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Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary
Fiction
Edited by Sandrine Sorlin
Advances in Stylistics Series London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2020 Hardcover. ix+253 p. ISBN 978-1350062962. £95
Reviewed by Violeta Sotirova University of Nottingham
Manipulation is not an obvious effect one would associate
with literature. Manipulation practices are more obviously associated with
advertising and political discourse. To most readers it would seem ‘counter
intuitive’ [1] to expect to find manipulation in literature. Or as Sorlin
remarks in an earlier article: ‘While persuasion
is at the heart of human communication, manipulation supposedly
belongs to its darkest fringes as it falls short of the ideal of truthful and
rational cooperation’ (2017 : 134). The history of manipulation goes at
least as far back as the Ancient Greek Sophists, who taught rhetoric and
philosophy and charged money for it, with a corresponding line of critique of
such practices as embodied in Plato’s dialogues about Socrates. One would
understandably find it hard to imagine that literature would engage in such coercive
practices as exhibited by ancient Sophists, modern day advertising agents and
politicians. But Sandrine Sorlin, Professor of English at Montpellier,
has here collected a fine array of essays on manipulation in contemporary
fiction, thus aiming to inaugurate a new field of stylistic study. Her panel of
contributors include some of the best-known names in Contemporary Stylistics,
together with some of its most promising students, to furnish the reader with
an innovative and insightful volume about manipulation in literary texts. Although
the most logical place where readers can expect to find manipulation in
literary texts would be in characters’ dialogue – an avenue of investigation
already pursued by Sorlin in her earlier work (2016, 2017) – the essays in this
book illustrate how manipulation occurs on a different and less predictable
level of communication – that between author and reader, or implied author and
implied reader. The volume’s introduction by Sorlin is usefully comprised
not just of an outline of chapters, but also provides a definition of
manipulation, an account of its history and strategies, in order to state the
aim of the collection, i.e. ‘to show
that although the aims are different, fiction can resort to strategies of
manipulation through language that are comparable to discursive manipulation in
other genres’ [1]. Having defined manipulation as encompassing ‘strategies [that]
need to be perceived in terms of degrees on a continuum formed by two poles,
one that is “benign” (what [she] would call entertaining deception) and another
that is illegitimately used for “exploitative deception”’ [4], Sorlin is able
to persuasively bring into the wider discussion of manipulation literature, with
its less offensive strategies that are primarily situated on ‘the more joyous
pole […] of fictional manipulation’ and seek ‘to seduce, surprise, please or
move the reader’ [4]. Three key strategies that play an important role in the
stylistic manipulation of the reader are discussed at some length in the
introduction: the construction of perspectives, characterisation and
narratorial stance, and the cognitive control of the reading process. While
none of these are new to stylistic study, Sorlin argues that these strategies
can manipulate empathy and sympathy, colour the reader’s interpretation of
events, or misdirect the reader by withholding or downplaying certain elements of
the story (as is the case in detective fiction), and thus account for an
overall drift at manipulation. The book is divided into three parts. Part I,
‘Manipulating positions, representations and viewpoints’, explores perspectives
and the positioning of the reader in relation to the text. The first chapter in
this section by Marina Lambrou focuses on the post-modern open-ended novel by
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It studies the use of metalepsis
(Genette, 1980), disnarration (Prince, 1988) and Borges’ ‘forked path’
technique (2000 [1944]) to argue that Fowles’ novel challenges many conventions
of traditional fiction thus compelling readers to be more active in the
construction of the story, but also leaving them with a sense of uncertainty. Chapter 3 by Andrea Macrae ‘explores manipulation of the
reader through deictic positioning’. Macrae’s focus is ‘on the functioning of
what is sometimes called “empathetic”, “social” or “relational” deixis’ and
after a detailed survey of the linguistic literature on deixis, she conducts an
analysis of the final stanza of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good
Night’(Macrae, 2020 : 50). In spite of the initial confusion of empathetic
deixis with social or person deixis, two concepts that are not necessarily equivalent
(although empathetic deixis can encompass person deixis), Macrae provides a
useful discussion of different scholars’ treatment of deixis, including some of
the classic linguistic accounts, such as Lyons (1977) and Bühler (2011 [1934]),
the pragmatic account of Levinson (1983), Adamson’s (1994) literary account and
more recent cognitive expansions of the concept (Stockwell, 2002), which have
