Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research 9783110222432, 9783110222425

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Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research

Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory

Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matı´as Martı´nez, John Pier Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik ´ Jose´ Angel Garcı´a Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

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≥ Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research Edited by Sandra Heinen Roy Sommer

≥ Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Narratology in the age of cross-disciplinary narrative research / edited by Sandra Heinen, Roy Sommer. p. cm. ⫺ (Narratologia) ISBN 978-3-11-022242-5 (alk. paper) I. Heinen, Sandra, II. Sommer, Roy. P302.7.N385 2009 4011.41⫺dc22 2009026537

ISBN 978-3-11-022242-5 ISSN 1612-8427 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Laufen

Preface This volume contains revised versions of the papers presented at the Inaugural Symposium of the Center for Narrative Research, which took place from June 25-26, 2007 at the University of Wuppertal. The contributions by Andreas Mauz and Harald Weilnböck were added in order to emphasize the cross-disciplinary character of the volume. The editors wish to thank Wolfgang Schmid, the executive editor of the Narratologia series, for his generous support, and the external reviewers (whoever they are) for their very helpful suggestions. We would also like to thank Anne-Catherine Höffer, who helped prepare the layout for this volume, Joseph Swann for his translations and careful proof-reading, Manfred Link for his work on the manuscript and Manuela Gerlof at de Gruyter. Wuppertal, May 2009 Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer

Contents

SANDRA HEINEN, ROY SOMMER

Introduction: Narratology and Interdisciplinarity......................... BO PETTERSSON

Narratology and Hermeneutics: Forging the Missing Link......... TOM KINDT

Narratological Expansionism and Its Discontents.......................

1 11 35

ANSGAR NÜNNING

Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials... DAVID HERMAN

Narrative Ways of Worldmaking.....................................................

48 71

ROY SOMMER

Making Narrative Worlds: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Literary Storytelling ......................................................................

88

MONIKA FLUDERNIK

The Cage Metaphor: Extending Narratology into Corpus Studies and Opening it to the Analysis of Imagery ........ 109 WOLFGANG HALLET

The Multimodal Novel: The Integration of Modes and Media in Novelistic Narration.................................................. 129 PETER VERSTRATEN

Between Attraction and Story: Rethinking Narrativity in Cinema............................................................................................ 154

Contents

SILKE HORSTKOTTE

Seeing or Speaking: Visual Narratology and Focalization, Literature to Film............................................................................... 170 SANDRA HEINEN

The Role of Narratology in Narrative Research across the Disciplines........................................................................ 193 ASTRID ERLL

Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies .................................... 212 JULIA LIPPERT

A “Natural” Reading of Historiographical Texts: George III at Kew ............................................................................. 228 VINCENT MEELBERG

Sounds Like a Story: Narrative Travelling from Literature to Music and Beyond ........................................................................ 244 ANDREAS MAUZ

Theology and Narration: Reflections on the “Narrative Theology”-Debate and Beyond....................................................... 261 HARALD WEILNBÖCK

Toward a New Interdisciplinarity: Integrating Psychological and Humanities Approaches to Narrative ..................................... 286

SANDRA HEINEN, ROY SOMMER (Wuppertal)

Introduction: Narratology and Interdisciplinarity

1. Interdisciplinary Narrative Research as a Horizontal Transfer between ‘Generic’ Theories In his survey article, “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory”, Brian Richardson (2000: 168) observes not only that “narrative is everywhere”, but also that it “seems to be a kind of vortex around which other discourses orbit in ever closer proximity” (ibid.: 169). There is no denying that narrative has been put on the agenda by an increasing number of scholars in a wide range of disciplines: psychologists are not only developing their own methodology to deal with narrative interviews (Riessman 1993) but have recently also proposed a dedicated ‘psychonarratology’ (Bortolussi/Dixon 2003); artificial intelligence research has a strong interest in storytelling (e. g. Bringsjord/Ferrucci 2000); there is a branch of business studies which deals with stories as means of branding and marketing (e. g. Zaltman 2003); ludologists have long recognized the narrative nature of games (e. g. Murray 1997); anthropologists explore everyday storytelling (Ochs/Capps 2001); theologists seek to ‘reclaim narrative’ (Doak 2004), and in performance studies there is talk of a “storytelling revival” (Wilson 2006: x) on British, Irish and, especially, American stages. The observation that many scholars in different disciplines are interested in the processes, results and functions of storytelling is frequently interpreted and welcomed by narrative theorists as a move towards interdisciplinarity. If one defines interdisciplinarity as a mutually enriching exchange of findings and ideas, based on shared research interests and concepts, however, there is little evidence of such a transcending, let alone erosion, of disciplinary boundaries. Only an extremely restrictive canon of seminal narratological works by Propp, Genette and, sometimes, Chatman is routinely admitted to the footnotes in works by ludologists, economists or psychologists dealing with stories, while current narratological research is all but ignored. On the other hand, only a handful of narratologists are really prepared to engage in a dialogue with, say, cognitive psychology or artificial intelligence research. As

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a consequence, despite the shared interest in narrative, common ground is hard to find: Although there has been extensive research on narrative on a wide range of fields, the flow of research findings across disciplinary boundaries is still minimal. Important advances in different scholarly traditions do not always inform each other, and research findings often remain isolated and largely unintegrated. (Bortolussi/Dixon 2003: 2)

One plausible explanation for such mutual ignorance between ‘unintegrated’ fields of research is offered in Sandra Heinen’s survey article in the present volume. Heinen points to the fact that narratologists are traditionally interested in narrativity in a very general way, and whereas this sounds almost tautological in narratological ears, one has to understand that researchers in other disciplines are interested in narratives for a wide range of reasons— except for narrativity. Thus, the epistemological status of narratives varies among the disciplines: whereas the analysis of life stories is a means to an end in narrative psychology, for instance, ‘classical’ narratology is traditionally interested in the nature of narrative in general, trying to define regularities and recurrent features which are shared by all narratives. As a consequence, most research questions which are at the centre of the narratological debate are simply too theoretical for scholars interested in storytelling as a marketing tool or in narrative interviews as a method of data collection. Even though ‘postclassical’ narratologists get excited when thinking of the manifold underlying implications of identity formation through life stories or corporate narratives, one has to accept that such phenomena transcend not merely disciplinary or institutional boundaries but also the competencies and research interests of ‘narrative’ sociologists or marketing experts. A second explanation is that narratology, due to its foundation in literary studies, has its roots in the theory of fictional narrative. The highly sophisticated models and terminologies developed for the analysis of the novel, plays, films, and poetry cannot be transferred to the analysis of non-fictional storytelling without some serious modification. Here, narratology is still in its infancy, despite the ground-breaking work by Monika Fludernik, David Herman and other proponents of cognitive and linguistic approaches to narrative and narratology. Even though more work is forthcoming in this field (see Klein/Martínez 2009), we are still far from ‘integrating’ narrative research in the sense of coordinating core interests, research questions and key findings in a concerted effort to move beyond the current ‘Babelization’ of narrative studies. There is a third, institutional reason for the scarcity of truly interdisciplinary dialogue. Most narratologists have been academically socialized exclusively within the humanities, so their closest or most natural ‘allies’ beyond the realm of literature or linguistics are colleagues from film studies, media studies, gender studies and, since Hayden White, history. Disciplines engaged

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in empirical research (sociology, psychology) or computing (AI) normally belong to different faculties, and the possible potential of cross-faculty interdisciplinarity is only very rarely realized in practice. The reverse is equally valid, of course: Few computer programmers interested in modelling storytelling processes (a tiny minority in informatics, anyway) will have a professional affiliation with the humanities. The respective methodologies of the humanities allow for little common ground with regard to the standards and procedures of empirical research and the criteria for valid results. Finally, one should not forget that historians, psychologists or economists interested in narrative are still a minority in their respective disciplines—and that, until very recently, narratology was regarded as unfashionable even within literary studies (see Fludernik 2000: 83). This rather sobering diagnosis gives way to a decidedly more optimistic outlook once one starts limiting the range of collaborators. Although the grass seems always greener on the other side, ‘narrative’ is quickly emerging as a paradigm which unites the fields of inquiry mentioned above—within the humanities. It is this type of ‘short-range’ interdisciplinarity which characterises most contributions to this volume. If one tries to step back and describe in more abstract terms what is currently happening in cross-disciplinary narrative research (from a narratological perspective), the relationship between narratology and its neighbouring disciplines appears as what Uri Margolin (2007: 204) has recently described as “a constant two-way horizontal transfer of concepts, models and claims between same level domain-specific disciplines”. Margolin (ibid.) explicitly mentions the exchange of concepts between literary and film narratologies as an example of such a horizontal transfer. He also distinguishes the horizontal exchange of concepts between theories from a vertical hierarchy of theories, which may be situated on one of three distinct levels, according to their range and degree of specification or abstraction: Level I theories are […] mid-range, basically descriptive, and deal with one or more aspects, such as kinds of narrators, of a specific literary corpus. The claims made in them are empirical in the sense of open to textual observation. Level II theories operate with higher level concepts and theoretical constructs, such as the nature of the narrative function or the demarcation of narrative texts from other text types. While Level I theories are specifically literary, Level II ones may have wider application [...], and in this sense may be termed generic theories. Level III theories are generic semi interpreted ones such as communication theory, semiotics, and general action theory. (ibid.)

