![[II.png|85x0]] ------ ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^6-1|[6.1.1] ]] _... analysis of the ==***representations of conviction***== in written form_...  ![[6-1-2.png|50x0]] ^6-1-1 $\qquad$ Discussions of the apparent certainty of written language must account for overt evocations of un/certainty in linguistic discourse. The Subjunctive is a grammatical mood that persists across number of global languages, fulfilling as it does the vital feature of denoting “a lack of commitment to a proposition’s truth value” in the words of Joseph Collentine and Yuly Asencion-Delaney; so to speak, to express all putative information that is not definitely nor not definitely not the case.[[Exotext#^foot-note|[6.1.1.1] ]] As sapient beings, humans have a capacity for abstract thought, to project into the future and, crucially, to acknowledge the contingency and indirect quality of information – and as such all verbal constructs occur on a continuous spectrum of modality or “real-ness” as represented by multiple distinct grammatical “moods” like the Indicative, Imperative, Interrogative, etc., broadly divided into “realis” moods that represent declared facts and “irrealis” moods that indicate different degrees of non-facticity – questions, wishes, orders, etc. Even within and between English dialects there occurs a wide variance of Subjunctive usage in different contexts; for example, Deshors and Gries’ 2020 study of the mandative Subjunctive (of the construct “_I demand it be so_,” e.g.) found greater preponderance of “_should_” constructs in US and Australian English over British dialects, while Horniou’s 2015 study across digital corpora concluded that while overall the Subjunctive may be declining historically, specific modes such as these are resurgent in certain milieux such as American English.[[Exotext#^foot-note|[6.1.1.2] ]] However, no study has evidently studied the occurrence of modality across historical genres of media. ^-6-1-1-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^6-1|[6.1.2] ]] _... ==***methods and approaches***==..._  ![[6-1-2.png|50x0]] ^6-1-2 $\qquad$ Digital Humanities has been up-and-coming as a discipline for some time and in a continuous state of disciplinary and technological refinement. William McCarty’s _Humanities Computing_ completed a broad survey of all ways that computational approaches might elucidate humanistic questions with respect to text’s interpretation and impact which had before and has since diversified considerably into the fields of stylometric authorship attribution studies (Juola, 2006), corpus linguistics (Firth, 1957; Sinclair, 1991), corpus stylistics (Mahlberg, 2013), natural language processing (Manning & Schütze, 2010), humanities computing (Hockey, 2004), cultural sociology (Underwood, 2017), empirical reader response theory (Hakemulder & van Peer, 2015) and neurocognitive and computational poetics (Jacobs, 2019; Schindler et al., 2017). However, the field to which this study will speak most pertinently is so-called “Computational Stylistics” as defined by Hermann et. Al (2021) as studying “the forms, social embedding, and the aesthetic potential of literary texts by means of computational and statistical methods […] that emphasize ‘hermeneutic’ processes, i.e. interpretative and subjective dimensions.”[[Exotext#^6-1-2-1|[6.1.2.1] ]] Chris Beausang’s “Brief History of Computational Literary Criticism” divides the history of the discipline into three epochs, marked first by broad collections of word frequency data, the “Delta” technique pioneered by J. F. Burrows’ 1987 computational study of Jane Austen that married inferential analysis with top-down guiding hypotheses, and the ongoing era in which machine learning (ML) techniques have begun to guide the collection of data in and of itself.[[Exotext#^6-1-2-2|[6.1.2.2] ]] In this tradition, this research attempts to mediate between “close" and "distant" reading” in analysing the contextual and countertextual implications of specific linguistic phenomena, moods and modality, using digital methods to “see” what is not evident in traditional reading.[[Exotext#^6-1-2-3|[6.1.2.3] ]] Franco Moretti’s work on genre provides a functional model in working outwards from granular features and inwards from an initial hypothesis to the “meso-level” patterns that form compelling associations, in my case between grammatical moods and the associated modes of historical discourse such as FID.[[Exotext#^6-1-2-4|[6.1.2.4] ]] As should be clear from recent research such as Matthew L. Jockers’ pioneering “sentiment analysis” within literary arcs, when first guided by a working hypothesis and guided by pertinent literary foci, quantitative data and Large Language Models (LLMs) can illustrate, inform and substantiate qualitative questions as to the scriptive effects of a given text or text(s), including evident certainty or uncertainty in large text bodies, or “_corpora_.”[[Exotext#^6-1-2-5|[6.1.2.5] ]] These LLM tools have yielded productive research with methods such as word-embedding and character- and topic-modelling that can unearth unseen and unanticipated correlations among these mid-level phenomena. ^-6-1-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^super-sect|[6.1.3] ]] _"==***I don’t know***==" is, after all, an indicative statement..._  ![[6-1-3.png|50x0]] ^6-1-3 $\qquad$ The evident limitations of this quantitative approach are perhaps best reiterated by T.S. Eliot’s typically modern bewailment: “Where is the knowledge lost in information?”[[Exotext#^6-1-3-1|[6.1.3.1] ]] The very fact that information has come adrift of its source diminishes its subjective source, presenting opinions as facts and erasing their context. Thus, even a statement as ridiculous and opinionated as “_Liverpool FC is the greatest team of all time_” is stated in the Indicative and on an internet chatboard is no longer excused by the sight of the militant fan behind it draped in red livery. The main counterpart to the Subjunctive mood – the Indicative or Declarative – is as much a feature of study here, since the former acknowledges the partiality that may be implicit or suppressed elsewhere.[[Exotext#^6-1-3-2|[6.1.3.2] ]] This is how I propose to build upon Balossi’s quantitative study of Woolf: by alloying broad stylistic patterning with specific instances where modality exists by dint of context even where conviction might seem absolute. Declared doubt is nonetheless a poor substitute for declared ignorance; this is why I use the term “_conviction_” throughout over “_certainty_,” since the latter implies an objective basis even in opinion – “_It is certain to happen_” vs. “_I am convinced it will_.” The words “_truth_” and “_reality_” will generally be eschewed for “_consensus_” and “_consistency_” to ground belief states within a social paradigm, particularly in the fourth chapter, while words like “_doubt_,” “_faith_” and “_belief_” will be deployed from the third to denote affective states of individual un/certainty.[[Exotext#^6-1-3-3|[6.1.3.3] ]] ^-6-1-3-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^6-1|[6.2.1] ]] _==***The insufficiencies of existing Large Language Models***== in recognising modal inflections in English..._  ![[6-2-1.png|50x0]] ^6-2-1 $\qquad$ It was necessary for me to design and test an AI parser for detecting the proportional modality of a large verbal specifically for this study. While existing LLM language models such as Stanford’s linguistic parser have complete morphological breakdowns within their capacities, these features are effective only on languages with a high degree of modal inflection, such as French or Arabic, and proved to be ineffective at judging even the most explicitly Subjunctive construct in English (“_Would that I were king_,” e.g.) as anything other than Indicative. Nonetheless, the SpaCy language model, a robust LLM that collects a number of "vectors" or meta-features for every given lexeme in a corpus, allows for the tokenisation and rapid assimilation of large texts according to bespoke rules that might judge the composition of various modalities.[[Exotext#^6-2-1-1|[6.2.1.1] ]] The primary moods that make up English’s various states of actuality – Indicative, Imperative, Interrogative, Subjunctive and Optative – have typical formulations and features of differing consistency; it is simple, for example, to judge that every sentence that ends with a question mark is Interrogative, and the Optative can be reduced to a finite set of phrases that accomplish the vestigial role of wishing and well-wishing – “_God save…”, “Would that it were…”, “Oh to…”,_ etc.[[Exotext#^6-2-1-2|[6.2.1.2] ]] I had to concoct a rather more complex series of formulations to detect Imperatives – for instance, detecting infinitive forms of a verb that begin a clause, as in: “_Go to the mirror, boy_.” The most complex and most important model parsing – detecting Subjunctive formations in sentences – will be elaborated below in [[#^6-2-3|[6.2.3] ]]. ^-6-2-1-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^super-sect|[6.2.2] ]] _==***I developed a parser***== to show a modal breakdown of a corpus of text..._  ![[6-2-2.png|50x0]] ^6-2-2 $\qquad$ Sentences’ modality had to be judged by verbal features that indicate such “non-actual” moods and represented proportionally in order to indicate the internal “conviction rate” of a verbal text. Sentences counted as belonging to modal sets if any of the relevant features were detected, without duplication of sentences with multiple features in order for there to be a consistent rate of comparison between different content; even so, in order to mediate between texts of radically different sentence length – a James novel versus a Pinter play, say – I also collected quotients of average sentence length and will be supplied for every studied text. In order to support a clarity of data representation, given that a certain subset of each modal sentence may contain multiple modal features – an “_if_” Conditional will usually be accompanied by a modal clause, as in “_If it doesn’t rain, we could go to the park_” – the sequence by which the parser detected features prioritised the most totalising modal features.[[Exotext#^6-2-2-1|[6.2.2.1] ]] Thus Optative sentences were collected first, given the relative specificity and rarity of this set; the next sentence set to be collected were Interrogatives, since even questions containing Subjunctive clauses are fundamentally “opened” by the injunction that contains them; next, Conditional clauses were collected, since by proposing specific conditions to subsequent modal clauses they are slightly distinct from the main body of Subjunctive formations, the other three subsets of which are collected next; the degree of Imperative features was the last modal category to be gleaned from those remaining sentences containing none of the preceding criteria, since for our services an Imperative command is only relevant as it exists free of questioning or speculating constructs; finally, the remaining sentences containing none of these modal features were counted and designated as Indicative. This ordering designates the semantic “stickiness” by which the prior modalities contaminate the propositional value of the sentence as a whole – for example, while a question such as “_If it rains, what will we do?