A Quintilian for the 21st Century: On Fictional Truth

• Published in: Romanic review 2010-01, Vol.101 (1-2), p.239-241
• Main Author: Barolini, Teodolinda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898); Humor; Literature and Literary Studies; Marx, Julius (Groucho) (1895-1977); Metalanguage; Narratives; Onomastics; Rhetorical figures; Subtitles & subtitling; Titles; Truth
• ISSN: 0035-8118; 2688-5220
• DOI: 10.1215/26885220-101.1-2.239

Consider the elegance and richness of the banquet of rhetorical techniques that Riffaterre catalogues on pages 29-30 (techniques Dante uses, and which I tell my students to find): "authors' intrusions; narrators' intrusions; multiple narrators; humorous narrative that acts as a representation of the author or of a narrator or that suggests an outsider's viewpoint without fully intruding; metalanguage glossing narrative language; generic markers in the titles and subtitles, in prefaces, and in postfaces; emblematic names for characters and places; incompatibilities between viewpoint and verisimilitude, especially omniscient narrative; signs modifying the narrative's pace and altering the sequence of events (backtracking and anticipation, significant gaps, prolepsis, and analepsis); mimetic excesses, such as unlikely recordings of unimportant speech or thought (unimportant but suggestive of actual happenings, of a live presence, creating atmosphere or characterizing persons); and finally, diegetic overkill, such as the representation of ostensibly insignificant details, the very insignificance of which is significant in a story as a feature of realism." [...] the elegance and force of the reading experience is heightened by the sheer pleasure of the extraordinary textual banquet that Riffaterre sets before us in his examples: we move in the first chapter alone from Proust and Balzac to James, Austen, Trollope, Lewis Carroll, and Meredith.