Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose
The notable breadth of the titular concept might scare people off it, thought it might also make it attractive. I include myself among those who consider referencing the concept of presupposition to be useful as part of studying narrative prose. I therefore suggest that we not only “exhaust” the concept, as Kuźma put it, but instead expound it, defining its meaning so as to avoid replicating other terms that are deeply rooted in research, such as intertextuality or styles of reception and the history of reception. Our guide for part of the way along this meandering path will be the linguist Oswald Ducrot. He worked on the assumption that a presupposition is a statement that cannot be contradicted. That much is obvious. But what is the status of presupposition: is it part of the conditions of use or does it form part of the content? Ducrot’s answer is clear: presuppositions are
the means by which the speaker creates a world between themselves and their listener, a necessary precondition for dialogue to take place. Relative to the extent that the listener accepts the initiated dialogue, they are compelled to accept or co-create the world of presupposed information that the speaker has linked to the act of mutual communication and understanding. In order to create a general theory of language, it seems essential to state that presupposed information is not merely a stylistic phenomenon related to the choice of a particular expression in a particular situation. Some aspects of presupposed information belong to the very structure of language: they are independent of any external context and instead create a kind of internal context inherent to the utterance itself. We call such assumed information presuppositions.[14]
Ducrot’s notion of propositions sounds convincing. The internal mechanisms of language play an important role when expressing simple communications. When we hear “Thanks to market analysis, we come to the conclusion that inflation is rising more quickly than the government is communicating through the media,” we can contradict the assumptions or question the accuracy of the analysis: but the growth in inflation, masked by the government, becomes an irrefutable fact.
What, however, happens to presuppositions when we apply them to literature? I would suggest focusing on realist prose as I doubt very much that the central concept discussed here would be relevant when seeking insight into the semantic mechanisms of poetry, although Kuźma did consider this possible. In the case of realist novels, we speak of a pact between the author/narrator and readers. Indeed, authors employ fiction but they claim to be creating truthful narratives that reference reality, providing a true picture of how things are. In a first-person novel or a novel with a personal narrator, who abandons the role of storyteller and instead is embodied in a protagonist who speaks directly to readers, this occurs openly, on the surface of the text. While this might indeed bring the story into disorder, it is nevertheless acceptable, suggesting as it does a voice of truth and authority. The form of the high, or mature, realist novel does not require such obvious confirmations of truthfulness. It is a generally accepted convention. What, then, are novel-based presuppositions? They are linked to the ‘automatic’ acceptance of the abovementioned pacts and conventions that are undermined only exceptionally in metafiction and in texts working towards stripping away the illusions of fiction. Above all, though, they are part of the process of creating a broad social setting, the presuppositional background. I would suggest that we abandon the opposition suggested by Ducrot when asking whether presuppositions are conditions of use or elements of content. When applied in the context of novels, they are both.