_” cannot fairly be judged to be a Subjunctive proposition, even though it contains the Conditional token “_if_,” since it takes no such Conditional stance as to a proposition’s truth value but requests suggestion.[[Exotext#^6-2-2-2|[6.2.2.2] ]] ^-6-2-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^6-1|[6.2.3] ]] _==***Four subsets of subjunctive features***==_  ![[6-2-3.png|50x0]] ^6-2-3 $\qquad$A sentence is judged to be Subjunctive if it is not Interrogative and contains any of the following sets of features: - Modal verbs including “_should_,” “_would_” and “_could_,” as well as “_might_,” “_may_” and “_ought_.” These are the features that most emphatically indicate Subjunctives indicating obligation, speculation and wishing, though there is also a bleeding edge as it applies to the future tense, which obviously also expresses non-actual states but ones to which the speaker is usually committed to their truth and potential.[[Exotext#^6-2-3-1|[6.2.3.1] ]] ^-6-2-3-1 - Modal adverbs of a larger set best exemplified by qualifiers “_maybe_,” “_perhaps_,” “_possibly_” and “_probably_.” Edge cases include adverbs such as “surely,” which explicitly might indicate utter conviction albeit from a subjective standpoint.[[Exotext#^6-2-3-2|[6.2.3.2] ]] ^-6-2-3-2 - Modal noun, adjective and verbal constructs (“_I think there will be trouble_;” “_It is my belief there will be_;” “_It is probable_”). These are the most capacious and porous feature sets since they are arranged out of features that are not specifically modal but which are attached to and qualify declarative statements. A broader subset of “knowing verbs,” “knowing adjectives,” “knowing adverbs,” etc. was also created in order to tease out those Subjunctives that are purportedly certain yet non-actual – “_it is sure that_ …”, “_He is definitely.._” – and those that explicitly acknowledge their own non-facticity.[[Exotext#^6-2-3-3|[6.2.3.3] ]] ^-6-2-3-3 - Conditional features, “_if_,” “_whether_,” and “_unless_.” These will be represented separately in some cases where they are statistically significant since they represent declarative statements as to non-actual scenarios.[[Exotext#^6-2-3-4|[6.2.3.4] ]] ^-6-2-3-4 $\qquad$Naturally the parser did not simply detect these verbal tokens but evaluated their role within the sentence to assure they had a Subjunctive component as to their clausal verb. To this extent, the SpaCy parser was also employed to parse the dependency of the verbal feature, in particular those belonging to the modal noun, adjective and verbal clauses as they related to the main verb. The corpus of features and relational rules had to be tested copiously before being deployed on larger corpora on diverse digitised corpora of varied texts in the English language from the last 200 years, in particular the British National Corpus (BNC) for which the site English-Corpora allows web-based exploration for free with an account, and downloading with payment, consists of samples of language from many genres of discourse from the 1980's-1993. The parser’s output was then judged and analysed for potential false positives and negatives and refined according to outstanding and outlying cases until no false positives could be detected in the output or, by the process of comparison false negatives in the input. The full code for the parser in Python and full test sets, including supplementary lists of Subjunctive-adjacent features arrived at using this method, i.e. “wishing verbs,” “knowing verbs,” “qualifier adverbs,” as well as the necessary SpaCy feature tags are available in [[Appendix B]]. [[Exotext#^6-2-3-5|[6.2.3.5] ]] ^-6-2-3-5 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^6-1|[6.3.1] ]] _...signalling ==***speculation, imagination and anticipation***==_  ![[6-3-1.png|50x0]] ^6-3-1 $\qquad$ In their discussion of George Eliot’s sentence-level style, the Stanford Literary Lab refer to modal features as the “soul” of a novel and its characters.[[Exotext#^6-3-1-1|[6.3.1.1] ]] What is meant by this is that Subjunctives represent the purely mental potential of doing verbs in the non-actual or “irrealis” – their beliefs, wishes, dreams and moral obligations. In this, the Subjunctive is teased apart from separate irrealis moods and the future tense in order precisely to make litmus readings of these very affective aspects. The capacity for abstract thought is not something for which there is an effective pan-cultural measure – it has been shown to exist even in the cognitions of non-verbal creatures like crows – but differentials in the degree of overt speculation can themselves be abstracted to infer the degree of conjecturing, if not the objects of each desire or fantasy.[[Exotext#^6-3-1-2|[6.3.1.2] ]] These functions are differentiated as “epistemic modality” that make, to quote F. Palmer, “judgements about the factual status of the proposition” in that they are declaredly dubious or declare themselves anywhere on the mental continuum of possibility – “_it might be so_,” “_perhaps it is the case_,” “_I could do it_,” etc.[[Exotext#^6-3-1-3|[6.3.1.3] ]] As said, the apprehension of such is always a subjective positioning contingent to the factors which that possibility depends on, and demonstrates a self-consciousness of the limitations of that mental positionality – an acknowledgement of the unknown or unknowable and evocation of a sense of uncertainty. ^-6-3-1-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^6-1|[6.3.2] ]] _...functions of ==***opinion, judgment and obligation***==_  ![[6-3-2.png|50x0]] ^6-3-2 $\qquad$ The so-called “deontic Subjunctive” that denotes necessity and contingency is another subset of modal features that further specifies the character of the Subjunctive. Just as epistemic modality can be said to “open” the mental conception or world-picture to the contingencies of that which is outside one’s own purview, notion or control, the deontic acknowledges (in Palmer’s formulation) “acts performed by morally responsible agents, e.g. obligation and permission” via its “_shoulds_,” “_oughts_,” “_musts_,” and “_perforces_.” In other words, it more firmly establishes that contingency in an intersubjective and social sense in knitting its speaker into a society of fellow speakers wielding their own set of beliefs and expectations, their own convictions and conjectures. In rough terms, the deontic can be seen as a measure of social consciousness, in style if not semantics – but it will be the work of a further study to begin to tease apart the relative proportions and import of epistemic and deontic modality in fiction. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.1.1] ]] _==***Mood Rings***==..._  ![[mr.png|40x0]] ^7-1-1 $\qquad$ “Mood” obviously denotes both a temporary emotional state and a condition of grammar, but reference to the OED shows that both senses derive from the earlier Latinate form _mode_ or _modus_ as in a categorical type.[[Exotext#^7-1-1-1|[7.1.1.1] ]] Other derivative terms eke into other disciplines, as in the “modes” and “modulations” in music, or “modal” law that deals with conditions and provisions, or in plain English such derived terms as “modify,” “moderation” and “modularity.” These, and the fleeting nature of emotive “moods,” as opposed to attitudes, characteristics or deeply-held beliefs, insinuates a temporal quality to these logical “modes” – that they exist both as instances of broader types but in specific instances and instantiations. ^-7-1-1-1 $\qquad$ Any representation of such emotive data must be suitably striking to demonstrate in a glance the complex breakdown of the modality of each modular sentence, collectively.[[Exotext#^7-1-1-2|[7.1.1.2] ]] Here, as an example, is a "Mood Ring," that shows the relative presence of each grammatical mood in a text per sentence as colours occupying proportionate arcs on a Donut Chart, as opposed a Pie:^-7-1-1-2 ![[ring.png|550x0]] The annular, radial graphic that represents this dissertation’s argument is fractal in the sense that it regresses infinitely into its constituent parts, the whole representing each part, each part regressing into more granular and gradated circles – therefore, the data on which the argument is based is most fittingly represented by the same shapes.[[Exotext#^7-1-1-3|[7.1.1.3] ]] The colours representing each mood are displayed in prismatic array, with the most semantically-similar moods blending one into another spectroscopically. The two most prevalent moods for our purposes, Indicative and Subjunctive, are represented in by purple and orange, as they will also be when viewed in isolation, for the purposes of contrast and consistency. ^-7-1-1-3 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.1.2] ]] _...provides ==***a quantitative basis***== to compare modalities..._  ![[7-1-2.png|50x0]] ^7-1-2 $\qquad$ The reference to the “Mood Ring” fad that so graced many a Millennial’s childhood is meant to be both memorable and reminiscent of the reading of affect in these grammatical “moods” and, perhaps, the arbitrariness of such a metric. Our thesis would be familiar perhaps to a dendrochronologist that these overlapping rings can help identify a text’s specific place in history, its society, its age – but only when analogised to the mode of narrative and literary tradition it represents. This quantitative analysis of style is hardly untrodden ground, having been employed by Dugan (1973) in analysing the _Chanson de Roland_ and Simonton (1990) on semantic and lexical diversity in Shakesperean Sonnets. More recent studies such as Kao and Jurafsky (2012) employ computer stylistics intertextually to distinguish different authors’ idiolects, or applied intratextually to the polyphony of modernist texts such as _The Waste Land_ or _Ulysses_.However, much close reading and historical contextualising is needed to accompany this when deployed on individual texts – one to examine how the Subjunctive means in specific instantiations, and then to connect it to a broader social milieu.