Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory

Now, narrative is everywhere. The study of narrative continues to grow more nuanced, capacious, and extensive as it is applied to an ever greater range of fields and disciplines, appearing more prominently in areas from philosophy and law to studies of performance art and hypertexts. Nor is there any end in sight: the most important new movement in religious studies is narrative theology, and there is even a new kind of psychological treatment called "narrative therapy." Cognitive science offers experimental evidence for a claim that only recently was the hyperbolic boast of a practitioner of the nouveau roman: that narrative is the basic vehicle of human knowledge. Or in the words of Mark Turner: "Narrative imagining-story--is the fundamental instrument of thought. [...] It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition

generally" (4-5).

In literary, cultural, and performance studies, narrative theory continues to expand, whether in the burgeoning field of life writing or in the analysis of drama or film. It is no exaggeration to say that the last ten years have seen a renaissance in narrative theory and analysis. Feminism, arguably the most significant intellectual force of the second half of the twentieth century, has (as should be expected) utterly and fruitfully transformed narrative theory and analysis in many ways. Virtually every component of or agent in the narrative transaction has been subjected to sustained examination, including space, closure, character, narration, reader response, linearity and narrative sequence, and even the phenomenon of narrative itself. Some of these reconceptualizations, as Honor Wallace's article in this issue demonstrates, continue to be debated and refined.

Broader-based gender criticism and queer studies steadily followed the rise of feminism, some results of which are likewise evident in this issue. Though rather less work has appeared from other marginalized or "minority" perspectives so far, these are certainly areas that can be expected to provide significant contributions in the near future. Already, several important studies are available, including work on narrative and race, and in postcolonial studies much attention has been devoted to the construction of imperial and national narratives. Other movements in critical theory from Lacanian analysis to "nomadology" to new historicism have been readily applied to narrative study and have often produced impressive results. Elsewhere in the field, a new kind of interdisciplinarity is quietly emerging, as developments in artificial-intelligence theory, hypertext studies, the concept of "possible worlds" in analytical philosophy, and advances in cognitive science are applied to narrative theory. Narrative thus seems to be a kind of vortex around which other discourses orbit in ever closer proximity.

Another interesting development is represented by the work of a number of younger scholars who retain the analytical rigor of traditional or "classical" approaches while moving far beyond the relatively limited theoretical parameters of structuralism to address new questions posed by postmodern texts and positionalities. These theorists (including Ruth Ronen, Tamar Yacobi, Brian McHale, Monika Fludernik, Emma Kafalenos, and Patrick O'Neill) have produced a number of groundbreaking studies that are necessitating a radical rethinking of concepts that hitherto have been foundational to narrative theory: the distinction between fabula and syuzhet, the nature of narrative time, the concept of plot, the notion of voice, and the concept of "the" reader. They have applied analytical methods to irreverent postmodern narrative practices and formulated a number of original positions. Though I suspect that some will reject the name (and perhaps the company) I am constructing for them, I will nevertheless refer to these works as gesturing toward a "Postmodern Narratology."

What is Narrative?

Currently, four basic approaches to the definition of narrative are in use; we may designate these as temporal, causal, minimal, and transactional. The first posits the representation of events in a time sequence as the defining feature of narrative; the second insists that some causal connection, however oblique, between the events is essential; the third and most capacious, Genette's, suggests that any statement of an action or event is ipso facto a narrative, since it implies a transformation or transition from an earlier to a later state; the fourth posits that narrative is simply a way of reading a text, rather than a feature or essence found in a text. In additional to these four, Monika Fludernik in an essay in this volume draws on linguistics to differentiate narrative from other text types.

Of these positions, the most commonly employed are the temporal and the causal stances. [1] Gerald Prince has defined narrative as "the representation of at least two real or fictive events in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other" (Narratology 4); this formulation appears to be the most widely cited of any definition. On the other hand, Dorrit Cohn has recently stated that the following is a fairly consensual definition of narrative: "a series of statements that deal with a causally related sequence of events that concern human (or human-like) beings" (12). Choosing between these two positions can be difficult; for many, mere temporal sequence is too weak a connection, as the following statements may suggest: "Long ago, Theseus slew the minotaur; yesterday, the mail came late." On the other hand, the demand for "causally related" events may seem too severe: many events in a given narrative--especially a picaresque or postmodern one--may have only the most tenuous connection to t he material that surrounds it.

