Table Of ContentFOREGROUNDED DESCRIPTION
IN PROSE FICTIONS:
fIVER CROSS-LITERARY STUDIES
Within the large, diverse body of criticism devoted to the novel, there has been
remarkably little attention paid to a key facet of prose fiction - the descriptive
passage. While discourse linguists have produced useful studies of description,
they have generally adhered to a plot-centred, action-driven model,
designating as 'background material' that which does not propel narrative time.
In this wide-ranging study, Jose Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical
framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers
readings of texts drawn from four national literatures - French, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Brazilian - testing his model across a cultural and temporal
spectrum.
Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une
Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito Perez Galdos' La de Bringas,
Cornelio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In
addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings
pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of
description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a
detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute
towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme,
parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain
relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts
to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks
to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component
necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and
twentieth-century fictional texts.
(Theory / Culture)
JOSE MANUEL LOPES is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for
Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.
THEORY/CULTURE
Editors:
Linda Hutcheon, Gary Leonard,
Janet Paterson, Paul Perron
JOSE MANUEL LOPES
Foregrounded Description
in Prose Fiction:
Five Cross-Literary Studies
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1995
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-0727-9
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication
Lopes, Jose Manuel
Foregrounded description in prose fiction
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-0727-9
1. Romance fiction - History and criticism.
2. French fiction - 19th century - History and criticism.
3. French fiction - 2Oth century - History and criticism.
4. Spanish fiction - 19th century - History and criticism.
5. Portuguese fiction - 2Oth century - History and criticism.
6. Description (Rhetoric). I. Title.
PN8i6.L661995 809.3'922 C95-931544-6
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the
financial assistance to its publishing program of the
Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant
from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities,
using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 3
I. Towards a framework for the analysis of description in prose
fiction / 6
1. Description and twentieth-century criticism / 8
2. Towards an analytical framework / 19
II. Description and mise en abyme in Zola's line Page d'amour / 28
1. The first description of Paris / 30
2. The novel inside the novel / 41
III. Reading of visual images and postcard descriptions in Claude
Simon's Histoire / 51
1. Reading representational paintings/photographs and
literary descriptions / 55
2. Motionless images and dynamic readings / 57
3. Expansions through descriptive details and the fragmented
main frame / 61
4. From descriptions to narrations / 63
IV. The sarcastic descriptor: Satire and parody in Benito Perez Galdos'
La de Bringas / 68
i. Description as suspense / 69
vi Contents
2. Parodic 'emblematizations/ or when mise en abyme also
reverts to its literal meaning / 77
3. When narration imitates description: Literal and
ideological mise en abyme / 83
Appendix 87
V. Description and modes of representation in Cornelio Penna's
A Menina Morta / 91
1. Semantic polarities and descriptive 'modalizations' / 96
2. Descriptive narrations / 109
3. The 'menina' as a filled ellipsis / 111
VI. The impossible 'mimesis': Description and metadescription
in Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra / 115
1. Eight variations on a landscape / 119
2. Descriptive/narrative versus dialogical 'mimetic'
representations / 135
3. Impossible replications and sliding referents / 138
Conclusion / 142
1. Stylistic, discursive, and functional levels / 142
2. Foregrounded versus backgrounded descriptions:
A diachronical overview / 145
3. Foregrounded description and the other arts / 148
Notes / 151
Bibliography / 167
Index / 178
Foreword
The development of literary theory in the second half of our century is
marked by the fact that numerous critics and theorists in the West have
discovered critical movements promoted by Eastern and Central Euro-
pean scholars of literature. At the same time, while such theorists as
Vladimir Propp, Victor Shklovsky, Juryi Tynianov, Roman Jakobson,
and Jan Mukafovsky have considerably influenced literary theory in the
West, Western critics and theoreticians have inspired new develop-
ments in the East. By the same token, the scope of literary theory has
expanded to such a degree that, nowadays, any specific literary phe-
nomenon can be scrutinized from various, albeit concurrent points of
view. The cognitive process of analysing forms of literary theory has
given rise to a number of critical, sophisticated idioms. Measuring their
capacity to understand and explain literary forms involves confronting
a concrete text with a given idiom. One may assume that the more the
idiom discovers and unveils in the text, the more it acquires the status of
an objectively valid critical tool. The above-mentioned interactive coop-
eration of Western and Eastern scholars has also yielded various syn-
cretic critical idioms. Their lexicon is not only structurally determined
but it also borrows from philosophical, sociological, semiotic, and lin-
guistic domains.
