Indulgence in wordplay is a chief marker of Lorrie Moore's prose. No matter the voice or context, her protagonists find refuge in words' multiple meanings. Puns, near-anagrams, and other verbal clevernesses are strewn throughout her tales, from the definition of “mistress” (to put one's shoes on the wrong feet) in Self-Help (1985), to the structural premise of reconfigured relationships in Anagrams (1986), to a character's willful misnaming of “Barama” in Moore's 2008 tale of American politics, “Foes.” Her characters are often shaped by their language and their response to others' words more than by their responses to physical events, giving speech acts more import than actual actions; this emphasis is especially clear in Anagrams, with its experimental, eponymous construction and its protagonist's dependence on imaginary characters. Speech act theory provides a useful lens for looking at the significance of linguistic acts in this text, as the divide between constative and performative language is particularly porous in Moore's work: declarations become true language events, the linguistic equivalent of a slammed door or child's caress.

Although all storytelling can be viewed as a type of speech act between author and reader, Moore's characters themselves use speech acts to create worlds within her provided fictional worlds. The temporary focus on a specific turn of phrase is a respite from the tension and interpersonal conflict experienced by her protagonists, but, more than that, speech acts invent new characters (Georgianne in Anagrams) or foster the development of characters, such as in the lies of Berie in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?. But language is chiefly used as a bandage to cover the gouged wounds of failing, or failed, relationships. Moore's characters are rarely looking for the “right” – consoling, helpful – words; they instead choose imaginative wordplay, or imagination itself, as an escape from serious discussion or confrontation.

Speech act theory has a decades-long history of application to literature, for obvious reasons: the existence of an artifact of language, with its raft of interpretations and (one would hope) careful word choices throughout, provides ample raw material on which to test theories of language. As Leah Hewitt explains,

Victoria Myers emphasizes speech act theory's emphasis on “the subtext of the conversation, the barely suppressed concerns that are communicated. In addition … it points to the listener's activity as an interpreter.”Footnote ² Speech act theory and cognitive pragmatics both open up the way we think about language and emphasize the role of successful communicative acts, ideas that are key in much literary analysis as well.

However, J. L. Austin's formulations of modern speech act theory, as set forth in his William James Lectures at Harvard and collected into How to Do Things with Words (1962), specifically exclude literary works from his interpretations; he, and later John R. Searle, single them out as “nonserious” discourse. Various critics have pushed back at that omission and applied the theory to create new literary analyses: from Stanley Fish, who applies Austin's and Searle's ideas of speech act theory to a reading of Coriolanus, to J. Hillis Miller, who uses the work of Austin, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man to illuminate a reading of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.Footnote ³ Mary Louise Pratt's book-length work on the topic, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, is especially useful in making the argument that literary language is pertinent and should be explored from the speech act perspective: “Since they are utterances, literary works by definition form part of the data for which linguistic theory must account. Both linguists and critics have been at fault in regarding the linguistic analysis of literature as some kind of special case.”Footnote ⁴

Speech act theory is particularly useful for analyzing Moore's Anagrams not only because of the book's anagrammatic structure, but also for its emphasis on wordplay and the interlocking worlds created through language in its final section. Its rearrangement of characters, vocations, places, names, and musical and artistic works creates a kaleidoscopic effect: one twist of the cylinder and the same fragments of glass create new patterns, but the fragments themselves do not change. Rather than a kaleidoscope or a mosaic, however, an anagram is something “done with words,” to borrow from Austin: a creation of a new word from what was there before. This highlighting of a new wor(l)d created through language emphasizes the imaginative nature of all fiction as well as the power of language. In an interview with Barbara Lovenheim, Moore explains, “Overall, the novel is about the enterprise of making fictions … I was inspired by the idea of an anagram, which is the rearrangement of characters to make a new word. What I did was rearrange characters to make new worlds.”Footnote ⁵

The novel's protagonist, Benna, makes this idea explicit:

From the reader's perspective, the first part, at least, of this pronouncement is not quite so: meaning survives this “reshuffling” of characters, as themes of loss, loneliness, and dislocation permeate the novel's various scenarios. But all the tales do bear out Benna's assertion that saying the inappropriate word, the clever phrase, or the close-but-not-quite-same thing staves off intimacy. Throughout Anagrams, characters, especially Benna, choose to joke or pun rather than risk emotional connection.

