) or impersonal implied author, acts of narration/reporting are the only source open to us. But always with one caveat: that the narrator see and speak with his own eyes and voice, in other words, that the "what" and the "how" of the act of reporting must be authentic, and belong uniquely to the speaker. The distinction qui voit/qui parle and its hybrid forms has been exhaustively studied by Genette, Chatman and Bal under the heading offocalization. Their common conclusion is that if an all-encompassing, implied author constantly assumes the voice and/or vision of other NAs, he cannot be characterized at all along personological lines. (See for example Culler 1974). However, if this seeing or speaking-like-another-NA is identifiable as such, temporary, and clearly demarcated, it may become a source of information

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about the mental properties of the reporter, starting with his very attitude towards the NA whose manner or matter he now adopts (serious, facetious) and the reasons for this assumption of the other's voice. Bakhtin's classical studies in this area, especially his book on Dostoevsky, and his long essay "Slovo v romane," have analyzed this phenomenon of speaking in a dual voice in a masterly fashion, to which nothing can be added here. One can only expand the scope of Bakhtin's problematics by saying that while he limits himself to cases where A reports the speech acts of B in B's style or vision (seriously or mockingly), in fact A may report any act of B in an inauthentic/alien style belonging to B or to any C as well, where B#A#C. Following Chatman (1980) and Kahr (1977), one may also establish a scale of narratorhood or "reporterhood," representing the extent to which the very activity of narration (reporting), as distinct from its specific purport, is prominent, perceptible or obstrusive (e.g., through self-reference to the act of reporting, through direct appeals to an assumed audience, etc). The more perceptible it is per se, the greater the number and diversity of psychological inferences we may draw about the reporter. Compare for example Hemingway's disembodied reporting voice in "The Killers" with Nabokov's tellers, as inPale Fire, or with Zeitblom in Mann's Dr. Faustus. The more obstrusive or opaque the very act of reporting becomes, the greater also the reader's inclination to focus his attention on the sujet de l'enonciation in addition to, or even instead of, the sujet de l'enonce (=the primary focus of attention in any act of reporting). 3.1.1 The inference of personological features of the reporter from his act of reporting follows the general procedure outlined in 2.0, except that the topic and propositional content are more complex and multifaceted here, consisting of a whole reported (first order) act, with its constituents and context. According to well-accepted cultural norms, the primary thing in a report is the information it contains; the question of its truthfulness and completeness is hence of primary significance. This leads us to place special emphasis on two aspects of the reporting act as a source of characterization of the reporter: its nature and structure, and its alethic dimension, i.e., its truth and completeness relative to the reporter's actual and expected knowledge of the reported act, and relative to the "true and full facts," in case they are conveyed to the reader by means of an unmediated scene or an authoritative implied author. If we are ignorant of what the reporter actually knows at the moment of reporting and of the "true and full facts," we may still infer quite a bit about this reporter from the nature and structure of his report, its manner and comments (if any) and from the relations manner-substance-comment. In spite of its great importance, the alethic dimension is not the only one relevant for characterization and (un)reliability is not the be-all and end-all of narrators. When the

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reporter is the highest narrative instance (= the all-encompassing narrator), and is in addition "disembodied" (= never refers to himself or to his act of reporting in the first person, present tense, never projects an image of the narratee), then the properties of the reporting act constitute the artistic narrative method (Darbietungsweise, metoda isobrazhenie) of the text as a whole. Since there cannot be any higher or more knowledgeable narrative instance than the all-encompassing narrator, and since the speech-acts of all other NAs are in fact quotes within his speech, the occurrence of any omissions or distortions of "the facts" in his reports cannot be identified or corrected by the reader. The latter can only register internal inconsistencies in the narrator's reports, or discrepancies between his reports of particular acts and the same acts as rendered in the scenic, supposedly unmediated mode. This may lead to further speculation by the reader about the psychological traits of the narrator which led to such inconsistencies (forgetfulness, guilt, instability). The nature and structure of the reporting act involve the very selection of acts to be reported, the aspects selected for mention from each, the number and kinds of details provided about each aspect, and the overall organization of the discourse. All of these serve as indicators of the reporter's cognitive faculties: scope, depth, etc. Truthfulness and completeness mean that all details of the reported act known to the reporter or at least believed by him to be true are mentioned, and none is omitted, replaced or transposed (e.g., who shot first!). If the reader does not know what the reporter actually knows/believes, the alethic dimension is truncated. However, if he does know, a whole array of implications can immediately be drawn about the reporter: honest, truthful, exaggerator, liar, one-sided, etc. The presence or absence of comment, its nature and relation to the reported act are also important. We may sometimes deem a NA or implied author reliable as regards information about acts, but unreliable/inadequate as regards any comment on them (see Paris 1974). This happens when our judgment or interpretation of the reported acts and the inferences we draw from them diverge from the reporter's, and we insist ours are the correct or better ones. In such cases we may further hypothesize about the reporter's underlying norms and symbolic codes and, using our own rules of psychological inference, about the kind of person likely to embrace such norms (liberal, rigid, superficial, etc.). The manner in which the report is uttered characterizes the reporter's attitude towards the act and agent being reported, and this attitude itself may become the object of our further inferences about the reporter. If the reporter and the agent of the reported act are one and the same person, each aspect of the reporting act (choice of detail, manner of telling, kind of comment) provides us with rich information about the utterer's attitude towards his present or past self, and his self-image.

