(If You Think So): Percival, the 'absent but spoken about' PDF
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Giuseppina Balossi: Independent scholar (PhD, Lancaster University) Via SS. Cosma Damiano, 47, Calolziocorte (LC), Lecco, Italy e.mail: [email protected] Right You Are! (If You Think So): Percival, the ‘absent but spoken about’ character in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves The concept of character (cf. Greek ‘pròsopon,’ and Latin ‘persòna,’ i.e. mask) in literature is strongly associated with the idea of a fictional entity representing somebody who does not exist but that, for various reasons, must be or is wished to be something more than words in the text. In this paper I look at how Percival, one of the seven characters in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is presented. In this ‘dialogical’ novel, Percival is an exceptional figure, as he not only never speaks, but he is entirely other-‐presented through the soliloquies of the other six speaking characters. The principal aim in this paper is to research to what extent we can construe or re-‐construe the ‘true’ Percival through what the other characters say, think and feel about him. The approach adopted draws upon cognitive linguistics that argues that our understanding of literary character is derived from the combination of bottom-‐up processes (textual cues) and top-‐down processes of inferencing (social schemata). If, on the one hand, such a model may be useful to define Percival, as an other-‐presented character, on the other hand we should also be able to account for the ontological gap between reality and fictionality inherent to fictional worlds in which a character also fulfills actantial and thematic functions within a plot in a possible text world. The analysis makes use of computer-‐aided methods in order to identify quantitatively the occurrences of the name Percival and pronouns referring to him in the other six characters’ speeches and then to pin down the shared aspects and/or the differences deriving from their viewpoints, as well as their diverse wish-‐worlds derived from their personality traits and individual backgrounds. Keywords: Virginia Woolf, The Waves, characterisation, text world theory, cognitive linguistics. 1. Introduction Character in drama possesses a make-‐believe identity performed by an actor, who when playing it, loses his own identity to become the ‘character.’ Authenticity (the actor) and pretence (the character) merge to the point that what is the actor off-‐stage disappears to become the character with which he identifies himself. Similarly, a character in a literary text is a fictional entity, not in the actual world but in a possible world that is imagined and created by the author to be functional to the progression of the story. The character can then be inserted in possible sub-‐worlds that are imagined, believed, or wished for by the characters of the story. Their interaction between each other is ‘fictional’, as if in a truth-‐falsehood game, often cruel but always human, in which interpersonal relationships are woven and which we also experiment with in our everyday life. The complex theme of truth-‐authenticity is perfectly exemplified by Pirandello’s (1917) play Right You Are! (If You Think So) as is the case with many of his works, such as One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926). Right You Are! revolves around the morbid curiosity of provincial middle-‐class people who question and produce conflicting versions of the identity of Mr. Ponza’s wife. His mother-‐in-‐law (Signora Frola) claims that her son-‐in-‐law went mad when her daughter, his first wife died. He then remarried but he fantasises the new wife is his old wife. In turn, Ponza himself claims that Signora Frola could not accept her daughter’s death, went mad, and only survives because she believes that his second wife is in truth her living daughter; she says that it is for this reason that Ponza is so jealous and does not want to show her in public. To unravel the intricate question (who is Signora Ponza?) she will be made to appear in public and will baffle everybody by saying: ‘No! I am she whom you believe me to be.’ This work is paradigmatic of how a character, already invented by its author, represents a further projection of ‘inauthenticity’ derived from our beliefs, expectations, and fantasies. In this paper the ‘apparent reality’ vs the ‘evident fictionality’ of character in a literary work is investigated through the presentation of Percival, one of the seven characters in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I will briefly consider some major issues in regard to the ontological status of character in possible worlds and the possibilities of analysing character in a storyworld and its modes of presentation, then I will move onto the major focus: Who is Percival? After placing this character in the narrative architecture of The Waves, and counting the occurrences of the name Percival and the pronouns referring to him in each of the six speakers via concordances, I will select the ‘authentic’ and converging information that the 2 speaking characters ascribe to him. Eventually, I will look at how each character projects onto Percival their wish-‐worlds according to their personal traits, social roles and experiences. 