Looking at the formulations that Austin first posited helps to reveal the evidence of speech acts in the banter of Moore's novel. His essays in How to Do Things were developed over the course of several years, as he lectured at Oxford on “Words and Deeds” from 1952 to 1954 before presenting lectures deriving from these notes at Harvard in 1955. The lectures reveal the limitations that he discovered in his theories, and he revised the categories that he initially proposed, continuing to rethink and develop his theories until his death in 1960. However, some of his early distinctions still help us better understand how language works, especially in a text as linguistically adroit and structurally unusual as Moore's Anagrams.

Austin initially places utterances into two categories, constative and performative. Constative statements are descriptions, with effectiveness that can be judged according to the truth or falsity of the statement. Performatives, on the other hand, use language to perform an act: to change reality. Examples would be a christening, a marriage, a knighting, or even an arrest; when a police officer says, “You are under arrest,” you are, with the statement of those words rather than the application of handcuffs or being put into a police car, under arrest. The effectiveness of performatives is assessed by achievement of their end, “whether or not they ‘fail to come off in special ways.’”Footnote ⁷ This achievement can be precluded, for example, by someone without the authority to make the statement trying to do so. A case in point would be, if I, a non-ordained college professor (as opposed to a Justice of the Peace), say, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” – the couple in question is still not married. Performatives that fail, for this or other reasons, are termed “infelicities”; they are “unhappy.”

One need not ponder this long to realize a few shortcomings of this bifurcation. For one thing, many constatives have the potential to create a change in the speaker's emotional reality, which would constitute a performative act. For example, if I say to my companion, “I love you,” I have issued a constative – a statement descriptive of my feelings – but the hearer's world is changed at this point, for better or worse, since s/he now realizes the depth of my feeling and all that might entail. Another example would be receiving news of the death of someone dear: the statement relating the death is a constative and can clearly be tested in terms of its truth value, but it has a performative effect, changing the reality of the hearer from a world in which a loved one is alive to one in which s/he is not. In order to accommodate this problem, Austin reorganizes speech acts into three categories: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. “Locutionary acts” becomes the term for the most limited conception of constative acts; they are simply any type of grammatically functional sentence in the language (e.g. “The book is on the table”). Next, as John R. Searle, Ferenc Kiefer, and Manfred Bierwisch explain, illocutionary acts include “making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc.”; the type of the illocutionary act is referred to as its “force.” Searle ultimately delineates

Perlocutionary acts involve the reaction of the hearer to the statement, which was ignored in the previous delineation of speech act types, but which clearly is involved in the scope and effect of the speech act in question. To return to Searle et al.:

Theorists go on to “distinguish the illocutionary act, which is a speech act proper, from the achievement of the perlocutionary effect, which may or may not be achieved by specifically linguistic means.”Footnote ¹⁰

The chief illocutionary act that Moore's protagonist Benna engages in throughout Anagrams is joking, oftentimes through wordplay, especially puns, or snatches of song (which themselves often involve puns). When, in “Water,” she is devastated by the news that her graduate student has a wife and daughter, she makes a joke about her thunderstruck silence: ‘“Give to seizure what is seizure's,’ she adds, aiming for hilarity” (59). The placement of these jokes makes it clear that they are also performing another speech act: that of avoiding the conversation, turning the topic away from real emotion, and therefore avoiding intimacy and any emotional connection or vulnerability. This is so even when Benna is clearly aware of a social convention or personal need to the contrary: when Eleanor tells her of her boyfriend Newton's affair with a woman who works for AT&T, Benna thinks, “Sympathy is important at a time like this. ‘God,’ I finally say. ‘I'm so glad I have MCI’” (157).

This verbal tic occurs throughout the novel, no matter Benna's role: in “Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers,” after Benna tells Gerard briefly about her husband's fatal car accident, he murmurs, “It must have been devastating,” to which she responds by singing ‘“Oh what a beautiful mourning,’ just that line. ‘I don't know,’ she said, and shrugged” (5). Her song – both the punning words and the incongruity of singing a show number in a serious moment – deflects the intensity of the conversation and Gerard's sympathy; her “I don't know” and shrug seem mild by comparison, and the conversational thread has been snapped by the interposition of the song. In “Strings Too Short to Use,” when Eleanor asks when Benna and Gerard last made love, Benna sings “January, February, June, or July” (14), and once again the conversation stops. In both of these situations, Benna has the power in the relationship, but the technique is not linked to either preservation of power or self-preservation in the face of it, as is shown by her and Gerard's use of song lyrics to indirectly represent or avoid any direct discussion of feelings:

The perlocutionary effect of this joking, whether through music or words, is to distance the listener and make the interlocutor stop the line of inquiry or self-revelation; in this instance the words are accompanied by Benna's nonverbal rejection, as she also refuses to make eye contact with Gerard and immediately leaves.