The book that the reader has in hand can also be considered a product
of this interactive process resulting in the assimilation and enrichment
of critical categories that have travelled from Eastern or Central Europe
to the West. The notion of 'foregrounding' that governs Jose Manuel
Lopes' critical project and analysis is precisely such a category. Aktual-
isace, the Czech name for 'foregrounding', is somewhat similar to the
famous ostranienie ('estrangement/ or in French singularisation) of the
viii Foreword
Russian formalists. It has been coined and discussed by the influential
Czech aestheticians Bohuslav Havranek and Jan Mukarovsky, both
prominent representatives of the Czech structuralist movement. 'Fore-
grounding', says Mukafovsky, 'is the opposite of automatization, that is,
it is the deautomatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the
less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more
completely conscious does it become.'
Based on analyses of five novels from the French, Spanish, Brazilian,
and Portuguese traditions, this book deals with the problem of descrip-
tion from the new perspective of its specifically narrative function. The
author enlarges and redefines the idea of foregrounding as an aesthetic
signal and as a representation of the literary text's referential dimension
that is discursively transformed. He grounds his critical scrutiny on the
assumption that, while using everyday language, any literary discourse
significantly transforms it inasmuch as it must be functional, and
thereby creates new specific values in terms of structures and effects.
Most remarkable is the author's demonstration that the notion of fore-
grounding, when precisely applied to his approach to the five chosen
texts, provides us with a deeper knowledge of the novelistic form. In
light of the evolutionary perspective of the novel, one has to admit that
description is by no means an ornamental structure. On the contrary, as
Lopes successfully points out, it is a functional and strategically impor-
tant element of the novel's specific idiom. One measures its functional
dimension by establishing its narrative finality, hence such paradoxical,
apparently oxymoronic expressions as 'descriptive narrations' or 'narra-
tive descriptions.'
The book's manifold purpose and accomplishment may be defined in
the following terms: it reorganizes and rethinks the critical material per-
tinent to description as a problem of literary technique and theory; it
also reassesses the semiotic function of description as a crucial category
in various textual modes and genres of prose fiction.
On the basis of the chosen material, the critic shows how the process
of the 'foregrounding description' occurs, and the means by which it
acquires specific aesthetic, semiotic, and textual qualities. The author
finally points out how the very diversity of descriptive modalities in the
five novels chosen gives rise to different specific roles for description. He
shows how this diversity is an important element of the narrative, dis-
cursive, and mimetic economy of the novel.
Thus summarized, the purpose of J.M. Lopes' critical enterprise gives
only an approximate idea of the book's richness and relevance. In fact,
Foreword ix
what seems to be the most valuable characteristic of this ambitious work
is its overall balance between the theoretical, critical, and comparative
approaches. This even balance allows him to mediate between the new
understanding of description that he proposes, and the historical and
aesthetic dynamics of the modern novel (understood from both diachro-
nic and synchronic perspectives). All in all, and mutatis mutandis, Lopes'
ambition may be equated with Erich Auerbach's finely accomplished
undertaking in Mimesis: to describe 'represented reality7 in the principal
literatures of the West. The author succeeds in demonstrating how the
changing functions of description reflect on the novel's development.
The novel, that is, evolves from the rhetorical descriptive topos to a vari-
ety of forms that magnify the specific functionality of description. In this
sense, his analyses of Zola's line Page A'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire,
Perez Galdos' La de Bringas, Cornelio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Car-
los de Oliveira's Finisterra are quite paradigmatic. The close readings of
these novels compose what he calls a 'complex text type.' The generat-
ing principles of the modern novel are therefore, according to the critic,
its 'very stylistic and ideological structures.' By emphasizing 'three main
levels of inquiry: stylistic, discursive, and functional/ he endows his
critical and cognitive objects with a relevant analytical perspective.
What sheds a new and revealing light on the problem of description is
the relationships that the critic establishes between the descriptive seg-
ments and mise en abyme, a device that pervades such novels as line Page
d'amour and La de Bringas. The distinction between 'literal' and 'ideologi-
cal' mise en abyme is a productive one, which logically arises out of the
analysed novels' structures. The critic's analyses corroborate the useful-
ness of his categories and, above all, that of foregrounding. This allows
him to account for aesthetic features of the modern novel, such as those
exemplified by the book's textual corpus. On the basis of a comparative
analysis of a literary corpus belonging to four distinctive literary areas, it
becomes evident that the language of the novel has been prominently
determined by its organic and necessary structures. These structures
may be described and understood as specific axiological and aesthetic
postulates of novelistic language. They are: realism practised as a com-
plex and multivalent superimposition of views and textual and metatex-
tual structures; mise en abyme as a sign of aesthetic autonomy; the
independent and creative position of the narrator; and the coalescence of
narrative and poetic structures. Lopes' study captures the complexity of
novelistic discourse by systematically revealing the dynamic and vari-
able relationship between narration and description.