2. Characters and Characterisation in the storyworld One of the major points of discussion in literary theory rests on the ontological status of character. Drawing upon possible world theory (PW hereafter), Doležel (1980; see also Eco 1984; Lewis 1986) stresses the radical incompleteness of fictional worlds as entities that don’t possess the same ontological fullness as the real world, it is useless to ask, for example, how many children Lady Macbeth had, because the number of her children is never specified; this lack of information forms an ontological gap inherent to fictional worlds. Narrative theorists have tried to make clear the implications of PW theories (Ryan 2012) for the ontological status of literary characters. For example, Margolin (1983: 1-‐2) offers multiple approaches to the study of fictional character. He states that character is generally conceived as “an actant, a role, a narrative device and an individual or person.” The terms “actant” and “role” suggest that character is a purely semiotic construct or some abstract dimension; while the terms “individual or “person,” inspired by PW theory, highlight the mimetic or make-‐believe properties of character: “endowed with inner states, knowledge, and belief sets, memories, attitudes and intentions—that is, a consciousness, interiority and personhood” (Margolin 1990: 455). The possibility of integrating the ‘incompleteness’ of fictional character, and investing it with the ontological fullness of the real world, can “be answered by an interdisciplinary research bringing together textual analysis and the cognitive sciences” (Fotis 2012: 42).i Within stylistic approaches we find scholars who view character as a mental representation constructed out of the interaction between the text and the reader’s background knowledge (Chatman 1978: 118; Toolan 1988: 92; van Peer 1989a: 9; Culpeper 2001: 9-‐12). Culpeper (2001; see also Fotis 2012; Balossi 2014) brings together a cognitive model for a stylistic approach to character and characterisation in which top-‐down processes of inferencing and bottom-‐up processes of perception interact and combine to allow readers to infer character in a storyworld. In simple terms, if our impressions are mainly derived from top-‐down processes (using our previous knowledge, principally social schemata) we obtain a category-‐based (i.e. flat) character; whereas, if we rely more on bottom-‐up impressions (i.e. textual cues) we obtain a person-‐based category or individualised fictional character. However, 3 the category-‐based or person-‐based category used in character perception can also be integrated with the categories of ‘dramatic role,’ which account for the functional or actantial roles of the formalist-‐structuralist approach, i.e. character is seen as realizing a function such as that of helper, hero and so on. These additional categories do not exclude the social ones applied to our knowledge of real people, which can indeed provide supplementary information for dramatic roles. Fotis (2012: 31) defines characterisation as the process of “ascribing information to an agent in the text so as to provide a character in the storyworld with a certain property or properties.” The reader can derive the properties attached to a character explicitly, when characters present themselves without any apparent interference from an omniscient narrator, or indirectly from information provided by other characters and narrators. The issue that rises in indirect presentation is that readers may question the authenticity of the properties that either characters or a narrator attribute to a character. Percival, the non-‐speaking character in The Waves, is presented entirely through the other six speakers’ soliloquies, and in assessing the validity of the information they give of Percival, we tend to accept that what they say or think about him is real/authentic. However, this principle may be true only partially as we must also take into account that the perception a character has of another character is dependent, as in real life, on his/her own personal traits and social roles and experiences just as it happens with the characters in Pirandello’s Right You Are! (If You Think So). 