Poem

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives: Analyzing a Poem from a Sociolinguistic

Perspective
Author(s): Timothy R. Austin
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 703-728
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772807
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Narrative Discoursesand Discoursing

in Narratives:Analyzinga Poem
from a SociolinguisticPerspective
Timothy R. Austin
Englishand Linguistics,Loyolaof Chicago
We will be using observationas a basisfor theorizing.

Thus we can start with things that are not currently
imaginable,by showing that they happened. (Sacks
1984: 25)
1. Language, Sociology, and Literature
In the past decade, linguistics has evolved as a discipline in any number of exciting directions. In the core theoretical subfields, scholars
have developed multiple models of linguistic behavior, some complementary, some in open competition with one another. In syntactic
theory, for instance, a growing number of generative grammars (each
sporting the almost obligatory identifying
initials: GB, UCG, LFG, HPSG)
make markedly different claims and predictions about linguistic data.

At the same time, the range of natural languages subjected to relatively thorough syntactic analysis has also been significantly extended.
But in an altogether different trend, those areas in which linguists'
concerns overlap with those of neighboring disciplines such as neurology, artificial intelligence, and psychology have taken their own
long strides towards independent respectability. These domains of
interdisciplinary investigation offer particularly exciting prospects for
future growth because of the opportunities
they foster for the mul-
The impetus of this paper derives from courses and lectures that the author attended at the 1987 LSA Summer Institute at Stanford University. The author
is particularly grateful to the instructors of two courses, Deborah Schiffrin and
Herbert Clark, for their clarity of exposition and enthusiasm. Financial assistance
toward the preparation of this material was generously provided by Loyola University of Chicago.
Poetics Today 10:4 (Winter 1989). Copyright ? 1989 by The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/89/$2.50.
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Poetics Today 10:4
tiple application of particular research findings. In the optimal case,

that is, the discoveries of psycholinguists will inform, and may even
influence, further work both by research psychologists and by theoretical linguists. By means of this process of cross-fertilization, each of
the intersecting disciplines may gain access to concepts, methods, and
perspectives first developed by the other.
Anthropologists and sociolinguists were among the first to join contemporary linguists in such essentially collaborative work (see Gumperz 1982: ch. 2). Psycholinguistics has enjoyed a somewhat shorter
history (see Fodor, Bever, and Garrett 1974). In recent years, however, specialists in both of these areas have displayed a shared interest in what one might term a second-generation interdisciplinary
subspecialization: discourse theory. Two characteristics mark linguistic theories of discourse as departures from the sentence-based competence grammars of the 1960s and early 1970s. In the first place,
they take as their domain language units that may be either smaller
or, more likely, larger than the canonical sentence (Stubbs 1983: 1).
In the second, they study "language in use" in a particular setting
(Brown and Yule 1983: 1), seeking to explain its function as well as
its form and, indeed, the interconnectedness of those two aspects of
language behavior. Given such a broad definition of the notion of discourse theory, of course, any number of technically quite disparate approaches satisfy it: speech-act theory and natural language semantics,
for example, as well as much recent work in artificial intelligence. It
has been socio- and psycholinguists, nevertheless, who have until now
devoted the most sustained attention to discourse issues. Such scholars as William Labov, Erving Goffman, John Gumperz, Dell Hymes,
and Herbert Clark have with some frequency employed discourse as
an ideal forum in which to promote alliances among their native disciplines and linguistic science, alliances that may then serve the kind of
cross-fertilizing purpose that I have described above.
Brief consideration of the grounds on which discourse theory appeals to both psychologists and sociologists, however, surely suggests
that literary scholars might also be attracted to this kind of study.
Literary texts, after all, represent language in use, and they almost
invariably exceed the length of a single sentence. And it is certainly
true that some theories of discourse phenomena have in recent years
been invoked in individual stylistic analyses. Speech-act theory, for
example, informs both Stanley Fish's (1980: ch. 3) treatment of Coriolanus and an excellent recent paper on W. H. Auden's "Song V" by
Ronald Carter (1983). By the same token, striking similarities can be
found between the theories of narratologists like Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, and Gerald Prince, on the one hand, and those of
psychologically based discourse theorists like Bertram Bruce, on the
Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives
705
other. All the same, one does not sense any dynamic mutual engagement of linguistic and literary interests in these studies. Where insights
from one field are drawn on in the other, the direction of flow seems
almost invariably to be from discourse theory into literary criticism
rather than vice versa.
In part, this lack of interplay may be due to a certain snobbishness
on the part of the literary community. Some blame, however, also accrues to discourse theorists, who repeatedly prioritize what Michael
Agar (1985: 147) calls a "favorite type of discourse... 'natural conversation.'" To be fair, some authors who routinely exclude written, let
alone literary, discourse from their work do take time out to deny that
they do so because of "any theoretical primacy we accord conversation" (Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 289). At the opposite extreme, however, are repeated and, so far as I can tell, unargued assertions by
other scholars that "conversation is a more basic, unmarked mode
of communication than other communicative genres" (Schiffrin 1988:
sec. 0). Such overt privileging of conversation seems to me unhelpful for reasons which this paper will demonstrate. For the moment,
however, I mention it only as one possible reason for the very evident
absence to date of fruitful interaction between discourse theory and
literary studies.
In this paper, I explore some ground shared by linguists, sociologists, and literary theorists in a way which illustrates the complex interconnectedness of these three fields.' First, in sections 2 and 3, I use
the techniques of one discourse-analysis approach, conversation analysis, to isolate and characterize an apparently anomalous discourse in a
literary text, William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence."
Next, in section 4, I argue that a second type of discourse theory,
structural narratology, allows us to explain how it is that the conversational infelicities in this poem are generally overlooked by readers
who encounter them in their literary context. Finally, in section 5, I
suggest that evidence from this literary case may be reapplied by discourse theorists in nonliterary contexts to account for some otherwise
baffling data from everyday conversation.
2. "Resolutionand Independence"
William Wordsworth wrote "Resolution and Independence" late in
the spring of 1802. It constitutes one contribution to what may be
seen as a protracted poetic debate between him and Samuel Taylor
1. Gumperz (1982: 15) notes one other rather isolated case of interaction among
these three fields at the level of theory: the extension of Kenneth Pike's etic/
emic distinction from phonological theory into both anthropological and critical
vocabularies.
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Poetics Today 10:4
Coleridge on the transitoriness of poetic inspiration, a debate which

also encompasses "Tintern Abbey," "Dejection: An Ode," and "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality." We shall have reason to return to this
broader context for the poem later in our discussion. For the moment, I shall concentrate only on Wordsworth's narration at the core
of the poem of a meeting between its first-person narrator and a leech
gatherer, a passage that occupies the final twelve stanzas of this twentystanza poem. We know something of the real-life circumstances on
which Wordsworth based this part of the poem, since Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's sister, was with him when the meeting took place
and recorded the facts succinctly in herJournal (de Selincourt 1944:
510-11). But the commonplace origins of this episode in an ostensibly
objective report of an everyday occurrence that happened to involve
some interpersonal social discourse may lead us to overlook some startlingly atypical features of the dialogue at its center.
Let us begin by segmenting Wordsworth's account of the meeting
informally into a series of steps familiar from our own experience of
similar meetings:2
Orientation (52-77)
The first-person narrator of the poem, out walking in a "lonely place"