This classification may further our understanding of the relationship between narratology and the narrative research conducted in disciplines outside the humanities. First of all, it is important to acknowledge that narratology is not a Level III type of theory. Early structuralist visions of a ‘universal’ narrative grammar or a ‘general’ poetics of narrative and current notions of the equally fundamental ‘anthropological’ or epistemological functions of storytelling

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display a tendency to encourage exaggerated expectations. But narratology is first and foremost the study of narrative, not the mind, or the brain, or human nature, and this restricts its range to first and second level theories. This is also valid for cognitive narratology which is not a subdiscipline of the cognitive sciences but imports relevant concepts and ideas from the cognitive sciences, usually via cognitive linguistics or frame and schema theories. Do they represent the state of the art in cognitive research? Are they aware of the latest neurological findings and psychological experiments? Probably not, but this is not a problem, as long as one agrees that genuinely narratological theories are situated on Levels I and II, and that they thus cannot be expected to develop a “framework helping us to think of a whole class of entities in a variety of domains” (ibid.). This means that it is not narratology’s function to provide other disciplines with general research orientations (a function exclusively preserved for Level III theories, according to Margolin), and that narratology is not required to come up with a ‘master theory’ which accounts for all things narrative. Instead of down-playing the relevance or prospects of narrative research across disciplinary boundaries, such a realistic definition of what can reasonably be expected of narratology as well as of narrative research conducted in other disciplines may both encourage further endeavours in this direction and save narratology from becoming yet another “grand theory with a poor knowledge base” (ibid.: 206). The fact that the key role of narratives for coming to terms with personal experience, for constructing collective identities and for making sense of the past and the future is now widely acknowledged, means that interesting work in this field will eventually be recognized by others, even though an increased interest in narrative doesn’t automatically coincide with an increased interest in (literary) narratology. But there is no doubt that narratology has an excellent knowledge base when it comes to narrative. 2. Controversies, Intermedial Applications of Narratology, and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Theory: The Contributions to this Volume What exactly narratology is to do with this knowledge base, how and in which directions it should be extended, and to which phenomena it should be applied, is the topic of the first three contributions to this volume. They represent opposed views with respect both to the present state and desirable developments of narratology (restrictive vs. expansive, textual vs. contextual, classical vs. post-classical positions), a debate which already surfaced in the first volume of the Narratologia series, a collection of essays edited by Tom

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Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003) under the seemingly simple, yet ultimately controversial question: “What is Narratology?” In his introductory essay, which was presented as a keynote speech to the conference from which this volume emerged, Bo Pettersson takes up this key issue in the ongoing debate between ‘restrictive’ and ‘expansive’ narratologists, i. e. the convergence of narratology and hermeneutics. Pettersson argues that the common distinction between two allegedly incompatible approaches focussing on formal issues from a synchronic perspective (theories of narrative) on the one hand and contextual or diachronic perspectives on the other (theories of interpretation) ignores the fact that both share an interest in textuality. Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, and referring to Schleiermacher’s notion of interpretation, Pettersson proposes to combine what he calls a “moderately intentionalist view of the literary work” with the toolkit of post-classical narratology. The usefulness of this hybrid approach to the analysis and interpretation of narrative fiction, termed “contextual intention inference”, is then explored in a close reading of the ending of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899). This is followed by an equally programmatic critique of post-classical narratologies by Tom Kindt which ends—tongue in cheek—with a move “towards classical narratology”, the point of departure for all contextual narratologies. In keeping with the restrictive position in narratology, Kindt calls for a strict separation of theories of narrative and theories of interpretation and points out that narratologically informed interpretations of literary texts don’t require a revision of existing narrative theory. He then rejects claims that narratology might serve as a foundation for interdisciplinary narrative research or that narrative theory might benefit from interdisciplinary applications, concluding that “we should leave narratology as it is”. Ansgar Nünning’s plea for contextualist and cultural extensions of classical narratology takes a more pragmatic stance, encouraging further efforts to develop narratology into a context-sensitive theory of narrative. Nünning refutes binary oppositions such as text vs. context, form vs. content and topdown approaches vs. bottom-up approaches as a false set of choices, arguing for an alliance between postclassical and classical narratologies instead. He emphasizes the achievements of postclassical approaches which have uncovered new and productive lines of narrative in a variety of fields, from feminist to postcolonial criticism, yet he also underlines that contextualist narratology is still in its infancy. The crucial question of the future of narrative theory and narratological analysis is closely linked to their ability to contribute to our understanding of culture as an ensemble of narratives. Nünning’s final remarks on the challenges posed to narratology by the cultural functions of narratives as crucial ways of making sense of the world anticipate the theme of David Herman’s contribution to this volume. In his

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article “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking”, Herman investigates how interpreters create mental models of characters, situations and events (storyworlds) in the reception process. This approach, which integrates cognitive and transmedial approaches, is not restricted to a specific corpus of narratives—Herman’s examples include face-to-face storytelling, a short story and a graphic novel—but explores the referential properties of narrative in principle. As Herman’s findings apply to all instances of world-making through narrative, both in fictional and non-fictional discourse, and regardless of the medium in which the story is conveyed, they will greatly increase narratology’s applicability and usefulness in cross-disciplinary research projects. Herman’s analysis of narrative world-making also reveals one major blind spot in both classical and postclassical narratologies: the making of narratives. Extratextual communication has traditionally been excluded from narratology’s (intratextual) object domain, or it has been reduced to the reception process, leaving the production side unattended. Roy Sommer investigates why this is the case, proceeding from an equivalence hypothesis which assumes that writing stories involves similar cognitive processes and knowledge structures as reading them. His essay looks at psychological creativity research, which distinguishes between aspects of person, field and domain, and argues that domain-specific studies of creative behaviour such as storytelling have to rely on expert knowledge in order to yield relevant results. Sommer then shows how the narrative domain can be re-conceptualized from a narratological perspective. His concept of narrative design accounts for the influence of generic conventions, dramaturgical planning and storyworld constraints in the storytelling process. Monika Fludernik’s essay on narrative and metaphor has methodological as well as theoretical implications. Using the example of the cage metaphor, Fludernik shows how databases, widely used by corpus linguists, can enrich narratological research. She demonstrates that metaphors can occur not only on the levels of story and discourse, but can also be attributable to the ‘implied author’, and that they may evoke alternative ‘mini-stories’. These properties pose a challenge to narrative theory which has traditionally neglected metaphors and their functions. Another suggestion for an extension of existing narratological models is made by Wolfgang Hallet whose analysis of the multimodal novel calls for a transmodal revision of the concept of novelistic narration. Following a comprehensive survey of novels which integrate non-verbal symbolic representations and non-narrative semiotic modes into verbal narrative, Hallet first offers a definition of the concept of multimodality. He then explores the functions of multimodality for, among others, the construction of plots and characters, the representation of cognition and the contextualization of nar-

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ratives. In conclusion, Hallet insists on the necessity of a transmodal narratological concept of meaning construction. Peter Verstraten revisits the controversy surrounding the narrativity of film, reviewing several positions and concepts. Whereas historical studies claim that, prior to the invention of cutting and editing techniques, film was created and experienced as spectacle rather than narrative, other approaches deny the possibility of non-narrative cinema. Other issues that pertain to the narrativity debate are the relationship between form and content, especially the functions of non-narrative spectacle and ‘excess’ (an abundance of stylistic devices which are not motivated by the story). According to Verstraten, ‘excess’ is not a well-defined feature of film narration but largely a matter of interpretation, and thus points to general questions of the relationship between story and style, dramaturgy and aesthetics across generic boundaries. This is equally valid of the ‘travelling’ concept of focalization whose textual manifestations and potential effects Silke Horstkotte traces in her comparative analysis of two novels by Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten, 1909) and Franz Kafka (Das Schloß, 1926) as well as their respective film adaptations by Stephen and Timothy Quay (1995) and Michael Haneke (1997). Horstkotte shows that whereas Kafka’s heterodiegetic narration makes use of consistent internal focalization, this is absent from Haneke’s adaptation, despite its use of voice over. In her readings both of Walser’s novel and of cinematic focalization techniques (point of view shots, voice-over and mindscreen sequences), Horstkotte questions the strict theoretical distinction between narration and focalization. Her conclusion therefore emphasizes the interpretive nature of narratological concepts, especially with respect to film narrative. Whereas Verstraten’s and Horstkotte’s intermedial extensions of narratology remain within the humanities, Sandra Heinen looks at interdisciplinary applications of narratology in the social sciences. Her survey of recent case studies concerned with non-fictional narrative allows for the distinction of three types of applied narratologies, based on the respective status of narrative: studies generally interested in understanding the storytelling process; qualitative research projects, mainly interested in storytellers’ intensions and motivations, which regard narrative as a way of making sense of lived experience; and, finally, studies focussing on the narrativity of scientific discourse, especially within historiography, but also in legal studies and medical studies. One example of a truly interdisciplinary approach within narrative research is the field of cultural memory studies which brings together scholars from the humanities and the social sciences. Astrid Erll looks at the various intersections of narrative and individual as well as collective memory. She first argues that classical narratology, despite its strong emphasis on narrative time, tends to neglect issues of remembering and remembrance, which have only recently been addressed more systematically by cognitive narratologists.

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Erll then introduces current concepts of memory and demonstrates how these apply to literature, as the various modes of remembering may be correlated with the ways in which the past is represented in narrative fiction. In her conclusion, Erll identifies areas for further research, such as a diachronic survey of what she calls the ‘ideology of first person narrative’ or the intermedial analysis of narrative templates for autobiographical storytelling. Julia Lippert’s essay on the ongoing reinvention and rehabilitation of King George III shows how popular history makes use of narrative in verbal and non-verbal media. Following a survey of narratological approaches to historiography, Lippert turns to Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratology as a theoretical framework for the study of experiential historical narrative. She then offers a cognitive reading of the permanent exhibition on George III at Kew Palace, distinguishing between framing devices (flyers, posters, internet ads and the welcome building) and the multimedia presentation itself which makes use of a wealth of audio material, including a narratorial commentary, and a wide variety of objects. Vincent Meelberg discusses whether narratology can serve as a mediumindependent analytical tool by applying it to music: can a musical listening experience be described in terms of narrative understanding? Proceeding from his definitions of narrative as a representation of a sequence of events in time and of narrativization as the identification of temporal relations between events, Meelberg contends that structuring a piece of music as narrative during the listening process may facilitate its comprehension. He further claims that music can be regarded as a representation of crucial elements, such as tension and resolution, and that we can speak of focalization in music, although there are a number of crucial differences between literary focalization and its musical counterpart, which Meelberg situates in performance. Andreas Mauz underlines the key role of narrative (alongside other, nonnarrative, text types) for theology. Situating his work within the context of modern Protestant systematic theology in German, Mauz first retraces the heated debate on Christianity as a ‘narrative community’ (a term coined by Harald Weinrich and Jean Baptiste Metz in 1973) which, interestingly, was then closely linked to the notion of an emerging ‘post-narrative’ society. Mauz subsequently gives a comprehensive overview over core aspects in theological discussions of narrative and narration, which leads to his final comments on the current role of narrativity for theology and the contributions of literary scholars to what might develop into an analytical ‘narratheology’. The final essay addresses a number of issues which call for interdisciplinary collaboration. Harald Weilnböck proposes an integration of psychological and narratological approaches in what he calls Literary and Media Interaction Research (LIR). LIR’s ambitious research programme tries to build

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bridges between the concepts of narrative in narratology on the one hand, and psychotherapy research, psycho-trauma studies and developmental psychology on the other. Weilnböck’s research questions demonstrate not only the wide range of issues that may be addressed by LIR, including the correlation of media interaction (aesthetic experience) with mental identity work, but also the compatibility of LIR with cultural memory studies and cognitive narratologies. Looking at the contributions to this volume, one may detect three distinct developments within the overall framework of interdisciplinary narrative research. The first trend seems to be the ongoing revision of existing narratological models in the light of new or hitherto neglected phenomena (such as storytelling and narrative templates, multimodality, stylistic metaphors and narrative levels or stylistic ‘excess’). A second development is what Wolf (2005) has described as the ‘export’ of narratological concepts, i. e. the application of (literary) narratology in transdisciplinary contexts (film analysis, music, popular representations of historical events). Finally, despite the criticism by ‘restrictive’ sceptics, there is a tendency to continue the development of ‘hyphenated’ narratologies which combine narrative theory with hermeneutics, linguistics, cognitive theory, or memory studies, to name but a few options explored here. What unites these approaches to narrative research is that they are sceptical whether the narrative poetics and narrative interpretation can really be completely separated, and whether such a separation is desirable or even necessary. The dominant attitude in this volume seems to be a pragmatic rather than programmatic one: it is the shared interest in establishing common ground where narrative theory and analytical practice can meet and mingle—to the benefit of both. Works Cited Bortolussi, Marisa and Peter Dixon. 2003. Psychonarratology. Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bringsjord, Selmer and David A. Ferrucci. 2000. Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of BRUTUS, a Storytelling Machine. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Doak, Mary. 2004. Reclaiming Narrative for Public Theology. New York: State University of New York Press. Fludernik, Monika. 2000. “Beyond Structuralism. Recent Developments and New Horizons in Narrative Theory”. In: Anglistik 11:1, p. 83-96. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.). 2003. What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter. Klein, Christian and Matías Martínez (eds.). 2009. Wirklichkeitserzählungen. Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler.