As Moore explains, “Most of the humor I'm interested in has to do with awkwardness: the makeshift theater that springs up between people at really awkward times – times of collision, emergency, surrealism, aftermath, disorientation.”Footnote ¹¹ In much of her work, jokes help to stave off uncomfortable or revealing conversation, but they also serve as a safety mechanism for the speakers themselves. In an assessment of the 1989 short story “You're Ugly, Too,” Robert Chodat questions why the protagonist, a female in her early thirties much like Benna, might “respond to the world in the joking way that she does … one of the leading [reasons] would have to be the way in which, throughout the story, death – its presence, its threat, its inevitability – lurks just around the corner.”Footnote ¹² He goes on to discuss the work of Ted Cohen, who, in his philosophical analysis of jokes, comments,

In that story, Zoë has a growth in her abdomen, and other death references occur throughout the tale. Chodat continues, “Moore's comedy escapes the charge of frivolity in part because she shows a clear-eyed awareness of an ‘ultimate power’ and an ‘incomprehensible’ abyss.”Footnote ¹⁴

Moore herself, despite her reputation for humor, “considers the essence of her work to be sad.”Footnote ¹⁵ In a 1998 NPR interview, host Jacki Lyden questions Moore about her characters' use of punning, jokes, and wordplay, especially when faced with despair or tragedy, to which the author responds,

The “unfaceable” is all around Benna in her various anagrammatic permutations: the deaths of her mother and her husband, the frightening lump in her breast, her abortion, her lackluster and unfulfilling teaching job (and its ultimate loss), the incestuous maneuvering of her brother, her longing for children, her chagrin with herself for not finishing her doctoral thesis, her inability to function in intimate relationships and resulting loneliness. So perhaps it is not so surprising that she retreats to the protection of verbal ripostes, especially given her ineffectiveness when she tries to communicate otherwise.

The few times that she is willing to have a direct conversation about intimate issues, she runs aground in various ways: when she tries to tell Eleanor about her pregnancy in “Strings Too Short to Use,” she mistakes someone else's feet for Eleanor's in the next bathroom stall and “confessed [her] entire life story to someone in black boots” (31). This poor timing continues to plague her, as she tells Gerard of her pregnancy moments before a cast party celebrating the opening night of his rock opera, despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of opportunity to discuss the ramifications of this revelation.

In “The Nun of That,” her demands on Darrel for intimacy increase, apparently in inverse relation to his willingness to cooperate. Their conversations in bed are some of the rare occasions where Benna pushes for connection rather than shrinking from it, but to no avail:

Rather than retreat into an easy joke, or even a hurt, snide remark, she continues to engage with Darrel, telling him, “I'm lying here falling in love with you and jeopardizing my job to boot” (151). Unfortunately, instead of generating the affirmation and affection Benna craves, the exchange ends by her giving a “whispered shriek” before “burst[ing] into tears” (152).

Her most serious confrontation with Gerard that is not avoided with jokes or wordplay ends no better. The entire exchange is given without any direct quotations at all, as though even to relate it in exact words would be too much for the first-person narrator:

Given the speed of this conversation's decline, and the damage it does to Gerard and Benna's relationship, perhaps it is not surprising that she avoids direct confrontation.

Just after this scene with Gerard, Benna and Darrel also have their final argument, when she picks a fight with him about his choice of profession. He tries to avoid both topic and argument by approaching her sexually, but she “maneuver[s] away, squirm[s] on the sofa”: ‘“Don't change the subject,’ I say. ‘Look, I want to talk about this’” (191). However, her professed interest in talking to him as an adult is belied by her sneering and laughing at him until he finally says the unthinkable (as she did in the fight with Gerard), and despite his apologies she orders him from her house. She afterwards reflects that, as any good Darwinian would attest, “The function of disguise is to convince the world you're not there, or if you are, you should not be eaten. You camouflage yourself as imperious teacher, as imperious lover, as imperious bitch, simply to hang out and survive” (194). But from a speech act perspective, the camouflage is reality. The self she enacts – the funny but at times imperious bitch – is who she is, a self that is constructed through her avoidance and choice of language. The perlocutionary effect of her comments in both these exchanges is to persuade both men that they should leave her alone. She may not “be eaten,” but she is not going to be passing her genes along, either.