(52), meets and describes at length the figure of "a Man."
Greeting/Response (78-86)
In lines which themselves represent a rather insightful commentary

on the purely social function of conversational openings, the narrator
explains, "And now a stranger's privilege I took; / And, drawing to his
side, to him did say, / 'This morning gives us promise of a glorious
day'" (82-84). As Clark and Marshall (1981: 56) point out, remarks
about the weather are indeed the "stranger's privilege," since the current state of the weather "is mutually identifiable by people in the
same locale" and hence an impeccable source of that basis of "mutual
knowledge" on which almost all conversations have to be constructed.
The old man's response is, evidently, equally formulaic, since the narrator fails to report it in detail: "A gentle answer did the old Man
make" (85).
First Question-Answer Pair (87-105)
At this point, the narrator makes the first substantive conversational

move, though again in a highly predictable direction. Since he has
as yet no sense of his interlocutor's "community membership," on
which basis a suitable topic for talk may be selected (ibid.: 35; Gumperz 1982: 142), the narrator selects one possible community type
(profession or occupation) and seeks to discover which of its many
2. References are to lines in the edition of de Selincourt (1944: 239-40).
707
members the old man belongs to: "'What occupation do you there
pursue?'" (88).
Before we hear the old man's reply, Wordsworth's narrator once
again supplies us with an apparently extraneous but useful and extremely realistic nonlinguistic detail: "Ere he replied, a flash of mild
surprise / Broke from the sable orbs of his yet-vivid eyes" (90-91).
A number of discourse theorists have noted that conversations constitute creations to which speaker and listener alike contribute vital
material of both verbal and nonverbal kinds (Merritt 1976: 317; Clark
and Schaefer 1987: 19). Yet we have relatively few opportunities to
explore the nonverbal dimension of discourse structure because, as
Susan Philips (1976: 83) laments, tape recordings, the most common
source of analysts' data, "do not capture the listener's contribution
to the regulation of interaction." (Students of literary discourse must
of course struggle with a still more impoverished corpus; what one
might call "standard" literary reports of spoken dialogue lack even
the limited information that tape recordings can supply about pauses,
most details of intonation, and speed of delivery.) Wordsworth's narrator, therefore, is unusually helpful in alerting us to the fact that
the old man shows heightened interest at this point, where the banter of everyday conversational pleasantries gives way to signs of an
impending more sustained and (referentially as opposed to socially)
meaningful conversation.
It should not surprise us, then, that the old man replies at some
length to the narrator's simple query. Rather than merely name his
occupation, he both describes and, to some extent, even evaluates it:
He told, that to these watershe had come
To gather leeches, being old and poor:
Employmenthazardousand wearisome.
And in this way he gained an honest maintenance.
(99-105)
Commentary (106-17)
Up until this point, as I have suggested by sporadically citing the work

of discourse theorists who discuss standard conversational techniques,
Wordsworth's narrator has reported a remarkably stock instance of
what we might term a meeting-between-strangers speech event (Merritt 1976: 318). It is only at line 106 of the text, in fact, that matters
take a somewhat less conventional turn. The narrator reports, "The
old Man still stood talking by my side; / But now his voice to me was
like a stream / Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide"
(106-8). Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson (1974:
727) have pointed out that the "turn-taking system" that underpins all
conversational behavior "builds in an intrinsic motivation for listen-
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ing to all utterances in a conversation, independent of other possible

motivations, such as interest and politeness." Where there are only
two parties to a dialogue, the likelihood that the current listener will
imminently be called upon (or will himself or herself choose) to speak
enhances that motivation.3 The narrator's self-reported inability to
separate one word from another entails, of course, that he will fail to
glean the information that he originally requested in his posing of the
question "What occupation do you there pursue?" but also, more seriously, that he will still lack any common ground on which to pursue
the conversation. To that extent, we would predict, the conversation
either will have to undergo major "repair" (Clark and Schaefer 1987:
22-23) or will simply go nowhere, since, as Stephen Levinson (1979:
370) argues, if the constraints that govern verbal activity of a particular type, such as questioning and answering, are not met, the activity
breaks down.
Pair(118-26)
Second Question-Answer
What immediately follows in the text confirms our worst fears: "My
question eagerly did I renew, /'How is it that you live, and what is it
you do?'" (118-19). Anyone reviewing this conversation, regardless of
theoretical viewpoint (philosophical, sociological, anthropological, linguistic), must surely recognize that with this development matters have
gone seriously awry. Following the lead of John Searle (1969), scholars
like Marilyn Merritt (1976: 347) have insisted that, in an unmarked
discourse context, "a query is appropriate ... only if the answer is not
readily available." What we see here is a particularly egregious violation of that principle, since the leech gatherer himself is the source
of the information which, since he has just supplied it in the previous turn at talk, he has every reason to suppose the narrator already
knows.
William Labov and David Fanshel (1977: 95), although they do not
discuss precisely the conversational anomaly that we encounter in this
poem, do consider the way in which "repeated requests" of other kinds
generate severe social tensions between interlocutors. One common
practice, they allege, is "for speakers to mitigate their repetitions."
Some examples of mitigatory utterances that forewarn the other inter3. It might be objected that, historically,there were not two but three parties to
this conversation: William, the leech gatherer, and Dorothy. I would respond that
no mention is made of a third party in the text of this poem, which, as a narrative, represents a wholly autonomous fictional event. That argument then dovetails
with another to be made later in the paper, to the effect that it would be equally
wrong-headed to identify Wordsworth himself with the first-person narrator of
"Resolution and Independence."
Austin * Narrative Discoursesand Discoursingin Narratives
709
locutor that he or she may have furnished inadequate information are

