José Angel García Landa
(From a letter to
a Chinese correspondent, who asks about the implications of the views
of M. H. Abrams, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roger Sell from the point of view
of the pragmatics of literature):
As to your questions on pragmatics... Well, to me literary
pramatics is of course an interesting field, but we should not lose
sight of pragmatics in the general sense. What I mean is, literary
pragmatics may be thought of sometimes as addressing only those issues
which are specific to literary communication, reading, writing,
narrative or poetic fictions... That is, literature is a special
communicative context, and therefore it has its own pragmatic
specificities. The concepts in literary pragmatics are derived from
those of general pragmatics, and many of the issues are related to the
issues we find in other neighbouring pragmatic fields (e.g. the
pragmatics of language generally, or the pragmatics of film, etc.), yet
they have a specificity of their own, special historical traditions
(genres, conventions, etc.) and that's why we speak of literary
pragmatics as a field in its own right.
BUT, it would be a mistake to restrict the pragmatic study of
literature to "literary pragmatics" in that sense—in the sense of "what
is specific to literature". Because literature also portrays or uses
many pragmatic dimensions of communication which are not specifically
literary. For instance, the verbal interaction of the characters is
also pragmalinguistic, although not only literary, in the sense that
many pragmatic elements of actual conversations are relevant in the
understanding and portraying of fictional narrated interactions. Same
thing for the nonverbal elements of communication, those are not
linguistic and not specifically literary, but literary works do use
them. (There is a good work in three volumes by Fernando Poyatos, in
Spanish alas, on literature and nonverbal communication—La
comunicación no verbal, but see the English translation, Nonverbal
Communication across Disciplines, Benjamins, 2002).
So, in a global pragmatic analysis of a literary work we would have to
take into account both what is specifically literary and what is not
specifically literary but is nevertheless relevant to literature, at
the level of the characters' communication or at the level of the
communication between author and reader.
You ask about a comparison of M. H. Abrams's and Roger Sell's
theories... well that would be a whole essay I'm afraid. But I can
point out that Sell is more aware than Abrams of the mediating role of
the critic—mediation between the author's and the reader's context.
Criticism involves a recontextualization, and sometimes the Founding
Fathers of criticism, including Abrams, are not sufficiently aware of
that—they tend to emphasize the author's context, which the reader
should recreate imaginatively or adapt to. Of course, not in the narrow
historical or biographical sense, but in the sense of what another
critic (Wendell V. Harris, Interpretive Acts, 1988) calls the
"wonted context", the intended context which the work carries along
with it so to speak, the way it "wants" to be read.
That is a crucial dimension of the literary work, but then there
is another dimension (which is dialogical, Bakhtinian) and which too
often is not consistently articulated or conceptualized. I mean that
works are not used only in the communicative context which is
established, or which they establish, between author and Reader 1, the
intended reader. The works are also recontextualized, and they are used
by Reader 2, an unexpected or unintended reader, perhaps with a context
of her own or an agenda of her own, to discuss other reader's
reactions, perhaps. And this Reader 2 is interacting with Reader 3,
addressing this other Reader 3 in a context which the author didn't
even think of (for instance, a historical study of his style in a
university course). And then Reader 4 may read the critical account by
Reader 2, and disagree and recontextualize the whole thing—because
Reader 4 is not Reader 3, readers are quite often unexpected creatures,
especially those readers who take the pen or the keyboard and produce a
text of their own which is a response to the original text, and which
addresses an audience of their own, different from the writer's
intended audience. Perhaps they haven't read the original work, even;
what I mean is that works are used in a variety of communicative and
pragmatic contexts. Sell's work is aware of this, even though sometimes
his critical priorities are still within the sphere the original
writer's communicative context—which is crucial, I'm not going to deny
this!