3. The speaking voices and the non-‐speaking voice in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves In The Waves, the lives of six characters, three females and three males, are presented by means of soliloquies delivered by each at different stages of their lives from childhood to old age. Each stage of life is framed by an interlude in which a part of the day is described, moving from sunrise to sunset in sequence, corresponding symbolically to the life stages depicted in the soliloquies starting with the characters’ childhood and moving progressively to their adolescence, early adulthood, adulthood, and finally to their old age. Each stage is also marked by a macro event such as in childhood the six characters are all together at boarding school, in their adolescence the males are at college and the females at a finishing school. The characters’ individual soliloquies are clearly demarcated by reporting clauses (e.g. ‘said Susan,’ ‘said Jinny,’ ‘said Rhoda,’ etc.), which are the only sign of the narrator’s presence in the novel. Woolf leaves the entire space to her characters to present themselves, but she also construes 4 a completely different character, Percival, who is both present in some parts of the novel and absent (after his death) in some other parts. Compared to the presence occupied by the six characters in the narrative Percival holds a marginal position within the narrative as he is present in the fictional world only in his early youth and early adulthood. Percival makes his first appearance in the story in the characters’ adolescence, when the males all go on to public school, where they meet him. The females will not meet Percival until early adulthood when the group gather at Hampton Court to say goodbye to him before leaving for India. This gathering is followed by his death in India, which represents the climax of the novel since from this moment on all the six speakers start their ‘fall’ toward old age and death. Even when present in a particular soliloquy, Percival is always silent and entirely other-‐presented. So the reader’s processes of inference can only take place through what the six speaking voices say about him. The whole architecture of the novel is designed on a complex scheme of fictions. First is the ‘fiction’ of the interludes, in each of which the intense impressions of a distinct part of the day are conveyed anonymously. They function as metaphors for the development of the characters’ lives. Second, is the ‘fiction’ of the dramatic soliloquies themselves in which the six characters express bluntly and sincerely their thoughts, judgements, impressions and feelings through life and in both public and private, but the juxtaposition of their consecutive speeches creates the impression that there is no communication between them. The author leaves to the reader the task of judging their ‘fictionality’ whenever they judge the other characters and their common experiences and events. The characters of The Waves are a mixture of fiction and authenticity even when they try to conceal themselves from the other characters and from themselves. 4. The naming of Percival Percival’s indirect presentation is also testified by the frequency of occurrences of his being named by the six characters and referred to by pronominals (Margolin 1995: 374) from his first appearance at public school until the end of the story. The frequency of overt naming of Percival and the third-‐person masculine pronominals referring to this character was obtained through the programme WMatrix (Rayson 2007). Tables 1 and 2 list the frequencies of the name Percival and the pronominals respectively and 5 are displayed according to the characters’ life stages and major events (e.g. The first reunion) in which they occur, with the female characters coming first, and the males second.ii Table 1 The naming of Percival Character Phase of life Event Freq. Susan Growing old Settled life 1 Corpus size 5,800 (8.3%) Tot. 1 Jinny Early adulthood The first reunion 2 Corpus size 6,077 (8.7%) Growing old Settled life 1 Tot. 3 Rhoda Early adulthood The first reunion 3 Corpus size Adulthood Percival's death 8 8,094 (11,6%) Growing old Settled life 2 Growing old The final reunion 1 Tot. 14 Louis Adolescence Public school 7 Corpus size 8,541 (12.2%) Early adulthood The first reunion 2 Adulthood Settled life 1 Growing old Settled life 3 Tot. 13 Neville Adolescence Public school 7 Corpus size Late adolescence At university 1 9.678 (13.2%) Early adulthood The first reunion 11 Adulthood Percival's death 1 Adulthood Settled life 4 Growing old The final reunion 2 Tot. 26 Bernard Adolescence Public school 1 Corpus size Late adolescence At university 2 31,385 (45.1%). Early adulthood The first reunion 9 Adulthood Percival's death 4 Growing old Settled life 1 Adulthood The final reunion 1 Old age Bernard’s summing up 14 Tot. 32 Tot. words 69,575 Tot. naming 89 Table 1 shows that the naming frequency varies according to the speaker and stage of life. The occurrence of the name Percival in the female characters’ speeches is overall much lower than in those of the male characters, except that Rhoda (14) refers to him one time more than Louis (13). Amongst the females, the naming frequency in Rhoda’s speeches (14) is much higher than in Susan’s (1) and Jinny’s (2). Susan mentions Percival only once towards the end of her life. In Jinny’s speeches, we find the name Percival used when all the six friends meet at the 6 first reunion at Hampton Court, and in the same phase of life as Susan, when Jinny is a mature woman; while Rhoda’s highest