listed by Clark and Schaefer (1987: 26): "I didn't hear you"; "Pardon
me?" Yet the narrator in Wordsworth's poem offers the old man no
such verbal flag of truce, and we would surely anticipate as a result
that the discourse should at this point dissolve, the leech gatherer retiring in what Goffman (1967: 23) rather charmingly calls "a visible
huff" (cf. Gibbs 1986; Gumperz 1982: 132; Tannen 1984).
Returning to Wordsworth's poem, then, we are surprised to find
that the narrator's gauche repetition of his question does not earn him
any rebuff at all. Quite the contrary; the narrator blandly reports, "He
with a smile did then his words repeat" (120). And indeed the narrator
himself obligingly repeats them, indicating, by his use of direct speech
on this occasion, his heightened alertness to what the leech gatherer
is telling him.
BriefCommentary,FurtherDialogue,and Coda(127-40)
With the end of the old man's second reply (126), the narrator loses
almost all interest in reporting the balance of the conversation, winding up the entire narrative in the space of fourteen lines. He dismisses
the remaining dialogue with the remark "Soon with this he other matter blended" (134) and slides quickly into the aphoristic close that has
caused considerable critical comment: "'God,' said I, 'be my help and
stay secure; / I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!'"
(139-40).
From the point of view of conversational analysis, then, we are left
with one very puzzling feature: the inclusion, in an otherwise remarkably realistic account of a dialogue, of a complete "echo" questionand-answer pair. We can look at this strange phenomenon from the
viewpoint of either of the two interlocutors. On the one hand, why
does the inattentive narrator not hedge ("mitigate") his socially unacceptable reiteration of a simple, previously fulfilled request for information? On the other, why does the leech gatherer not take umbrage,
as we would expect him to? Why is he so compliant in the face of
clearly improper conversational protocol?
Before proceeding to a fuller discussion of these questions, it is
interesting to note that Lewis Carroll, a reader whose ear for the linguistically offbeat seldom let him down, detected and exploited precisely the conversational infelicity I have been isolating when parodying "Resolution and Independence" in Throughthe Looking-Glass.The
first-person narrator of "The White Knight's Song," Carroll's burlesque version of the poem we have been examining, resembles the
Wordsworthian figure on whom he was modeled in his marked insensitivity to his "aged" interlocutor. In Carroll's poem, however, rudeness
is allowed to run amok:
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"Whoare you, aged man?"I said.

"Andhow is it you live?"
And his answertrickledthrough my head
Like water through a sieve.
So, having no reply to give
To what the old man said,
I cried, "Cometell me how you live!"
And thumped him on the head.
I shook him well from side to side
Until his face was blue;
"Cometell me how you live,"I cried,
"Andwhat it is you do."
(5-8, 21-24, 37-40)
To Carroll's Alice, as to most of his Victorian readers, this conversation, like the Wordsworthian dialogue it parodies, was either absurd
or cruel, perhaps both. It is therefore by no means a trivial question
whether we can establish that "Resolution and Independence" applies
its unconventional conversational forms to some legitimate artistic end,
whereas "The White Knight's Song" (designedly, of course) does not.
3. Explanations
In seeking an explanation for the puzzle described in the previous
section, we might first consider whether discourse theorists who specialize in conversational analysis have noticed any naturally occurring
circumstances in which either a request by a speaker for information
presumably available to him or her already or, the more marked case,
repetition by one speaker of the same request in successive turns at talk
ever constitutes acceptable conversational practice. As it happens, the
literature does offer a number of such examples. One subclass of these
cases derives from Levinson's (1979: 367-68) observation that language use is situated in specific contexts, all of which are also "activity
types,... goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded, events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on." (As "paradigm examples"
Levinson offers "teaching, ajob interview, ajural interrogation, a football game.") Participants in each activity type fill certain roles that are
broadly defined by the goals they are pursuing within this context.
Most important for our purposes, however, is Levinson's (ibid.) additional remark that each activity type also imposes "constraints ...
on
the kinds of allowable contributions" that speakers can make to the

ongoing dialogue.
Levinson's theory of activity types (which has approximate analogues in Charles Ferguson's [1983] "genres" and Goffman's [1974]
"frames") allows him to explain a number of everyday contexts in
71 1
which speakers routinely request information they already possess

without endangering the talk in which they are engaged. Legal counsel in a courtroom, he explains, is constrained by accepted definitions of what constitutes "a prosecution" (or "a defense") to ask questions which "request details that are already known to the questioner"
(Levinson 1979: 380). Posing these questions serves no purpose whatsoever if we assume that the only discourse function of a question is
to make new information available to the questioner. But reference to
counsel's goals in this particular activity reveals that such seemingly
anomalous utterances serve two ends. First, though Levinson himself
does not point this out, they publicize or institutionalize the information contained in the reply by inscribing it on the official transcript
of the proceedings. More intriguingly, they permit counsel to order
the flow of information, juxtaposing individual replies in such a way
as to invite the judge or jury to infer causal or logical connections.
They enable counsel, in fact, to "build a case" (ibid.: 381). Indeed, the
witness who treats the questions of a skillful cross-examination merely
as requests for information, to be answered truthfully one at a time,
may find himself or herself condemned by an implicit, unsuspected
argument.
What other activity types permit the posing of questions to which
the speaker already knows the answer? Teachers certainly use this
technique to induce their pupils to display knowledge that they are
supposed to have acquired (ibid.: 384-90; Labov and Fanshel 1977:
89-90). Parents characteristically grant young children an opportunity gracefully to accept responsibility for some presumed misdeed:
"George, did you cut down that tree in the yard?" And in so-called Socratic arguments, speakers may begin a complex series of interrelated
questions with one or more interlocutors, whose answers they expect
to be uncontroversial, so as to establish a firm basis for the increasingly
disputable propositions that will follow (ibid.: 102-3).
Granted that particular activity types may lift the most neutral requirement that speakers must not request information already known
to them, such an approach still will not help us to address the selfreported behavior of Wordsworth's narrator. Deliberately set in the
unremarkable context of a casual encounter between strangers, this
conversation serves no highly specialized social purpose, nor can we
assign any specific goals to its participants. If anything, we might feel
tempted to invoke a distinction noted by Deborah Schiffrin (1984b:
315) between the "referential" function of talk and its purely "sociable"
use. Schiffrin (ibid.) suggests that even though all talk is naturally
used at some level "to convey referential information," in certain cases
"the meaning of that information [may become] subordinated by the
meaning of the talk itself." Suppose, then, that we locate Wordsworth's
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scenario at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from Levinson's

