A Poetics of Illocution

For the most part, our performance is perfect. The independent individual who has already learned the lessons of all those self-help books and stopped caring what other people think of him. He who wanders the world wondering only which mountains to scale and never what his two-exes-ago-ex-girlfriend really meant that one time when she said that one thing at that one ARCO. But every once in a while, we are graced with an artist or a theorist or friend who admits: that is not it at all. Jürgen Habermas gives us this honesty through his theory of communicative action and in James Joyce’s short story, “the Dead,” Gabriel shows us how what we say to each other is only ever about each other. Habermas’ theory of the illocutionary effect of language regrounded liberalism on a new philosophical foundation, but it is in the dialogue of literature that we can experience the depth of what lifeworlds our words build between us. And what a world is found in the final scene of “the Dead,” where the dialogue with illocutionary aims reveals the depth of the relationship between Gabriel and Gretta. Nothing means only what is said and no one is to each other only what they imagine themselves to be.

That all sounds rather lofty, and maybe Habermas was never so flowery as that, but he surely sought some respite from the dark place in which social theory found itself in the mid-20th century. Baudrillard said we were selling ourselves as signs, Schmitt argued liberalism was a desperate survival strategy, and in the aftermath of World War II, everyone was afraid of the evil in each other. ¹ Many took Enlightenment Reason to blame, but Habermas didn’t think that the “instrumentalizing reification of human beings” was the only conclusion. ² He took our hurling words and used them to prove that we can be more to each other than a means to an end. Indeed, we always are, in every utterance. His theory of communicative action argues that our conversation exists not to extract a task but simply to be understood. 

But before we can take on the linguistic definitions and literary implications of communicative action, we must hearken back to earlier theory which establishes the division of language taken up by Habermas. Namely, JL Austin’s seminal How To Do Things With Words, which is itself a lecture series, doing a great many things with words. ³ Austin takes “utterances” as his object (as opposed to sociolinguistic’s object of sentences) and distinguishes three modes enacted in each utterance: the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary. ⁴ The locutionary is the “semantic or literal significance.” ⁵ Let us take the first line of dialogue in “the Dead” as an example. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, says to Gabriel, “O, Mr. Conroy,…Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming.” ⁶ The locutionary meaning is in the correlation of ideas with those shapes on the pages, or the sounds out of Lily’s mouth. We see “tho” and “ug” and “ht yo” and “u we” and “re neve” and “r coming” and say, those two women formed a thought with their brain and that thought was that Mr. Conroy was never going to come to the party. It’s a miraculous motion on its own, but this paper will (as all of always do) take the locutionary for granted and focus on the next two effects. The perlocutionary meaning refers to the results of the utterance in the hearer, whatever their reaction and any action they may take as response. In “the Dead,” one of the perlocutionary meanings is that Gabriel voices a reply (“I’ll engage they did.”) ⁷ It also encompasses anything internal, like the fact that Gabriel has acquired a piece of knowledge. As Austin writes, “The consequential effects of the perlocutions are really consequences.” ⁸ But what we really want to understand is the illocution, found in between the two: requiring the locution but preceding the perlocution. The illocution is the “intention” of the speaker, in which the speaker is positioning themselves in relation to the hearer. It is a statement about the people in the conversation, not the conversation. So when Lily says “Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming,” she is intending to give a message. She puts herself in the role of messenger, disappearing herself from the conversation. But more than that, the illocution gives a contextual intention. She isn’t necessarily a disappearing messenger always but she is, now, with Gabriel. Her language indicates the irrelevancy with which she sees herself in his eyes. Ah, just these few moments lingering on the illocutionary has unlocked the scene for us. Now, when Gabriel asks after her schooling and inquires into her love life and retreats into himself feeling “he had made a mistake” and quickly gives her a silver coin– we can feel the subtler intimacies of the scene. ⁹ The small way he wants to tell her, you aren’t a disappearing messenger to me. I want you to be a person. I remember you when you were “a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll.” ¹⁰