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In the second stage of the inference, each component of the reporting act may be juxtaposed with all the others (see 2.1), and both the act as a whole and each of its components juxtaposed with all contextual features. In the third and final stage, each component of the reported act (= the topic and propositional content of the reporting act) may be confronted with all components of the reporting act, but especially with its "opposite number." One may, for example, compare the manner in which a reported act of speech was performed, let us say hysterically, with the manner in which it is being reported, let us say calmly and composedly. The similarity or difference recorded will itself serve as a further source of characterization of the speaker at the time of the reporting. If all the pairwise matchings of factors mentioned above are carried out, we will obtain a cartesian product consisting of dozens of order pairs. Clearly, no reader ever carries out this operation exhaustively in the course of a normal reading, and different readers may concentrate on different pairs. This is one reason for the divergence of readers' characterizations of NAs as reporters and for the discovery of more aspects in successive readings. 3.2 The direct and explicit characterization of NAs is not the reader's exclusive privilege. Actually, any NA can characterize itself as well as any other NA on the same or any lower level(s) of narration. A characterization statement (CS) within a narrative universe is therefore an utterance made by a NA, consisting of the ascription of mental properties or of a personality model to himself or to any other NA(s). Unlike other descriptive statements in narrative, CSs are not strictly true or false, because of the element of judgment and evaluation they contain, but rather (in)correct, in(valid), (in)appropriate, (un)just. The characterization act may be described as follows: A utters a statement, overtly or subvocally, to himself or to any other person B, at space-time situation Sjtj, in which he ascribes mental properties or a personality model * 1, *2 'T3, to himself, to B, or to any other person C, at timespace-situation Siti (or at any time span ta... i). The ascription is made by A with respect to an information base Io concerning the person being characterized, and to a set of attributes and psychological inference rules Cn. J > i, so characterization applies to past and/or present states of the NA being characterized. If j < i, we are dealing with a forecast as to which characteristics a NA will display in a given future situation, made on the basis of present Io and Cn. Some of the basic properties of CSs made by NAs are as follows: - Every NA can characterize himself and any other NA(s) on his level of narration and on all lower ones. An all-encompassing dramatized or undramatized narrator can be directly characterized only by himself. Any characterization of him made by another NA or by a narratee can occur in the text only as a quoted, reported speech-act embedded within the narrator's own discourse and therefore subject