[[Exotext#^7-1-2-1|[7.1.2.1] ]] ^-7-1-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.2.1] ]] _... the capacity of literary fiction to ==***embody a particular cultural milieu***==..._  ![[7-1-3.png|50x0]] ^7-2-1 $\qquad$ Consider the overall shape of a novel such as Austen’s late work _Persuasion_ as to its characters – the minds the Jane Austen is attempting to render for her contemporary audience – since we must assess the modular relationship between the novel’s process over time and its constituent language. Beginning as we always do with the title, Austen’s last novel themes itself after changes of mind and the transience of emotional relationships over time. Her mature protagonist Anne Elliot, had been betrothed to Captain Wentworth as a younger woman but, having been persuaded by her relatives that his prospects were unsuitable, subsequently ended their engagement, to her later chagrin when Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars having achieved rank and privilege. Elliot, as with many of Austen’s protagonists, is bound by propriety and economic necessity to seek a partner for the good of her family and yet exists in a tight social circle whose outward actions are similarly circumscribed by protocol rather than desire. Therefore, we can see how Austen’s style of writing, both Subjunctive and subjective, models a plot that must constantly mediate between speculations as to what might happen as well as differing apprehensions as to the state of other minds, their own anticipations of the future and particular enframing of the past. But this plot too models a particular social reality in process, one in which expectations and obligation inform entirely the lived reality of its characters.[[Exotext#^7-2-1-1|[7.2.1.1] ]] ^-7-2-1-1 $\qquad$ The characters of _Persuasion_ – Anne, Elizabeth, Captain Wentworth, Lady Russell, etc. – live in a media environment dominated by gossip and word of mouth. Perhaps the most significant use of media of any kind in the novel, and one of the most transformative moments in all Austen, comes in the letter which Wentworth sends to Anne after overhearing her describe her persisting feelings for him and in which he declares his own love and constancy. The very fact that the mediated correspondence is actually the most candid confession of subjective feeling prefigures one of the things which separates Austen from Woolf’s: personal, as opposed to impersonal media, which has a specific audience rather than a mass. Wentworth’s letter is an attempt to circumvent the distorting social and internal pressures that have barred Anne from speaking her mind to him when they converse face to face, and yet the verbal niceties within acknowledge the social contingencies they both must obey. This is why this moment, and Austen’s form of social realism, is so replete with overt speculation – neither she nor her characters yet exist in a narrative-prescribed reality, but one in which preceding media is often implicitly or explicitly criticised for being overly sentimental or delusive.[[Exotext#^7-2-1-2|[7.2.1.2] ]] ^-7-2-1-2 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.2.2] ]] _... ==***our selection of texts***== ..._  ![[7-1-4.png|50x0]] ^7-2-2 $\qquad$ It is worth stepping back to answer an obvious question that pertains to our data set: “_Why fiction, exactly?_” If we are already holding up this historical differential alongside the social, cultural and media environment, might not this elaborate parser be best deployed on the content of that news media, on the very texts that purport to represent and inform their society as it really was? A large-scale modal analysis of historical corpora of digitised, published news media would certainly be a useful and compelling project that would speak to questions as to journalistic practise and consumer appetite for speculation over reality; however, canonical literature will make for a more capacious subject for a number of reasons. Firstly, influential texts as denoted by scholarly consensus (of which discussion follows) can be said to inform their cultural milieu as well as being formed by it – unlike news media, their style is not simply an appeal to preceding convention and their voice is declaredly subjective. Since we have already eschewed the notion of facticity, it would be better to identify so-called “literature” simply as fiction which identifies as such. Just as James Bond exists in a world notably free from Bond films, and Sherlock Holmes has remarkably never read a _Sherlock Holmes_ story, to analyse the impact of a media form we must look elsewhere than in the media itself. $\qquad$ Novels are, so to speak, con/textual representations of contemporaneous consciousnesses – embodying how people think, as opposed to simply what they say – and if they misrepresent reality then, to use Aristotle’s double-Subjunctive formulation, “_perhaps it is as it ought to be_.”[[Exotext#^7-2-2-1|[7.2.2.1] ]] This decidedly un-Platonic artistic ideal is the unifying feature of Austen, Brontë, the other writers Woolf judges as great in and beyond their time, and indeed Woolf herself in drawing out from an individual apprehension those vacillations and essential uncertainties that speak to a universal human condition. This “permanent quality of literature,” we can say with relative certainty, is what makes for a classic and a worthwhile object of study in the centuries to come as while media of all types changed, so did the novel’s role in depicting the individual in society.[[Exotext#^7-2-3-2|[7.2.2.2] ]] Secondly, news corpora are extremely diverse, in their authorship, in their address and their lack of geopolitical specificity – they are by nature ephemeral, global and aggregates of different voices and genres, and cannot have the subjective or permanent quality to suppose anything with any certainty. ^-7-2-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.2.3] ]] _... focused on ==***those canonical authors***==..._  ![[7-1-5.png|50x0]] ^7-2-3 $\qquad$ Choosing which individual authors are deserving of study is obviously problematic. The Stanford Literary Lab has recently refined its select corpus of 20th-Century novels by combining scholarly lists of so-called “best” novels of the century with yearly bestseller and readers’ lists in order to counterbalance both the arbitrary allocation of literary value in the former and the over-emphasis to either recent or accumulated “value.”[[Exotext#^7-2-3-1|[7.2.3.1] ]] The Lab’s Franco Moretti has engaged with this issue at length in his prior research on canonicity, and while he has advocated a particular philosophy of “distant reading” as an alternative to the hegemonic authority of close reading a few select texts via quantitative analysis of large-scale corpora, they acknowledge that the _Quantative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels_ that the Lab had attempted previously would be impractical in a corpora that is not yet free or fully solidified, and perhaps even undesirable.[[Exotext#^7-2-3-2|[7.2.3.2] ]] While combined of several lists with a naturally high degree of redundancy, certain novels such as John Steinbeck’s _Grapes of Wrath_ spanned nearly all lists consulted, as do both James Joyce’s _Ulysses_ and Woolf’s _Mrs. Dalloway_ and _To the Lighthouse_. Therefore, while any large 20th Century corpora is “fated to reflect the various social inequalities embedded in its components,” and a full profile of the SLL list too is outside the purview of this project, it is encouraging that these texts occupy both the Indicative and Subjunctive of their literary moment, being both texts that experts agree one _should_ read and representing that which people really have and do. ^-7-2-3-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.3.1] ]] _==***Virginia Woolf***==, for example..._  ![[7-2-1.png|50x0]] ^7-3-1 $\qquad$ Virginia Woolf occurs as the ideal early-20th-Century author to form a workable case model for modal cases, given the scope for discussion already in this project and the breadth of her published writing. The techno-social parallels between the London of a hundred years ago and this very moment is also fortuitous in that Woolf’s, and indeed Joyce’s, works have entered the public domain as of 2016, allowing for the use and publication of their complete data in text, or indeed graph, form. Her oeuvre of novels forms a consistent, if evolving, series of text corpora right across the time period we are considering, from _The Voyage Out_ (published 1915) to _Between the Acts_ (1941).  We have already established that Woolf eschewed Subjunctives in _The Waves_ while embracing them in other writings, particularly in her non-fiction and early novels, but we can now set her relative modality against other fictional texts and her own social paradigm. In her time, Woolf’s own social circle consisted of the literati of the Bloomsbury set, an independent if condensed claque of experimental writers and aesthetes of this era who similarly set themselves against former conventions. If Woolf herself embodies the proudly reparative stance of a first-wave feminist writer, the very argument of _A Room of One’s Own_ displays the somewhat classist and privileged distinctions which allowed her to publish such socially exemplary works – even if their contents and those of her published letters reflect elitist opinions implicitly or explicitly.[[Exotext#^7-3-1-1|[7.3.1.1] ]] Nonetheless, her decidedly canonical position among the aforementioned corpora and the wealth of her own and subsequent criticism means that there is also a great deal of supplementary documentation and interpretation upon an already self-aware and socially- (if less than societally-)conscious writer. ^-7-3-1-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.3.2] ]] _==***Jane Austen***==..._  ![[7-2-2.png|50x0]] ^7-3-2 $\qquad$ As shown by her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf consciously set herself against predecessors such as Jane Austen. Indeed, we can see from the early essays on the author in _The Common Reader_ and the references to Austen both explicitly and stylistically in her first two novels, _The Voyage Out_ (1915) and _Night and Day_ (1919) that from the first Woolf considered Austen’s style of fiction an important touchpoint for her own a hundred years later. Austen, her works and her style make a vital point of comparison to our own and to the early 20th Century – she looms so large that this style, as part of the formative era of the early novel, nonetheless inspires and informs our media and lived reality to this day. However, the intervention made in Woolf’s essay reacts to those prior certainties and staid mores in prizing the artistic individuality that exists beyond or outside them.[[Exotext#^7-3-2-1|[7.3.2.1] ]] ^-7-3-2-1 $\qquad$ Woolf states in one of her earliest essays: “Only great artists, giving their mind to nothing else, represent their age,” and “a history of modes and manners […] is not a history of ourselves, but of our disguises.”[[Exotext#^7-3-2-2|[7.3.2.2] ]] Austen was certainly this to Woolf, a similarly precocious talent but beyond even her own time, as she explains in a later essay: “She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own […] even at that early age Jane Austen was writing.”[[Exotext#^7-3-2-3|[7.3.2.3] ]] Her fiction’s many humorous manipulations of social protocol for Woolf strikes at something more intrinsic than fleeting modes, moods or manners; or perhaps something intrinsic about them – that, to paraphrase Vonnegut, we are who we pretend to be.