naming frequency is especially high (8) when she learns about his death. For the male characters the naming frequency is much higher. This may be partly explained by contextual reasons: they all meet him for the first time at public school, though Louis and Neville mention him seven times each, while Bernard only once. Bernard and Neville name him seven times on the first reunion. Bernard’s naming is the most prolific (32), and higher in his summing-‐up when he is the only speaker left on stage recollecting his life and that of the other characters. Overall, the phases of life in which the name Percival appears and which contribute most to the other-‐presentation of Percival are ‘Late adolescence,’ ‘Early adulthood,’ and Bernard’s summing up in ‘Old age.’ As stated earlier on, characters are also referred to through pronominals. Yet, identifying all the occurrences of the pronouns that the six characters employ to refer to Percival was not an easy job. Firstly, I had to obtain the statistics of all of the third person singular masculine pronouns, secondly I had to produce concordances for each pronoun and delete all the instances of he-‐pronouns that did not refer to Percival. In some cases it is difficult to understand, even from the co-‐text, whether the pronouns refer to Percival, while in others the he-‐pronouns appear to implicitly refer to Percival, or rather they hint at an idealised wish-‐world that a character projects onto Percival; for example, when Susan imagines her hero/Percival coming back from the battle with trophies: ‘He will come home, bringing trophies to be laid at my feet. He will increase my possessions’ (Woolf 1931: 123).iii As part of my analysis aimed to look at how each character projects onto Percival their wish-‐worlds, the statistics of the pronouns also include these instances. A further issue was about the inclusion of the he-‐pronouns and exclusion of other pronouns such as ‘you,’ which may refer to Percival. Although my choice was to focus on the occurrence frequencies related to the name Percival and the most obvious he-‐pronouns, we must also take into account the possibility that other pronouns may contribute to this, though not so frequently. The frequencies of the he-‐pronouns referring to Percival are displayed in Table 2. 7 Table 2 He-‐pronouns Speaking section Phase of life Event Pronouns he his him Susan Growing old Settled life 2 1 x Corpus size 5,800 Tot. 3 Jinny Early adulthood The first reunion 1 x x Corpus size 6,077 Growing old Settled life Tot. 1 Rhoda Early adulthood The first reunion 4 x 1 Corpus size Adulthood Percival's death 2 2 1 8,094 Tot. 10 Louis Adolescence Public school 3 4 2 Corpus size 8,541 Early Adulthood The first reunion 1 x x Adulthood Settled life 2 x x Tot. 12 Neville Adolescence Public school 32 12 5 Corpus size Late adolescence At university 3 3 x 9,678 Early adulthood The first reunion 8 1 1 Adulthood Percival's death 11 3 2 Tot. 81 Bernard Late adolescence At university 5 x x Corpus size Early adulthood The first reunion 8 4 1 31,385 Adulthood Percival's death 16 4 7 Growing old Bernard’s summing up 13 7 8 Tot. 73 Tot. words 69,575 Tot. he-‐pronouns 180 Similarly to what resulted from the naming of Percival, Table 2 shows that the frequency of occurrence of he-‐pronouns referring to Percival is higher for Rhoda (10) compared to the Susan (3) and Jinny (1), and much higher for Neville (81) and Bernard (73) compared to Louis (12). From the concordances obtained these pronouns are also most often employed in the same stages of life in which also the name Percival occurs (cf. Table 1). 4.1 Meeting Percival The quantitative results for the name Percival and the pronominals referring to this character are the textual clues that help identify his salient physical, psychological traits, interests and experiences, though being rather sparse and scattered throughout the six characters’ soliloquies.iv 8 • Percival is beautiful and young: ‘this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty’ (104). ‘I remember his beauty’ (111); ‘He had the kind of beauty’ (172) • Percival is strong: ‘He is heavy’ (26); ‘Percival lying heavy among us’ (27). • Percival is gross in the ways he breathes, speaks, laughs, or moves: ‘He breathes through his straight nose rather heavily’ (25); ‘His slovenly accents’ (27); ‘His curious guffaw’ (27); ‘his surly and complaining accents’ (60). • He is conventional: ‘There is Percival in his billycock’ (43; a type of hat which became (fashionable after Edward VII had adopted it); ‘He is conventional’ (88). • He is unintellectual and lazy: ‘He is allied with the Latin phrases on the memorial brasses’ (25); ‘He reads a detective novel’ (52). ‘I have just pulled Percival out of bed […] as I pull the blankets off his feet; he burrowing like some vast cocoon meanwhile’ (60). • He is athletic and his main interest is cricket: ‘He is thinking of nothing but the match […]. He despises me for being too weak to play’ (34). • He loves Susan: ‘when he takes his seat by Susan, whom he loves’ (88);v ‘not