Such literary bounty will only abound when we add Habermas’ insights. Now, we are equipped to understand his definition of communicative action as that action pursued for illocutionary aims “without reservation.” ¹¹ In his theory, perlocutionary aims correlate with instrumental action– when we take language as a way to use people, people only are objects to be used. But illocutionary aims correlate with communicative action. An illocutionary aim takes language as a way to talk with no greater purpose than to be understood and wanting nothing from another except that they understand. Perlocutionary reactions are only a byproduct. William Outhwaite, a scholar of Habermas, writes, “communicative action is the ‘basic form of action’ and that instrumental … forms of action are derived from, and parasitic upon, action oriented toward reaching understanding.” ¹² Habermas’ idea of that parasitism is concrete. He concludes that perlocution meaning is dependent upon illocutionary meaning’s “reason-based consensus arising from the offer and acceptance of validity claims, but not vice versa.” ¹³ He writes that linguistic communication presupposes four validity conditions; when we are seeking to be understood in the illocutionary mode it is because we are able to rely upon these principles. That what we say is (1) comprehensible, (2) true, (3) right, and (4) a sincere expression of the speaker’s feelings. Taken together, these aspects create a Lebenswelt, a life world, “that ‘always-under-construction’ network of countless meanings and values within which we live out our everyday lives, the never-exhausted always-replenished horizon of intelligibility within which we move and speak and breathe.” ¹⁴ And our speech is an invitation into that lifeworld– to believe, for a moment, in the same true thing and the same notions of rightness and to take everyone for what they seem to mean and relish in our essential comprehensibility to each other. As Outhwaite writes that, because of this bond, we can always ask a speaker “‘What do you mean?’, ‘Is what you say true?’, ‘Are you entitled to say that?’ and ‘Do you really mean it?’” ¹⁵ and expect an accessible response. The bond doesn’t have to last longer than the time it takes to utter an utterance, but Habermas holds this moment of true togetherness as the lynchpin of language.

So it may seem trivial to say language is for communication but that hides the true radicality of his theory which asks us to reorient ourselves to the way we speak and reorient ourselves to each other each time we speak. Through focus on its very substance, language transcends its meaning and becomes something wild–  inarticulable and ever present. It is who we are to each other; it is everything between us; it is the subtlest subtext and as yet, always as simple as speech. All this delight and difficulty and beauty and baggage if we can just shift our focus to the illocution. 

Habermas forged his theory of communicative rationality in an effort to reground social theory outside of a metaphysical context. ¹⁶ He was frustrated with what he termed the ‘philosophy of the subject’ which he argued ‘obscures and even blocks the way to grasping the intrinsic intersubjective and dialogical character of communicative action.’” ¹⁷ But one would be forgiven for thinking that quote describes the writing of Habermas himself should he be so unfortunate as to parse through the man’s own words. But there are easier ways to feel the vastness and simple elegance of the illocutionary– literature fulfills that function. 

Although there has been some historical push back as to whether theory of speech acts can apply to the written word. Michael Hancher of the University of Minnesota warns that, “the information contained in the context of a live utterance goes a long way towards disambiguating” between illocutionary, syntactical, and semantic ambiguity, “but, because the context available for understanding a written utterance is narrower, ambiguities can persist.” ¹⁸ Mary Louise Pratt, famous for coining the phrase “contact zone,” takes it a step further and argues that sentences in a literary work “lack the illocutionary forces that would normally attach to them. Its illocutionary force is mimetic.” ¹⁹ She writes, “the suspension of normal illocutionary forces tends to shift a reader’s attention to the locutionary acts themselves and to their perlocutionary effects.” ²⁰ But both of these arguments ignore the lifeworld which is created by the immersion of literature itself. Just as Habermas argues that, through conversation, a hearer and a speaker join together under the temporary acceptance of various terms– the exact same is true of literature. We cannot begin a book with any doubt as to whether we trust the author on any of Habermas’ four validity claims. When we are in the act of reading, we suspend our own selves and believe that the writing is (1) comprehensible, (2) true, (3) right, and (4) a sincere expression of the speaker’s feelings. If we felt so arrogant as to ask the author, “Do you really mean it?” we would be failing as readers and rejecting outright any good that may come of a text. And besides, neither Austin nor Habermas ever thought that the power of the illocution could be felt in paragraphs of prose, but this does not mean we should reject its effect through dialogue– even when fictional. 