specialized "activity types." Might not requesting known information,
under the right circumstances, constitute a purely sociable use of language? As we have seen, Wordsworth's narrator and the old man certainly indulge in sociable "small talk" (Goffman 1979: 2) when they
first meet. Brief reflection, however, soon leads us to reject this explanation as well. Even at cocktail parties, overt demonstrations of a
failure to attend to one's collocutor (such as asking the same question
twice) are not tolerated; they appear either inept or condescending.
If conversational analysis cannot provide a suitable contextual frame
within which to set Wordsworth's narrator's apparent pursuit of knowledge already available to him, perhaps we should reexamine our (thus
far implicit) assumption that the leech gatherer has ever answered the
question posed to him in the first place. After all, one reason for repeating one's utterance is that the first has failed to elicit the desired
response (for a question, has failed to elicit the information sought).
Clark and Schaefer (1987: 37) consider a rather specialized case in
their analysis of telephone calls made to directory assistance operators. These operators are trained specifically to request information
from callers in a particular (functionally determined) order. If their
standard opening question ("For which town, please?") is answered inappropriately ("Could you give me the number of Mr. E. Michaels?"),
the operators repeat their first question without comment ("In which
town?").
Less contextually bound are cases discussed by Merritt (1976: 33033) under the heading of "calls for replay." In a tantalizing footnote,
Merritt observes that a questioner "may decide to replay a question"
because he feels "that the focus of the question was not properly interpreted" (ibid.: 332). In the case we have been considering, this
translates into the suggestion that the old man's reply to the narrator's
first query, though lengthy, does not actually address the narrator's
request; hence the second attempt to isolate that crucial information.
Such an analysis in this particular instance becomes more plausible
after the additional observation that the narrator's question falls into
the rather narrow class of "Who is/are X?" interrogatories. Asking
who somebody is, it has been pointed out (Boer and Lycan 1975), can
be undertaken only with reference to some specific discourse context;
the question "Who is that woman in the red dress?" may be answered
with any of the following sentences, even if in practical terms they
all identify precisely the same individual: "That's Angelica Norburg";
"That's Bill's wife"; "That's the new vice president for marketing";
"That's our hostess." In any given conversational setting, just one of
these replies will be particularly apposite; the others will miss the
point, prompting the response "Yes, I know that, but who is she?"
(ibid: 300). Perhaps, then, the narrator's repetition of his question
713
should be viewed as an attempt to imply that the old man has misidentified the discourse context in which the query is framed.
It is one of the advantages of analyzing conversation that the (un-)
acceptability of individual parts of a discourse need not be alleged
as the expert opinion of "professional analysts." Instead, discourseinternal evidence may be adduced for the success or failure of each
contribution. In the case of failure, in particular, "the parties themselves address the talk as revealing a misunderstanding in need of
repair" (Schegloff 1987: 204). Indeed, upon close examination, each
contribution to a discourse can be shown to reveal (to the interlocutors
themselves as well as to the analyst) how prior contributions have been
understood by the participants (see Clark and Schaefer 1987). In our
particular case, the availability of such rich evidence puts a quick stop
to our emerging analysis of the narrator's reiterated question as mere
refocusing of his initial query. Not only does the narrator himself refer to his second question as an unelaborated "renewal" but, as we
have observed, it prompts only a repetition of the old man's story, not
any adaptation of it to some previously unnoticed discourse context.
Reluctantly, then, we must abandon our explanation of this dialogue
as "replay as recontextualization."
Why else might a replay be requested by a participant in a conversation? Alas, we are now driven back to the simplest but least attractive
of all explanations: the possibility that the narrator's question reveals
simply that he has altogether failed to process the leech gatherer's
first response. His repetition thus constitutes the functional equivalent
of the conversational "What?" or "What did you say?" (Merritt 1976:
332 n. 29 and sources cited there). This hypothesis fails, of course, to
explain the old man's remarkable good humor in the face of the narrator's rudeness, and it brings us uncomfortably close to Lewis Carroll's
view of the poem. All the same, it does seem to be the only explanation
compatible with the findings of the conversational analysts to date.
In an everyday context, of course, this conclusion would not be so
surprising; misunderstandings and even social gaffes commonly occur
in discourse, and repairs are not always made verbally. What then
disturbs us so much when it occurs in a poetic context? The root of
our unease lies, I suspect, in the fact that this conversation is part of
(indeed, represents the bulk of) a narrative, a discourse form which
imposes its own constraints and its own expectations. It may repay us,
therefore, to review this puzzling passage from this second discourse
perspective.
4. The Narrative Dimension
Most sociologists who have investigated narrative discourses, and they
are many, have focused their attention on oral narratives (Labov 1972;
Schiffrin 1981, 1984a; Polanyi 1985). A strong initial hypothesis, how-
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ever, would surely be that what holds for oral narratives should also
be true in written, and even in consciously literary, texts. We might
further suppose that our hypothesis should hold most firmly for those
analytical findings about discourse structure that seem most theoretically fundamental and uncontroversial, and for those literary texts
that most clearly simulate first-person oral narration. In particular, it
seems improbable that a literary narrative such as "Resolution and Independence" should evade that most basic of all narrative imperatives:
that it "make a point" (Polanyi 1985: 187).
"A story," Bruce (1981: 278) observes, "is told by someone to someone with some purpose." Indeed, it has been repeatedly pointed out
in the literature that each story we tell or hear is carefully designed
and delivered so as to forestall that most damning of all criticisms of
narrative technique: "So what?" (Labov and Fanshel 1977: 105, 108).4
Furthermore, since all narratives consist at their most elementary level
of a series of reported events (Labov 1972: 360), it must be in those
events that the integrity of a given narrative as a "tellable" story finally
resides. "No event in and of itself," to borrow Livia Polanyi's (1985:
196) summary, "is important-it is significant only in some context....
'A man got murdered sometime' is not, in itself, a particularly tellable
story." The reader who wishes to understand the dynamics of Wordsworth's account of his meeting with the leech gatherer as narrative,
then, is confronted with two tasks: first, to determine what constitutes
"the events" in this particular story; second, to relate those events to
some overall narrative purpose that they may be seen collectively to
serve. Let us take those tasks one at a time.
I shall not rehearse here the characteristics of "event clauses" in English narratives; Polanyi (ibid.) summarizes them effectively and cites
relevant discussions from the literature. In any case, it seems to me
4. Livia Polanyi (1985) gives formal status to the issue of the purposefulness of
narratives by explicitly distinguishing a story, "a recital of events and circumstances
[that] must ... be told to communicate some message about the world in which
the speaker and hearer actually live," from a narrative, which may be used without
such a context. The latter case, she argues, results in hearers perceiving that the
speaker has "abused his access to the floor, .... adding nothing substantive to what
was being said" (ibid.: 189). A still stronger claim is made by William Brewer and
Edward Lichtenstein (1981: 367), who would reserve the term story for "narrative
structures organized so as to produce surprise and resolution."
The issue of the degree and quality, so to speak, of the point a narrative makes is
by no means trivial, even in a literary context (Polanyi 1985: 197); contemporaries
criticized Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads both for sensationalism (excessive "surprise and resolution") and for pointlessness. One has also to bear in
mind, of course, derivative or self-referential narratives, such as Carroll's parody,
in which the point is precisely to comment on how some other story has made its
point. Despite these complications, however, a more generic approach at this stage
in our discussion will not seriously misrepresent the majority of cases.
Austin ? Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives
715
Table 1. Narrative events in the narrator's story

O
I saw a Man (55)
he the pond / Stirred (78-79)

a stranger's privilege I took / And ... to him did say, ...
(82-83)
D
D
A gentle answer did the old Man make (85)