In this instance, it is probably most useful to look to adjacent arts, such as film or painting, in which a group of contiguous representations may or may not constitute a narrative sequence. Here David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson provide a telling test case of a series of cinematic images: "A man tosses and turns, unable to sleep. A mirror breaks. A telephone rings" (55). Alone, this is a non-narrative sequence. But one can postulate connections that would weave these images together into a narrative: the man can't sleep because he's had a fight with his boss, and in the morning is still so angry that he smashes the mirror while shaving; next, his telephone rings and he learns that his boss has called to apologize. In this example, causal ties are necessary to produce the work's narrative status; without them, it is merely a suggestive montage.

My own preferred formulation is the following: narrative is a representation of a causally related series of events. [2] This definition would include verbal as well as nonverbal narratives (in painting, ballet, mime, etc); "causally related" would be understood as "generally connected" or part of the same general causal matrix--a much looser, more oblique, and indefinite relation than direct entailment; and it is further assumed that numerous nonnarrative elements may comfortably reside within a larger narrative framework, as Porter Abbott demonstrates so effectively elsewhere in this issue. But, as Gerald Prince goes on to suggest in the ingenious questions that conclude this volume, the story may not end even here. What are we to do with dreams, prophecies, memories, and recipes--all representations of causally related events in a time sequence (though many dreamers are notoriously lax in supplying causal connections)? I leave these for other theorists to tease out.

The Narratives of Narrative Theory

In America, a single, rarely questioned master narrative of modern critical theory has dominated literary studies for some time. It is an extremely familiar account; one of its versions runs as follows: at the beginning of the twentieth century, criticism was dominated by philological studies, historical and biographical speculation, and an impressionistic humanism. These were supplanted by various types of formalist approaches, one important strand of which culminated in the structuralist promise of a comprehensive, rigorous, linguistically grounded, objective, disinterested science of literature. Beginning in the late sixties, a number of poststructuralist theories challenged this orthodoxy and soon overthrew it, setting in its place a new series of issues, questions, methods, and valorizations that seriously addressed ideological issues, established the positionality of the reader, examined historical contexts, and affirmed the inherent impossibility of disinterestedness in such endeavors. Just as formali sm had rightly succeeded the facile yet barren impressionism of earlier humanistic critics, the ideologically sophisticated and politically engaged schools that succeeded the formalists swept away the mania for structure, spurious objectivity, pretentious system building, false claims of organicism, and scientistic excess.

This master narrative is so well entrenched that it is rarely questioned or indeed even noticed, and occasionally attempts are even made to map it (however clumsily) onto the very different history of narrative theory. These attempts invariably prove inadequate; indeed, the history of narrative theory itself contradicts the critical narrative just outlined. Like all seamless, streamlined historical accounts that follow a teleological pattern and lead to a conclusion that is both satisfying and inevitable, the poststructuralist master narrative is palpably untrue; the rise, fall, and metamorphosis of critical positions over time is much more complex than such a simple pattern can express.

As Jerome McGann has stated, "history is a field of indeterminacies, with movements to be seen running across lateral and recursive lines as well as linearly, and by strange diagonals and various curves, tangents, and even within random patterns" (197). The same of course is true of the history of criticism and theory: it is necessary to radically narrow the definition of what constitutes "Theory," to minimize the formalists' fascination with parody and defamiliarization, and to posit an artificially unified poststructuralist subject that obscures its multiple schisms in order for this narrative to seem compelling. [3] Poststructuralist insight into the interestedness of all discourse also contains a blindness that does not seem to allow this knowledge to be reflexively applied to the narratives it tells about itself.

In narrative theory proper, a very different scenario has unfolded, as the more traditional approaches (neoAristotelian criticism, structuralism, linguistics) have been augmented though not displaced by important new work grounded in feminism, deconstruction, new historicism, "minority" poetics, and queer studies. The exclusionary antagonisms that have fueled theoretical debates elsewhere in criticism and theory are often absent here; the choices available to the narrative theorist include the option of "both/and." Furthermore, several distinct kinds of interaction can be seen at work: we find the uneven incorporation of some poststructuralist methods and concerns into existing narratological practices--some want only a taste; others take large drafts; all generally choose carefully which nonformalist discourses they will embrace. Then there are what might be termed "maverick poststructuralists" like Peter Rabinowitz, Michal Peled Ginsburg, and Jay Clayton, whose analyses are as vital as they are difficult t o categorize. In the writings of yet other narratologists, poststructuralism does not have much discernible effect at all.

