each authentic orchestration, Magona exposes the heartache of the black South African woman striving to reach higher […]” (2).26 With its emphasis on the manner of orchestration, this is more than a simple equation of fiction and society. Magona herself has explained that the fate of ←17 | 18→the woman on whom her major character in the novel is based is “the story of the people, the majority of us that I call perfect products of apartheid” (Craps 54); her novel’s addressee is a White American.27 As for Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus, in Tasnim Qutait’s analysis, it dramatizes “the inadequacies of political vision in the Arab world today,” and explores “the potency of the emotional rhetoric of peoplehood in the context of the ongoing crises in the Arab world” (82) – a further form of answer to what would otherwise be a reductive query about the range and scope of relevance attributable to the fictional works. We could add that, as analyzed by Hélène Machinal and CEIMA, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go can “be envisaged as denouncing a society drifting towards an impossibility to be anchored in the real anymore […] what emanates from our societies is mainly an artificial and illusive reality” (§ 24). The question of peripheral or representative conditions can easily evaporate.
We have referred, in our first approach, to authors’ contribution to a “remembering of erased and forgotten experiences and voices.” When authors delineate or expose honor- and face-induced violence, the question arises whether they are speaking about, or speaking for, those who are less privileged: hardly less than the latter preposition, the former is a mediated act, however legitimate we may understand the enterprise to be, and amounts to shaping others’ subject positions. When Ayfer Tunç for instance speaks about Western publishers’ expectation of stories “about lives ruined” (“Literature”), there is not much patent emphasis on speaking “for.” Because in our time the struggling masses “know perfectly well, without illusion,” Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault can diagnose “the indignity of speaking for others” (see Foucault, “Intellectuals” 207, 209). Yet we might take heed of the lingering effects of Gayatri Spivak’s suspicion that “[t];the social sciences fear the radical impulse in literary studies” (19). Literature subjects a character/person to being imagined “without guarantees, by and in another culture” in a Teleopoiesis of both distanciation and proximity; literary training is “the irony of the social sciences, if irony is understood as permanent parabasis” addressing its audience (Spivak 52).
←18 | 19→
This somewhat difficult statement becomes more transparent, surely, when we understand it as picking up the question “Who is speaking to whom” which we have touched on, in our second approach, and which has both conceptual and empirical relevance. The preposition has further implications than “about” and “for.” The narratives we are studying create fictive addressee positions with indexical orientation signs, according to Wolf Schmid. These comprise socio-ethical codes or norms which the addressee is expected to share. This does not mean that the narrator’s addressee is the same as the author’s implied or ideal reader. Moreover, the target readership is circumscribed in each case by the language in question, to which translations add a further dimension. In all cases, the mode of addressing the audience or its narratee positions is vital for the “radical impulse” which literary analysis may at least sometimes discern in the fictional works, as their society’s imaginary. Wherever we have found statements concerning the intended or empirical reading community, we have included the information mainly in footnotes.
For works representing conditions in honor-based communities or circumscribed by face norms, an empowering or transformative impulse would be relevant especially for empirical readers within such communities, including Eco’s concrete subjects of acts of textual cooperation (90) – though these may possibly not be the majority reading group. We are not suggesting, however, that members of families directly affected by honor-based violence are likely to be among the readers. At the same time we remain aware that, for interpretive tasks, it is not easy to identify difference regarding regional in relation to transnational or even global audiences, and that positing imaginary social unities for reading formations can be fallacious (see for instance Benwell et al.). The people who “look for the measure of reality in your work” come from different cultural environments. As they seek to exercise individual and collective agency, readerships form communities with porous boundaries, while they may become the targets of an alterity industry (Huggan 423–24). Whether consciously or less consciously, values as well as socio-ethical concepts are (re-)defined while interacting with a literary text in various ways, both on the writer’s and the reader’s side across cultural boundaries.28 Psychological research ←19 | 20→confirms that readers show effects of stories on their real-world beliefs and conduct.29
A rethinking of what seem to be ingrained sets of values may not be wholly unrealistic,30 if reading groups can engage in dialogue and seek to enable a presence with other change agents in communities with restrictive honor or face norms, gaining a foothold to effect a carefully calculated degree of cognitive dissonance without arousing “overwhelming anxiety” about attacks on a received way of life (Churchill 265). Ideally, our book might encourage the coming about of such engaged groups. Elif Shafak, who does not regard a fictional work as a “personal item,” argues in the same vein, seeing that female readers (for instance) “share it with their friends, their relatives, people around them, their boyfriends… It is thanks to this sharing by word-of-mouth that books survive even in countries where democracy is in danger” (Shafak, “Ten”). Shafak’s hope is that her novel Honour will connect readers and “transcend cultural ghettoes” (“Q&A”). A related perception is that of Sema Kaygusuz: “language does not belong merely to those of the same race, but to communities. […] In fact, all of the world’s writers are actually stateless” (“Literature”). Fiction does crucial sociopolitical work in building bridges, while negotiating and shaping differentiated attitudes toward the realities we confront, provoking the question “How should we live?” (see also Mbembe 13).
Between dignity and honor: A troubled heritage
Since we are dealing with values and socio-ethical concepts, literature can help us understand crucial variants of honor: how such a value is not only internal to an individual but also external, so that self-confidence in both honor cultures and face cultures very much depends on the approval of others, of a social collective. This perception is quite different from dignity cultures, which nominally ←20 | 21→uphold a conviction that “each individual at birth possesses an intrinsic value at least theoretically equal to that of every other person” (Ayers 19). At the same time, there is no denying that presumably all cultures are characterized by the “social self” as analyzed by Charles Cooley: in this classic concept there is no sense of “I” without a “correlative sense of you, or he, or they,” submerging the self to some degree in collective perception (182). Indeed, the whole notion of intrinsic value is not without controversy, and would need careful consideration in its own right, beyond what we can actually offer in our context (see Zimmerman and Bradley sections 3 and 4). In most Western European and North American regions, nonetheless, respective value systems profess notions of dignity rather than of honor or face (see also Welsh x), though there are some notable exceptions. Partly, this focus can be explained by the “modernization hypothesis”: “as societies become wealthier, more educated, and capitalistic, they become more individualistic and analytical” (Talhelm et al. 603). Yet there are significant exceptions; at the same time, dignity cultures lack built-in safeguards against the threat of rampant individualism.31
