Trollope's Implicature

Speranza

TROLLOPE’S IMPLICATURE

Helm notes: “Elsewhere, Powers writes: “Bleikasten stresses the fact that Faulkner was a storyteller in both senses of the term.””

I think Powers is confused about ‘story’ and ‘history’. You can be a story-teller and you can be a history-teller, or historian.

Helm quotes from Powers:

“Faulkner loved writing complex stories of ‘the human heat in conflict with itself’ (a phrase he used in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm in 1950), and he compulsively embroidered the bare facts of his own prosaic life.  Writing later about the months he lived in New Orleans in 1925, Falkner claimed that he supported himself by “working for a bootlegger.  He had a launch that I would take down [Lake] Ponchartrain into the Gulf to an island where the rum, the green rum, would be brought up from Cuba and buried, and we would dig it up and bring it back to New Orleans. . . .   And I would get a hundred dollars a trip for that.’ “Nothing about this story was true, but just as remarkable is where he told it – in an American lit class at West Point in April 1962, about two months before he died. “Yet bigger lies were told about his eventless months with the Canadian Royal Air Force; after the war he limped from imaginary machine gun wounds suffered, he claimed, in aerial duels over the fields of France.  Faulkner was still in flight school when the war ended, was never sent to France, was never wounded in combat as he claimed, and never even took up a plane alone until years later. . . Bleikasten is blunt about Faulkner’s fabrications and writes that ‘he lied to his parents, his brothers, his friends, and later his son-in-law, his mistresses, his editors, his colleagues in Hollywood, and his doctors.””

Helm comments:

“How judgmental Bleikasten and Powers are being is unclear because immediately following the above, Powers writes “In time Faulkner told fewer tall tales and had the deeper pleasure of constructing elaborate fictions in prose.””

Indeed. Helm goes on: “A reader might be excused from concluding that if he learns to lie well enough perhaps he too can incorporate his lies into stories and perhaps one day win a Nobel Prize.”

As Borges would say, what is literature but a ‘fiction’? Is poetry a fiction, though? “Fiction” possibly has just ONE sense – as any other expression. And it’s not clear how Powers makes the passage. Powers seems to be implicating that there is a flouting here of Grice’s ‘qualitas’ conversational category – “do not say what you believe to be false.” Novelists are expected, whether they get the Nobel or not!

Helm: “Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography writes “Whether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on is a question which probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think.  That men have become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no doubt; -- but have they become less honest?”

Meaning ‘truthful,’ in this context. (“Honesty is the best policy, says I -- This proverb is first found in the writings of Sir Edwin Sandys, the English politician and colonial entrepreneur, who was prominent in the Virginia Company which founded the first English settlement in America, at Jamestown, Virginia. In Europae Speculum, 1599, Sandys wrote, “Our grosse conceipts, who think honestie the best policie.”

Helm ends his quotation from Trollope:

“If so, can a world, retrograding from day to day in honesty, be considered to be in a state of progress?  We know the opinion on this subject of our philosopher Mr Carlyle.  If he be right, we are all going straight away to darkness and the dogs.  But then we do not put very much faith in Mr Carlyle – nor in Mr Ruskin and his followers.  The loudness and extravagance of their lamentations, the wailing and gnashing of teeth which comes from them, over a world which is supposed to have gone altogether shoddy-wards, are so contrary to the convictions of men who cannot but see how comfort has been increased, how health has been improved, and education extended – that the general effect of their teaching is the opposite of what they have intended.  It is regarding simply as Carlylism to say that the English-speaking world is growing worse form day to day.  And it is Carlylism to opine that the general grand result of increased intelligence is a tendency to deterioration.”

Helm comments:

“I am apparently typically American in not liking Faulkner or his novels.  Not liking him because his lies sounds a bit archaic however.  Lying has been worked upon by politicians.  “Spinning” and “Spin Doctors” are a fact of politics and not considered lying.”

Well, the conceptual definition of lying is quite a trick. Grice makes fun, for once, of Kant, in “Aspects of reason,” which is fun, because in “Logic and Conversation” he is echoing Kant and calling himself ‘enough of a rationalist’ to be ‘echoing Kant’. In “Aspects of Reason” Grice is bringing up the ridicule Kant received in the English-speaking world. Kant’s systematic refutation of lying as regarded as too ‘rigouristic’. It’s, granted, all different with Faulkner’s archaic white lies.

Helm concludes his interesting post: “When a famous politician is caught in flagrante delicto, he doesn’t admit that he did anything wrong, nor does he admit that he was lying about it up until the very time he was caught.  He says “I made a mistake.”  Lying was not involved.  Carlyle and Ruskin were clearly wrong.  Modern man spins and makes mistakes.  He does not lie.”

I would think the Griceian approach to this is complex, and perhaps relying on his “Intention and uncertainty.” It seems ‘intention’ is essential. Violating the maxim pertaining to the category of ‘quantitas’ (“Do not say what you believe to be false”) seems central in communication. Yet of course, most figures of speech (qua conversational impicatures) are a sort of ‘lie’: ‘metaphor,’ ‘hyperbole,’ ‘litotes,’ ‘irony’. If the intention is there on the part of the utterer that the addressee will recognise that the utterer is ‘flouting’ the maxim, things seem okay, even for Kant.

Faulkner, granted, lied. If following philosopher D.F. Pears in “Motivated irrationality,” see see Faulker as believing his lies, a further caveat is needed. Faulkner may have ended up believing his lies. It is obvious that his novels were a way to ‘legitimise’ those lies into ‘fictional narratives’ that perhaps only a die-hard Oxonian (from Oxford, Mississippi) would regard as a lie!

Cheers,

Speranza

REFERENCE

Grice, H. P. “Aspects of Reason,” Oxford, Clarendon Press. (On Kant on lying).