A striking feature of the contemporary theoretical scene is the continued significant presence of older schools. Marxist and Freudian paradigms of narrative analysis have been active and productive for most of the century, despite regular reformulations of and internecine struggles over central features and methods (indeed, it is one of the ironies of the history of criticism that revised versions of these nineteenth century doctrines have routinely been called "post" structuralist). Similarly, models derived from both linguistics and the basic approach of the Chicago school have yielded impressive results for over seventy years and continue to do so. Many of the authors of more traditional though classic works have gone on to produce ingenious accounts that extend or exceed the boundaries of their earlier formulations: I am thinking here of studies like Gerard Genette's work on the paratext, Dorrit Cohn's analysis of simultaneous narration (96-108), and Gerald Prince on the "disnarrated."

Still more illustrative is the unlikely history of the morphological approach to the fundamental elements and transformations of story. [4] In the twenties, Vladimir Propp developed this framework as part of his study of the Russian folktale, and derived thirty-one basic story functions from the thousands of examples he had investigated. Soon after, formalism was suppressed by Stalin, and Propp's work was thereby prevented from being widely known in literary circles for many years. In the sixties and seventies, however, it served as a touchstone for several structuralists (including Greimas, Bremond, Todorov, and Prince) who sought to extend and revise Propp's model and map out a universal narrative grammar. This project, after generating considerable initial interest, was rapidly abandoned and had nearly expired by the end of the eighties; it came to appear to many, especially in the U. S., to mark the worst extremes of scientistic excess and reductionism. Suddenly, however, it re-emerged in slightly altere d form as a central aspect of some types of cognitivist approaches to narrative (see Herman). Against all odds, narrative grammar is back in fashion again. It would seem that in the history of narrative theory, old models don't die a timely death--they simply pause for a few years before being resurrected in a moderately new form. In fact, it is hard to think of a major tradition of narrative analysis that has been definitively abandoned; even Northrop Frye's somewhat hoary archetypal theory has recently been refashioned within Allen Tilley's work on "plot snakes."

The actual evolution and development of narrative theory cannot begin to be grafted onto the master narrative of critical theory as told by the poststructuralists. Indeed, the story of modern narrative theory does not fit well into the frame of any narrative history. There are far too many story strands, loose ends, abrupt turns, and unmotivated reappearances of forgotten figures and theoretical approaches to fit easily within any one narrative structure. The history of modern narrative theory is more accurately depicted as a cluster of contiguous histories rather than a single, comprehensive narrative.

Noting comparable problems in the writing of literary history, David Perkins recently suggested that one is ultimately forced to choose between either a necessarily false narrative history or the unwieldy and intellectually deficient form of the encyclopedia (53-60). I suggest instead that for both literary and critical history we use the model of the chronicle, with its minimal causality, openness to multiple stories, and abandonment of teleological trajectories, in order to represent more accurately the purposive clutter and unpredictable successions of the polymorphous past. [5] The chronicle form allows us to chart the varied trajectories of several disparate, competing theories in operation at the same time; it encourages us to note the continuities, interruptions, permutations, and divisions of these models overtime. Eschewing a simple, linear, teleological model, we can be more alert to the abrupt emergences, hibernations, revivals, forkings, and disappearances of different critical schools over time.

The essays in this volume amply illustrate the wide range of impressive work being done in narrative theory today as well as the persistence and continued utility of many earlier explanatory models. The first three intervene directly in ongoing debates involving different strands of narrative theory. In "Desire and the Female Protagonist," Honor Wallace critically examines basic aspects of feminist narrative theory, in particular the opposition between lyric and narrative and the frequent valorization of the lyric mode as a progressive alternative to the masculinist biases of traditional narrative trajectories. In "Maurice in Time," Jesse Matz argues persuasively for a new kind of narrative temporality in Forster that he terms "tenselessness"; though eccentric to typical modernist deployments of time, "tenselessness" gestures toward a homosexual form that would elude constricting notions of "identity." Eyal Amiran analyzes the work of three central poststructuralist theorists (Peter Brooks, Deleuze and Guatt ari, and Michael Fried) and demonstrates how each ultimately confuses figuration with poetics, just as the earlier theorists they critique had done; Amiran goes on to offer an approach to the text that eludes this and other comparably faulty binary oppositions. Daniel Punday in turn imagines what a thoroughgoing narratology of the body would look like and shows how basic concepts of narrative theory (character, plot, space) depend on an understanding of bodies that has yet to be adequately articulated.