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to all the caveats mentioned in 3.1.1. Characterizations of the implied author made by the "implied reader" (e.g., "'Dear reader, you call me hypocrite . .") are of course pure projections made by the implied author, playing or assuming pro tempore the role of an "other" or interlocutor vis-a-vis himself. Strictly speaking, only the implied author himself can be characterized in this case, with regard to what he believes others see in him or think of him. -In some types of narrative, the implied author may by convention be regarded as absolutely reliable. In such cases, his characterizations of NAs are consistent, complete, absolutely correct and not open to any doubt, even if he does not present any evidence for his CSs. His characterizations also serve as touchstones for the correctness of any characterization of one NA by another, hence also for judging the perceptiveness, depth, etc., of any internal characterizer. CSs made by the NAs, on the other hand, are always to be regarded as defeasible, subject to testing by the reader, and sometimes indicative more of the characterizer than of the person characterized. -The very operation of direct characterization is optional with regard to the nature of narrative, but there is hardly a narrative where no single NA characterizes himself or some other NA. On the other hand, narratives with no authoritative CSs made by implied authors are quite common. Direct characterization has its advantages though. It is the only way of providing the reader with undeniable information about the beliefs, intentions, and sincerity of NAs. It provides the reader with an immediate initial orientation towards any newly introduced NA: a perspective for viewing him, interpreting his doings, assessing his acts and predicting his future course of actions. Direct characterization is also the most economical way of portraying a NA, especially a minor figure, who carries out too few acts for the reader to be able to infer his mental make-up. - For all acts of characterization in literary narrative, the reader is the ultimate authority. It is possible for him to accept as true and complete the "implied" author's reports about the acts of a NA, and at the same time not to share his analysis of this agent, due to a difference in norms, psychological rules, concepts, and models between reader and implied author. This applies with even greater force to CSs made by one NA about another. In all such cases of disagreement between reader and implied author or internal characterizer, the characterizer himself becomes marked (thematized) and an object of characterization by the reader. This can be generalized as follows: Whenever a NA characterizes himself or any other NA, he himself becomes at that moment an object of characterization by the reader. What the NA says about the sujet de l'enonce may not be accepted by the reader, but he himself, as sujet de l'enonciation, can always be validly characterized on the basis of this act, especially as regards his "understanding of human nature."

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3.2.1 The inference by the reader of personological features of the characterizer from his acts of characterization follows the usual procedure applicable to all acts (see 2.0 and 2.1). Manner is thus studied in isolation, as well as with regard to substance and context. Substance is examined for types of psychological predicates employed, personality aspects stressed (e.g., "see everybody in terms of sexual hangups") and so forth. Substance is then confronted with contextual factors. A new and interesting dimension is introduced when the substance of the speaker's CS is confronted with his informational base and psychological norms, including rules of inference. The reader may deem the CSs, hence their originator, as consistent, astute, correct, superficial, weak or erroneous relative to these two factors. Should the CS be found erroneous, then the error may be inadvertent or deliberate, i.e., insincerity or deception. Sincere or not, any CS can next be related to a set of situational factors consisting of the speaker's relations with, and intentions towards himself, his listener and the person being characterized. A further set includes the speaker's conception of the listener's information with regard to the person being characterized, of the listener's criteria of inference and of the listener's relationships and intention towards himself (the speaker) and the person being characterized. Insincere characterization, positive or negative, may be explained by reference to some of these factors, but any CS can be assessed relative to all of them. As with reporting, here, too, many dozens of inferences about the speaker may be drawn from any one act of characterization made by him once the act is related to all of the factors listed above. Here, too, any one act of reading will actualize only very few of these inferences, and successive readings by the same reader, or readings by different readers, will actualize somewhat different subsets of the total range of possible inferences. Each reading will therefore result in a somewhat different image of the speaker, even if all of them were to employ the same rules of inference. This is one more reason why no characterization in narrative can ever be a completed task, once enough situational factors are provided. A quick computation will indicate that there are six possible types of direct characterization in narrative: speaker characterizes himself to himself (self-image) or to an interlocutor/correspondent (projected self-image); speaker characterizes interlocutor/correspondent to himself (image of other) or to interlocutor/correspondent (direct assessment and portrayal); speaker characterizes an absent person to himself (image of other) or to his interlocutor/correspondent (e.g., letters of reference). Quite often, the speaker's characterization of a particular NA to himself, to interlocutor B and to interlocutor C will not coincide, even though the speaker's information and rules of inference are the same in all three cases, due to a difference in contextual factors. Most obvious in literature is the gap between actual and projected selfimage (eiron, alazon). However, even one's self-image may be found by

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the reader to be incorrect, e.g., a NA can be found by the reader to suffer from low self-esteem (= underestimate those aspects of his psyche which are positive) or to overrate himself. Notice also that the comparison between the way in which a NA characterizes himself and the way in which the reader characterizes him serves itself as a source of second order characterization of this NA, as the examples above indicate.
REFERENCES Anscombe, G.E.M. 1970. "Pretending," in: An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Joseph Margolis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 404-414. Chatman, Seymour, 1980. Story and Discourse (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Culler, Jonathan, 1974. Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London: Elek). Kahr, Johanna, 1977. Enterpersinlichende Personenerwdhnung im modemen franzisischen Roman (Amsterdam: B.R. Griner). Martinez-Bonati, Felix, 1980. "The Act of Writing Fiction," New Literary History 11:3, 425-434. van Dijk, Teun A., 1977. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse (London and New York: Longman).