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Margolin, Uri. 2007. “In What Direction is Literary Theory Evolving? Response”. In: Journal of Literary Theory 1:1, p. 196-207. Murray, Janet. H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Ochs, Elinor and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative. Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Richardson, Brian. 2000. “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory”. In: Style 34: 2, p. 168-175. Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 1993. Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park/London/New Delhi: Sage. Wilson, Michael. 2006. Storytelling and Theatre. Contemporary Storytellers and their Art. Houndsmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolf, Werner. 2005. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon. A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts”. In: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.). Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Berlin: de Gruyter, p. 83-108. Zaltman, Gerald. 2003. How Customers Think. Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

BO PETTERSSON (Helsinki)

Narratology and Hermeneutics: Forging the Missing Link Narratology and hermeneutics, the study of narrative and the study of interpretation, have traditionally been considered separate areas of study. In this paper I shall try to show that both could benefit from a rapprochement. This essay will first briefly review some of the reasons why such a convergence has not been forthcoming, and then attempt to show that a particular kind of hermeneutics can make a rapprochement possible. This requires, however, that narratology revise some of its most deep-seated text-centred— or textualist—notions. After presenting a number of avenues this rapprochement has taken and others that it could take, I will apply them to Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899). Finally I will draw some conclusions for a more interdisciplinary view of literary studies in general and for a merging of narratology and hermeneutics in particular. 1. Narratology and Hermeneutics: Similarities and Contrasts Some of the most obvious reasons for the de facto separation between narratology and hermeneutics bear on their different histories and theoretical foundations. Hermeneutics has a long and abiding association with biblical scholarship—so much so that almost any search on hermeneutics on the net will give you more hits on biblical than literary hermeneutics. Hence, it is no surprise that it was Friedrich Schleiermacher, primarily a religious scholar, who devised the first universal hermeneutics in the early nineteenth century. His posthumously published major work in this field, Hermeneutik (1838), shows that in his study of—literary and other—works Schleiermacher attempted to combine linguistic and psychological (or intentional) approaches. His disciple Wilhelm Dilthey went on to develop the psychological side of hermeneutics and to include anthropological aspects—without, as is often falsely claimed, completely abandoning its linguistic aspects (see e. g. Makkreel 1992: 414-419). But by the early to mid twentieth century there was a

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kind of lull in literary hermeneutics, that is, before Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur revived the subject. This was the time when structuralism was developed by, among others, Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Leonard Bloomfield in linguistics, based on the foundations laid by Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de la linguistique générale. As structuralism moved into literary studies, and narratology developed in the 1960s and 1970s under the leadership of Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette and others, it became clear, however, that it drew not only on the structuralist heritage but also on Aristotle’s Poetics, Russian formalism and the Prague school. Not surprisingly, then, language and text became the overriding metaphors for narratological frameworks devised in a latter-day positivist, scientific spirit. In the 1960s there were moves in the direction of interpretive relativism in both hermeneutics and structuralism. In 1960 Gadamer published his magnum opus Wahrheit und Methode, which argues on the basis of Heidegger’s ontology for a reader-oriented view of hermeneutics. In France in the 1960s and early 1970s Ricoeur wrote and taught on the interrelation between structuralism, psychoanalysis and hermeneutics, in part inspired by Gadamer. But other French scholars were more radical. By the end of the 1960s Barthes and Jacques Derrida had discarded the scientific pretensions of structuralism and opted for versions of what is now termed post-structuralism. In other words, at this point in time (and some years following) a number of hermeneuticists and literary scholars took similar theoretical and/or ideological paths through the landscape of interpretive relativism. But note that—with the possible exception of Ricoeur—structuralist narratology and hermeneutics did not actually converge: Gadamer, for instance, never employed narrative theory, and the later Barthes, who retained his narratological interest, never entered the hermeneutic discussion, even though he had an abiding commitment to interpretation. In short, despite the fact that narratology and hermeneutics had similar interests in the late twentieth century, they never really merged. Perhaps the closest they came to a convergence—again, excepting Ricoeur—was in approaches that sought to reconcile hermeneutics with deconstruction, such as Silverman and Ihde’s anthology on the topic (1985), the conversations recorded between Gadamer and Derrida (Michelfelder/Palmer 1989) and some early works by Manfred Frank (e. g. 1997). Structuralist narratology and twentieth-century hermeneutics, then, have different historical and theoretical foundations. The one has primarily formal interests, the other broadly interpretive ones. The one has positivist roots, the other ontological ones which—in part due to an emphasis on the historical situatedness of readers—were bound to lead to interpretive relativism.

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The one takes for the most part a synchronic, non-contextual view, the other a diachronic, contextual one. What has less frequently been noted is that narratology and hermeneutics have a common textual interest. Andrew Bowie (1990: 157) is right in maintaining that Schleiermacher was in fact a precursor of the so-called linguistic turn on account of his hermeneutics—and this more than a century before structuralism became a prevalent tendency in the human sciences. And, now that narratology has gone beyond its structuralist beginnings, there is noticeably more of an interdisciplinary, diachronic and contextual focus in recent work by, say, David Herman, Monika Fludernik and Ansgar and Vera Nünning. As for the relation between narrative and interpretation in general, a few years ago there was an instructive debate in Poetics Today between David Darby (2001) on the one hand and Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003) on the other. The latter criticized the former for advocating contextualist narratology, since they felt it obscured “the epistemological difference between narratological (descriptive) and interpretive operations in textual analysis”, and they viewed narratology merely as “an interpretive heuristic” (Kindt/Müller 2003: 416 and 416n). As we shall see at the beginning of the next section, this kind of emphasis on narratology as a descriptive heuristic subordinate to interpretation continues to neglect the interpretive moves inherent in narratology. In other words, even though some attempts have been made to combine an interpretive angle with narrative-theoretical concerns, narratology and hermeneutics are still a long way apart. Let me now consider some of the most promising attempts to connect them. All through his career Paul Ricoeur made important advances in the area between narrative (as well as metaphor) and interpretation, and in mid-career he even worked directly on hermeneutics. In 1970 he spoke of how “we”— apparently meaning ‘we as scholars’—should “search—beyond a subjective process of interpretation as an act on the text—for an objective process of interpretation which would be the act of the text” (Ricoeur 1981a: 162, emphases original). This approach he found not only “objective” but also “intra-textual” (Ricoeur 1981a: 162). In other words, Ricoeur was at that date more influenced by structuralist thought than by (Gadamerian) hermeneutics. Three years later, although his stance evidently still differed from Gadamer’s, his position had drawn closer. The peculiarity of the literary work, and indeed of the work as such, is […] to transcend its own psycho-sociological conditions of production and thereby to open itself to an unlimited series of readings, themselves situated in socio-cultural contexts which are always different. In short, the work decontextualises itself, from the sociological as well as the psychological point of view, and is able to recontextualise itself in the act of reading. (Ricoeur 1981b: 91, emphases original)

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In claiming that the literary work goes beyond its conditions of production Ricoeur here (and elsewhere) signals that he is critical of the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. Yet his view of the work as decontextualised (even if recontextualised by reading) marks his way of combining structuralism and hermeneutics, since both usually view the work in isolation (even though Gadamer had emphasised the relation of hermeneutics to tradition). Ricoeur goes on to explicate what he terms “the status of subjectivity in interpretation” and maintains that “[i]n sum, it is the matter of the text [a phrase borrowed from Heidegger and Gadamer] which gives the reader his dimension of subjectivity; understanding is thus no longer a constitution of which the subject possesses the key” (Ricoeur 1981b: 94). What Ricoeur did, then, during his mid-career interest in hermeneutics was to suggest how structuralist narratology and hermeneutics could be combined: both focus on the text and, by making the reader’s experience of it “objective” and “intra-textual” and claiming that the reader’s subjectivity is mainly triggered by the text, Ricoeur attempts to draw the two approaches closer together. He even claims that “semiological models, applied in particular to the theory of the narrative” may help us understand that Dilthey’s “ruinous dichotomy” between explanation and understanding can be overcome (Ricoeur 1981b: 92).1 I think Ricoeur is right in pointing out that such a stark dichotomy does not hold—and after the Science Wars I should by now be in good company. But in other respects I feel that Ricoeur’s attempt at finding some common ground for structuralist and hermeneutic approaches was misguided. Let me briefly raise three objections. In my opinion, a literary work cannot decontextualise itself; interpreting a work can never remain ‘intra-textual’, let alone ‘objective’; and, as an artefact, a work cannot act as an agent by supposedly providing readers with their ‘dimension of subjectivity’. If Ricoeur’s starting-point in combining the two approaches was mainly hermeneutic (despite his structuralist leanings), there was at least one notable attempt in the same direction from the narratological camp. In 1978 Uri Margolin published a paper on what he termed the “Significant Convergence” of literary structuralism and hermeneutics.2 He acknowledged their different points of departure, but referring to recent work by Tzvetan Todorov and Jonathan Culler claimed to detect signs of a structuralist approach to phenomenology and hermeneutics (see Margolin 1978: 179). This may be rather surprising, since it was only a few years later that structuralist narratology came to the end of its classical phase—which in turn was due not least to the fact that narratologists had themselves started to see the truth in 1 2

Later in his career, Ricoeur (e. g. 1988: 157-179; 207-240) also discusses hermeneutics but in ways that do not explicitly alter his view of its relation to the study of narrative. I would like to thank Howard Sklar for this reference.

