Flouting figures: Uncooperative narration in the fiction of Eliza Haywood

Abstract

Eliza Haywood’s narrators often display what could be termed ‘uncooperative narration’ in that they defy the smooth course that fictional narration is supposed to take, and claim to be unable to narrate strongly emotional states (in Love in Excess, 2000; first published 1719) or precipitate readers’ reactions to future events (in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1998; first published 1751). Haywood’s strategies of uncooperative narration are based on rhetorical figures which flout the cooperative principle underlying human communication according to Grice: the denial of narration, adynaton, flouts the maxim of quantity; the time-based playing with readers’ meaning-making, prolepsis, flouts the maxim of manner. This article will develop an account of uncooperative narration on the basis of Gricean pragmatics (Grice, 1989) and Tomasello’s work on communication and cooperation in human evolution (Tomasello, 2008), which extends the traditional narratological focus on unreliable narration. Uncooperative narration challenges readers to find the communicative purpose behind flouting figures like adynaton and prolepsis, contributes to the characterisation of the narrator and, in Eliza Haywood’s fiction, often holds up a mirror to readers themselves.