Book Review: Narrating Knowledge in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction

Narrating Knowledge is a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. It is an important contribution to stylistics in two respects. First, it exemplifies what can be achieved in a stylistic investigation of O’Connor’s fiction. Second, it demonstrates some of the methodologies of corpus linguistics in stylistics. This book concentrates on three linguistic patterns (clausal presupposition, not negation, and verbal complements) that are spread throughout O’Connor’s stories and novels, and the quantitative examination of these grammatical patterns serves the qualitative investigation of the central thematic concern in O’Connor’s fiction, i.e. the limitations of human knowledge. Chapter 1 outlines the purpose and organization of the book, namely to investigate the concern with the fallibility of human knowledge in O’Connor’s fiction, and to explain the comparative corpus methodology used in the book. To make a valid comparison with O’Connor’s work, Hardy uses the K subcorpus of the one-million-word Brown Corpus, which contains a sample of American ‘general fiction’ published in the early 1960s (which is roughly contemporaneous with O’Connor’s fiction) and totals 58,120 words in 29 excerpts, each of around 2000 words. Hardy compares the Brown general fiction corpus to his O’Connor fiction corpus (i.e. two novels and three short story collections) in order to demonstrate the statistical significance of the stylistic patterns of (a) negation and (b) verbal complements in O’Connor’s texts. As Hardy shows in the following chapters, the statistical significance of these patterns supports his argument that O’Connor’s concerns with human knowledge permeate her stories at a remarkable level of detail. Chapter 2 introduces and summarises Labov’s (1972) influential account of the structure of oral narrative and shows how the analysis of O’Connor’s narrative makes reference to that structure. Hardy explains the theoretical background to his exploration of the three syntactic and semantic-pragmatic patterns in the book: (a) dependent clauses and presupposition in Chapter 3, (b) not negation and supposition in Chapters 4 and 5, and (c) nonfinite complements and implication in Chapters 6 and 7. Hardy’s analysis shows that each of the three (background) constructions has its own complex grammatical and epistemic qualities and that each is subtly involved in the production and manipulation of human knowledge in O’Connor’s fiction. O’Connor frequently manipulates narrative main clauses (foreground) and supporting subordinate clauses and phrases (background) to reflect the linguistic sense of foregrounding and backgrounding in knowledge. Through a manipulation of the quality of knowledge in each background construction, Hardy argues, O’Connor is able both to critique the fallibility of human reason and influence the reader’s response to her characters. Chapter 3 examines dependent clauses and presupposition in O’Connor’s fiction. Presuppositions are background assumptions which are tied to linguistic expressions, i.e. presupposition triggers (cf. Levinson, 1983). Hardy restricts his investigation to those presupposition triggers whose sentences include the presupposition either in phrasal or clausal form, especially the latter. He identifies four basic types of marked clausal presuppositions in O’Connor’s narrative according to the varying quality of the focal character’s presupposed knowledge; namely, the character (1) ‘knows’ incorrectly, (2) does not know, (3) knows in a way in which the narrator and/or the narratee cannot share, or (4) knows correctly. Such a typology is based not only on the distribution of knowledge