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the objection that their focus on the formalist how often precluded the interpretive why. Margolin (1978: 181) went on to suggest that structuralism and hermeneutics could converge through the “super science” of semiotics or communication theory by “giving primacy to the dynamic interference of readers’ and writers’ code over the text in isolation”. Understandably perhaps, he was not able to show how this could be done, but his choice of semiotics—an approach closely affiliated with structuralism—as a super science showed that his way of effecting a convergence between structuralism and hermeneutics was to subsume the latter into the former. It was with reference to the work of the “Konstanz school of literary theory” (presumably meaning Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss) that he finally put his cards on the table: “I am in fact proposing to regard structuralism as a methodological paradigm for hermeneutics, in the same way that linguistics was for structural poetics” (Margolin 1978: 183). Since Margolin (1978: 182) claimed that structuralism with “its explicit and orderly nature” had “a clear advantage” over hermeneutics, the convergence for him evidently meant that structuralism should hold sway but at the same time incorporate some features of reception aesthetics in order to broaden its approach. It was in this context symptomatic that Margolin did not refer to any hermeneutic scholar by name. As far as I can tell, Ricoeur’s and Margolin’s attempts to combine structuralism and hermeneutics in literary studies were among the most explicit of their kind. To be sure (as some names already mentioned suggest), in the 1970s and 1980s there were a number of efforts among scholars with a structuralist or reception aesthetics background to blend formalist and interpretive aspects in their approaches. But they were seldom interested in hermeneutics as such and often had a firm textual focus. Not until the 1990s did things really change. Or did they? In his wideranging recent survey of the different kinds of narratologies of the last two decades or so Ansgar Nünning (2006) shows how broad the field of narratology has become. The approaches are variously inspired by other areas of study in human sciences and beyond (cultural studies, postcolonial studies, ethics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, even artificial intelligence), or by theories such as poststructuralism or feminism. The most prevalent tendency is to combine formal study with an interest in what Nünning (2006: 154 et passim) broadly terms “cultural history”. Perhaps one could speak of two kinds of move: one in which narratology broadens its structuralist approach by thematic, contextual or diachronic interests and another in which there is a more pronounced effort to combine it with other disciplines. In neither, however, have I detected any concerted effort to combine narratology and hermeneutics. Nevertheless there have been other moves in that di-

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rection. Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel (1995: 189—see also Pettersson 2002), two authorities on literary structuralism and semiotics, have noted that “poetics and aesthetics simply cannot keep feeding off intentional notions, while pretending to ignore them”, thus implying a broader view of interpretation not unlike the one I aim to present here. Peter Stockwell (2005: 281 et passim) has also recently made a gesture towards combining Gadamer’s hermeneutics with cognitive poetics and stylistics, but his approach still has evident structuralist roots. Perhaps the present state of the relation between narratology and hermeneutics is best portrayed by David Herman et al.’s wide-ranging and impressive Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005). This includes a short and informative article on hermeneutics (Ankersmit 2005), which however does not discuss the relation of that field to narrative theory. Nor does the volume include an article on interpretation—which tallies with the deep-seated view that narratological study does not make use of interpretation. In other words, as far as the relation between narratology and hermeneutics goes, things have not changed much. Neither party has engaged in earnest with the other. The one really notable exception is Paul Ricoeur, but I have already noted some misgivings about his approach, misgivings that have to do with his grounding in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Now if the foremost twentieth-century hermeneuticists and classical and post-classical narratologists have not been able to show how their areas of study could be combined, can this really be done at all, and if so, how? 2. Forging the Link: From Schleiermacher to Contextual Intention Inference As I see it, there are two main obstacles in trying to combine narratology and hermeneutics. The problem with narratology (which, as I have noted, still in many ways includes structuralist traits) is its unwillingness to concede that it entails interpretive decisions. For one thing, focusing on the formal features of a narrative usually leads to a neglect of its thematic and ideological aspects. What is more, an emphasis on narrative chronology and the representation of consciousness is itself the result of interpretive decisions—evidence enough that insights into some aspects of a literary work entail blindness to others. This is one reason why many narratologists in the 1980s and 1990s turned to thematics (see Pettersson 2002) and why, at the same time, the socalled post-classical narratology (with related contextual and diachronic interests) got under way. Nevertheless, as far as I can see, the role of interpretation in narratology has not yet been adequately discussed. The other obstacle is that even when hermeneutics has analysed particular literary works

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(and on these rare occasions they have tended to be fictional), it has not notably used narratological tools in doing so. I have suggested above that this may have to do with the kind of hermeneutics that has prevailed since the mid-twentieth century. As my brief comments on Schleiermacher may already have suggested, I hold that his hermeneutics laid the foundations not only for a more tenable and useful kind of literary hermeneutics but also for one that can accommodate, and even in part merge with, narratology. However, let me first briefly discuss Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s refutation of Schleiermacher’s attempt to reconstruct the meaning of a work linguistically and historically. In Gadamer’s (1996: 167) words such an attempt is “nonsensical” and “no more than handing on a dead meaning”. Repeatedly Gadamer faults his predecessor—on whom he draws so heavily—for his supposedly psychological focus, although when first discussing his work in detail he admits that Schleiermacher’s combination of grammatical (linguistic) and technical or psychological (intentional) interpretation is his “most characteristic contribution” to hermeneutics (Gadamer 1996: 186). In using a sentence of Schleiermacher’s highlighting the seminal role of language for hermeneutics as a motto for the third (and last) part of his magnum opus, Gadamer also recognizes this aspect of his predecessor’s position. In other words, by diminishing the importance of his major forerunners (Dilthey as well as Schleiermacher) through showing them as more simplistic than they really are, Gadamer—like so many others in hermeneutics and literary theory—attempts to make his own approach appear more novel and tenable. Similarly, Ricoeur (1981c: 47) claims that according to Schleiermacher, grammatical and technical interpretation “cannot be practised at the same time” and that “[t]he proper task of hermeneutics is accomplished in this second [technical or psychological] interpretation”. Thus he too makes of Schleiermacher (1998: 229)—and even more so of Dilthey—a narrowminded intentionalist, not heeding that in his “General Hermeneutics” Schleiermacher repeatedly emphasizes that “[t]hese [grammatical and technical interpretation] are not two kinds of interpretation, instead every explication must completely achieve both” and that “[p]recisely because in all understanding both tasks must be accomplished, understanding is an art”.3 Present-day hermeneutics is in the sorry situation that most readers have accepted Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s thwarted views of two of the finest scholars in the history of hermeneutics.

3

However, Andrew Bowie (1998: viii) is right in pointing out that “Schleiermacher thought both types essential, but tended to change his mind on certain aspects of how each was to be carried out”. Also, on balance, in his later career he especially developed his notion of divination (see below).

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Since I aim to show that the attempt to approximate interpretive validity by inferring contextual intention is related to an approach first championed by Schleiermacher, and that such an approach goes well beyond “handing on dead meaning”, let me now briefly mention some salient points in Schleiermacher’s (1998) Hermeneutics of 1838 and other works. As noted above, interpretation (more precisely, Auslegung or exposition) for Schleiermacher takes two forms: the grammatical and the technical. Schleiermacher’s point is that both are equal in status, and in order to understand a (literary) work4 both are needed, just as an interpreter must combine the objective and the subjective in his or her interpretive effort. But even though one of Schleiermacher’s aims was to work out a general hermeneutics, he is far from scientistic in his approach. In his hermeneutic writings Schleiermacher’s interest lies partly in language (he even repeatedly claims that there is no thinking without language) and he is at all times keenly aware of the fact that language use is going on continuously and that any individual learning a language by definition enters it in medias res. In fact, Schleiermacher’s focus is precisely on language in use, often spoken language, not on an abstraction like Saussure’s langue. And it is because no hardand-fast rules can be applied when interpreting utterances or works that he calls explication an art of understanding (Kunst des Verstehens), as I have noted above (see e. g. Schleiermacher 1995: 75-78).5 Since any work is mediated by language, it must be interpreted by means of contextual historical as well as by hypothesizing divinatory reconstruction. The ultimate task is, in perhaps the most famous phrase in all of Schleiermacher (1998: 23), “to understand the utterance at first just as well and then better than its author”. Indeed the very marriage of the grammatical and psychological accounts entails a historical contextualization of the work that goes beyond the author’s conscious intention. As Gadamer (1996: 192) rightly observes, the critical effort “renders many things conscious of which the writer may be unconscious” (see Thiselton 1992: 227). In this way Schleiermacher attempts to deal with one of the major problems for any intentionalist account of interpretation, that of unconscious meanings. Perhaps he would have agreed with Paisley Livingston’s (2005: 44-45) useful view that artists’ (conscious and unconscious) intentions consist of “microplans” (e. g. typing a word) and “macroplans” (e. g. writing a novel). Macroplans can 4

5

Unlike Andrew Bowie in his translation of Schleiermacher (1998), I translate Schrift as work throughout, since text may sound anachronistic owing to the fact that in the last few decades it has become so firmly anchored in (post)structuralist approaches. For a brief discussion of some central terms in Schleiermacher and their translation see Pettersson (2005: 134). We should, however, remember Andrew Bowie’s (1998: xxn) cautionary note that Kunst in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism also can mean ‘method’ or ‘technique’, but as I have noted, Schleiermacher (1998: 11) emphasizes that hermeneutics is an activity that “cannot be mechanised”.

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include unconscious intentions and changes in intentions, and it seems that Schleiermacher’s point may have been that hermeneutics should be able to deal precisely with these. Even these few remarks on some central interpretive notions may suggest how modern Schleiermacher sounds. At a time when processual and contextual views—in various pragmatic, pragmaticist and pragmatist guises—finally prevail in contemporary linguistics, literary studies, semiotics and philosophy, we can see that these developments had already been adumbrated by Schleiermacher (as well as by Peirce, William James and Dewey, among others). So even though the considerable rapprochement of intentionalist and anti-intentionalist positions in philosophical aesthetics in the last decade or so was not explicitly prompted by Schleiermacher’s work, his balanced and complex view of interpretation certainly figures in the background of some recent accounts (especially those of Peter Szondi, Manfred Frank, Andrew Bowie and Wolfgang Iser). As a matter of fact, Schleiermacher may have been more influential for the literary studies of the last century than has hitherto been realized. I have mentioned in passing that in his hermeneutic writings Schleiermacher repeatedly underlines that all thinking starts with language. It may not be an exaggeration to claim that his emphasis on the centrality of language, as well as the chain of influence joining him to Dilthey and Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger, and finally Gadamer and various poststructuralists, has been seminal in the development of the fully-fledged ‘linguistic turn’ that has transformed the humanities in the last fifty years or so (see Bowie 1990: 157). If there is any truth in that, then it is surely ironical that Schleiermacher has been so downgraded in recent literary studies and philosophy. However, let me add another ironical twist. In my view, this is not the reason why Schleiermacher is one of the foremost hermeneuticists ever. On the contrary, I think the linguistic turn in its strong form has been one of the most simplistic, even misguided movements in the history of the human sciences, because of its autonomous view of language, exaggerated indeterminacy in meaning-making, agentless textuality, and disproportionate emphasis on ideology and on a constructionist view of man (see Pettersson 1999a, 2005: 133-140). The linguistic turn that Schleiermacher was seminal in starting has in fact led to a deplorably single-minded emphasis on language and text in the human sciences. But if so prevalent an approach is misguided, what can one offer instead? Here Schleiermacher has provided us with certain prolegomena to a better kind of hermeneutics, and even to a developmental account of interpretation. In many of his works—the Ethik (1812/13) and Dialektik in particular—Schleiermacher (1990; 1976) has given us clues to the nature of the psychological process of divination, the hypothesizing attempt to understand

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other people and their artefacts. This has not been lost on hermeneuticists such as Herbert Schnädelbach (1984: 117-118), Frank (1997: 21-22) and Bowie (1990: 163-165), who have commented on Schleiermacher’s (1995: 326327) developmental view of divining and comparing in the language usage and comprehension of children. This divinatory process continues into adult life, and in this context it is typical of Schleiermacher’s (1995: 328) praxisoriented and processual view to observe that, as an “art”, the sum of hermeneutic experiences does not form absolute “rules” (Regeln) in human conduct but only “advice” (Ratschlägen) (see Scholtz 1995: 97). Schleiermacher could, then, be of help in devising a developmental account of literary interpretation. We do not simply become adult literary interpreters just like that; we learn to interpret literature by our exposure to various semi-literary genres in our childhood. The music, rhythm and rhyme in ditties, nursery rhymes and lullabies prepare us for reading poetry. The social element in human interaction that is so central in Schleiermacher can be taken to suggest that dialogue and human interaction in general help us understand drama and (some) fiction. Finally, so much of human communication is couched in narrative, both in speech and writing—and, if Damasio (2000) is right, our very identity as persons is narrative—that this again, if it is true, helps explain how readily we understand real life narratives as well as those in fiction and non-fiction.6 What is more, we should remember that Schleiermacher not only portrayed the basis of literary interpretation but also gave us the keys to approximating interpretive validity by a number of procedures. In brief, he produced a broad account of interpretation that, perhaps better than any other hermeneutic theory, combines a host of central aspects: linguistic and psychological, subjective and objective, personal and social, historical and textual, intellectual and imaginative, in a holistic processual approach. Schleiermacher’s achievement, I would claim, offers the foundation for a kind of hermeneutics that is more useful in literary-critical praxis than other current approaches. But it requires a more definite perspective. This I have, in earlier work, termed contextual intention inference.7 Most generally, and anticipating the more detailed discussion below, contextual intention inference constitutes the meaning-making of a literary work by a detailed study of it in relation to the intentional, textual, social and cultural dimensions of its context of origin. This inferential effort does not entail that interpreters should try to accomplish the impossible task of blindfolding the dimensions of their own predilections and contexts, but that they should use them as best they can for actively gaining an understanding of the dimensions of the literary work in relation to its context of origin. In the words of Robert D. Hume (1999: 141), who has presen6 7

For a discussion of narrative and other views of identity see Pettersson (2008). The next two paragraphs are based on views first suggested in Pettersson (1999b).

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ted a related contextual approach based on what he terms “old historicism”, “[w]hen we reconstruct contexts we are building the best hypothesis we can”. In terms of the current discussion of intention and interpretation in aesthetics, contextual intention inference can, as a kind of up-to-date and critical approach to philological study, be termed a moderate intentionalist and moderate monist position.8 Where does interpretive validity come in, then? Following Kai Nielsen’s (1996)—and others’—refinement of Nelson Goodman’s original concept of reflective equilibrium, interpretive validity, when combined with contextual intention inference, is approximated by a continuous intersubjective and corrective critical pursuit drawing on similar efforts in ethics, philosophy and epistemology. This kind of intersubjectively agreed position would fall under the usually unattainable ideal of wide reflective equilibrium.9 Suffice it to say at this point that my approach differs from interpretivist advances by its combination of historical contextualization, interpretive intersubjectivity and the selfcorrection ideally inherent in critical praxis. In contrast to interpretivist readings, which by their relativist nature often invite obsolescence, literary studies focusing on interpretive validity stand a chance of being useful to future readers. The goal is, in Wendell V. Harris’s (1996: 208-209) terms, to provide cumulative scholarship rather than ephemeral criticism. Now, more explicitly, how does this relate to narratology? What I have presented is a view of literary interpretation based on a contextual and moderately intentionalist view of the literary work. When joined with narratology, such a hermeneutic can help narratology outgrow its abidingly structuralist view of the literary text and its unidimensionally contextualized readings. In other words, contextual intention inference can provide contemporary narratology with an interpretive approach that would do its broader cultural and historical aspects justice. I write approach rather than framework, let alone theory, since I think Schleiermacher is right in claiming that interpretation is an art rather than a science and thus in part reliant on the interpreter’s skill and in part on the specific aspects of the object of interpretation—for the interpretation of each literary work requires particular foci. What is more, contextual intention inference requires the kind of detailed contextual, historically-anchored and interdisciplinary study of the literary work that post-classical narratology and its multi-faceted toolkit is well equipped to provide in the study of fiction. Hence, narratology and hermeneutics can profitably be combined: classical narratology offers the textual tools, post-classical narratology the contextual and cognitive tools, and a hermeneutics based on contextual intention inference provides an account 8 9

For recent arguments for monist versus multiplist right interpretations see Krausz (2002). See also moral objectivity or, more precisely, “objectivity humanly speaking” in Hilary Putnam (1994: 151-181, 177n quote).

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that is able to deal with narratology’s interpretive features and approximate interpretive validity. Literary-critical praxis is the touchstone of any approach, not least one that tries to forge a link between two schools as different as narratology and hermeneutics. So let us see how contextual intention inference can deal with a test case. 3. The Awakening as Test Case: Edna’s Final Swim The ending of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899) has long been a central bone of contention in Chopin studies. After providing some contextual background on the novel and its protagonists, I shall, therefore, concentrate on that final section. By now considered a minor American classic, the novel tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a bourgeois wife and mother in New Orleans who, in the summer in which she learns to swim, falls in love with a younger man, Robert Lebrun, and experiences a sexual awakening. Their love is apparently not consummated, but Edna goes on to have an affair with a roué called Alcée Arobin and finally realizes that no human relation will last and that she is what the original title of the novel suggests, “A Solitary Soul”. In the last pages she swims out to sea and apparently drowns. Let me first contextualize Chopin’s novel in her oeuvre and Chopin criticism. By the time Chopin published The Awakening she was already an established author with a novel (At Fault, 1890) and a collection of short stories (Bayou Folk, 1893) mostly depicting rural life in the South. Her focus in these stories is mainly on the relations between men and women, and although she often focalises the action through her female characters, she has stories in which the focalisation is evenly distributed in terms of gender, and even some in which the male perspective dominates, such as “A Morning Walk” (1897) and “Ti Démon” (written in November 1899). This suggests that the common view of Chopin as a straightforwardly feminist author does not hold in terms of the formal aspects of her fiction. A careful contextual reading of the ending of The Awakening also suggests that a narrow thematic feminist interpretation of the novel does not do it justice. One of the important aspects bypassed in many readings of The Awakening is Chopin’s deep-seated interest in science, especially in the works of Charles Darwin, noted by a contemporary critic as early as 1894.10 Through10

In a presentation of Chopin published in 1894 William Schuyler stresses her strong scientific bent: “[H]er reading [was] almost entirely scientific, the departments of Biology and Anthropology having a special interest for her. The works of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer were her daily companions; for the study of the human species, both general and particular, has always been her constant delight” (reprinted in Seyersted/Toth 1979: 117; see Seyersted 1969: 49).

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out his critical biography Seyersted (1969: 90) shows how well-read Chopin was in contemporary science and French realist authors—Flaubert, Zola and especially Maupassant—and finally maintains that “[w]hat Kate Chopin wanted was nothing less than to describe post-Darwinian man with the openness of the modern French writers”—a point later developed by Bert Bender (1991/2007). It is important to recognize this Darwinian aspect in Chopin, because without it the female characters in her fiction—Edna Pontellier in particular—may be viewed merely in their social role, especially in relation to their male counterparts. That much Chopin criticism has ignored this dimension is because of its emphatic focus on the women’s role. My point, then, is that the social aspects of The Awakening should be seen in relation to Chopin’s broader view of humankind. Among such social aspects the relation between men and women, especially adult heterosexual love, is one of the most important. Critics have tended to emphasize Chopin’s view of women’s emancipation as “her major subject: the emergent selves of women defying the social securities and strictures of the old South” (Papke 1990: 27), or more generally as “the female struggle for identity” (Gilbert 1986: 18), or in The Awakening as “a woman’s (female artist’s) struggle for her own identity” (Wheeler 2007: 120). These are important aspects of much of Chopin’s work, but should be counterweighted by the fact that she often focuses on individual rights irrespective of gender. For instance, in one of her most widely anthologised short stories, “The Story of an Hour” (1894), which thematises a woman’s awakening after hearing the news of her husband’s death, the narrator first focalises the protagonist’s thoughts, then comments on them: There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellowcreature. (Chopin 2006: 353, emphasis added)

What is more, as I have noted, in most of her fiction—both before and after The Awakening—Chopin also focalises the action through her male characters. One instance is another celebrated story, “At the ’Cadian Ball” (1892), in which the two male and two female protagonists focalise the action (three of them suffering pangs of jealousy) and finally form two couples. Out of the four only Calixta cannot get the lover she actually wants (Alcée), but makes do with another. In a sequel to the story, “The Storm” (written in 1898), in the sexually most explicit scene she ever wrote, Chopin (2006: 596) allows Calixta, during a storm, to experience her consummation with the lover who had previously spurned her. Afterwards they both go back to their spouses and “everyone was happy”. (Understandably, Chopin never even tried to publish this story.) Similar scheming, cunning and passion among both men and women occur elsewhere in Chopin’s work, and at times

