Politeness: Narrator and Reader Level
A very serious type of FTA that occurs on the
authorial or narratorial level lies in the choice of topic. Many fictions cause
offence to some readers: an extreme example is Salman Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses, which led to a fatwa being pronounced against him. A less
extreme example is Nabokov’s Lolita, where the subject matter is also
offensive to some readers. Joyce experienced great difficulties in getting Dublinerspublished: it was deemed so offensive that a printer destroyed the plates.
There is a relationship between reader and writer: we may be offended by
certain topics, as recurrent demands for censorship show. When the Scottish
novelists James Kelman and Irvine Welsh were published, it was clear that many
English readers felt that writing in their dialects were inherently FTAs. The
norms and knowledge required to process a text also change over time. This can
result in problems for the reader not foreseen by the author. Obvious examples
are quotations from Latin, which until the post-war changes in British
education could be assumed to be understood by most readers; understanding
Latin is not even likely to have been a marker of in-group identity, and so
promote solidarity with the reader. Nowadays, it is quite likely that the
reader will not understand it, so it may be interpreted as an FTA. (This is a
case where the implied reader and the real reader are at some distance from
each other – see Chapter 1.) Much the same applies to quotations (or
intertextuality), or echoes of other literary works. The reader who misses them
is at a disadvantage, and, once apprised of the error, may well feel his
positive face has suffered. For example, in Lodge’s Changing Places (1975/1978)
an American professor, on an exchange to an English university, finds a book on
novelwriting belonging to the lecturer he has exchanged with. The book, called Let’s
Write a Novel, belongs to a series that includes Let’s Weave a Rug and
similar self-help titles: ‘Every novel must tell a story’ it began. ‘Oh,
dear, yes,’ Morris commented sardonically. (1978: 87). The sardonically may
puzzle a reader who does not pick up the echo of Yes – oh dear yes – the
novel tells a story, from Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. In Lawrence’s ‘Tickets,
Please’ there are a number of intertextual elements. One of them tells us that
the philandering ticket inspector leaves one girl for pastures new. The
echo of Lycidas may not seem particularly significant (a reader unfamiliar with
Milton might notice only the inversion of the normal order of noun and
adjective), but it points to the theme of the story (essentially a retelling of
Dionysiac rituals, with a young man torn up by the women) by stressing the
difference between the idyllic pastoral past (!) and the present.