And him ... I thus bespake, . . . (87)
a flash of mild surprise / Broke from...
his yet-vivid eyes
(90-91)
he told that...
(99)
former
My
thoughts returned (113)
My question eagerly did I renew (118)
He ... did then his words repeat / And said that ...
D
D
(120-21)
He . . . the same discourse renewed (133)
with this he other matter blended (134)
"God," said I, "be my help .. ." (139-40)
that one can quite reasonably appeal to our natural sense of narrative
intuition to distinguish clauses that move the narrative forward in what
Polanyi calls the "story-world" from those that merely relate states of
affairs, habitual actions, evaluative commentary, and so on. I have relied on just such a naive notion to draw up the array of event clauses
from stanzas 8 to 20 of "Resolution and Independence" that appears
as Table 1. The first and most obvious remark to make about this list
is that it contains an overwhelming preponderance of conversational
events (many of them, indeed, realized as conventional conversational
"tags," such as "he told" and "I said"). The first event clause listed
in Table 1 need not concern us at this point; I have labeled it O to
indicate its status as part of the narrator's fairly extensive orientation
section, to which we shall return below. The clause in lines 139-40,
by the same token, constitutes the coda (C) to the narrative and will
also attract our attention in due course. But, as the D (for discourse)
prefixed to the great majority of the remaining clauses in Table 1 is
meant to indicate, the principal impetus propelling this narrative is in
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Poetics Today 10:4
fact nothing more exciting than the inherently sequential, turn-taking

nature of human talk.
In what, then, might the substance, the "point," of this peculiarly
"uneventful" narrative consist? Two immediate possibilities present
themselves. On the one hand, Wordsworth might expect the reader
to infer something from the structure of the conversational exchange
itself; the point could be the very way in which that talk evolves. I
shall return to this alternative shortly. On the other hand, the poet
could be using the conversational frame transparently, intending us
to draw meaning from the substance of the talk itself, from the views
that are expressed by the participants. Like the conversationalist who
reports hearsay ("I met Mr. Jones in the bar last night and he told me
that.. ."), Wordsworth could be using dialogue merely as a convenient
channel through which to convey some opinion of his own, employing the narrator and the leech gatherer as mouthpieces for ideas he
himself wishes to express.
To see how this option contrasts with the first, it may help to portray the narrative structure of this poem diagrammatically, adapting
a scheme developed by Bruce (1981: 287; cf. Chatman 1978; Chafe
1980: 36), which allows us to view the entire episode as a story within
a story. As Figure 1 illustrates, the old man "narrates" his autobiography to the narrator, "I," who in turn relays it to us, but at a quite
different level or layer of narrative structure. If we suppose that the
focus of this narrative lies at level 1, in the words spoken by the old
man to the narrator, we shall need to examine the substance of those
remarks themselves with some care.
The leech gatherer's "story" tells of him pursuing without complaint
a thankless, difficult, and depressing occupation in thoroughly unpleasant surroundings even as circumstances beyond his control make
success ever harder for him to achieve: "'Once I could meet with them
on every side; / But they have dwindled long by slow decay'" (12425). The point would seem to have to do with perseverance in the face
of adversity, and that indeed is the lesson the narrator himself claims
to have learned when he tacks on his own summation of the tale: "I
could have laughed myself to scorn to find / In that decrepit Man so
firm a mind" (137-38). Polanyi (1985: 193) suggests at one point that
a "story can be justified as worth telling . .. because of the significant
alterations in the world resulting from the events around which the
story was built." If this is so, then the narrator's closing remarks would
seem to have been custom-designed to pick out just this "moral" as the
level 1 point of the narrative.
A moment's thought, however, reveals that such an account of this
narrative helps not one jot to resolve our original problem with the
violations of conversational norms described in sections 2 and 3. Since
Narrator Leech gatherer --
717
Reader
Narrator\
Figure 1. Narrativelayersin the narrator'sstory

the leech gatherer repeats his words a second time, apparently verbatim, the level 1 point we have just posited would be just as effectively
presented if Wordsworth made it only once. Indeed, under this analysis, the repetitiveness of the episode's dialogue appears to be a problem
not only in terms of conversational realism but also in terms of the
narrative strength of the poem, since it artificially prolongs, or even
distends, the slightly self-righteous moralizing of the old man.
Let us move, then, to reconsider the text from the perspective of
level 0, and begin with the question of the storyteller's motive for embarking on his narrative in the first place. At level 1, after all, the leech
gatherer's use of autobiographical narrative occurs in response to the
discourse prompt of the narrator's first question: "What occupation do
you there pursue?" His reply actually exceeds what is strictly necessary
under the circumstances,5 but because he is answering a direct request
for information, the old man is under no obligation to establish the
contextual relevancy of what he says or to secure a conversational turn
in which to place it. The narrator at level 0, by contrast, resembles
more closely the typical speaker characterized by Labov (1972: 366),
who needs to indicate early in his or her narrative "its raison d'etre:
why it [will be] told, and what the narrator is getting at" (see also
Chafe 1980: 41-42). Narrators employ various means to achieve this
end. In particular, they may use an abstract to preview their story
or insert contextualizing material into the orientation section, which
characteristically precedes the first event clause in a narrative, perhaps
establishing characters or settings that will be inherently interesting to
their auditors. In many instances, therefore, the opening section of a
narrative will furnish important clues as to its point when that issue
has not been settled a priori by the immediate discourse context in
which it occurs.
Wordsworth's narrator offers no clear abstract for his encounter
with the leech gatherer, but his orientation section occupies most of
5. This in itself is a slightly risky conversational "move," as Goffman (1967: 36)
notes.
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Poetics Today 10:4
the first eleven stanzas of the poem. In these lines, the narrator describes the pleasant pastoral setting for the beginning of his country
walk ("on the moors / The hare is running races in her mirth" [10-11]);
he reconstructs his own mental state immediately before the meeting
with the old man ("I thought of Chatterton" [43]; "When I with these
untoward thoughts had striven" [53]); and he sketches the bleaker
scenery amidst which he will later find the leech gatherer ("Beside a
pool bare to the eye of heaven" [54]). How does this extensive and detailed narrative orientation help us to understand the "complicating
action" that follows it?
The mention of Chatterton may offer a starting point; his inclusion, after all, seems at first quite extraneous to the events of the leech
gatherer episode, although our expectations of coherence between the
orientation and complication sections of narratives lead us to assume,
and to seek, some measure of relevance. Of Chatterton, the narrator stresses three things: his youth ("marvellous Boy"6), his animated
nature ("sleepless Soul"), and his untimely death ("that perished in
his pride"). This brief portrait contrasts strikingly with the impression
created by the leech gatherer when the narrator first observes him
several stanzas later. "The oldestman ... that ever wore grey hairs" is
described only as "not all alive nor dead, / Nor all asleep"(my italics),
barely more animate than the drab surroundings in which he lives,
"motionless as a cloud." Indeed, the narrator thereafter takes great
care to reiterate and even reinforce these characteristics of his interlocutor. The only two event clauses marked in Table 1 as not denoting
conversational exchanges refer to the narrator's startled recognition
first of the old man's animation and then of his humanness: "He ...
stirred" and "a flash of . . . surprise / Broke from . . . his yet-vivid
eyes."
This dominant physical contrast between Chatterton and the old
leech gatherer surely leads us to anticipate contrast at a second level:
As Chatterton was a gifted poet, the logic goes, so this old fellow,
who is in other respects his opposite, should turn out to be virtually
mute, as paralyzed verbally as he seems to be in other, physical re6. Wordsworth's use of the term boy here is more heavily weighted than might at
first appear. I discuss below the relationship between "Resolution and Independence" and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," which Wordsworth had composed
a few years before. Of interest to the present discussion is that boy is one of a
number of words that appear in both texts, so that its appearance here necessarily
evokes the fuller context of its use in the earlier work. The central section of the
ode, strophe 5, describes the progress of man from birth (58) through boyhood
(68), youth (71), and manhood (75). Applying this scale to Chatterton, we find that
he, as a "Boy," "beholds the light" of poetic inspiration but is never subject to the
"shades of the prison-house" that "close" around the maturing adult.
719
spects. It follows that the reader will be as surprised as the narrator to

