Abstract
When Gérard Genette drew the distinction between “voice” and “focus” in narrative, he pointed to two kinds of deviation from the monitoring of narrative details based on focalization. One is “paralepsis,” that is, giving the reader more information than is available to the focal character; the other is “paralipsis”—giving the reader less information than the focal character possesses. This paper suggests that the content of paralipsis—what the focal character knows but the reader is not told—is often the intentions and concrete plans of the focal character. The paper discusses the ending of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1959) as a paradigmatic case: the precise intentions of Sydney Carton are not disclosed to the reader; the second reading is therefore qualitatively different from the first reading; and the intentions of the author (the implied author or even the historical author) for this temporary gap invite interpretation and raise the issue of the reasons and the causes for this feature of the narrative as a communicative act.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In her discussion of what Phelan’s sees as the paradox of paralipsis in first-person retrospective narratives, Alison Case too notes that at such a point there may be something “more important to the author than producing a mimetically consistent narrative voice” (Case 2005, p. 313).
This paper was written for a narrative conference at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which I thank for funding my participation. At the conference I paraliptically suppressed the titles of these works, to avoid a spoiler for students who have not yet read them. Assuming that fellow narratologists have read everything, these works are Chekhov’s 1884 The Shooting Party and Christie’s 1926 The Murder of Roger Acroyd. In Agatha Christie’s 1967 novel Endless Night the focal character’s intentions are likewise a temporarily suppressed pivotal piece of information. This happens also in Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and other internally focalized novels (see Hajdu 2008, 206–213)—the suppression of the focal character’s sundry intentions may be a consequence of his avowed intention of keeping a secret to which he has become privy.
The easy availability of such inferences creates what Meir Sternberg has called “a surprise gap,” that is, an informational gap of whose existence the reader is not made aware (Sternberg 1978, pp. 244–45), or not fully aware.
For examples from Bleak House see Toker (1993), pp. 64–66.
See also Phelan and Rabinowitz on “the system of intentionality that explains why the text has this particular shape rather than some other one” (2012, p. 32).
Narratives “can be characterized as a form of communicative action, for the uptake of which inferences about the authors’ (and sometimes narrators’) reasons for acting are not only pertinent but necessary” (2012: 44).
Phillips’s play was produced in the Adelphi Theatre in November 1859, shortly before the (already written) last installments of A Tale of Two Cities were published; see Dolmetsch for a discussion of the possibility of Dickens’s having known the play before or of both the authors having a common source; see also Glancy 25–26 on other works that represent self-sacrificial substitution. However that may be, Phillips’s play was one of the works that might have given Dickens’s audience a sense of déjà vu when Carton substitutes himself for Darnay.
So does the victory of Milly Theale in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove: Milly succeeds, after her death, in taking precedence over Kate Croy in Densher’s heart; with insights into intention suppressed, a demystifying reading might translate Milly’s nobility, like that of Dickens’s Carton, into a version of psychological egoism.
The name of the Holocaust memoirist Aleksander Donat is not his real name but the name of the dead young man whose identity he adopted. In his memoir of imprisonment on the Solovetsky islands, the academician Likhachev records that while he was allowed to spend some time away from his cell, with his parents who came to visit him, the guards had come to carry him away to an execution and, because of his absence, took another prisoner, a random one, to make up the necessary number: Likhachev’s whole sense of self and of moral duties was forever affected by this event. In Mikhail Kuraev’s tale “Captain Dikshtein,” after the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion the imprisoned rebel-protagonist does not answer when his name is called (to execution by list), so the guards grab another person, one who has the good boots that they covet; the protagonist adopts that victims name, Dikshtein, and attempts to live up to that person’s cultural standards. And in Jorge Semprún’s The Necessary Dead (Le mort qu’il faut), the authorial protagonist faithfully attends on a man who is dying in Buchenwald and whose identity he needs to adopt in order to submerge and survive.
References
Case, A. (2005). Gender and history in narrative theory: The problem of retrospective distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House. In J. Phelan & P. J. Rabinowitz (Eds.), A companion to narrative theory (pp. 312–321). Blackwell.
Dickens, C. (2003 [1859]). A tale of two cities (Ed. R. Maxwell). Penguin.
Dolmetsch, C. R. (1959). Dickens and the dead heart. Dickensian, 55, 179–187
Eliot, G. (1990 [1876]). Daniel Deronda (Ed. T. Cave). Penguin.
Genette, G. (1980). Narrative discourse: An essay on method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press.
Genette, G. (1988). Narrative discourse revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press.
Glancy, R. (1991). A tale of two cities: Dickens' revolutionary novel. Twayne.
Hajdu, P. (2008). Secrecy and the transcendental desire for order in drama and narrative. Neohelicon, 35(2), 203–213.
Herman, D. (2008). Narrative theory and the intentional stance. Partial Answers, 6(2), 233–260
Herman, D. (2012). Authors, narrators, narration. In D. Herman, J. Phelan, P. J. Rabinowitz, B. Richardson, & R. Warhol (Eds.), Narrative theory: Core concepts and critical debates (pp. 44–50). Ohio State University Press.
Nabokov, V. (1980). Good readers and good writers. In V. Nabokov, Lectures on literature (Ed., F. Bowers) (pp. 1–6). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Norris, M. (2011). Virgin and veteran readings of Ulysses. Palgrave Macmillan.
Phelan, J. (1996). Narrative as rhetoric: Technique, audiences, ethics, ideology. Ohio State University Press.
Phelan, J. (2005). Living to tell about it: A rhetoric and ethics of character narration. Cornell University Press.
Phelan, J., & Rabinowitz, P. J. (2012). Authors, narrators, narration. In D. Herman, J. Phelan, P. J. Rabinowitz, B. Richardson, & R. Warhol (Eds.), Narrative theory: Core concepts and critical debates (pp. 29–38). Ohio State University Press.
Rimmon-Kenan, Sh. (1983). Narrative fiction: Contemporary poetics. Methuen.
Sternberg, M. (1978). Expositional modes and temporal ordering in fiction. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Toker, L. (1986). Self-conscious Paralepsis in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Recruiting” and Pnin. Poetics Today, 7, 459–469
Toker, L. (1993). Eloquent reticence: Withholding information in fictional narrative. University Press of Kentucky.
Toker, L. (2010). Towards the ethics of form in fiction: Narratives of cultural remission. Ohio State University Press.
Wimsatt, W. K., & Beardsley M. C. (2001 [1946]). The intentional fallacy. In: V. B. Leitch (Ed.), The Norton anthology of theory and criticism (pp. 1374–1387). Norton.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Toker, L. Paralipsis and intention(ality). Neohelicon 49, 13–23 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00588-9
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00588-9