In some places Pratt’s argument seems to disregard the possibility of an illocutionary level on the basis of the text’s predestiny and writer’s unnatural power over the effects of the dialogue. But even if the perlocutionary and the illocutionary actions are contrived by an author, they don’t feel that way to the characters. And we interact with dialogue, not as a reader, but as a silent observer in the setting of the story, through the perspective of the text. When I read that Miss Ivors says to Gabriel, “​​Well, I’m ashamed of you…to say you’d write for a paper like that. I didn’t think you were a West Briton,” my reaction is not: what an interesting choice for Joyce to have made up Miss Ivors line that way; I wonder how he will decide Gabriel should respond. ²¹ No, I am perplexed. Because “A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face.” ²² I am only fulfilling my duty as a reader to be in the lifeworld of the story. And it isn’t without cost– that much is clear by the time that I “suppose you were in love with this Michael Fuery, Gretta.” ²³ But it isn’t without feeling, which would be worse. In fact, when we are reading, the experience is more illocution than any other motion. Because readers don’t have agency over the locutionary composition of the text or the perlocutionary response of the characters. But the illocutionary aim of the dialogue, so often unsaid by the writer, gets to exist between ourselves and the character in whose hands we’ve been placed. When Miss Ivors accused me of being a West Briton, I wasn’t only perplexed. That physical look was just the perlocutionary effect. I am hurt by the tone of her voice. I am shocked by her forthrightness, here, while she is dancing in my arms. Because all of these pieces show me what she thinks of me, what she thinks of herself in relation to me, what her intention was in her words. It’s something precious and painful, something only Gabriel and I know. It’s illumination of the illocution. 

Habermas argued that communicative rationality is irreducible to instrumental rationality in his irreducibility thesis; in the same vein, this illocutionary perspective will attempt analysis that doesn’t narrow the illocutionary effect of the dialogue to any singular sentiment. While Habermas worried that the world at large functioned through too much instrumental rationality, that is not the setting of the “the Dead.” This is a story that takes place largely, in a home. The final scene in a hotel bedroom between two people who love each other very much. And it is perhaps when we are in love that the illocutionary mode is most obvious, when we are the most conscious of the maintenance of the us, and where speech is least subtle in meaning nothing except how close I want you to be to me. 

This surfaces clearest in the final dialogue between Gabriel and Gretta, as she recalls a dialogue of her past. They talk to each other, through each other, past each other. But beyond the surface story, they are speaking about each other. We can utilize Habermas’ theory of the illocutionary aspect of dialogue to get a clearer look at what it is they’re saying and why it devastates us so. The couple has just left the party; as they went to go, Gretta stood on the top of a staircase listening to a song played in the distance. As Gabriel looked at her, “the blood went bounding along his veins; and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous.” ²⁴ They have just arrived back at their hotel room. The illocution calls us into a shared sense of the world, and in this scene, Gretta’s dialogue is no exception. But it won’t feel so inviting. Our task as readers of the illocution is to observe how she asks him– with agreed comprehensibility, truth, rightness, and sincerity– to join her in this new lifeworld. 

Gabriel is an excellent character to follow through a study of communicative action because he is gushing over in illocutionary self-consciousness. The whole of the story can be told in moments of his anxiety over the illocutionary implications of his dialogue with others. The first moment of the story contained his aforementioned anxious exchange with Lily, then he enters into the party and spends much of it worrying over how his speech at dinner will position himself in relation to the audience. Just read the communicative richness: