Handbook of Narrative Analysis / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Handbook of Narrative Analysis / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0803273495
- ISBN-13:
- 9780803273498
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2005
- Publisher:
- Nebraska Paperback
- ISBN-10:
- 0803273495
- ISBN-13:
- 9780803273498
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2005
- Publisher:
- Nebraska Paperback
Handbook of Narrative Analysis / Edition 1
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Overview
In addition to discussing classical theorists such as Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and Seymour Chatman, Handbook of Narrative Analysis presents precursors (such as E. M. Forster), related theorists (Franz Stanzel, Dorrit Cohn), and a large variety of postclassical critics. Among the latter, particular attention is paid to the ethics of reading, gender theory, and "possible worlds."
Not content to consider theory as an end in itself, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck use two stories by contemporary authors as a touchstone to illustrate each narrative approach, thereby illuminating the practical implications of theoretical preferences and ideological leanings. Marginal glosses guide the reader through discussions of theoretical issues, and an extensive bibliography points readers to the most current publications in the field. Written in an accessible style, this handbook combines a comprehensive treatment of its subject with a user-friendly format appropriate for specialists and nonspecialists alike
Luc Herman is a professor of American literature and literary theory at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He is a Pynchon specialist and the author of Concepts of Realism. Bart Vervaeck is a professor of Dutch literature and literary theory at the Free University Brussels. He is the author of a study on postmodern Dutch literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803273498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska Paperback |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2005 |
| Series: | Frontiers of Narrative |
| Edition description: | Older Edition |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 6.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Before and Surrounding Structuralism
Structuralism has undoubtedly offered the most popular theory of narrative. It was able to build on an age-old tradition, a lot of which it rejected. Yet structuralism also held on to a number of classical concepts, some of which we will explain in this chapter. In the course of these explanations we will also present a few more recent theories that do not really belong to the structuralist canon but that have made important contributions and have very often led to interesting discussions with structuralism. We do not aim to be exhaustive or, for that matter, to provide a history of narratology. Instead we mention only those theoreticians and concepts that still figure in narratological discussions.
1. Story and Plot
If narratology is the theory of the narrative text, then it should first offer a definition of narrative. Traditionally a narrative is considered to be a sequence of events. This formulation is highly problematic, and some of the problems it entails seem to defy solution. First of all, this definition simply shifts the problem in defining narrative to the equally problematic concept of "event." Of what does the event in "Pegasian" consist? Rather than a narrative, isn't this text perhaps a sketch or a scene?
Second, one could ask what kind of sequence of events appears in a narrative. Can we already speak of a narrative when one event follows the other in time? Or does the link between the events have to be stronger? For instance, does there have to be a link of cause and effect? In order to answer this question, the novelist and theoretician E. M. Forster introduced his famous distinction between story and plot. For the time being we will work with these two terms, but later on in this book we will replace plot with a pair of technical terms gleaned from structuralism: narrative and narration. According to Forster, story is the chronological sequence of events. Plot refers to the causal connection between those events. Forster provides the following example of a story: "The king died and then the queen died." This sequence becomes a plot in the following sentence: "The king died and then the queen died of grief."
Unfortunately the distinction between temporal and causal connections is not always easy to make. Human beings apparently tend to interpret events succeeding each other in time as events with a causal connection. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan quotes the following joke about Milton: "Milton wrote Paradise Lost, then his wife died, and then he wrote Paradise Regained." The joke resides in the suggestion of an (unspoken) causal connection between the death of the wife and the rediscovery of paradise. The sequence seems chronological, but it has a causal dimension as well.