Susan, whom he loved’ (112); ‘I think sometimes of Percival who loved me’ (137). • Neville loves Percival ‘It is for that that I love him’ (43); ‘Neville suffers. He loved Percival’ (112). • Percival goes to India ‘We shall say good-‐bye to Percival, who goes to India’ (83); ‘he is about to leave us, to go to India’ (88); ‘Percival is going […] India lies outside’ (97); ‘Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-‐bitten mare, and wears a sun-‐helmet’ (97); ‘Percival, riding alone on a flea-‐bitten mare, advances down a solitary path’ (98). • Percival dies in India: ‘Percival is dead’ (109); ‘Percival by his death’ (114); ‘Percival has died’ (121); ‘He is dead’ ‘He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown’ (105); ‘He died where he fell' (108); ‘I have lost friends, some by death – Percival’ (139); ‘Percival fell; was killed; is buried’ (108); ‘Percival's death’ (129); ‘Percival died’ (137); ‘after Percival died’ (146); ‘Percival comes no more’ (160). ‘The door will not open; he will not come’ (150); ‘Into this crashed death -‐-‐ Percival's (186); ‘But now Percival is dead’ (205); ‘Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell.’ (205) • Percival as the hero and the catalyst: ‘His magnificence is that of some mediaeval commander’ (26); Look at us trooping after him, his faithful servants, to be shot like sheep’ (27); ‘He is a hero’ (88); ‘He rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were -‐-‐ what indeed he is -‐-‐ a God. (97); Percival ‘[…] was adored’ (173); ‘He is remote from us all in a pagan universe. But look -‐-‐ he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime. Dalton, Jones, Edgar and Bateman flick their hands to the back of their necks likewise. But they do not succeed’ (87). Through the information coming from the six speakers, we can build up a personalized character: Percival is well built, beautiful, though gross in his manners (he prefers cricket to Latin). Percival is charismatic, a god-‐like figure, and a perfect leader, who everybody follows and tries to imitate. Yet, Percival is above all a category-‐based character, a stock character, and a literary type: he is the leader, the hero, the catalyst, the pagan God who inspires deep “obedience, respect [and] adoration” (Hite, in Woolf 2006: lviii). Everybody follows him and tries to imitate him. He embodies the physical and psychological qualities of manliness 9 (especially for the male characters), and the conventional roles for males associated with heroism; in serving in the British army Percival accomplishes the ideology of British imperialism. Percival, as a category-‐based character also embodies familial conventions: he loves Susan who embodies the traditional male fantasy of the perfect wife and mother. All these qualities are emblematically represented in the Arthurian name Percival that encourages the readers to regard him as a mythical, heroic and romantic figure (McConnell 1971; Graham 1982; Booker 1991; Hite, in Woolf 2006: lv-‐lxi). Percival is the name of one of the most famous Knights of the Round Table. He is mentioned in several great European works from the French chivalric novels of Chrétien de Troyes (ca. 842-‐1300) and Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485) to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1953) and finally Wagner’s Parsifal (1882). Intensely personal authorial autobiographical meanings have also been attached to the name Percival that go beyond these mythical associations; for example, Hussey (1995: 213) notes that “[f]or many readers, Percival is another attempt by Woolf at writing some kind of elegy for her dead brother Thoby Stephen.” Gordon (1984: 241) suggests “the name may have associations with Spencer Perceval, a Tory Prime Minister who was assassinated in 1812 and died in the arms of Woolf’s great-‐grandfather.” However, Percival contradicts the archetypical version given by the six characters and some critics; he does not die in battle; ironically his death is caused by an accidental fall from ‘a flea-‐bitten mare’ (97). Thus Percival, whose name Bernard says, ‘is ridiculous’ (109) is also an anti-‐modern hero, representing the failure of military virtu. In this regard, Little (1983: 77) states that Percival represents “a mythos, a narrative or 'sequence' that gives shape to a culture and to individuals within the culture […] a mock grail-‐hero [he] mocks the very notion of story, of legend.” 4.2 Percival: the six characters’ wish-‐worlds In the previous section I looked at the textual cues that give factual or ‘authentic’ information about Percival without taking into account the characters such information came from. In what follows, I look at how Percival is presented from the viewpoint of each character and how each of them (especially the males) uses Percival “as a model to define themselves” (Booker 1991:36) and projects onto him their own wish-‐worlds (Eco: 1984) depending on their social roles, personal traits and experiences. 10
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