[[Exotext#^7-3-2-4|[7.3.2.4] ]] ^-7-3-2-2 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.3.3] ]] _==***Charlotte Brontë***==..._  ![[7-3-1.png|50x0]] ^7-3-3 $\qquad$ Austen’s deliberate use of Subjunctive features can be seen to have consistency within a wider paradigm if we take a look at a later author of the same century – Charlotte Brontë. In both her discussions of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë in _The Common Reader_, Woolf goes beyond simple analysis of their texts – beyond indeed their natural biography – by venturing into the Subjunctive. Writing in 1916, sixty years after Brontë’s death, she begins:[[Exotext#^7-3-3-1|[7.3.3.1] ]] ^-7-3-3-1 It is strange to reflect how different those legends might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span. She might have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly met with in London and elsewhere […] She might have been wealthy, she might have been prosperous. But it is not so. Similarly, her short discussion of the life of Austen ends with a welter of Subjunctives speculating on how an adumbrated career _might_ have progressed.[[Exotext#^7-3-3-2|[7.3.3.2] ]] In so doing she in some sense reflects her contemporary discussion of women writers through history who, like Shakespeare’s theoretical sister in _A Room of One’s Own_, occupies a speculative relation to the known canon that was never fulfilled or attested to but can only be guessed at in retrospect, what Dakin in Alan Bennett’s _History Boys_ would call “Subjunctive history.”[[Exotext#^7-3-3-3|[7.3.3.3] ]] However, the all-embracing humanitarian aspect of Austen’s writing is, in Woolf’s opinion, missing in Brontë: [[Exotext#^7-3-3-4|[7.3.3.4] ]] ^-7-3-3-2 Of this power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace. She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, ‘I love,’ ‘I hate,’ ‘I suffer.’ These stark Indicatives bear out what for Woolf are differentials between the orientations of Austen, and Charlotte’s sister Emily, and a thoroughly self-absorbed and “self-limited” writer in some sense closed off to the outer world. While Woolf diagnoses “a stiff and decorous journalism” as the staple of Charlotte’s style when compared with Austen’s intuitive aspect, we now have the capacity to directly measure the two styles in terms of that socially-open modality. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.4.1] ]] _This "==**Mood Swing**=="..._  ![[7-3-2.png|50x0]] ^7-4-1 $\qquad$ The epistemic shift embodied by Woolf's experimental fiction bears stark contrast with a seemingly far higher degree of doubting in 19th-Century fiction. With the separation of nearly half a century between the publications of _Persuasion_ and _Jane Eyre_, we can see distinct similarities and differences in their respective modal profiles: ![[fig10.png|800x0]] ^-fig-10 _[[Figures#^fig-10|Fig. 10]]: Mood Rings_: Persuasion _vs._ Jane Eyre. While the Indicative quotient is nearly identical for both novels, there is a diminishment of the presence of the Subjunctive from around 27% to 18% composition, while the Interrogative, the mood of questioning, rises from under 6% to 14.5%. Part of what is perhaps behind this increased questioning is the “lensing” of its eponymous protagonist, since _Jane Eyre_ is written in 1st-person narration, as opposed to the 3rd-person mediated narrative of Austen. $\qquad$ If we compare the modal profiles of Austen and Woolf’s fiction side-by-side, specifically our spotlit texts _Persuasion_ and _The Waves_, we can clearly see a broad diminishment in the presence of the Subjunctive mood from the former to the latter: ![[fig11.png|800x0]] ^-fig-11 _[[Figures#^fig-11|Fig. 11]]: Mood Rings_: Persuasion _vs._ The Waves. The differential between a roughly 7 and 27% proportion of sentences containing a Subjunctive feature is more significant in that Conditional features are nearly twice as common in _Persuasion_ as _The Waves_ without a corresponding drop in the Subjunctive features collected subsequently. Despite the isolated quality of the voices in _The Waves_, Interrogative questions are roughly as frequent in both texts and the vast disparity in Subjunctives such as modal verbs, adverbs and clauses is taken up by an increase in Indicative features. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.4.2] ]] _... innovations in narrative form, from ==***Free Indirect Discourse***==..._  ![[7-3-4.png|50x0]] ^7-4-2 $\qquad$ A compelling basis for coherence of style, at least in the case of a single author, can also be wrought from these rings. For instance, if we hold Austen’s _Persuasion_ Mood Ring side-by-side with that of her earlier _Pride and Prejudice_, they strike us as nearly identical: ![[fig12.png|800x0]] ^-fig-12 _[[Figures#^fig-12|Fig. 12]]: Mood Rings_: Persuasion _vs._ Pride and Prejudice. It would be hard to find a representation of both that bear such resemblance, differing as they do in setting, theme and cast of characters. [[Exotext#^7-4-2-1|[7.4.2.1] ]] This goes beyond even the matching of idiolect that, for example, has been used in author attribution studies as the basis of authorial style.[[Exotext#^7-4-2-2|[7.4.2.2] ]] We can also see a broadly similar modal profile between _Jane Eyre_ and Emily Brontë’s _Wuthering Heights_, much though Woolf herself makes much of their stylistic and expressive differences: ^-7-4-2-1 ![[fig13.png|800x0]] ^-fig-13 _[[Figures#^fig-13|Fig. 13]]: Mood Rings_: Jane Eyre _vs._ Wuthering Heights. Each of these novels has a narrator, but nonetheless speak from points of view that suppose and guess at the intentions of other characters such as Rochester and Heathcliff. What is clear is that Woolf's studied lack of uncertainty represents a clear epistemic break from her predecessors. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.4.3] ]] _... the so-called "==***stream of consciousness***==" style_  ![[7-3-4.png|50x0]] ^7-4-3 $\qquad$ Since narrative text occurs in process, we could also slice texts by section as we did with _The Waves_ to show this modality over the course of a single text, or to show differentials in other authors’ style as it changed over the course of their career. So, if we compare the Mood Ring of Woolf’s _Waves_ with that of her first published novel, _The Voyage Out_ (1915), a much greater disparity makes itself apparent: ![[fig14.png|800x0]] ^-fig-14 _[[Figures#^fig-14|Fig. 14]]: Mood Rings_: The Voyage Out _vs._ The Waves. This is perhaps due to Woolf’s early style, which many have noted as highly influenced by the Victorian mode of Free Indirect Discourse than the later, more experimental works which follows _The Mark on the Wall_.[[Exotext#^7-4-3-1|[7.4.3.1] ]] This marks a transition from representing uncertainty from declared subjunctives mediated by an authorial voice to the unmediated juxtaposition of Bernard, Neville’s and the rest stating worldviews with utter conviction. This connection between mood and mode may also provide a basis for a profound intertextual connection that goes beyond simple adherence to a contemporary style or narrative frame but a common apprehension of reality. ^-7-4-3-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^7-1|[7.4.4] ]] _... ==***from the subjunctive to the subjective***==._  ![[7-3-4.png|50x0]] ^7-4-4 $\qquad$ As discussed, the signal difference between a statement containing an irrealis construct of any type and an Indicative clause with none is its openness to contingency and recognition of conjecture. A clause that is Subjunctive does not represent its apprehensions as immutable fact and represents its speaker as on object in its text-world that can be acted on and affected by the intents of others; the Indicative makes of its speaker a subject that knows its own mind and the world it perceives as objective fact but which is nonetheless subjective. Illustrative though these different styles are, it must be noted that we are dealing merely with the representation of uncertainty in fiction, whose import must be elaborated in context. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^8-1|[8.1.1] ]] _... how ==***modal content***== is modulated..._  ![[8-1-1.png|50x0]] ^8-1-1 $\qquad$ As nearly everyone reading this will already know, _Pride and Prejudice_ begins with a famous, jaw-thrusting assertion from the author: [[Exotext#^8-1-1-1|[8.1.1.1] ]] ^-8-1-1-1 It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. We should stop awhile before proceeding and consider this axiom, which is probably necessary just to reincorporate such a mush of cliché into something substantive. What is it about this polished yet distinctly odd sentence that still rings in our ears? To a modern reader, were the actual meaning not obscured by simple recognition, it would sound phenomenally hollow and almost imperils what from hereon we are meant to read as an omniscient narrator. This “_universal truth_,” we are led to believe, was the case in Austen’s and her characters’ day – or at least in her particular social circles. The meshing of the romantic and the economic gears it evokes, and the absolute mechanical necessity of that relation, is seemingly taken for granted even as it is so aggressively deployed. That opening clause, incongruously isolated by a comma, is mirrored by the finalistic modal epithet “_must be in want…_” – i.e., said single man is not only expectant of that fulfilment of self, but is expected to expect it by all others – indeed, expects it of himself. The social relations Austen goes on to describe, their many caprices and emotional chicaneries, are all nonetheless built on that essentialism – as much as many rich and happy bachelors in Austen’s very era would no doubt have vigorously disagreed. The word “_universe_,” and by extension “_universal_,” has significantly greater capacity today than it did in Austen’s day, and as such our fictional worlds seem far more open to possibilities, even as the mode of fiction remains grounded in that social function. My question earlier – and hereon – was and will be, could such a statement seriously even be made today? Is there any single fact that is “_universally acknowledged_” as being true? Do the social spheres we move in today allow for such a tidy summary of consensus? $\qquad$ However, this all occurs under the plausible and ironical deniability of both Free Indirect Discourse, which posits thoughts alternately as totalising truths and personal points of view, as well as British period diction which often uses Subjunctive features in a mannered and non-literal way as a form of social discourse. For example, _Persuasion_ bears a modal judgment on marriageability in its own opening: [[Exotext#^8-1-1-2|[8.1.1.2] ]] ^-8-1-1-2 That Lady Russell, of steady age and character, and extremely well provided for, should have no thought of a second marriage, needs no apology to the public, which is rather apt to be unreasonably discontented when a woman does marry again, than when she does not. The “_should_” here clearly bears no prescriptive judgment and in fact refers to the actuality of Lady Russell’s situation while nonetheless putting it in the arena of public approbation. This rather British quirk, while a unifying feature of our chosen texts, may display both a historical disparity and demonstrate the extra-grammatical knowledge required to interpret modals in context. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^8-1|[8.2.1] ]] _... by ==***tonal context***==..._  ![[8-2-1.png|50x0]] ^8-2-1 $\qquad$ When made granular by the process of corpus induction, the individual data points of each modal feature shed their context and everything outside of the preselected metric. This, for example, limits the applicability of our comparative study of the word “perhaps” as being idiosyncratic and too mono-dimensional for the variety of the last century’s media. For example, we may close read a use of “perhaps” in _Persuasion_, where Anne is speculating as to Wentworth’s feelings for her: [[Exotext#^8-2-1-1|[8.2.1.1] ]] ^-8-2-1-1 She would have liked to know how he felt as to a meeting.  Perhaps indifferent, if indifference could exist under such circumstances. He must be either indifferent or unwilling. We can read an arch contradiction in the FID-mediated second sentence – the “_perhaps_” of the first clause is undermined by the apparent impossibility of the second, and further qualified by the third with its emphatic “_must_.” The fact that Anne’s thought process occurs one step at a time, in one direction then another, is lost if each token, each sentence, were to be taken in isolation. AI, irony-illiterate as it is, would miss the modulations upon modulations, and not the ironies Austen lays upon each one in isolation. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^8-1|[8.2.2] ]] _Jane Austen’s style employs large quantities of ==***irony***==..._  ![[8-2-2.png|50x0]] ^8-2-1 $\qquad$ The modulation of content in context opens up a wider question: how can we be sure genuine conviction or uncertainty is held as to proposition – that they *mean* what they say? A study dealing with printed text clearly eschews the non-textual elements of diction – gestures, body language, tone of voice and situation – that can undermine the literal seriousness of a spoken statement. Television as a medium preserves these aspects but also excels in undercutting its verbal content with its visual, as identified by David Foster Wallace in his writing on television’s oversaturation towards the end of the century.[[Exotext#^8-2-2-1|[8.2.2.1] ]] Verbal irony, or sarcasm, is highly situational as well and also idiosyncratic – as comedian Ed Byrne among many others may have noted, Alanis Morissette’s definition of “Irony” seems to differ from most.[[Exotext#^8-2-2-2|[8.2.2.2] ]] What is interesting though is that modal features do occur frequently in ironical statements, since weakening a assertion juxtaposes what is utterly obvious in context ("I *think* he might be drunk," "Well he'll *definitely* keep his promise," e.t.c.). However, this can only be achieved with reference to something external, whether a shared observation, experience or cultural code so obvious that the author can assume as much for any reader – those "truths universally acknowledged" or, indeed, derided. As such, irony and the Subjunctive both have a cultural and contextual co-factors and are strong indicators of modal thinking within a text. ^-8-2-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^8-1|[8.2.3] ]] _... statements from the points of view of some characters that are ==***undercut***==_  ![[8-2-3.png|50x0]] ^8-2-3 $\qquad$ A further study might differentiate modality by the speaker of other texts as we have with _The Waves_, since the central technique of multiplicity is to some extent represented by separate interpretations or expressions by different focalisers. For example, Romeo and Juliet’s pledges of undying love are made tragically ironic by our knowledge that they will take their own life from the play’s Prologue. This is what is well-known as “dramatic irony” which arises from the combinations of impressions in the mind of the reader, and unlike multiplicity is often resolved or paid off by the action of the play rather than left dissonant. This is some extent the process of any social text in which differentials between characters' worldviews are developed by value exchanges until a new equilibrium is reached. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^8-1|[8.2.4] ]] _... our understanding of them as ==**ignorant, misinformed or ridiculous**==..._  ![[8-2-3.png|50x0]] ^8-2-4 $\qquad$ “Unreliable narrators” like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert of _Lolita_ undermine their own testimony for the reader by a combination of impressions and intuitions of which they are generally unaware. Their convictions in narrating are nonetheless certain but not taken seriously due to insanity, ignorance, naivety, exaggeration, dishonesty or inconsistency – what is sometimes called "structural irony," though this term lacks the specificity here to differentiate from, say, multiplicity.. These aporia in a text speak again to the inconstancy of even a single individual apprehension and destabilise themselves via extreme or eccentric subjectivity. The concept of "reliability" and consistency of character implies a moral character to this modality, which is what brought Serpell to fixate on *Lolita* first and foremost in her study of uncertainty:[[Exotext#^8-2-4-1|[8.2.4.1] ]] ^-8-2-4-1 I begin with Lolita because it beautifully illustrates how an intense, structured uncertainty can refract—rather than merely reflect—an ethical disturbance. Decoupling ethics from propositional content, the novel does not guide or imitate readers’ moral values; it unsettles them. Yet the uncertain experience that Lolita affords itself has ethical value. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^super-sect|[8.3.1] ]] _... all ==***fiction is a form of speculation***==..._  ![[8-3-1.png|50x0]] ^8-3-1 $\qquad$ Obviously, the entirety of what we call fiction depicts non-actual conditions that are merely supposed in order to assert through pretence, and different forms and genres of fiction hold different relationships to our apprehension of reality. The “social realist” fiction that dominated the 18th and 19th Centuries generally depicted situations that were possible within the world in which they were written – the drawing-room politics of Austen’s social world, or the grit and grift of _Oliver Twist_ in the slums of Victorian London – even as that apprehension of the possible changed or was idealised or romanticised to an improbable degree. More modern Science fiction, by contrast, projects that which is possible under certain non-actual conditions – the future civilizations of Asimov’s _Foundation_ trilogy, or a world of super-advanced cyborgs – given our current conception of scientific capabilities, as opposed to fantasies like _Game of Thrones_ that imagine that which could never be nor ever have been, but which still compel our interest and attention nonetheless. That interest and attention is the only metric by which these stories all adhere to the world of the reader; this is what Aristotle meant by his most famous term, “_mimesis_,” in that fiction must _imitate_ lived reality, or else deceive in a way that enhances and idealises that which is insufficient but recognisable. Impossible as encountering a cyclops would have been to the Greek _hoi polloi_, it was not _implausible_ in the sense that their worldview would have allowed for the possibility of giants, gods, immanent deities etc., unlike a modern audience who might have a far stricter sense of what they would consider impossible. The typical self-drawn storyworld will not reference its own constructed nature but allows for this function of abstraction and projection of real experience – which will be our focus in the following chapter – to exist _between_ itself and its audience. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^super-sect|[8.3.2] ]] _... ==***a meta-feature of text***== that is not necessarily conducive to granular analysis._  ![[8-3-2.png|50x0]] ^8-3-2 $\qquad$ The process of fiction are not necessarily inherent in content, therefore, but can only be gleaned by understanding literary narrative as a kind of above-sentence grammar, as it has been described for example by Teun van Dijk.[[Exotext#^8-3-2-1|[8.3.2.1] ]] Novels are a maximalist expression of language in that they must exist in temporal sequence, emotional process and social context, therefore this aspect of language must be appreciated as a whole and as a function of the essential projection, anticipation and speculation which language must capture. Therefore any reader, human or artificial, must appreciate the modality introduced by each of these aspects as supplementary to the modality of its actual content that both ironises its most emphatic statements and reifies the abstract. We have noted that in texts like *The Waves* model features wax and wane at various points in the narrative, yet contextual analysis is still vital to grasp how language mediates these moments of exchange. Moving forward from the overt uncertainty represented by the Subjunctive to how all of fiction might embody the embodied uncertainties of a life in process, we may now look at Woolf's ouevre as an example of how modality reveals points of change across her own life. ^-8-3-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^9-1|[9.1.1] ]] _... we can spot this "==***truth decay***=="_  ![[9-1-1.png|50x0]] ^9-1-1 $\qquad$ The paradox at hand seems to be that despite the narrative that the last century was riven with discord, confusion and instability, both the technological affordances of the age and our study of contemporary language suggest that in fact society as a whole was becoming gradually more confident in its convictions. Yet the analysis of historical change is always a meta-narrative that orbits above the lived experience of people of the time which is elided or suppressed by the intervening time. Technology of “facticity” like the photograph, phonograph and the rest are perhaps responsible for eliding the circumstances of media via preservation that makes it “autonomous” in Friedrich Kittler’s conception, and divesting the individual of the purview to remember or discern truth.