Blogroll: Narrative Implicatures and the Chewbacca Defense

[alixtii]

As remarked before in this journal, the underlying process of the game of "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" provides some interesting fundamental similarities and dissimilarities to other processes of inquiry: to a detective investigating a mystery, to a scientist developing a theory, to the work of logicians, linguists, and lawyers. So it should be in no way surprising that while going through my favorite blogs, I came across several matters of interest which speak to the philosophical issues at hand in the way we go about our canon-formation (speaking of canon here as a set of "facts" about a fictional and/or actual world derived from a text, rather than as the text itself).

First off, there is this insight from languagelog:

Where things started to go wrong here is where [the comic strip character] Jade refers to "two black guys". We'll take her word for it that the guys in question were black, but why did she mention that? Was it somehow relevant? Important?

Not everything that's true is relevant (or important) in context. She could have mentioned their ages, their heights, the country they grew up in, their sexuality, their marital status, the city they live in, their relationship to her, or a zillion other things. (Even mentioning their sex could be problematic; the combination of black and male might raise a flag in our society.) [. . .] In each case, her audience would be sent on a hunt to discover what these properties might have to do with Jade and her Uno game.

The large principle at work here is part of H.P. Grice's account of "conversational implicature": the principle of RELEVANCE, that what you say should be relevant to the context, which means that if people are assuming you're behaving cooperatively, they'll assume that what you say is indeed relevant to the context. Which means they'll read more into what you said than what you literally said; what you said will "implicate" more than its face value.

So the fact that Jade's fellow Uno-players were black (and also male) looms large. Maybe she's telling us that she's cool, and hangs out comfortably with black men. Whatever. There's a message there, even if she didn't intend it.

Before we move on to the real matter here, let's take a moment to revel in the swipe at authorial intent in the last sentence. Yes, even positivistic linguists who deride Derrida, disavow Sapir-Whorf, and would probably run fleeing from Barthes and Foucault endorse the Death of the Author!

Okay, on to the real issue--that of conversational implicature, the notion that more is going on in a speech act than its literal meaning would imply. Attentive long-term readers of this journal might recognize the similarity of this linguistic notion to one I made about the process of reading TV canons in my meta post "Reality's Subtext":

In Real LifeTM, if a brother accidentally enters a bathroom while his sister is getting out of the shower, that doesn't mean he wants to jump her bones (or vice versa). It just means they live in a house together and she forgot to lock the door and he neglected to knock or she didn't hear him and so he, completely by accident, saw his sister naked. That's what "really happened" (we say). And it happens. No big deal, although the sister probably isn't going to be very happy.

[. . .]

And then, that evening, in the course of doing his wash, that brother takes his sisters' bras and panties out of the dryer and he puts them in a laundry basket. Hell, maybe he even folds them. This is Standard Operating Procedure in pretty much every family across the world that has its own washer and dryer.

But if I'm watching a forty-minute show and thirty seconds of it is devoted to each of these events, then yeah, it Means Something. Because things don't "just happen" when read as part of a literary text. Because we--if you let me channel Jubal Early for a moment--imbue them with meaning. We give it a purpose. We construct an author-function, and we decode a message, and yes, the decoder ring is jury-rigged so the message will be sex, sex, sex.

In addition to conversational implicature as a linguistic phenomenon, then, there is also narrative implicature as a literary phenomenon. If there are conversational maxims, then there are also narrative and cinematic maxims.

What is at stake in Jade's description of her UNO game isn't the ding-an-sich--we are perfectly willing to believe that she played UNO with two black men, we simply wonder why she felt it was important to mention their race and gender. In my 'cest example, we're agreed what is going on between the brother and the sister, but we wander what the semiotic message[1] the creator conveys (whether intentionally or not) by including it in the episode.

But is an episode a semiotic message from a creator to their audience, or a objective presentation of facts about a fictional world? Can it be both at the same time? One of the problems is that we, as fen, aren't quite sure how we should evaluate implicature. If we really want to know what is canon, what is solid fact about a fictional world, it seems we should ignore implicature altogether. The foreboding music that plays whenever a character appears on screen isn't "really" there and doesn't add to what we can say is true about the character in canon.

The problem is that we, like real-life juries, often are influenced by implicature. Remember that Reading Rainbow episode where they showed the alligator walking to three different types of music, and how different each one seemed? Canonically, they are the same sets of information, but the implicature is completely different. After all, if Jade's comments were part of a legal proceeding, and it was decided that the mention of the Uno players' races truly were irrelevant, that information might be stricken from the record.

But often texts only tell meaningful stories if we let implicature do its work. The semiotic messages the creator sends the audience are what allows a story to cohere and makes sense. We know, by convention, that a fade to black while characters are undressing means they are going to have sex. When a character shows up pregnant six episodes later, we're supposed to know who the father is, or at least who he could be.

Which is not to say the creator can't fake us out at any time. But some conventions are so established that we might end up feeling cheated. In general, we tend to trust that not only is what we see on screen canon for the fictional universe, but that the author is playing fair, that the implicatures also hold true for the fictional universe--the literary equivalent of the cooperative principle.

Anyway, linguistics isn't the only field which parallels these issues. Take this post by Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy, a libertarian law blog, on "The Chewbacca Defense"--an attempt to fanwank some of the seeming inconsistencies between the original Star Wars trilogy and, ahem, those other three movies. (I recommend reading the post and its comments; there's some quality geeking out going on there.) Somin writes:

In the end, however, the big problem with elaborate, after-the-fact explanations of the plot holes in Star Wars is that there is little if any hint of these explanations in the movies themselves. [. . .] To my mind, a plot hole that can only be explained away through an elaborate post hoc rationalization that is not mentioned in the film itself, is probably a hole that can't be explained at all.

Again, we have the suggestion that in constructing the canon for a fictional world, we have to pay attention to not only the logical facts which hold true in regard to the Star Wars universe, but also to the semiotic message from the creator to the audience in terms of what they chose to present onscreen (and what they chose not to).

(Note that while I'm talking a lot about messages from creators to their audiences, I'm not committing the intentional fallacy. It's not an author whose meaning we need to figure out, but an author-function's, just as Jade presents a message about the black men with whom she played UNO which she presumably did not intend.)

I don't believe there is a wrong way to respond to a text, so feel free to treat narrative implicature as you wish, either ignoring it or priveleging it as you please. But it'd be wise for all of us to be aware as we construct our personal canons how implicature functions, and that the reading which is most logically sensible in terms of objective facts might not be the one most readers might be walking away from a text with, if the semiotic message might be selling some other reading. Indeed, this is how most subtext works; the creator is winking at the audience and saying "sure, this doesn't mean they're gay/cesty/whatever, but wouldn't it be cool if . . . ?".

Somin closes with the familiar patronizing refrain:

I am impressed with the ingenuity of many of the commenters who have made valiant efforts to defend George Lucas' handiwork and reconcile the seeming inconsistencies. I wish that I could get law students to work this hard on analyzing case law:).

Analyzing Star Wars and case law really are more alike than they are different. Indeed, these are issues which pertain to any process of inquiry, because they involve the manner in which we interrogate texts--and there is nothing, after all, outside the text.

Notes.
1. Yes, "semiotic message" is incredibly redundant, as I don't know of any way to send a message without using symbols. Still, the fact that texts send messages about their fictional worlds to their audiences in ways other than simply presenting objective facts about said fictional world is so important to my argument here that it cannot be overstressed.