This means that the distinction between plot and story is by no means absolute. The example readily shows the importance of the reader, who interprets the sentence about Milton and thus turns the story into a plot. We do not reject the fundamental distinction between the two levels, but we want to make clear from the start that such a distinction comes down to a theoretical construct, which doesn't tie in with concrete interpretations by actual readers. The sequence of events is always the work of the reader, who makes links between the story's several incidents. This provides the plot with its dynamic, and it also gives rise to the idea that something is in fact happening. Just like the sequence of events, the event itself turns out to be dependent on the reader's input. It is impossible to define an event in abstracto once and for all. What happens in "Pegasian"? A reader who approaches this text as we have in our introduction might say that quite a lot is happening here. There is a discussion between teacher and pupil about the correct way to ride a horse, followed by a double space and a resolution in which the question of who is right reveals itself to be less important than the fact that both characters use the horse to defy gravity. In "The Map" the events may seem more easily discernible — the acquisition of a map, the bike rides relative to it, and more generally the mapping of ordinary activities — but still, how the events are discerned will depend on the reader.
One may doubt whether meaningful connections that the reader makes between events can be reduced to causal connections. In "Pegasian," although we do not see all that much cause and effect in the plot development, there is a meaningful transition from the discussion to the conclusion. It is a transition from dogmatism to relativism, from dressage or submission to freedom and takeoff. These connections are not causal, but they are significant and not merely chronological. A plot therefore depends not only on causal connections but on a wealth of relevant connections that transcend mere chronology and are always introduced by the reader.
If we consider plot to be an event sequence meaningful to the reader, then we still have to distinguish the narrative text from other genres. Does a newspaper article constitute a plot-driven narrative? Do nonlinguistic sign systems result in such narratives? Do movies, plays, comic strips, and video games all come down to this type of narrative? For us they do. We define plot-driven narrative as the representation of meaningfully related events. Such a representation can use any sign system, so for us Wasco's "City" definitely amounts to a story.
This means we use a broad definition of narrative, one that is even broader than that proposed by Susana Onega and José Angel García Landa in their narratology reader. They say, "A narrative is the semiotic representation of a series of events meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way." In our view the last six words of this sentence can be dropped. For us, meaning in meaningfully related events cannot be reduced to temporality and causality. It results from the interaction between reader and text.
Since we extend temporal and causal links to meaningful connections at large, we deviate from the traditional view on the so-called minimal story — with "story" used here, contrary to Forster, in its general meaning as a synonym of narrative. The concept of the minimal story fits the structuralist search for the smallest units of a text. It has been developed to determine when one can speak of a narrative. If a character says, "Yes, I can come tomorrow," does that mean we have a story? No, Gerald Prince says, since a story consists of at least three ingredients: an initial situation, an action or event, and an outcome. Connections must be temporal as well as causal. For instance, "John was happy, then he lost his girlfriend, and as a result he became unhappy." Rimmon-Kenan criticizes Prince's definition and submits that a temporal connection is sufficient to speak of a minimal story. For us, meaningful relations suffice, and they might even be metaphorical, metonymical, or thematic, as long as the reader considers them significant. "Yes, I can come tomorrow" does not amount to a narrative, because it does not connect events in any meaningful way. "He could not come then because he was ill" does constitute a narrative since it does make a meaningful connection between events. In this case the link is simply causal, but different links can also create a minimal story. "It was raining hard, in the streets as well as in his heart," is a minimal story too, as it makes a significant metaphorical (or symbolic) link, and it does not imply causality or temporal sequence.
2. Telling and Showing
In order to avoid complicating the following discussion, we will temporarily assume that we can distinguish more or less easily between events and reality on the one hand and their narrative representation on the other. A narrative never provides a perfect copy of the reality constituting its subject. Persons who narrate what has happened to them will always summarize, expand, embellish, and leave out certain aspects of their experience. Since a narrative text always makes use of a sign system, it is always mediated and will never show reality directly. On the stage certain events can be shown, but this hardly applies to a novel. All this relates to the age-old distinction between what Plato called mimesis and diegesis.
Mimesis evokes reality by staging it. This is evident in the theater, but narratives too have moments that tend toward mimetic representation, for instance, literally quoted conversations. In this case the narrative almost literally shows what was said in the reality evoked by the text, and yet a complete overlap between narrative representation and the "real" conversation is out of the question. Short phrases like "he said" already indicate an intervention by the narrator. Furthermore, chances are high that the time necessary for the reader to process the conversation in the text will not exactly coincide with the duration of the original conversation. The latter even applies when reading a text meant for the stage, which after all only approximates mimesis. There will probably be a major difference between the duration of the performance and the time necessary to read the text on which it was based.
Diegesis summarizes events and conversations. In such a summary the voice of the narrator will always come through. This voice colors narrated events, which are therefore no longer directly available. "The Map" recounts how the boy enters the store and asks about the enchanting map: "Monday afternoon, in the bookshop, I pointed to it. I did not have enough money, so that I had to wait until Saturday." This summary probably covers an unreported conversation in which the shopkeeper mentions the price of the map, and the boy concludes he will need his next weekly allowance in order to buy it. The narrator summarizes this situation instead of showing it.
In the Anglo-American tradition before structuralism, the difference between diegesis and mimesis equals the difference between telling and showing, between summary and scene. In "The Art of Fiction" (1884) and other theoretical writings, Henry James established his preference for a narrator whom the reader can barely see or hear and who tries hard to show as much as possible. In The Craft of Fiction (1921) Percy Lubbock, under the influence of James's novels, favored showing to telling. A mimetic novel usually contains a lot of action and dialogue. In strongly diegetic texts, on the other hand, narrators do come to the fore, so that they ostentatiously place themselves between the related scenes and the readers. In postmodern narratives narrators can behave in such an extremely diegetic way that readers starts to distrust them. So little is left of the original scene that you wonder whether the reported event actually took place.
Although mimesis and diegesis may look like a binary pair, they really constitute the two extremes of a continuum on which every narrative occupies a specific position. "Pegasian" appears more mimetic than "The Map," not least because Charlotte Mutsaers shows conversation much more directly than Gerrit Krol and because the time of narration in the Mutsaers narrative adheres more closely to the duration of a scene than it does in Krol's piece. In "The Map" long periods such as the one in which the main character bikes around are summarized in a few sentences. In "Pegasian" the original conversation between the riding master and the female rider remains almost untouched. However, the difference between the two narratives is far from absolute. In narrative prose there exists no such thing as pure mimesis or diegesis. Summaries always have their mimetic aspects, and mimetic representation always has moments of summary as well. This also holds for a graphic narrative like Wasco's "City," as the sequence of panels does not cover the two characters' entire visit to the city.
This combination of mimesis and diegesis has been typical of the novel from its very beginnings. On the one hand the novel is a diegetic genre, and in that sense it forms the opposite of drama, an avowedly mimetic genre that dominated the literary system until at least the end of the eighteenth century. On the other hand novelists often defined their new art by pointing to the mimetic properties of their texts. Authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Jonathan Swift wrote introductions to their novels in which they presented their "new" way of telling as a form of the "old" showing. They paradoxically defended the trustworthiness and prestige of the new diegetic narration by calling upon its mimetic opposite. Whatever found its way into their books was not supposed to be an imaginary summary by a narrator but rather a truthful representation of scenes that actually happened. The tension between summary and scene is inherent in every form of narrative, and it remains central to any discussion of contemporary prose — witness, for instance, the recurring polemic about the combination of fact and fiction in autobiography.
3. Author and Narrator
It has become a commonplace that the author of a book must not be confused with its narrator. However, a total separation between these two agents proves inadequate. Autobiographical fiction, for instance, simply thrives on the close connection between its author, narrator, and main character. Occasional discussions about supposedly improper statements in fiction also prove that the theoretical separation between author and narrator does not remain clear in practice. Sometimes authors are even sued for statements made by their characters or narrators. This goes to show that the connection between author and narrator often plays out on the level of ideology.