[[Exotext#^9-1-1-1|[9.1.1.1] ]] This means that “truth” as arising from unmediated social consensus diminished by necessity, giving way to the mediated seeming plausibility determined by what Stephen Colbert has called “truthiness.” This means that the very media we are studying represent a deterministic mediation of reality itself, which is no longer constructed via observation of real phenomena but appeals to cultural preconceptions and does not necessarily overtly declare uncertainty but may employ or imply the ironical techniques discussed in the previous section for the purposes of plausible deniability. Many public figures now manipulate this flat ontology to advance arguments from a position of bad faith – allegedly. ^-9-1-1-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^9-1|[9.1.2] ]] _... ==***between The Voyage Out and Between the Acts***==... ![[9-1-2.png|50x0]] ^9-1-2 $\qquad$ The interwar period saw an explosion in mass media, printed media and, naturally, propaganda. Whether her artistic career meant she was set in her ways, or thoroughly disillusioned by these turbulent times, Woolf’s last novel, _Between the Acts_, which was published posthumously in 1941, contains the lowest proportion of Subjunctive features of any of her published work at only 6.1%. This decrease from 15.7% in her first novel would seem to imply a linear decline in Subjunctive usage and increased representations of conviction; however, a similar parse of Woolf’s latest “experimental” phase shows that this is by no means a consistent feature of her later work: ![[fig15.png|800x0]] ^-fig-15 _[[Figures#^fig-15|Fig. 15]]: Mood Rings_: The Voyage Out _vs._ Between the Acts. ![[fig16.png|800x0]] ^-fig-16 _[[Figures#^fig-16|Fig. 16:]] Mood Rings_: To the Lighthouse _vs._ Mrs. Dalloway. As we can also see from _Fig. 16_, To _the Lighthouse_ (1925) and _Mrs. Dalloway_ (1927) bear profiles much closer to the 19th-Century fiction of Austen and the Brontës; the reasons for this are not immediately clear, since these three late novels are all concerned with intimate social circles – the Dalloways’, the Ramseys’ and the various audience members of _Between the Acts_ – but the consistency of avoiding overt Subjunctives is a telling consistency across her latter fiction. The picture becomes less clear if we consider the modal profile of an intervening non-fiction work, _A Room of One’s Own_ (1931): ![[fig17.png|600x0]] ^-fig-17 _[[Figures#^fig-17|Fig. 17:]] Mood Rings_: A Room of One's Own As we have noted, _A Room of One’s Own_ is a highly speculative work of reparative social history that mediates between personal anecdotes and subjective assertions, as discussed by Margarita Sánchez Cuervo in her analysis of Woolf’s intersubjective modality.[[Exotext#^9-1-2-1|[9.1.2.1] ]] The rhetorical character of her consistent use of questioning across both fiction and non-fiction becomes more apparent as a pattern in her discourse; however, it must be said that the higher degree of Subjunctives in the last three texts mentioned may also be due to the relatively longer sentence length (26.6 words per sentence in _To the Lighthouse_, 22.0 in _Mrs. Dalloway_ and 27.5 in _A Room of One’s Own_, as opposed to 14.0 in _Between the Acts_ and 18.1 in _The Waves_), which would allow for a greater degree of sentences containing a modal feature as opposed to Indicative or Interrogative sentences. This corresponds closely to Austen’s average sentence length, which is around 26.4 words across her six novels, and it is also telling that the Brontë novel with the largest proportion of Subjunctive constructs, Anne’s _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ (1848) at 20.3%, also had the longest average sentence length. However, this does not necessarily refute the apparent shift in writing styles if we consider that this shortening of sentence may in fact be another symptom of increased conviction, via statements that do not take qualifying or modifying clause or which do not take the space to acknowledge the limitations to their statements or of individual assertions existing in a kind of paratactic, isolating sequence. ^-9-1-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^9-1|[9.1.3] ]] _... ==***Woolf's language***== becomes less and less subjunctive_  ![[9-1-3.png|50x0]] ^9-1-3 $\qquad$ As Eric Auerbach analysed a passage of _To the Lighthouse_, so we can take a look at Woolf’s sentence-level organization of social sense that lies at the root of her modulation of experience. In an early passage, Lily Briscoe broods on the inscrutability of her fellow woman: [[Exotext#^9-1-3-1|[9.1.3.1] ]] ^-9-1-3-1 Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs Ramsay's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs Ramsay's heart. How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people. Mrs Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs Ramsay went. We can easily assume the focaliser of this passage to be Lily, with the repeated “_Nothing!_” emphasizing her personal frustration, and many of the subsequent sentences being equally fragmentary. While a rhetorical question occurs, it is not left unattributed as in Free Indirect Discourse but phrased as her “_ask[ing] herself_” as object. Finally, three Indicative sentences evoke this paratactic social relation, where actions are seemingly not reactions or causally related but occur in isolation. These emphatic but discrete Indicative statements mirror the interjections at the start of the passage – both carry no irrealis features and would be judged as Indicative – but latterly the affect of Lily only implied. The emotional charge of private feeling, just like in _The Waves_, is most palpable in moments of grief:[[Exotext#^9-1-3-2|[9.1.3.2] ]] ^-9-1-3-2 Mrs Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died—and had left all this. Really, [Lily] was angry with Mrs Ramsay. With the brush slightly trembling in her fingers she looked at the hedge, the step, the wall. It was all Mrs Ramsay's doing. She was dead. Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time, unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs Ramsay's fault. She was dead. The step where she used to sit was empty. She was dead. These determined but reductive “_She was dead_”s mirror the abject facticity of the telegram by which Bernard learns of Percival’s death in Woolf’s later novel. This “newsy-ness” of her style captures how Benedict Anderson envisaged the newspaper society within its content, as a series of declarative stories existing side-by-side by disconnected one to another.[[Exotext#^9-1-3-3|[9.1.3.3] ]] Following Auerbach, Hammond, Brooke and Hirst in their 2016 stylistic analysis of the novel’s Indirect Discourse were unable to find a unifying stylistic solution to the “its principal interpretive dilemma: the vexed question of _who is speaking_ [sic] at any given point.” [[Exotext#^9-1-3-4|[9.1.3.4] ]] Lily is seemingly both subject and object of her address, referred to by name but also engaging in pronoun usage that sometimes confuses just _who_ it is that is dead. That consciousness of ignorance, of absence, is Woolf capturing a _zeitgeist_ of the dispersed continuum, fleeting as it is. Immediately after this paroxysm, Lily asks herself: “But why repeat this over and over again? Why be always trying to bring up some feeling she had not got?” In the ever-moving “stream of consciousness,” once again different modalities show an almost arbitrary oscillation that destabilises apprehension over time. ^-9-1-3-3 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^9-1|[9.2.1] ]] _... the prevailing ==***social discourse***==..._  ![[9-2-1.png|50x0]] ^9-2-1 $\qquad$ Woolf’s use of the Interrogative is more or less consistent across her published work, and outside of quoted speech these irrealis features indicate Free Indirect Discourse fairly reliably as interpolations of characters’ speculations. Just as we looked at telling moments where the Subjunctive was deployed in _The Waves_ and _Persuasion_, we can also look at what specific instances are doing in the early novels of Woolf that so drew from Austen stylistically: in The Voyage Out (1915), Subjunctives are most frequent in the early discourse on board the _Euphrosyne_, as in this debate between Mrs. Dalloway and Helen Ambrose:[[Exotext#^9-2-1-1|[9.2.1.1] ]] ^-9-2-1-1 'I’m convinced people are wrong when they say it’s work that wears one; it’s responsibility. That’s why one pays one’s cook more than one’s housemaid, I suppose.' 'According to that, one ought to pay one’s nurse double; but one doesn’t,' said Helen. 'No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies, instead of saucepans!' said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a probable mother. 'I’d much rather be a cook than a nurse,' said Helen. 'Nothing would induce me to take charge of children.' 'Mothers always exaggerate,' said Ridley. 'A well-bred child is no responsibility. I’ve travelled all over Europe with mine. You just wrap ’em up warm and put ’em in the rack.' That “I suppose” encapsulates the deference that must qualify statements by subjunctivity in such delicate matters of social protocol as paying one’s servants.[[Exotext#^9-2-1-1|[9.2.1.2] ]] In matters of marriage, like Austen, her characters are arch yet dubious:[[Exotext#^9-2-1-2|[9.2.1.3] ]] ^-9-2-1-2 ‘I can quite imagine you walking alone,’ said Clarissa; ‘and thinking—in a little world of your own. But how you will enjoy it—some day!’ ‘I shall enjoy walking with a man—is that what you mean?” said Rachel, regarding Mrs. Dalloway with her large enquiring eyes. ‘I wasn’t thinking of a man particularly,’ said Clarissa. ‘But you will.’ ‘No. I shall never marry,’ Rachel determined. ‘I shouldn’t be so sure of that,’ said Clarissa. Her sidelong glance told Rachel that she found her attractive although she was inexplicably amused. ‘Why do people marry?’ Rachel asked. ‘That’s what you’re going to find out,’ Clarissa laughed. The course of the novel displays Rachel becoming at first passionately attached to the idea of marrying Terence before despairing of the idea once again, and the irrealis features here capture a mix of deference and desire by which these two women negotiate their respective expectations in dialogue. When deployed outside of quoted dialogue, we can see how Subjunctives capture moments of Free Indirect Discourse involving subjective speculation by the characters, but which nonetheless can be undercut and destabilized by Indicatives. Terence later wonders:[[Exotext#^9-2-1-4|[9.2.1.4] ]] ^-9-2-1-4 [I]n spite of all the love between them, was not their marriage too a compromise? […] Perhaps Rachel had been right, then, when she said that night in the garden, “We bring out what’s worst in each other—we should live separate.” No, Rachel had been utterly wrong!... All three sentences here, the Interrogative, the Subjunctive and the final Indicative, are obviously focalised through Terence, despite having very little cohesion or consolidation one to another. This dissociation over time suggests the distinctly modern sense that Woolf later hoped to capture in _The Waves_ – the multiplicity of a single personality realised over time and the agonies and compromises of an individual living in a culture where neither marriage nor the constancy of women is any longer a given.