Benna herself admits the power of language for the opposite end: “Words, I think, words are all you need for love – you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting that way” (148). Her assertion, while ostensibly championing language, actually devalues it from a constative and illocutionary standpoint; words become useless because they are not guaranteed any truth value. At some point, one of these phrases may become a performative speech act, creating love by saying it into being (and in turn at that point becoming a successful constative speech act), but in the meantime one is left with meaningless declarations.

Benna may believe that words can “create” love, but, as she proves, words are all one needs to destroy it, more effectively and surely: when Benna tells her husband “I hate you” (114), when he later tells her that he never wants to see her again (129), and when she affirms to Darrel that he is “just one of [her] fucking students” (194), these are all language acts that have the same power to destroy a relationship as any single expression of intimacy has for building one, or more power than that. The hostile language of disengagement from a relationship has a powerful perlocutionary effect, as the ensuing suitcase-packings and door-slammings make clear.

These language acts can be seen as discrete parts of “language games that several speakers play by performing together a joint action rather than … distinct individual activities.”Footnote ¹⁷ Cognitive pragmatists embrace this view, terming conversations “behavior games” that are initiated and maintained through communication between two people who

Until one recognizes what behavior game is in play, all manner of miscommunication is possible, as one cannot truly understand the utterance or its intent. To integrate both Moore's explanation and my earlier example, saying “I love you” while “bidding” in the behavior game of a true expression of my feelings would be very different from saying “I love you” when I do not actually have that emotion but am instead hazarding words, in hopes that the emotion will eventually fill the vessel I have created through language. That would be a distinctly different behavior game. Our “shared belief” would be different from the “common belief” in the latter instance, while “shared” and “common” belief would be synonymous in the expression of true feelings.

This approach provides a new way of thinking about communication within the text of Anagrams, where people often speak at ostensible cross-purposes. If one person answers another with a non sequitur, speech act theory would engage the cooperative principle in order to make sense of the dialogue. The goal of communication is ostensibly to be understood, and there is thus a pact (the cooperative principle) between the speaker and the audience that what is spoken will contribute to the exchange in some way; the hearer must then pause and think of other reasons for the non sequitur.Footnote ¹⁹ Options could include, among others, a speaker's desire to inject humor into the dialogue, to change the subject, or to insist on having a conversational turn. This analysis, however, requires thinking about the motivation on the part of the speaker. Looking at the earlier conversational non sequitur, a pragmatist would try to distinguish the behavioral game being enacted in the conversation and see how this utterance constitutes a bid, or move, in that game.

One could theorize that in any fictional narrative, the author is creating a behavior game in which the reader enters into the suspension of disbelief and thus participates in the game of the narrative. This approach proves illuminating in terms of looking at “The Nun of That” as well as the text as a whole. Much postmodern literature, including Anagrams, requires patience and perseverance on the part of the reader to pull disparate parts together and make sense of them. This negative capability, a postponement of the gratification of meaning, draws on the cooperative principle in order to assure the reader that the gratification of meaning will be forthcoming, that the pact of communication of an idea from writer is intended to occur. Even if the ultimate theme of the text is that there is no meaning, an understanding of existential futility is the payoff for the investment of time and mental energy in reading the text. In order to get to that deferred meaning, however, one must try to understand what the text is doing, what behavior game the author is engaged in.

Moore's behavior game in Anagrams is unusual, not just because of the reshuffled, anagrammatical nature of the stories, but because of the worlds within those stories, not all of which are true within the fictional world itself. Four short stories and a novella comprise the book, which is hardly the conventional structure for a novel; then embedded within the novella, like a Russian doll, are two ongoing character lines that are only real to the protagonist. Although Benna introduces both Eleanor and Georgianne as imaginary (64–65), they are so central to her existence, and Georgianne in particular is so lovingly drawn, that despite the specific statements to the contrary, the reader is unsure that they are, indeed, imaginary. As Carol Hill notes in her review, “Benna loves Georgianne intensely, and in this love, which is sustained only by words, we discover how much this novel is about language … It is a tribute to Lorrie Moore's talent that the reader believes in Georgianne.”Footnote ²⁰ As we are drawn into the “reality” of Georgianne's existence through Benna's everyday experiences of their interaction, the common belief between reader and narrator shifts to a shared one: whereas the reader thinks that the behavior game is a story as bid in a game about loneliness and the intimate comfort of a child, the narrator's story is actually much more stark than the reader initially recognizes, the protagonist more isolated, and the game more serious and tragic.