The next three essays look at the concept and definition of narrative from different vantage points. Philippe Carrard examines three types of modern history writing both to determine whether a genuinely nonnarrative history exists and what its features might be. Building on cognitive science, Porter Abbott, by contrasting the dissimilar ways in which "narrative" and "literature" function, provides a better understanding of each while revealing the large conceptual gap between them. Monika Fludernik, drawing on the resources of linguistics, utilizes text-type theory to better comprehend narrative as a discourse type.

The issue concludes with two important investigations into basic concepts of narrative analysis that turn out to have significant implications for more general theoretical concerns. David Herman on the one hand, scrutinizing the concept of reflexivity, differentiates it sharply from metalanguage and identifies a distinctive type of "lateral" reflexivity that produces a series of changing versions or "self-paraphrases" of basic material, rather than a hierarchical order of distinct levels--a differentiation found elsewhere in narrative discourse, and one that illuminates core cognitive principles. Dorrit Cohn, on the other hand, breaks down the unwieldy category of "unreliable narration" into the more useful subtypes of "misinformed" and "discordant"; in doing so, she discloses discordant narration to be an exclusive property of works of narrative fiction.

In addition, further demonstrating the utility and consequences of the conceptual frameworks in question, the theory in these essays is in almost every case applied to--and helps to reinterpret--an array of narratives by Fay Weldon, E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison, Patrick Modiano, and Joseph Conrad. If one may venture a single, self-conscious teleological surmise, it is that narrative theory is reaching a higher level of sophistication and comprehensiveness and that it is very likely to become increasingly central to literary studies now that the dominant critical paradigm has begun to fade and a new (or at least another) critical model is struggling to emerge.

Brian Richardson (brian_richardson@umail.umd.edu) teaches in the English department of the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (1997) and several articles on different aspects of narrative theory, including time, sequence, second-person narration, reflexivity, and reader response.

Notes

(1.) The limitation of most transactional definitions is that they usually seem to beg--if not miss entirely--the central fact that some texts (e.g., an anecdote) produce or reward a narrative response more than other kinds of texts (such as a mathematical equation). The main problem with Genette's conception ("as soon as there is an action or an event, even a single one, there is a story because there is a transformation" [19]) is that it is far too inclusive to be of much use; virtually any description at all (not only, "The sun is up," but also "The sun is hot") thus becomes a narrative, since it implies a transition from an earlier state to a later one. I believe that narrative, however, presupposes a minimal amplitude. Several of these rival definitions are discussed at some length in my book, Unlikely Stories (89-107). For Prince's recent assessment of Genette, see "Revisiting Narrativity."

(2.) This definition was first proposed in Unlikely Stories (105), which includes additional discussion of this issue and its varied theorists. I see no reason to limit narrative, as Cohn does, to human agents (including anthropomorphic entities); the story of a glacier's advance and retreat or the development of a solar system strikes me as being eminently narrative.

(3.) A deconstruction of the poststructuralist account would point to feminism's independence of (and feminists' occasional hostility to) deconstruction and psychoanalysis and note that for most of the twentieth century Marxism and psychoanalysis have, for instance, opposed rather than complemented each other as interpretive projects.

(4.) The extreme brevity of the following account necessarily collapses some important distinctions between different practitioners; for a more thorough version of the relations between Propp and the structuralists--and among the structuralists themselves--see Culler (205-24) or Ronen.

(5.) I use the term "chronicle" as Hayden White has described it: situated halfway between narrative proper and the purely chronological annals, it "often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it. More specifically, the chronicle usually is marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure. It does not conclude so much as simply terminate" (5). For a chroniclestyle account of the history of modern fiction, see my "Re-Mapping the Present," which elaborates some of the arguments set forth here.

Works Cited

Note: See the general bibliography of this issue for full citation of works mentioned but not cited in this article.

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 1990.

Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Herman, David. "Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology." PMLA 112 (1997): 1046-59.

McGann, Jerome. "History, Herstory, Theirstory, Ourstory." Theoretical Issues in Literary History. Ed. David Perkins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.196-205.

Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Amsterdam: Mouton, 1982.

___. "Revisiting Narrativity." Grenzuberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext. Ed. Walter Grunzweig and Andreas Solbach. Tubingen: Narr, 1999. 43-51.

Richardson, Brian. "Re-Mapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction." Twentieth-Century Literature 43 (1997) 29 1-309.

___. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1.997.

Ronen, Ruth. "Paradigm Shift in Plot Models: An Outline of the History of Narratology." Poetics Today 11(1990): 817-42.

Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

White, Hayden. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality." On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 1-23.

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