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women do not understand men, as the male protagonist of At Fault even complains to his dearly beloved Thérèse (2006: part II: ch. 6, 816).11 Nevertheless, more often it is the female protagonists who feel their husbands or lovers show no understanding of their needs and views, especially of emancipation. Now let us turn to the novel and consider it, and especially its ending, in some detail. Between her first and final swims Edna is portrayed in different social roles, as wife, lover, mother, daughter, sister, friend, hostess. In most of these roles she is less than successful, at times wilfully so, at times despite herself, dissociating herself from the company of others. As a wife she finds she does not love her nice, but dull and possessive, husband. Like Jeanne Vasseur in Guy de Maupassant’s (1922) story “The Awakening” (Maupassant was Chopin’s favourite author), she stands between a young lover (Robert Lebrun) and a seductive roué (Alcée Arobin), and finally realizes that neither love nor sexual attraction will last. As a mother to her two small boys, she is simply “not a mother-woman” but rather volatile, being “fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way”; her husband even speaks of “her habitual neglect of her children” (ch. 4, 888; ch. 7, 899; ch. 3, 885). As a daughter and sister, she has gloomy memories of her stern and selfish Presbyterian father, the Colonel, to whom she does not feel “warmly or deeply attached” (ch. 23, 950). As a sister she refuses—without offering an excuse—to go to the wedding of one of her two sisters (ch. 24, 954). As a friend, she is torn between two women, both of whom she is fond of in some way, but neither of whom is suitable as a role model for her: the beautiful madonna-like motherwoman Madame Ratignolle and the artistic and emancipated but “disagreeable” and “self-assertive” Mademoiselle Reisz, who has “a disposition to trample upon the rights of others” (ch. 9, 905). As a hostess, she throws a fine dinner-party at the end of the novel, having moved out of her marital home, but even here she experiences solitude: she is “the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone” (ch. 30, 972). In the light of Edna’s behaviour in these social roles, Nina Baym (1981: xxxvi) thinks we must finally admit that Edna is “a wholly self-absorbed character”. Since “[n]o large-scale growth in psychological, intellectual, or spiritual freedom follows from Edna’s sexual awakening”, she concludes that the novel is “best characterized not so much as a feminist work as an individual and indecisive meditation on feminist themes, resisting translation into ideology” (Baym 1981: xxxviii f.). Baym may be largely right that it is anachronistic and exaggerated to read The Awakening as a feminist novel, but

11

Subsequent references to Chopin’s (2006) complete works will be included in the text by page reference. As is customary in Chopin criticism, owing to the many editions of her works, references to At Fault and The Awakening are given by both chapter and page.

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whether Chopin was “indecisive” in penning it is more doubtful, as a careful reading of the ending will suggest. From the very start Edna’s face is portrayed as having “a contradictory subtle play of features”, and in the first inkling of her awakening her behaviour is impelled by “two contradictory impulses” (ch. 2, 883; ch. 6, 893). Paula A. Treichler (1993), among others, has studied the many ambiguities in The Awakening, and I have touched above on a number of its dualities: two lovers, two friends, two children, two sisters, two swims. Kathleen Wheeler (2007: 130) summarizes her study of the novel’s “oppositions” as related to different levels of structure, theme, character and style. All such dualities and dichotomies would suggest that ambiguity in different guises is the central literary technique of the novel. Neither in its feminist import, however, nor in other aspects is this “indecisive”; on the contrary, it is carefully plotted in Maupassant’s spirit. Before focusing on Edna and her final swim, let me note that the other major characters are also made more complex by being portrayed in contradictory ways. This has not been remarked by Chopin critics, although many, like Wheeler (1994/2007), discuss the pair-like juxtaposition of these characters. Even though she is depicted in predominantly negative terms, Mademoiselle Reisz moves one and all, especially Edna, by her piano-playing. Madame Ratignolle may be beautiful and devoted to her husband, but she shocks Edna by the way she coquettes with the Colonel (ch. 23, 951). The boring and patriarchal Léonce Pontellier is nevertheless well-liked by all, who consider him “the best husband in the world”, and even Edna must admit that “she knew of none better” (ch. 3, 887). Although passionate and considerate, Robert Lebrun turns out to be just as possessive as Edna’s husband (ch. 36, 992). Doctor Mandelet, often considered Edna’s sympathetic confidant, shows his prejudice against emancipated women when he asks Mr Pontellier whether Edna has been “associating of late with a circle of pseudointellectual women—super-spiritual superior beings” (ch. 22, 948).12 Across the board, character description is another feature in the novel’s network of ambiguities. I have observed above some self-centred qualities in Edna, but she has a number of other qualities, some of them redeeming, that make her the central enigma on which all the ambiguities of the novel shed light. First of all, it is important to notice that her duality and her predilection for solitude are constitutional:

12

In his answer to the doctor Mr Pontellier notes that the trouble is that Edna “hasn’t been associating with anyone” (ch. 22, 948). Thus, Chopin again stresses the solitary aspect in Edna’s awakening.

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Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions. (ch. 7, 893) She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. (ch. 16, 929)

What her awakening entails is that Edna refuses to keep on silencing the thoughts and emotions of her “inward life”. With her engaging manner and sensual, sensitive and artistic personality, Edna, like her husband, is popular with both men and women. But it is her struggle to combine the conflicting aspects of her life openly in a social context that makes her such a complex and intriguing character. In an argument with Madame Ratignolle she epitomizes her emancipated stance: “I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself” (ch. 16, 929). However, when Edna remembers these words immediately before going for her final swim, her children “appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her”, although “she knew a way to elude them” (ch. 39, 999). The latter statement seems to suggest that she has made a conscious decision, but that suggestion is withdrawn in the very next sentence: “She was not thinking of these things as she walked down to the beach”. Here we have an instance of Edna’s contradictory view of her children—as well as of how she suddenly forgets the very important issue of what her awakening entails for her relation to them. As Tuire Valkeakari (2003: 209) has pointed out, “any critic’s view of the two issues—the deliberateness of Edna’s suicide and the degree of Chopin’s feminism—are interrelated”. Above I have suggested that Edna’s character, her actions and motivations, thoughts and emotions are so contradictory and ambiguous that any straightforward feminist reading of the novel fails to take account of much of her personality. And I have shunned using the simple word suicide for Edna’s last swim. Likewise, her sudden impulse to “elude” her children seems to be swept away in the next sentence. Similarly, in the final paragraphs the sea is portrayed in terms that echo earlier descriptions, but with heightened ambiguity. The water of the gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling, disabled down, down to the water. Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded, upon its accustomed peg. She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bath-house. But when she was there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.

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How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world it had never known. The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. She went on and on. (ch. 39, 999-1000)

To be sure, there is evident emancipated, even ecstatic Whitmanian action and imagery in this passage, relating to both Edna and the sea. A sudden impulse makes her discard the bathing suit she has just put on. Savouring her own nudity, she feels newborn and succumbs to the sea’s sensuous embrace. But her rapture is deeply undercut. The sea still invites her into “abysses of solitude” and tempts her like a serpent. The image of the bird flying away in her fantasy of the naked man on the beach has turned into a maimed bird helplessly falling into the sea. The final awakening as a “new-born creature” is undermined by the fact that the previous day she has watched “the scene of torture” of Madame Ratignolle giving birth and remembered how she herself had “awaken[ed] to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude that come and go” (ch. 38, 995, 994). Also, both on land and in the water, she is anything but comfortable: the sun and breeze have no mercy on her; the sea is chill and deep. What is more, there is little to imply that she makes a deliberate decision to commit suicide. As she is swimming, Edna thinks of her near and dear ones—of her husband and children, who “need not have thought that they could possess her”; of Mademoiselle Reisz’s scornful reaction to such a notion; of Robert, who “would never understand” her; and of Doctor Mandelet, who might—until “it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone” (ch. 39, 1000). The fact that she sums up her social relations in this way may suggest that she is aware that she is approaching the end of her life. But is this the result of a deliberate act? Treichler (1993: 309) has shown how Chopin often makes Edna the grammatical object and employs “the distancing it was/there was construction” (ibid.: 317). In the phrases just quoted we have instances of both, implying that although awakened in many senses, Edna is at least as much acted upon as acting. And Treichler (1993: 320), I think rightly, goes on to argue that the language of the novel “continually asserts the existence of an independent, impersonal state of affairs over which Edna has little control”. For Treichler (1993: 323), the dread and source of oppression “lies in the reality of the female body”, and “to awaken, as Edna has done, is to die” (ibid.: 325), which means that her

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“suicide” (ibid.: 325) is “a triumph, not a failure” (ibid.: 325)—a common enough view of Edna’s last swim.13 However, as we have seen, there is much to suggest that the reasons for her lack of control go beyond patriarchy and its oppression. I think Nancy Walker (1994: 256) is closer to the mark in her assertion that “Chopin writes The Awakening from the perspective of a naturalist, giving Edna little control over her own destiny, and it is important to note that she is controlled by her own emotions, not by men or society”. But when Walker (ibid.) detects “no stance about women’s liberation or equality” in the novel, she rather downplays the feminist dimension in Edna’s awakening. Nevertheless, her emphasis on the naturalist tendency in the novel is significant. As we have seen, much in Chopin points in this direction. Edna echoes typically disconsolate naturalist views in her opinion that her children merely add to “the great unnumbered multitude that come and go”. Moreover, when she first confesses that she loves Robert (to Mademoiselle Reisz), Edna finds it as unfathomable as Chopin does in her answer to the query “Is Love Divine?”: “[D]o you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select?” (ch. 26, 964). What Chopin seems to be saying here is that sexual selection may be a fact, but it is certainly not conscious. But even though she still loves Robert dearly as she is about to drown, Edna is well aware that he will never understand her, that she is utterly alone. She also realizes that neither Robert nor Alcée will be her last lovers, not least since Robert’s brother Victor made advances to her at her final dinner-party, repeatedly singing the song with which his brother had first won her heart (ch. 30, 974). Watching Victor’s advances to Edna a minor character called Gouvernail murmurs two lines from Swinburne’s poem “A Cameo”, which suggest a rather cynical view of love: “There was a graven image of Desire [/] Painted with red blood on a ground of gold” (ch. 30, 973).14 Edna’s sexual awakening is nevertheless portrayed in terms of the Sleeping Beauty when she asks Robert “How many years have I slept?” and he answers “You have slept precisely one hundred years” (ch. 13, 919). However, the fairytale aspect of her awakening is later qualified by the statement that she starts to “comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality” (ch. 28, 967). The very last lines of the novel are often glossed over as mere childhood reminiscence, but I think they are more significant. Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer

13 14

For a summary and discussion of different view of Edna’s ‘suicide’, see Wolkenfeld (1994). The fact that a character called Gouvernail is trying to seduce the married protagonist in Chopin’s story “Athénaïse” (1895) seems to strengthen such a reading.