find in the old man an enthusiastic and even eloquent speaker. From
the moment when the leech gatherer first responds to the narrator's
formulaic greeting, his manner of speech is given particular emphasis:
A gentle answerdid the old Man make,
In courteous speech which forth he slowlydrew.
His wordscame feebly,....
But each in solemn order followedeach,
With somethingof a lofty utterancedrestChoice word and measuredphrase,above the reach
Of ordinarymen; a statelyspeech;
Cheerfullyuttered, with demeanourkind,
But statelyin the main.
(85-136)
And at the end of their meeting, we share the narrator's "troubled"
reaction to the discomforting triple juxtaposition of "the lonely place,"
"the old Man's shape," and, crucially, his "speech" (127-28). For the
leech gatherer's eloquence stands as proof that one need not die
young, like the unfortunate Chatterton, to continue to command great
power over the language. Both the old man's pride and, still more
important, his capacity to articulate that pride remain only slightly
dimmed by age and by "the ways of men, so vain and melancholy"
that had earlier loomed as such daunting obstacles on the narrator's
own horizon.
It is in this context, I believe, that we can finally begin to discern
the source of the strangeness that characterizes the conversation at
the core of this text. For one component of the point of the narrative told at level 0 in "Resolution and Independence" is that the old
man, despite his long and wearisome life, can speak as he does. In
the context of forebodings about the loss of inspiration and poetic insight that accompany maturity, forebodings that had been troubling
the narrator before the meeting, the old man's garrulousness is noteworthy regardless of the content expressed by the leech gatherer at
level 1. Indeed, so remarkable is it that, rather like a child with a talking teddy bear, the narrator excitedly makes the old man "perform"
a second time. Since it is that he speaks and how he speaks rather than
what he says that most matter to the narrator, the fact that the content of the answer is already known to him becomes irrelevant and the
usual rules of conversational good behavior are, from his admittedly
unorthodox perspective, moot.
In the preceding discussion, I have used the notion of narrative
levels to tease apart two possible points to the story of the encounter
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Poetics Today 10:4
with the leech gatherer. At level 1, the leech gatherer consciously advocates perseverance in the face of adversity; at level 0 he unknowingly
provides the skeptical narrator with living, breathing proof that old
age need not render one mute. Furthermore, I have suggested that
my level 0 analysis accounts for one of the more baffling aspects of
the dialogue that passes between the narrator and the old man: the
reiterated question. We are, however, not yet out of the woods, for we
have not yet explained the old man's good humor despite his being
treated like a clockwork toy by his nosy and inattentive interlocutor.
Conversational analysis, as the preceding sections of this essay have
shown, would predict that this essentially nonserious use of language
should anger a participant like the leech gatherer, who after all is not
privy to the narrator's motives at level 0 and thus should expect his
contributions to be treated in the usual, "serious" way. To understand
the point of the old man's mysterious smile and even temper, then, we
shall have to look elsewhere. We begin by noting that Figure 1 does
not, in fact, give a comprehensive picture of the narrative form of this
poem.
The author of "Resolution and Independence" did not in the first
instance intend it for commercial publication. Rather, as I observed
at the beginning of section 2, the poem occupies a special place in
the remarkable decade-long exchange of poems between Wordsworth
and Coleridge that took them from their extraordinarily productive
collaboration between 1797 and 1800 to the beginnings of the rift that
would part them completely in 1810 (see Prickett 1970: ch. 6; Margoliouth 1953). One may dispute where exactly to fix both the first and
last contributions to what Stephen Prickett (1970: 167) repeatedly and
insightfully refers to as this "poetic dialogue"; it may begin as early as
July 1798 with Wordsworth's composition of "Tintern Abbey," and its
echoes may still be detected in Coleridge's lines to Wordsworth after
his reading the so-called 1805 Prelude in 1806-7. But the conceptual
core of this dialogue undoubtedly consists of three great statements
about poetic inspiration: Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," and finally "Resolution and
Independence" itself.
Dating the three poems is complicated by the fact that all three
underwent considerable revision. The "Immortality Ode" consists of
two sections known to have been written at different times, and most
of "Dejection" originated, though not in print, as "Letter to Asra,"
a work with a quite different addressee and purpose. What matters
for our concerns is that, thematically, these three poems do represent
essentially ordered contributions to the two men's debate over the evanescence of poetic insight. Thus the opening lines of the "Immortality
Ode," "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream .. .," are
Wordsworth -o-
Narrator
Leech gatherer --
721
Coleridge \
Reader\
Narrator
Figure 2. Narrativelayersin Wordsworth'spoem to Coleridge