stretched deixis to encompass modality, referring expressions, evaluative
language, dialect, or pretty much any expression of subjectivity. Macrae wisely
raises a question, which demonstrates that such a redefinition of deixis might
ultimately lead to a loss of its explanatory power: ‘given the scope of evaluative
language and replacement vocabularies, what then, can be excluded from deixis
as a category of language?’ [59]. As her textual analysis illustrates, the
strictly linguistic definition of deixis is sufficient to uncover the layers of
deictic meaning in Thomas’ stanza. Chapter 4 by Rocío Montoro adopts a different
methodology. Through a rigorous corpus analysis Montoro demonstrates that Henry
Green’s novels undergo a shift towards a reduction of description and an
increase in the use of dialogue, an aesthetic aim articulated by the writer
himself. The evidence offered by the corpus approach though compelling in
itself, is complemented by a more nuanced pragmatic exploration of the actual
construction of dialogue across Green’s novels in order to conclude that
Green’s dialogues become more ‘oblique’ ‘by underscoring not simply
indirectness […] but also the interactive aspect of dialogue’ [86]. In Chapter 5, Jeremy Scott explores the boundaries of two
narratological concepts, both as old as Plato – mimesis and diegesis – by
mapping them onto first person narrative with a specific focus on Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Scott uses
Semino and Short’s (2004) cline of discourse presentation, which as he
correctly observes, has not been studied in detail in relation to homodiegetic
narrative, to demonstrate that ‘applying [the] discourse presentation taxonomy
to homodiegetic narration can be problematic because its status as narration or
presentation of thought of some kind is often uncertain’ [110]. Part II brings into the discussion of stylistic
manipulation readers’ responses. In Chapter 6, Billy Clark studies the effects
of implicature and explicature in fiction on readers’ inferences and their
accessibility. Drawing on comments made by real readers on goodreads.com, Clark
shows how pragmatic analysis can explain these comments, evaluations and the
degree of reader engagement with, and immersion in, the different texts he
explores. After the chapters reviewed so far (2-6), Chapter 7 by
Hidalgo-Downing is the one that most clearly and explicitly defines the
parameters of manipulation and its relevance to the study of literary texts.
While chapters 2 to 6 refer to the manipulation of the text and the
manipulation of the reader, the textual analyses presented in these chapters sometimes
leave the question of what is distinct about manipulation as opposed to just
stylistic effect in general implicit. Chapter 7, however, makes the terms of manipulation
more explicit and differentiates them vis-à-vis stylistic effect more broadly.
The definition of manipulation offered here is one that makes the concept
distinct and charts its relevance to certain literary genres that engage in
manipulation more openly than the rest. Hidalgo-Downing bases her use of the
concept of manipulation on Emmott and Alexander (2010) and Emmott and Alexander
(chapter 9 in this volume) to argue that manipulation is defined as the ‘use
[of] specific textual strategies as techniques to misdirect the reader’s
attention during the reading process’ so as to ‘prevent them from guessing who
the murdered is’, for example, in detective fiction [149]. For Hidalgo-Downing,
there are similarities between the genre of detective fiction and the genre of
the short story in that they both ‘lend themselves more easily to the
exploitation of certain manipulative techniques’ [149], which include: ‘burying
information’, ‘red herrings’, ‘split frames and reconstruction’, ‘underspecification
of main characters’ [153-154]. This framework works well to uncover the
techniques Salinger uses in his short story ‘A Perfect Day for Bananfish’,
which, like the detective novel, surprises the reader with its tragic ending
offered after a series of mundane descriptions. Reader questionnaires
supplement the analysis to demonstrate that the strategies of manipulation
create palpable effects felt by readers. Chapter 8, by Sara Whiteley, takes an original angle on
the concept of manipulation by exploring how readers manipulate texts in the
construction of meaning. Whiteley analyses a poem by Simon Armitage – ‘Upon
Opening the Chest Freezer’ – in terms of its use of perspective and register
and the manipulation of pronouns. She then goes on to examine in detail the
responses and discussion of two reading groups – one entirely male; the other –
female – and thus show that readers take an active part in the construction of
meaning and are not just ‘passive recipients of the “manipulations” of the text
[189]. The final section of the book – ‘Genre-specific and
multimodal manipulation’ – delineates most successfully the usefulness of the
concept of manipulation in relation to stylistic analysis. It is in this genre-specific
context, i.e. the genre of detective
fiction that manipulation gains its full explanatory power and demonstrates
what the concept has to offer in relation to the study of literary texts.