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clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (ch. 39, 1000)

Elaine Showalter (1993: 186) is among the few critics who focus on this passage, arguing that “Edna’s memories are those of awakening from the freedom of childhood to the limitations conferred by female sexuality”. But, like Treichler’s, her conclusions seem exaggerated: the image of the bees and flowers is supposedly “a standard trope for the unequal relations between women and men” (Showalter 1993: 186), and such images “decoy women into slavery” (ibid.: 187). In fact, the end of the novel is alluding to the scene in which Edna, before learning to swim and before her sexual awakening, sits watching the sea and is reminded of a meadow that to her as a little girl in Kentucky “seemed as big as the ocean”. The smell of the flowers may also refer back to the first way the sea tempts her, not by its voice or touch as it was to do later, but by its “seductive odor” (ch. 5, 892). And on that earlier occasion she goes on to reminisce about her first romantic infatuation, the object of which was a cavalry officer: At a very early age—perhaps it was when she traversed the ocean of waving grass— she remembered that she had been passionately enamored of a dignified and sadeyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky. She could not leave his presence when he was there, nor remove her eyes from his face, which was something like Napoleon’s, with a lock of black hair falling across the forehead. But the cavalry officer melted imperceptibly out of her existence. (ch. 7, 897)

This was her first awakening to romantic love, just as her desire for Robert was her first awakening to sexual love. Its major significance and ultimate defeat is symbolized by the comparison to Napoleon. But although sometimes called the American Madame Bovary, The Awakening is not a straightforward novel of the danger of romantic illusions. Just as Edna is about to go for her final swim she realizes that “the day would come when he [Robert], too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone” (ch. 39, 999). Even when seen exclusively in relation to her social bonds, Edna’s romantic and sexual awakenings both point to the same outcome: solitude. Thus, Edna’s final awakening—and the one Chopin criticism seldom focuses on—concerns her realization that romantic and sexual awakening leads inevitably to a more encompassing insight: that every individual is (as Chopin’s original title has it) “A Solitary Soul”. To be sure, Chopin describes a woman’s awakening, and perhaps Seyersted is right that the bird imagery implies that in a patriarchal society only “male freedom can fly” (1969: 159, emphasis original). But so much of her other writing and her translations of Maupassant (see below) seem to suggest that the final and most hard-won awakening concerns the ultimate solitude of each and every human, irrespective of gender. Even though such an awakening seems to be too much for

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Edna, by depicting it in detail Chopin shows that she is able to face it—and helps her readers face it. My conclusion is, then, that critics detecting either straightforward triumph (Treichler 1993) or pessimism (Seyersted 1969: 142, 149) in the depiction of Edna and her final swim overlook the care with which Chopin structured her novel and its ambiguous end—despite the fact that both Treichler and Seyersted stress Chopin’s use of ambiguity. Just as Maupassant in “Night” leaves his first-person narrator entering the Seine (although since it happened “yesterday” (Bonner 1988: 197), he must have survived), and just as Maupassant’s narrator in “Solitude” cannot make up his mind whether the man who feels an abiding horror for solitude is insane or not (see ibid.: 200), Chopin, who translated both stories, leaves the ending of her novel supremely ambiguous. Of course, by the 1890s having ‘fallen’ women die or commit suicide was a common ending in novels, but Chopin chooses only to intimate her protagonist’s death—Edna is still swimming and reminiscing in the final lines. What she seems to be implying is that Edna had necessarily to experience her infatuation with—and later sexual desire of—men, since humankind, like all of nature, subsists only through such attraction. She opts neither for rejoicing in nor deploring Edna’s awakening; rather, following Darwin and the literary naturalists, she reports unsentimentally its results. Like Yeats, Chopin casts a cold eye not only on death but on the solitary life each individual must lead—an aspect neither Margo Culley (1994) nor Elaine Showalter (1993) refer to in their respective readings. Of the literary naturalists, Chopin held Zola in high regard, but in reviewing his novel Lourdes, she finds it “unpardonable” (698) that the author’s view is so evident, since for her, as she notes elsewhere, “Thou shalt not preach” is “an eleventh commandment” (703). Of the American authors she especially liked the contemporary Southern-born author Ruth McEnery Stuart, in particular the “[s]ympathy and insight” she showed in her realist stories (712).15 In portraying Edna with sympathy and merciless insight Chopin seems to be saying, with Maupassant in “Solitude”: “What a mystery is the unfathomed thought of a human being; the hidden, free thought that we can neither know nor lead nor direct nor subdue!” (Bonner 1988: 196) As we have seen, so complex and carefully constructed is Chopin’s portrayal of Edna’s awakening that the novel (and especially its ending) has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Inspired by Darwin, Whitman and Maupassant, Chopin had by the late 1890s developed her craft as a writer to the

15

A detailed description of Chopin’s meeting with Stuart can be found in Toth (1991: 268-271), who also notes: “Although she read carefully the writings of her American competitors—Ruth McEnery Stuart, Mary E. Wilkins, Sarah Orne Jewett—Chopin’s model remained Guy de Maupassant” (ibid.: 272).

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point that she was able to create one of the most multifaceted and compelling female portraits in American literature. 4. Conclusion: A Kind of Link Forged In what sense has this analysis of The Awakening been able to combine narratology and hermeneutics? It made use of detailed study of the work, its language and focalisation, and related it to other works of fiction and nonfiction by Chopin. It studied its characters, especially the protagonist, and central thematics, and drew interpretive conclusions on the basis of formal and thematic traits, attempting in this way to contextually infer the intention Chopin had in penning her novel. Furthermore, it referred to some of the most astute Chopin critics and came to the conclusion that many have rightly pointed out ambiguous traits in The Awakening. It proceeded to adduce ancillary evidence substantiating and developing such claims: Chopin’s reading of French fiction, especially Maupassant, her deep-seated interest in Darwin and Whitman, her diary entries, all strengthen a reading of the novel as focusing on the solitude of the individual; for human natural selection, and the sexual awakening it is based on, prioritise the species and its survival at the expense of personal happiness. In this way, the analysis aimed to show that although American feminist critics have done a good job in contextualizing the novel, their ideological perspective has made them exaggerate its feminist import. A multidimensional reading based on contextual intention inference aspires to a greater approximation of interpretive validity. Indeed, I would claim that such a reading could provide a firmer basis for any ideological interpretation. In the case of The Awakening one could demonstrate how Southern patriarchy is portrayed in a balanced way, with Darwinian thematics playing a central role. The blend of narratology and hermeneutics illustrated in this reading adds intentional and contextual parameters to both those approaches, holding in check the interpretive relativism of late twentieth-century textual structuralism and hermeneutics. That is the kind of link I have tried to forge between these two important traditions within the human sciences. I envisage that it could be extended in a number of ways: its developmental aspects could be studied in order to better understand how humans make use of narrative and how it is interpreted; its intentional aspects in order to better understand how humans function as agents in creating and understanding narrative; and its contextual aspects in order to better understand the role sociocultural aspects play in writing and reading narrative. It is up to the readers of this paper to see whether the metal I have used in forging the link, and the welding I have made, are strong enough. If not, I

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invite them to do a better job in this or some other way. But one thing is certain: the link between narratology and literary hermeneutics must be forged if both approaches are to receive a more tenable foundation. Works Cited Ankersmit, Frank. 2005. “Hermeneutics”. In: Herman et al. 2005, p. 211-212. Baym, Nina. 1981. “Introduction”. In: Kate Chopin. The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York: The Modern Library. vii-lviii. Bender, Bert. 2007 [1991]. “The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and The Descent of Man”. In Bloom 2007b, p. 89-101. Bonner, Thomas, Jr. 1988. The Kate Chopin Companion. With Chopin’s Translations from French Fiction. New York/Greenwood, CT/London: Greenwood Press. Bowie, Andrew. 1990. Aesthetics and Subjectivity. From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 1998. “Introduction”. In: Schleiermacher 1998, p. vii-xxxi. Bremond, Claude and Thomas Pavel. 1995. “The End of an Anathema”. In: Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy and Thomas Pavel (eds.). Thematics. New Approaches. Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 181-192. Chopin, Kate. 2006 [1969]. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press. Chopin, Kate. 1993. The Awakening. Complete Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Nancy A. Walker. Boston, MA/New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. Chopin, Kate. 1994. The Awakening. An Authoritative Text, Biographical and Historical Contexts, Criticism. A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. Ed. Margo Culley. New York/London: W. W. Norton. Culley, Margo. 1994. “Edna Pontellier: ‘A Solitary Soul’”. In: Chopin 1994, p. 247-251. Damasio, Antonio. 2000 [1999]. The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. London: William Heinemann. Darby, David. 2001. “Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 22:4, p. 829-852. Frank, Manfred. 1997 [1989]. The Subject and the Text. Essays on Literary Theory and Philosophy. Ed. Andrew Bowie; trans. Helen Atkins. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1996 [1989]. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Trans. rev. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. London: Sheed and Ward. (Originally published in 1960) Gilbert, Sandra M. 1986 [1984]. “Introduction: The Second Coming of Aphrodite”. In: Kate Chopin. The Awakening and Selected Stories. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert. Harmondsworth et al.: Penguin, p. 7-33. Harris, Wendell V. 1996. Literary Meaning. Reclaiming the Study of Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London: Macmillan. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London and New York: Routledge.