echoed but then turned to a more somber end by Coleridge in "Dejection": "There was a time when, though my path was rough ..."
Similarly, while "Dejection" is set before a storm ("This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence / Unroused by winds"), Wordsworth deliberately describes a storm's-one might almost say the same storm's
-aftermath in the opening lines of "Resolution and Independence":
"There was a roaring in the wind all night; / The rain came heavily
and fell in floods; / But now the sun is rising calm and bright" (1-3).
And even if such incidental verbal cross-referencing were not enough
to establish these poems' interrelatedness (see also note 6), we would
still have the most obvious connection of all. The narrator of "Resolution and Independence," in describing his mood at the beginning
of the poem, alludes to the title of the ode by Coleridge, which had
provided the context for this reply: "As high as we have mounted in
delight / In our dejectiondo we sink as low" (24-25; my italics).
This interlacing of phrases from one poem in the series into the
language of the next seems to represent the literary counterpart of a
process described for natural discourses by Schiffrin (1987: 17): "By
repeating
key phrases from prior conversation
...
[speakers]
use a
cohesive device to show that understanding the interactional meaning of the story requires reference to prior conversation." If this is
so, however, it also suggests that we need to stipulate a more complex
narrative structure for "Resolution and Independence" than we have
worked with thus far. I propose the overall form shown in Figure 2,
in which I have modified Bruce's numbering system to allow positive integers to denote narrative layers immediately evident within the
text of the poem, while layers carrying negative indices can only be
inferred by the reader.
We may note in passing that independent considerations confirm
the necessity of the additional narrative layer shown in Figure 2 as
level -1. For although, as we noted in section 2, the narrator claims
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as a part of his level 0 narration not to be able to follow the old man's
first reply ("nor word from word could I divide"), the text that we read
still contains a meticulous report of its substance. Readers accept here,
I suggest, the tacit intrusion of the poet himself at level -1 into the
telling of the level 0 story.7
The relationship between level 0 and level -1 in this poem is an intriguingly indirect one. Whereas level + 1 fits into level 0 by means of
standard conversational practice, as we noted above, a more conscious
artifice on Wordsworth's part relates the two "higher" levels. The crucial clue to the nature of that relation lies in Oswald Doughty's (1981:
205) observation that "a portrait of Coleridge at this time, a slightly
critical one, appears in 'The Leech-Gatherer'-now better known as
'Resolution and Independence.'" Doughty points out the many biographical parallels that link the description of the narrator early in
this poem, who questions why "others should / Build for him, sow for
him, and at his call / Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all"
(40-42), with Coleridge's own cloying dependency on William and
Dorothy in 1801-2. Coleridge, a hypochondriac, unhappily married
and already addicted to opium, leaned heavily on his friends during
these years while still suffering frequent pangs of guilt over his own
lack of productivity. Thus it is Coleridge's voice, not Wordsworth's,
that we hear echoing the strains of "Dejection" at the beginning of
"Resolution and Independence." Wordsworth daringly takes up the
story of Coleridge's stormy night exactly where it left off, extending
it into the following day without shifting from the first-person narration of the original into the third-person framework that we would
naturally expect. The ostensibly first-person I is categorically not the
poet himself-another justification, if we needed one, for the concept
of narrative layering.
But if it is Coleridge who is characterized as the narrator in this
poem, then where (if anywhere) does Wordsworth figure in the level 0
or + 1 narrative? Wordsworth, I suggest, realizes his own point of view
at level + 1, in the person of the old man. The doctrine of stoic endurance, after all, of pursuing "dwindling" opportunities for whatever
they are worth, is exactly what is espoused more enthusiastically in the
"Immortality Ode"; and the "flash of mild surprise" that is glimpsed
in the leech gatherer's eyes picks up tellingly on Wordsworth's metaphor, recurrent in other contributions to this poetic debate, for those
evanescent "gleams" of poetic insight that represent the last hope of
7. The usefulness of this line in my attempt to justify a "higher" narrative layer for
the text was first suggested to me by some similar instances detected by Herbert
Clark (personal communication) in quite different, conversational contexts (see
section 5).
Wordsworthx --
Narratory i
Leech gathererx--
723
" Coleridge
Reader \
Narrator \
Figure 3. Narrativelayers and aligned roles in Wordsworth'spoem to Coleridge