All of the novel's characters, of course, initially only exist in Moore's mind, although by participating in the behavior game of fiction readers add Benna to the roster of imaginary, literary characters whom we feel we know well and whose actions, motivations, and responses we can speculate about as we would those of someone who actually exists. The twist in “The Nun of That” is that some of its characters – Georgianne and Eleanor – only exist in Benna's imaginary world within Moore's fictional world. The imaginary world within the “real” world of the text places us at the same point that Chodat locates us in his examination of the imaginative jokes in “You're Ugly, Too”: “smack in the middle of debates about the ontological status of fiction … What kind of reality does a fiction represent? What sort of world does it depict, and how is it related to other worlds that are said to exist?” Chodat later answers this question using Nelson Goodman's “worldmaking” theory, the postmodern view that the difference between fiction and fact is “undecidable, since all facts are shaped by human needs, purposes, and entrenched customs. Facts are, in short, constructed, and relative to the particular world under consideration.”Footnote ²¹ This theory makes all stories equally fictitious and factual and brings us back to Benna's remark about words being all we need, whether they are true or simply have the potential to be. When she makes this utterance in the novel, Benna is speaking of declarations of love, but her declarations of her daughter's existence and her continued verbal representations of the child show a desire that perhaps one of these statements will come true as well.

The creation of Georgianne lies in Benna's matter-of-fact introduction: “My imaginary daughter, Georgianne Michelle Carpenter, is six and will soon be in the first grade” (65). This simple statement is both a constative and a performative act, as it brings her into being. Georgianne does not exist except in Benna's imagination, expressed in the text through language. Benna's revelation of Georgianne and Eleanor to Gerard is not an illocutionary act of the same force as the utterances that created them, as her words do not convince him of the reality (or even the significance) of her two companions. It is instead a constative act that ultimately leads to her dismantling of the imaginary daughter, but that effect is not caused by the statement. The utterance is truly a constative act with a perlocutionary effect on Gerard.

It also, however, has other perlocutionary effects, most notably on Benna, as it forces her to face reality. That evening she “let[s] her go, though it's hard” (203) when Georgianne asks to go eat with the neighbors, and says that “Eleanor, too, seems to have become unavailable. Perhaps both she and George are simply being resentful. I have exposed them, like opening an oven door on a couple of soufflés: They will never forgive me” (204). The most telling evidence for the profound shift in Benna's identity caused by her revelation to Gerard is that Eleanor never returns, and Georgianne only on the last two pages of the book, when in the face of so much loss – Gerard's death, her job's termination, and the dashing of any hope of a normal relationship with her dysfunctional and incestuous brother – she reinvents Georgianne as “a gift I have given myself, a lozenge of pretend” (225). The degree to which Benna's sense of self has been shaken by the loss of both her imaginary companions and Gerard is also shown by the shift from first-person narration to third-person; as soon as she begins to process the news of Gerard's death, she becomes “the teacher,” escaping into a different role and identity. But she is no longer “the teacher” of anything, having lost her job, and the entire next section (IV) of the novella is written in the third person, with Benna named as the protagonist. Both we and she experience her world, including her encounter with her brother, at a remove, and it is only when Georgianne reappears that the first-person point of view does as well.

The reader's experience of Benna's world at arm's length, and especially our shock along with Gerard's at realizing (or remembering) that Eleanor and Georgianne are imaginary, indicates a perlocutionary effect on us, as well, from Benna's revelation to Gerard. Austin explains that utterances have the potential to “produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons.”Footnote ²² In this case all three entities experience perlocutionary effects. My own experience of surprise at finding that these characters are unreal has been echoed by the majority of students in every class or group in which I have covered this text. Students uniformly initially recognize that the characters are invented, but this piece of information – vital though it is – gets lost in the experience of Benna's interactions with the two, their loving banter and quotidian concerns. We immerse ourselves in Benna's imaginary world, participating in it in the same fashion we do the ostensibly “real” world of the novella, and we thus understand the depth of her loss since we also experience the shock that there is no wise-cracking voice of conscience or small, snuggly source of unconditional love.

Benna's speech acts ultimately prove fruitless in holding off the pain of intimacy and loss, but what comforts her in her isolated world is the pleasure of imagination and verbal ripostes. Moore comments,

The “reckless ride” of speech acts through the novel – constative, performative; illocutionary, perlocutionary – takes both reader and Benna through a panorama of failed relationships, dotted with the genuine laughter of shared witticisms and the forlorn respites of wordplay and bad puns. Her performative reinvention of Georgianne at the end of the novel is the championing of imagination both as escape and as means of survival: ultimately words may not be all we need, but sometimes they are all we have.