Abstract
Conrad’s Falk portrays the act of cannibalism of a white man to propose that even resorting to cannibalism can find its moral justification within the society that abhors such actions. This effect is achieved by means of simultaneous narrative distance and involvement created through both deictic shifts in various narrative spaces (embedded within the main narrative space and constituting the textual world, subworlds and possible worlds with multiple spatio-temporal shifts) and delayed decoding which results in imperfect knowledge worlds delivered by the personal, justifying viewpoint of the intradiegetic narrator. As such, both deixis and delayed decoding, we argue, are ultimately related to the manipulation of narrative distance; they produce a kind of uncanny effect of simultaneous immediacy and distance which is fittingly in line with epistemological doubt as an aspect of modernist sensibility.
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Notes
Deixis is defined as “the function of certain words (demonstrative pronouns, definite articles, temporal adverbs) to locate referents in place and time relative to the speaker’s location. In a narrative utterance such as ‘I realized that this apple was now better than that orange,’ ‘this’ and ‘that’ have the deictic function of indicating that the apple is closer to the ‘I’ than the orange, while ‘now’ has the deictic function of indicating both some change over time and the speaker’s current realization. The juxtaposition of ‘now’ with ‘was’—an adverb conveying the present with a verb conveying the past—is linked to the narrative convention of the past tense often functioning to signify the present time of the narrated events” (Phelan and Rabinowitz, 543–44).
Notice that this quote also indicates that the narrator consciously manipulates his intradiegetic addressees (also real readers) to form an imperfect knowledge world and consequently makes them confront this statement with the actual state of things once they finish reading/listening to the story.
“Conceptual blending, form and meaning.” Recherches en communication, n. 19 (2003).
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Saei Dibavar, S., Pirnajmuddin, H. Deixis and delayed decoding in Joseph Conrad’s Falk. Neohelicon 45, 789–806 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0440-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0440-2