Wayne Booth has provided a theoretical analysis of this connection in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), one of the first classics of narratology. A narrative text, Booth writes, is a form of communication, and therefore you always have a sender, a message, and a receiver. These three concepts do not simply translate into author, narrative, and reader. More communicative agents are involved. In his study Booth does not deal with the empirical author in any great detail, but he inserts three more agents between author and narrative, which we will discuss one by one.
The implied author does not actually appear in the text. Implied authors do not have an audible voice, and yet they may form part of a narrative. They constitute the source for the aggregate of norms and opinions that make up the ideology of the text. In other words, the implied author is responsible for the worldview emanating from a narrative. This view can be established in a variety of ways, for instance, on the basis of word choice, humor, and the manner in which characters are introduced. The implied author may have a different ideology than the characters or the narrator. Empirical authors may develop an implied author who is opposed to a specific worldview, but that does not prevent proponents of this ideology from speaking up in their novels. According to Booth, the distance between implied author and narrator offers an excellent criterion to test the latter's reliability. The more the narrator's statements resemble the implied author's ideology, the more reliable the narrator will turn out to be.
This point about the proximity between the narrator and implied author does not hold. The implied author and the narrator's reliability are not offered in the text itself, but instead they are construed by the reader. There exist no objective procedures to derive the implied author from a narrative. The importance of the reader for the construction of the implied author shows through in the alternative names proposed for it by other critics. Seymour Chatman prefers inferred author. Gérard Genette likes auteur induit. The degree of the narrator's reliability is a subjective matter as well, which critically depends on the reader's preconceived ideas about reliability and trustworthiness.
As a construction, the implied author therefore depends on the reader and on the textual elements as they are interpreted by the reader. That turns the implied author into a paradoxical concept. On the one hand this implied author is supposed to be at the root of the norms and values in a text and in this way would give the reader direction. Chatman defines the implied author as the "agency within the narrative fiction itself which guides any reading of it." On the other hand the implied author depends on how the reader handles the text. Ansgar Nünning correctly suggests that the location of the implied author in the communicative structure of fiction is very unclear. In theory implied authors occupy a position on the side of the sender since they connect to actual authors, but in practice any implied author amounts to a construction by the receiver (the reader), who makes use of the message (the text) in order to arrive at this construction. The exact position of the implied author remains vague. Nünning criticizes Chatman because the latter first says that the reader constructs the implied author and then lets this construction coincide with the text: "The text is itself the implied author." Eventually Chatman combines reader and text in a definition of the implied author as "the patterns in the text which the reader negotiates."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Traditional Questions 2. New Questions Chapter 1. Before and Surrounding Structuralism 1. Story and Plot 2. Telling and Showing 3. Author and Narrator 4. Narrator and Reader 5. Consciousness and Speech 6. Perception and Speech Chapter 2. Structuralism 1. Story 1.1. Events 1.2. Actants 1.3. Setting 2. Narrative 2.1. Time 2.2. Character 2.3. Focalization 3. Narration 3.1. Narrating 3.2. Consciousness Representation Chapter 3. Postclassical Narratology 1. Broadening Conceptions of the Narrative Text 1.1. Broadening the Medium: Intermedial Narratology 1.2. Broadening in Time: Diachronic Narratology 1.3. Broadening the Fictional World 2. Communicative Approaches 2.1. Rhetorical Narratology 2.2. Cognitive Narratology 3. Narratology and Ideology 3.1. Narrative Ethics 3.2. Feminist and Queer Narratology 3.3. Postcolonial Narratology 3.4. Cultural Narratology and Socio-narratology 3.4.1. Socio-narratology 3.4.2. Cultural Narratology 4. Everyday Life as a Narrative Process 4.1. Postmodern Narratology 4.2. Natural Narratology 4.3. Unnatural Narratology Appendix A: “Pegasian” Charlotte Mutsaers Appendix B: “The Map” Gerrit Krol Appendix C: “City” Wasco Notes Bibliography Index