The maxim and its reader in Proust. Considerations from the point of view of aesthetics of reception, rethoric and psychocritics

Abstract

Some hypotheses in literary theory regarding the relationship between narrator and narratee can be interrogated in the light of the role of sententious discourse in the novel, a discourse that endeavors to include and inscribe the reader's perspective into utterances. This paper reviews one of the main principles of Rezeptionsästhetik: the idea that is possible to establish an equation of equivalence between fictional of fictionalized readers in the text (either as implied, implicated or model readers) and empirical of extra-diegetic readers. In addition to this, and following argumentative rhetoric and the notion of language as action, we propose to study maxims in the novel not so much as utterances of short forms, but as enunciations and strategies. The fact that, as Aristotle suggested, the main objective of narrative is verosimilitude means that the narrative pact is only a pact of willing suspension of disbelief. Therefore, maxims can be used by narrators to introduce arguments or proofs that allow them to justify themselves in front of the reader so as to force him of her to subscribe the pact. Along this line of argumentation, but now according to psycocriticism, we conclude that sententious texts within the novel work not so much as a sort of secondary discourse but as the discourse for secondary messages: no narrator is beyond suspicion, particularly when he or she talks us in the first person. Prout's Recherche has not been chosen as an example for testing of applying what literary theorists have already hypothesized regarding this issue, but rather as a specifïc case in point that precisely questions many of such hypotheses.