[[Exotext#^9-2-1-5|[9.2.1.5] ]] ^-9-2-1-5 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^9-1|[9.2.2] ]] _... speaks to an audience of its time along a recognisable ==***social register***==..._  ![[9-2-2.png|50x0]] ^9-2-2 $\qquad$ The presence of Subjunctive and Indirect discourse in Woolf’s early fiction displays the issue that published discourse, and fiction in particular, does not necessarily speak in contemporaneous discourse. Even writers of distant ages such as Edmund Spenser have employed conspicuously archaic language in their works in order to provoke a specific effect, and genre fiction such as Sci-Fi or Fantasy might emulate language of the distant future or sentimental past as an extension of their worlds. If Woolf’s language is a conscious emulation of earlier writers, however, and adheres to Lodge’s definition of “realism” as “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to descriptions of similar experience in nonliterary texts of the same culture,” then that relationship to media of the past and present is again a representation of this moment of apparent tension.[[Exotext#^9-2-2-1|[9.2.2.1] ]] ^-9-2-2-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^9-1|[9.3.1] ]] _... an understanding of the ==***text as process***==..._  ![[9-3-1.png|50x0]] ^9-3-1 $\qquad$ As is evident from the passages analysed in _The Voyage Out_, modality exists quite prevalently in dialogue and especially in the early phases of the novel where characters are mingling socially on the titular voyage out from London. Once the narrative focuses in more closely on the relationship between Rachel and Terence, and each as subjects isolated from their surrounding community, the Subjunctive presence can be read as more epistemic than deontic. To return to _The Waves_, viewing the novel over time displays how modality occurs in such moments of uncertainty, such as the passages in Chapter 5 that explicitly concern the narrators dealing with Percival’s death: ![[fig18.png|600x0]] ^-fig-18 _[[Figures#^fig-18|Fig. 18]]: Modality in_ The Waves _by chapter._ The prevalence of modality differs by chapter as well as speaker, gradually increasing and peaking in Chapter 5 – but by no means consistently. In Neville’s single use of the Subjunctive in the chapter, at the end of his section, the modalities and intentions surrounding them are similarly mixed:[[Exotext#^9-3-1-1|[9.3.1.1] ]] ^-9-3-1-1 I will not lift my foot to climb the stair. I will stand for one moment beneath the immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut, while downstairs the cook shoves in and out the dampers. I will not climb the stair. We are doomed, all of us. Women shuffle past with shopping-bags. People keep on passing. Yet you shall not destroy me. For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob. Here the defiantly Indicative statements of purpose reflect an apparent sense of futility and determinism: ‘_We are doomed_.’ The Subjunctive ‘_You shall not destroy me_’ seems equally emphatic, since where before the statements reflect positive or negative actions completely within Neville’s own agency here ‘shall’ may be said to open his fate to the influence of the outside world, the oppressive and ephemeral urban environment and its indifference to his essential inner life. The shift to the Indicative then comes as a rejection, an apostrophe to his own pain and grief to consume him inwardly and another embarrassing eschewal of society in favour of self-involvement and involution. $\qquad$ As possibilities become actualities as her protagonist’s molten lives become more and more determined, speculations like Bernard’s Subjunctive history of Hampton Court become more abstract, and for Woolf the moment is always now, here and this (see *Fig. 19*): ![[fig19.png|600x0]] ^-fig-19 _[[Figures#^fig-19|Fig. 19]]: Occurrence of "Now" (cap.) in_ The Waves _by Chapter._ In a sense, this constant positioning over time ironises the Subjunctive itself. Possibilities only exist in that constant, present moment – and, once past, are either realised or mourned. Literature along can literally suspend our disbelief in time, and preserve those fleeting moments in history when anything was possible, and nothing is certain. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.1.1] ]] _... ==***historical precedent***== will be explained..._  ![[10-1-1.png|50x0]] ^10-1-1 $\qquad$ As has been noted, this technique of placing voices of equal conviction side-by-side has points of comparison within Woolf’s other fiction and those of her contemporaries, particularly since they were in such close, often literal, dialogue. [[Exotext#^10-1-1-1|[10.1.1.1] ]] The impulse behind such groupings as “modernists” or the “Bloomsbury set” speak to this common technique; much as Woolf apparently despised James Joyce’s fiction, the many voices, styles and interbleeding of thought and speech in his _Ulysses_ displays a paratactic multiplicity strongly presupposed Woolf’s own urban heterotopia in _Mrs. Dalloway_. Attempts here to limit the discussion purely to British Modernism become more difficult in an era of greater globalism and intellectual exchange – T. S. Eliot, already quoted as the epitome of the Modernist “_perhaps_” was, after all, not a native Brit but from St. Louis originally. It is beyond the remit of this project to consider this geospatial variable alongside the temporal but, since that very dissonance is what writers from both sides of the pond perhaps hoped to capture within multiplicity, consonance across nations might reinforce the idea of a consistent, if inconstant, historical moment. ^-10-1-1-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.2.1] ]] _==***Multiplicity***==, the parallax style of multiple focal points..._  ![[10-2-1.png|50x0]] ^10-2-1 $\qquad$ We can define this first super-sentence construction of literary uncertainty as a superset of the “parallax” affect previously described that uses alternative viewpoints to destabilise or, to be more precise, multistabilise the apprehension of reality.[[Exotext#^10-2-1-1|[10.2.1.1] ]] This is distinct from the kind of omniscient or Free Indirect style that best characterised novelists of the 19th Century in that there is no voice that mediates these separate apprehensions; the voices are placed in parallel as well as series and the business of the narrative is not to reconcile these societal differences but rather to depict that disparity. It is not difficult to see how this interpretation of minds in concert might arise out of a modern environment where a larger number of individuals might negotiate a shared urban space without necessarily knowing one another personally or sharing a common cultural vocabulary and negotiating a dissonant and diverse media environment, though as said the connection between reality and its depiction is always speculative; nonetheless, we will investigate this via parallax ourselves by studying an early 20th-Century writer from outside the insular culture of British fiction. ^-10-2-1-1 ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.2.2] ]] _==***As I Lay Dying***==_  ![[10-2-2.png|50x0]] ^10-2-2 $\qquad$ 1930, the year that saw the bulk of Woolf’s agonised composition of _The Waves_, also saw the publication of William Faulkner’s _As I Lay Dying_, a distinctly modernist text in Faulkner’s as-yet obscure American mode of Sothern Gothic. While the inspiration of the latter by the prior can only be speculated, the two texts reflect that common historical moment in similar structures of interpolated monologues by a cast of characters inhabiting a shared place and time over the course of the narrative. _As I Lay Dying_ speaks with a larger number of individual voices but concerns the events of only a few days over which a cast of characters on a ranch in rural Mississippi come to terms with the death, transportation and burial of the family matriarch Addie. Unlike _The Waves_, which follows a compact cast through their whole lifespans, Faulkner’s project could be considered in terms of consonance rather than consistency over expanded timescales. Like the privatising forms of grief we glimpse in the aftermath of Percival’s death, the various coping mechanisms of Addie’s children Darl, Jewel, Vardaman, Cash and Dewey Dell, her husband Anse and the various farmhands and neighbours they encounter on their voyage back to Addie’s childhood home are juxtaposed like the amalgamated perspectives of a cubist portrait. $\qquad$ The narrative modes of _The Waves_ and _As I Lay Dying_ may seem similar on the surface, as it were, with multiple of Cohn’s “psychonarratives” laid in parallel and rendering the same events and observations new depth and texture by parallax. However, there are key differences in the composition of Faulkner’s text – the monologues are explicitly internal, for one thing, but contain quoted dialogue by the narrator and surrounding characters, meaning that while the novel is divisible into sections by character, the language data within may belong to a number of different voices. All the same, Faulkner’s characters arguably show greater stylistic disparity between the poetic and increasingly abstract narration of Darl, the second eldest Bundren child, to the fragmentary and semi-hysterical voice of Vardaman, the youngest. The characters of course have their own preoccupations and fixations that mark out their own perspective that also juxtapose the religious moralisations of Tull’s wife Cora with Cash’s obsessive mechanical concern over the balance and dimensions of his mother’s coffin. The orthography also makes for a distinctive textual aspect for each speaker – Cash’s taciturn sections punctuated by bullet points and diagrams of the coffin he is building, Darl and Vardaman’s by italicised interpolations that create a mixed visual aspect even within their separate narratives. Throughout, the sparse, laconic Southern diction by which characters converse with each other often serves as a barrier that demonstrates the inadequacy of language to reconcile the characters one with another or with the cause of their grief, to make plain their states of mind to us and to themselves. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.2.3] ]] _... ==***different voices placed side-by-side***== create..._  ![[10-2-3.png|50x0]] ^10-2-3 $\qquad$ The deictics that created a disorienting parallax in the openings of speeches in _The Waves_ are here frequently mirrored by abrupt openings that often disguise who or what the speaker is referring to by the use of pronouns:[[Exotext#^10-2-3-1|[10.2.3.1] ]] ^-10-2-3-1 On the horse he rode up to Armstid’s and came back on the horse, leading Armstid’s team. > But time I give him another sup of whisky and supper was about ready, he had done already bought a team from somebody, on a credit. > I happened to look up, and saw her outside the window, looking in. The lack of specificity in these openings gives the effect of being made suddenly privy to an ongoing inner monologue that does not make concessions to our own comprehension, but also a kind of interchangeable identity or vagueness in their own discernment of the minds around them. $\qquad$ Like _The Waves_, the narrative alternates between the corporeal and material fixations of speakers situated in a social world with an almost transcendental strain that detaches the narrative from those predispositions. Where Woolf interpolates different eras of her characters’ lives with impersonal descriptions of the passage of time in nature, Faulkner does so in the single section voiced by the dead woman Addie, with her monologue carrying on after her death as if delivered by a disembodied spirit that has passed into the realm of eternity. This perspective is offered to us around the beginning of the book’s final third, and is bracketed by the pious narratives of Cora and Whitfield that agonise over the fate of Addie’s soul in a manner she herself disdains. In particular, Addie’s perspective patronises Anse’s obliviousness to her, his relationship with his children and patriarchal self-interest at her expense during their marriage and early parenthood:[[Exotext#^10-2-3-2|[10.2.3.2] ]] ^-10-2-3-2 He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. “Like Cora, who could never even cook,” Addie perversely sees Anse and the people around her as non-entities in spite of their own essential sense of identity. As such, her perspective is destabilising to the strict sense of social propriety and seems the most uninhibited and personal, taking the aspect of a confession from someone with nothing left to lose and no stake in the material world. Addie’s sense of self is as private and inaccessible to the others as Percival’s identity, which also can only be glimpsed and abstracted since she is either absent entirely in their narratives or reduced to a mere body of uninhabited flesh, like the dead fish onto which Vardaman projects his own visceral revulsion. Ironically, then, Addie’s articulation of identity has become fixed and ossified by passing out of those dependencies of flesh and family that vacillate the others’ lived experience. This privatising and transcendent perspective is accentuated by Addie’s blindness, which serves to both shutter her perceptual experience from the physical world and recall the blind bard Homer, from whom the novel’s title is adapted. Addie is both that ancient, timeless voice that casts those about her in a vaster scope of meaning, and the alien and inscrutable aspect that guides us to the beyond, the psychopomp whose beckoning embodiment of death renders everything preceding petty and futile. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.2.4] ]] _... an overall ==***impression of instability***==..._  ![[10-2-4.png|50x0]] ^10-2-4 $\qquad$ Death naturally presides over the whole of _As I Lay Dying_, in its title and the activities and mentalities of its characters as they prepare for Addie’s burial, just as Percival’s death preoccupies Woolf’s various narrators in _The Waves_. Grief is not only the expression of lost potential but a moment of utmost epistemic uncertainty as one confronts the unknowability of that which is most certain and unifying in human experience: ­an end. Faulkner’s characters’ habit of prayer also raises an interesting interpretive question in terms of modal analysis. Whitfield quotes himself in retrospect praying on the night of Addie’s death:[[Exotext#^10-2-4-1|[10.2.4.1] ]] ^-10-2-4-1 ‘Just let me not perish before I have begged the forgiveness of the man whom I betrayed,’ I prayed; ‘let me not be too late; let not the tale of mine and her transgression come from her lips instead of mine. She had sworn then that she would never tell it, but eternity is a fearsome thing to face: have I not wrestled thigh to thigh with Satan myself? let me not have also the sin of her broken vow upon my soul. Let not the waters of Thy Mighty Wrath encompass me until I have cleansed my soul in the presence of them whom I injured.’ From a linguistic perspective, we would gloss these sentences as Imperative; yet can we really interpret “_Let me_” in the same sense as Woolf’s characters’ “_Let us_,”, since this is pendant only on providence rather than an enjoinder to the actions of others? By begging not to die before he can make penance, Whitfield makes a palpable statement of intent while also committing himself to the totality of things outside of his control; man proposes, God disposes.[[Exotext#^10-2-4-2|[10.2.4.2] ]] ^-10-2-4-2 $\qquad$ While highly modal languages such as Arabic historically have had a mood specifically for the prayer, the divine Imperative might be thought of as an Optative in another guise. The apostrophe to the absent/transcendent listener which also expresses a speaker’s apparent wish is apparent in the ritualistic forms of address by which characterise religious intonation in the novel:[[Exotext#^10-2-4-3|[10.2.4.3] ]] ^-10-2-4-3 ‘Praise to Thee, O Mighty Lord and King. By this token shall I cleanse my soul and gain again into the fold of Thy undying love.’ > ‘God’s grace upon this house,’ I said. We can consider this a linguistic mode of projecting certainty rather than representing uncertainty – and, in this, we may attempt a coda for the technique of multiplicity as resolved by Woolf’s and Faulkner’s common project. Speculation rarely expresses itself as such; while we have not discussed the concept of faith or believing in terms of factual validity, it is because these concepts by definition are free from basis or contingency. To quote David Hunter _On Believing_:[[Exotext#^10-2-4-4|[10.2.4.4] ]] ^-10-2-4-4 A person can be more or less certain about something she believes, and her belief can be stronger or weaker, but she cannot more or less have the property of believing it […] unlike certainty, believing does not come in degrees. We shall investigate the tones and gradation of the representation of certainty in subsequent chapters, but by way of final remarks we might say that literary multiplicity is one method to console conjectural viewpoints with their own subjective and partial nature when run up against the hard bounds of the impossible and unthinkable and, ultimately, must be reconciled outside of the subjective. The word is everything that is the case; for everything else, there are writers. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.3.1] ]] _==***Subjective framing***==, which will be explored in the following chapter..._  ![[10-3-1.png|50x0]] ^10-3-1 $\qquad$ As opposed to the super-sentence literary technique of multiplicity, the third chapter of this dissertation will feature an analysis of James Joyce’s _Ulysses_ to spotlight a different way of thinking about uncertainty through the lens of early 20th Century British fiction: subjective framing that focuses on the irrationalities, delusions and misapprehensions of its focalisers. Joyce’s novel, while also making conspicuous use of stream of consciousness, multiplicity and news media in its own kaleidoscopic mix of styles, is also conspicuously structured and written according to the somatic, corporeal and contingent bases of human perception. This can be said to occur above the level of sentence content in contaminating the voice of its narrator with the individual bodily reality they inhabit, enforcing the disparity between their literal positionality – distracted by hunger, arousal, memory and so on – that problematise the concordance between reader and subject. While the “fact of a body,” to quote David Foster Wallace, is an immutable feature of human consciousness and Affect Theory and Cognitive Narratology will be major theoretical touchstones to evince the distributed nature of cognition with its appendages and environment, when these contingencies are utilised as a literary technique they disrupt the consensus being communicated by specifying it to the moment and person of its telling. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.4.1] ]] _... narrative self-reference through ==***meta-fiction***== ..._  ![[10-4-1.png|50x0]] ^10-4-1 $\qquad$ The final way into uncertainty will attempt to bring the discussion up towards the present day by investigating the so-called “postmodernist” fiction of the Late 20th Century that is so frequently described in terms of a reaction to the preceding “Modernist” writers and the saturation of media through Western and developed nations like the US. As such, American writers Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon are the exemplars of the final pan-cultural technique of literary uncertainty: narrative self-reference or “meta-fiction” that draws attention to its own speculative nature. Pynchon’s “paranoid” sensibility is clearly influenced by the emergent information technologies of his era whose flat ontology results in obsessive conspiracy theories, while Vonnegut insistently involves himself in his own fictional words to demonstrate the equivalence of narratives to lived fact. This must be held up alongside those contemporary theoretical schools such as Narrative Formalism that indicate a corresponding awareness of the tropes and formulae of written fiction and the manic narrativisation of probabilistic industries like investment, insurance and securities in the discipline of Risk Studies; what links all of these tentacles in our modern media environment must be a growing distrust in media propaganda and awareness of both the manipulative qualities of media and its essential power in influencing our cognitions. ###### $\qquad$[[Introduction#^10-1|[10.4.2] ]] _... this nonetheless provides ==***a final starting point***==..._  ![[10-4-2.png|50x0]] ^10-4-2 $\qquad$ Appreciations of the devices that literary writers have used to disrupt the apparent certainties by which information can be conveyed is increasingly necessary as long-form fiction diminishes its presence in the modern media diet. The fact that so much information is mediated and ingested piecemeal from social media, listicles, blogs and the like means that these long-form devices will become less frequent and less apparent to its consumers. The fact that irony, for example, is so often invisible or ineffectual when deployed on a comment thread is indicative that the text-scape of the internet in particular effaces the positionality of its constituent voices. This is a problem currently being faced in LLM text generators trained exclusively on online content, and the fact that soon much of that content will be the product of these same engines may close a vicious circle of utter conviction and utter hallucination about us. The fact that our lives, our media and our tools exist in such a flat data ontology makes the basis of uncertainty all the more pressing and vital as echo chambers, catered content and “Deep Fakes” are at this moment poised to reinforce our inherent certainties. Doubt is our highest virtue; let us not lose it. -----