Emmott and Alexander’s chapter explores the granularity of description in order
to show how specific details can be buried as inessential or withheld and thus
delay the recognition on the part of the reader of who had committed the crime.
Gregoriou further demonstrates the role that the
foregrounding of irrelevant detail, the withholding of information and the
burying of certain clues play in the manipulation of the reader in crime
fiction. Gregoriou brings a new aspect to the study of manipulation by showing
that certain manipulative clues, such as the use of gender-neutral items in
English, cannot always be sustained across languages in translation thus
leading to a loss in the degree of manipulation of the reader. In the final Chapter (11), Nina Nørgaard,
unorthodoxly, explores ‘literary realism [as] being manipulative in its
creation of the illusion of verisimilitude’ [234]. While for most readers
stylistic manipulation would more naturally be associated with more
experimental texts and certain genres, such as detective fiction, Nørgaard
takes what some would deem the most traditional type of fiction – realist
fiction – as its focus and argues that the multimodal manipulation of typeface
may paradoxically work in two ways. It may manipulate readers into a more
immersive belief that they are reading an old library book with handwritten
notes in the margins, but it may also, for some readers, expose the artifice of
verisimilitude and thus the constructedness of even the most realist of texts. The variety of texts, frameworks and approaches that the
book encompasses, including deixis, relevance theory, narratology, multimodal
stylistics, corpus analysis, cognitive stylistics and reader responses,
provides a rich and multifaceted context for the exploration of stylistic
manipulation. This collection is thus a first step towards a potential new
avenue of stylistic exploration – the manipulation of the reader. References Adamson, S. ‘From Empathetic Deixis to Empathetic
Narrative : Stylisation and (De)-Subjectivisation as Process of Language
Change’. In Stein, D. & Wright,
S. (eds), Subjectivity and
Subjectivisation : Linguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: University Press,
1995 : 195-224.. Borges, J. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. In Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew
Hurley, London: Penguin 2000 (1944) : 119-128. Bühler, K. Theory
of Language : The Representational Function of Language, trans. D.E.
Goodwin. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011 (1934). Emmott, C. & Alexander, M. ‘Detective Fiction, Plot
Consctruction, and Reader Manipulation : Rhetorical Control and Cognitive
Misdirection in Agatha Christie’s Sparkling
Cyanide’. In McIntyre, D. & Busse, B. (eds), Language and Style : In Honour of Mick Short. Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2010 : 328-346. Genette, G. Narrative
Discourse : An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Levinson, S. Pragmatics.
Cambridge: University Press, 1983. Lyons, J. Semantics,
Vols. 1 & 2. Cambridge: University Press, 1977. Prince, G. ‘The Disnarrated’. Style 22/1 (1988) : 1-8. Semino, E. & Short, M. Corpus Stylistics : Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a
Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge, 2004. Sorlin. S. Language
and Manipulation in House of Cards : A Pragma-Stylistics Perspective.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Sorlin, S. ‘The Pragmatics of Manipulation : Exploiting im/politeness
theories’. Journal of Pragmatics 121 (2017) :
132-146. Stockwell, P. Cognitive
Poetics : An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.
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