the maturing poet. It may help, therefore, if we extend Bruce's schematization once again by employing subscripts to illustrate the varying
alignment of participants at different narrative levels within the text.
Such an elaboration yields Figure 3 as a reformulation of Figure 2.
Naturally, we must be cautious as we interpret Figure 3. The narrator at levels 0 and +1 is not the Coleridge of level -1 in fact, and
Wordsworth's attribution to the narrator at level 0 of a change of heart
after he hears the leech gatherer's story is nothing more than a clever
persuasive device of narrative. Rather like role modeling, it seeks to
seduce Coleridge into perceiving the reasonableness of Wordsworth's
own resolution of the problem: If the fictional narrator is convinced
after expressing doubts every bit as black as Coleridge's own, then why
should Coleridge himself not also come around? At the same time,
we must not lose sight of the fact that Wordsworth cannot be sure of
his own success, and the desired conflation of the y-indexed roles in
Figure 3 may in fact never occur.8
And so we return, one last time, to our original conundrum and to
the only piece of the puzzle as yet unexplained: the leech gatherer's
smiling tolerance of his interlocutor's conversational clumsiness. The
key here, I believe, lies in the nature of the point of the narrative contribution made at level -1. As Schiffrin (1987: 16) again notes, "What
is intended and understood as the point [of any narrative] is strongly
dependent on social, cultural, conversational, and personal contexts"
(my italics). Such is assuredly the case here. On a purely interpersonal level, Wordsworth displays, through the imperturbability of his
chosen persona, both his good-humored patience with Coleridge's recurrent worries (hence, of course, the smile) and, surely, his conviction
8. Indeed, as Coleridge's later poems like "Work without
Hope" clearly show,
Wordsworth's strategy was unsuccessful.
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Poetics Today 10:4
that the only possible response to them has already been given and
that "renewing the question," however earnestly or eagerly, cannot
educe a different response, at least from this responder. To that extent, Wordsworth may be seen as seeking politely to terminate this
dialogue. Indeed, if one characterizes the dialogue as having consisted
of a dynamic exchange of mutually responsive positions on a common theme, "Resolution and Independence" does occupy the final
turn, since whatever poems one seeks to add to it as afterthoughts
are neither as closely linked nor as personal as those that have gone
before.
5. Closing Remarks
This paper begins with the observation of an apparent violation in the
text of "Resolution and Independence" of the conventions that, conversational analysts have proposed, govern "turns of talk." No amount
of contextualization, I argue in section 3, can explain that violation
naturally, that is, explain it as having occurred in some realistic though
highly specialized discourse setting. Instead, we find it necessary to
begin by acknowledging the preemptive importance of a series of embedded narrative contexts for the dialogue in which the violation has
occurred. Since one or more points are being made with the same
material at each of a series of different levels, various aspects of the
perceived conversational deviancy can be satisfactorily accounted for
through appeal to those functions in narrative context.
There is much that has not been considered here. Prickett (1970:
166) says of this poem that "it is hard to read it as not addressed to
Coleridge." The fact remains that, with a brief autobiographical introductory note that served only to muddy the waters, "Resolution
and Independence" was eventually published and hence directed to
a wholly new audience, as shown in Figure 4. A full treatment of the
poem would naturally need to take note both of level -2 and of the
complexities of the relationship between it and level -1, itself only
an extratextual construct. My purpose in this essay, however, has not
been to conduct an exhaustive analysis of a single work. Rather, I
hope to have established by demonstration the practical usefulness
of discourse theories of several types both in raising and in resolving important questions about literary texts. The anomaly detected in
the course of my analysis at level + 1 of Wordsworth's poem is quite
adequately handled through appeal to structural aspects of levels 0
and -1; the overarching presence of level -2 in no way complicates
or simplifies this particular argument.
A final note of interest to linguists, stylists, and literary scholars
alike: This analysis indicates that, at least in the case of this poem, the
narrative imperative of making a point may, under the right condi-
Wordsworth- W
o
thoede
Reader
Wordsworth
x --
Coleridge\
Narratory
--
"Reader"
725
Leech gathererx- A Narrator +,

~~~y
Figure 4. The public poem

tions, obviate the necessity of observing more detailed rules of conversational discourse. This raises a number of interesting questions:
Which rules or rule types can be affected, how many, and in what
way(s)? Does this possibility obtain in all narratives or only in written,
literary, or perhaps even poetic narration? Is the relationship indeed
asymmetrical, or can the "narrative point constraint" itself be usurped
by rules of conversational well-formedness or by some other discourse
consideration?
One piece of data is highly suggestive. Recordings of spontaneous
speech collected by Deborah Schiffrin and William Labov include one
story whose narrator attempts to support his point that it sometimes
pays to talk to a friend or a neighbor rather than to a doctor when
one is sick.9 The narrative is told in the third person for the most
part, the narrator relating events that have happened to his friend
Louie. The sad story of Louie's medical misfortunes also involves at
least three different doctors, all, apparently, male, and Louie's neighbor, the hero of the story, who finally diagnoses correctly what all of
the professionals have missed. Towards the end of his narration, the
speaker utters the following sentence: "He said it would've been a little
bit more, he could've strangled t' death."
One can adduce plausible arguments for interpreting the first he in
this sentence in any number of particular, determinate ways. Strict
application of sentence-level syntactic rules of anaphora, for example,
9. I am most grateful to Deborah Schiffrin for her permission to refer to this material, which she employed in her course "Sociolinguistic Approaches to Discourse"
at Stanford University in the summer of 1987. Many of the competing analyses of
those data that I present briefly in the following paragraphs were contributed by
Schiffrin's students.
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Poetics Today 10:4
in the absence of any contrastive stress, leads us simply to search back

through the narrative for the most recently mentioned, eligible antecedent noun phrase-one of the three doctors. Pragmatically, though,
the malapropism that occurs in the indirect speech-Louie has risked
death from a strangulatedhernia, not from being strangled-points to
an inexpert speaker, perhaps Louie himself, as the referent for he.
Then again, the narrator's choice of generic they in the immediately
preceding clause to refer to the medical personnel who finally operate on Louie might lead us to rule out at least those individuals as
candidates for this honor.
In the end, particularly in light of our discussion of Wordsworth's
poem, 1 suspect that all of this searching is, quite literally, missing
the point. The narrator here, after all, has somehow to work his way
around to demonstrating to his audience that "it sometimes works to
talk to a friend . . ." Furthermore, he has selected as his exemplum
a story that deals with "the danger of death or of physical injury,"
matters which, as Labov (1972: 370) notes, "occupy a high place on
an unspoken permanent agenda" of discussible topics. But unless, in
his story, the advice of some friend proves effectual where more traditional resources have failed, the narrative will not count as having
illustrated that appealing to friends "works" in this kind of extreme
circumstance. In this light, the evaluative comment "It would've been
a little bit more, he could've strangled t' death," embedded as a source
of evaluation internal to the narrative and succinctly characterizing its
crisis, seems structurally all but inescapable.10 To whom the remark
is attributed, then, may make sense as the question of a theoretical
syntactician. For the discourse theorist, however, it may well be moot,
since the "he said" tag merely provides an ad hoc slot into which the
triumphant narrator can drop the clinching evidence of disaster narrowly averted and thus the evidence that talking to friends really does
work.
This case confirms prima facie the evidence gleaned from our literary study and supports Schiffrin's (1987: 14, 22) insistence on "the
integrated nature of discourse," in which the sometimes competing
demands of "different levels of analysis" have to be resolved by readerhearers who are intent, first and foremost, on making "overall sense
out of a particular segment of talk." Useful as the many available approaches to discourse may be, and valuable as we may already have
found the results, we have only scratched the surface when it comes
to describing the ways in which different components of our discourse
10. Indeed, as Schiffrin pointed out in her Stanford lectures, an exactly parallel
sentence occurs in a story discussed by Labov (1972: 387), the announced point of
which is also almost precisely the same.
727
theory interact. Adding literary narratives and discourses in poetic

form to the fundamental database may well complicate the task of
achieving a comprehensive account. As I hope to have illustrated, however, the long-term gains from such a move, whether in conversational,
narrative, or literary theory, far outweigh the short-term frustrations
that it will undoubtedly occasion.
References
Agar, Michael
1985 "Institutional Discourse," Text 5: 147-68.
Boer, S. E., and W. G. Lycan
1975 "Knowing Who," Philosophical Studies 28: 299-344.
Brewer, William F., and Edward H. Lichtenstein
1981 "Event Schemas, Story Schemas, and Story Grammars," in Attention and Performance 9, edited by John Long, 363-79 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).
Brown, G., and G. Yule
1983 Discourse Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Bruce, Bertram
1981 "A Social Interaction Model of Reading," Discourse Processes 4: 273-311.
Carter, Ronald A.
1983 "Poetry and Conversation: An Essay in Discourse Analysis," Language and
Style 16: 374-85.
Chafe, Wallace L.
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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives: Analyzing a Poem from a Sociolinguistic

Narrative Discoursesand Discoursing

We will be using observationas a basisfor theorizing.

initials: GB, UCG, LFG, HPSG)

make markedly different claims and predictions about linguistic data.

they foster for the mul-

Poetics Today 10:4

tiple application of particular research findings. In the optimal case,

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Poetics Today 10:4

Coleridge on the transitoriness of poetic inspiration, a debate which

The first-person narrator of the poem, out walking in a "lonely place"

In lines which themselves represent a rather insightful commentary

At this point, the narrator makes the first substantive conversational

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Up until this point, as I have suggested by sporadically citing the work

Poetics Today 10:4

ing to all utterances in a conversation, independent of other possible

Austin * Narrative Discoursesand Discoursingin Narratives

locutor that he or she may have furnished inadequate information are

Poetics Today 10:4

"Whoare you, aged man?"I said.

the kinds of allowable contributions" that speakers can make to the

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

which speakers routinely request information they already possess

Poetics Today 10:4

scenario at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from Levinson's

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Poetics Today 10:4

Austin ? Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Table 1. Narrative events in the narrator's story

I saw a Man (55)

he the pond / Stirred (78-79)

A gentle answer did the old Man make (85)

his yet-vivid eyes

"God," said I, "be my help .. ." (139-40)

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fact nothing more exciting than the inherently sequential, turn-taking

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Narrator Leech gatherer --

Figure 1. Narrativelayersin the narrator'sstory

Poetics Today 10:4

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

spects. It follows that the reader will be as surprised as the narrator to

Poetics Today 10:4

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Figure 2. Narrativelayersin Wordsworth'spoem to Coleridge

key phrases from prior conversation

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Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Figure 3. Narrativelayers and aligned roles in Wordsworth'spoem to Coleridge

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Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

Leech gathererx- A Narrator +,

Figure 4. The public poem

Poetics Today 10:4

in the absence of any contrastive stress, leads us simply to search back

Austin * Narrative Discourses and Discoursing in Narratives

theory interact. Adding literary narratives and discourses in poetic

Poetics Today 10:4

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