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Hume, Robert D. 1999. Reconstructing Contexts. The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003. “Narratology and Interpretation: A Rejoinder to David Darby”. In: Poetics Today 24:3, p. 413-421. Krausz, Michael (ed.). 2002. Is There a Single Right Interpretation? University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Livingston, Paisley. 2005. Art and Intention. A Philosophical Study. Oxford et al.: Clarendon Press. Makkreel, Rudolf A. 1992 [1975]. Dilthey. Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Margolin, Uri. 1978. “Conclusion: Literary Structuralism and Hermeneutics in Significant Convergence, 1976”. In: Mario J. Valdés and Owen J. Miller (eds.). Interpretation of Narrative. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, p. 177-185. Maupassant, Guy de. 1922 rpt. “The Awakening” [Réveil]. In: Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 112-119. Michelfelder, Diane P. and Richard E. Palmer (eds). 1989. Dialogue and Deconstruction. The Gadamer–Derrida Encounter. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nielsen, Kai. 1996. Naturalism Without Foundations. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Nünning, Ansgar. 2006. “Narratology and Cultural History: Tensions, Points of Contact, New Areas of Research”. In: Herbert Grabes and Wolfgang Viereck (eds.). The Wider Scope of English. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, p. 154-185. Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss. The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Westport: Greenwood Press. Pettersson, Bo. 1999a. “The Postcolonial Turn in Literary Translation Studies: Theoretical Frameworks Reviewed”. In: AE: Canadian Journal of Aesthetics /Revue canadienne d’aesthetique. Special Issue: The Work of Art in an Age of Diversity and Globalization. Vol. 4, Summer 1999. http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/vol_4/petter.htm Pettersson, Bo. 1999b. “Towards a Pragmatics of Literary Interpretation”. In: Arto Haapala and Ossi Naukkarinen (eds.). Interpretation and Its Boundaries. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, p. 48-65. Pettersson, Bo. 2002. “Seven Trends in Recent Thematics and a Case Study”. In: Max Louwerse and Will van Peer (eds.). Thematics. Interdisciplinary Approaches. Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research. Amsterdam: Benjamins, p. 237-252. Pettersson, Bo. 2005. “Literature as a Textualist Notion”. In: Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson (eds.). From Text to Literature. New Analytic and Pragmatic Approaches. Houndmills/Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 128-145. Pettersson, Bo. 2008. “I Narrate, Therefore I Am? On Narrative, Moral Identity and Modernity”. In: Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning and Bo Pettersson (eds.). Narrative and Identity. Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, p. 23-36. Putnam, Hilary. 1994. Words and Life. Ed. James Conant. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981a [1970]. “What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding”. In: Ricoeur 1981d, p. 145-164.

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Ricoeur, Paul. 1981b [1973]. “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology”. In: Ricoeur 1981d, p. 63-100. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981c [1975]. “The Task of Hermeneutics”. In: Ricoeur 1981d, p. 43-62. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981d. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge/Paris et al.: Cambridge University Press / Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988 [1985]. Time and Narrative. Volume 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1976 [1942]. Friedrich Schleiermachers Dialektik. Ed. Rudolf Odebrecht. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1990. Ethik (1812/13). Ed. Hans-Joachim Birkner based on Otto Braun’s edition. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1995 [1977]. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings. Ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1984. Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933. Trans. Eric Matthews. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press. Scholtz, Gunter. 1995. Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Seyersted, Per. 1969. Kate Chopin. A Critical Biography. Oslo/Baton Rouge: Universitetsforlaget and Louisiana State University Press. Seyersted, Per and Emily Toth. 1979. A Kate Chopin Miscellany. Oslo/Natchitoches: Universitetsforlaget/Northwestern State University Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1993 [1988]. “Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book”. In: Chopin 1993, p. 169-189. Silverman, Hugh J. and Don Ihde (eds). 1985. Hermeneutics and Deconstruction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Stockwell, Peter. 2005. “On Cognitive Poetics and Stylistics”. In: Harri Veivo, Bo Pettersson and Merja Polvinen (eds.), Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, p. 267-282. Thiselton, Anthony C. 1992. New Horizons in Hermeneutics. The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading. Grand Rapids/Michigan: Zondervan. Toth, Emily. 1991 [1990]. Kate Chopin. London et al.: Century. Treichler, Paula A. 1993 [1980]. “The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening: A Linguistic Analysis”. In: Chopin 1993, p. 308-328. Valkeakari, Tuire. 2003. “A ‘Cry of the Dying Century’: Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and the Women’s Cause”. Nordic Journal of English Studies 2:1, p. 193-216. Walker, Nancy A. 1994 [1979]. “[Feminist or Naturalist?]”. In: Chopin 1994, p. 252-256. Wheeler, Kathleen. 2007 [1994]. “Kate Chopin: Ironist of Realism”. In: Harold Bloom (ed.), Kate Chopin. Updated ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism/Infobase, p. 119143. Wolkenfeld, Suzanne. 1994. “Edna’s Suicide: The Problem of the One and the Many”. In: Chopin 1994, p. 241-247.

TOM KINDT (Göttingen)

Narratological Expansionism and Its Discontents* “Here comes the future and you can’t run from it If you got a blacklist I want to be on it.” (Billy Bragg: Waiting for the Great Leap Forward)

In the course of the last ten years, narratology has gained a popularity in the humanities that it never enjoyed before, not even in the heyday of structuralism. Given the annual number of new monographs, anthologies and articles devoted to questions of narrative theory, it stands to reason to adopt a term coined by Manfred Jahn and Ansgar Nünning (1994: 300) and to speak of a “narratological industry” that is currently experiencing boom conditions. As is well known, once a field of study in the humanities becomes the object of increased attention it runs the risk of decreased unity. Narratology’s recent development seems to be an illustration of this rule. After the demise of structuralism in the 1980s, narrative theory has not only experienced a remarkable revival; at the same time, it has undergone extensive diversification. What once was a more or less homogeneous domain of theorizing has become a many-voiced field of debate; where once there was agreement at least on crucial questions there is now controversy on almost everything.1 For some time now, narratologists have obviously felt more and more uncomfortable with this situation and have therefore made intense efforts to appraise and cautiously evaluate the proposals for a renewal of narratology and its core concepts. In her “Afterthoughts” to the 2002 edition of her Narrative Fiction Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 135) accurately observed: “A reconsideration of narratology has become a genre of its own”. In what follows, I will contribute to this genre. In contrast to most of the existing attempts to reconsider narratology, I am not going to provide a survey of new approaches to remodeling narrative theory, be it in part or in whole. Instead, I will address a claim that has, since the 1990s, been put forward in various contributions to narratology, irrespective of their particular programmatic * 1

I would like to thank Tilmann Köppe and Jan Christoph Meister for their criticism of an earlier draft of this paper. See, for example, Herman (1999), Nünning (2000), Fludernik (2000), Nünning/Nünning (2002a; 2002b), Kindt/Müller (2003a), Sommer (2004), Meister/Kindt/Schernus (2005).

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background. To cut a long story short: my paper will analyze a trait of the ongoing debates on the present and possible future state of narrative theory which I will from now on refer to as ‘narratological expansionism’. I will proceed by successively addressing what seem to be the two basic varieties of the expansionist claim with regard to narratology. The first part of this essay will criticize the idea of transforming narratology into a foundational theory within the domain of literary studies, suitable in particular to guiding and evaluating the interpretation of literary texts. The second part will discuss the endeavor to reconceptualize narratology as a basic discipline responsible for narrative phenomena in different fields of research. To prevent the suspicion that I am once more, as David Darby (2003: 429) put it, attempting “to close the barn door long, long after a number of purebred […] horses have escaped”, I will deal with both expansionist claims in a twostep procedure, initially considering the actual state of affairs in literary studies on the one hand and in the humanities on the other, thereafter examining the arguments for the proposed changes in the two fields of research. 1. Narratology and Literary Studies Apart from some leftover structuralists, almost every narratologist in current literary studies seems to be hooked by the idea of a fundamental renewal of narrative theory. Although the proposals for such a renewal—the so-called new, hyphenated or postclassical narratologies—are manifold and differ in a number of respects, most of them have at least some features in common.2 In the present context, it will do to dwell on just one of these features, namely, the expansionist claim that narratology is to be modeled as a theory encompassing both the analysis and interpretation of literary narratives. This is the central demand of the large subclass of new approaches to narrative theory that have been, for some years now, categorized as ‘contextual narratologies’.3 The claim can be traced back to Susan S. Lanser’s 1986 manifesto for a ‘feminist narratology’4 and has, since then, been taken up in several contributions that argue for a reorientation of narrative theory, e. g. in the proposals for a ‘historical narratology’, a ‘postcolonial narratology’, or a ‘cultural/intercultural narratology’.5 In my view, the claim should be rejected; in the next paragraphs I shall explain why. 2 3 4 5

For a list of these features, see Nünning (2003: 243-244). On this concept, see for instance Chatman (1990), Tolliver (1997), Darby (2001; 2003), Kindt/Müller (2003c), Sommer (2007). On the debate surrounding the conception of a ‘feminist narratology’, see Lanser (1986; 1988), Diengott (1988), Prince (1996), Allrath/Gymnich (2002), Nünning/Nünning (2004). See, for example, Nünning (2000), Erll/Roggendorf (2002), Birk/Neumann (2002), Sommer (2007).

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If one attempts to explicate what narratology is or should be, it seems advisable to reconstruct at first how it is generally understood. A good starting point for such a reconstruction is obviously to take a look at the usage of narratological concepts in literary studies. To simplify matters, I will abstain from examining these applications in any detail, confining myself to a single finding: that the usage of narratological concepts has not fundamentally changed since the days of Eberhard Lämmert, Franz K. Stanzel, and Wayne C. Booth, when theorizing on literary narrative started to become a continuous and coherent venture.6 Narratology has been and still is predominantly applied in the context of textual interpretation, but it has not been and still is not used as a theory of interpretation. People interested in interpreting a literary narrative normally resort to narratological concepts, but at the same time they will probably be aware of, to quote Mieke Bal (1985: x), “the need for more theory beyond narratology”. While there is obviously no agreement as to what can or should be the outcome of narratological analyses, there seems to be a broad consensus that they cannot result in interpretations, unless the analytical tools are combined with an interpretive approach. To put it in a nutshell: in literary studies, narratology commonly serves as a tool for preparing, initiating, or backing up interpretations; it is understood as a heuristics but not as a theory of interpreting texts.7 So far, such a conception of narrative theory has only been outlined; its relevance, however, becomes apparent in the casual programmatic commitments of many narratologists, not least of prominent and influential ones. Gérard Genette (1980: 265), for example, characterizes his own approach in Narrative Discourse as “a procedure of discovery, and a way of describing” or, in short, as “a method of analysis” (ibid.: 23).8 Picking up this theme in the afterword to Narrative Discourse Revisited, he stresses again that he has no time for the “impositions of ‘coherence’” that are usual in “interpretative criticism”: “the function of narratology is not to recompose what textology decomposes”.9 Franz K. Stanzel (1986: 237) at the end of his Theory of Narrative, expressly emphasizes that his system of possible and historical narrative forms can also “serve as a frame of conceptual reference for practical criticism”. And in the introduction to his 2002 essay collection Unterwegs. Eine Erzähltheorie für Leser, he professes that the aim of his contributions to narra6 7 8

9

On the history of narratology, see especially Stanzel (2002b), Cornils/Schernus (2003), Herman (2005a), Fludernik (2005). On this idea, see Kindt/Müller (2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2006). As shown by, for example, the work of Eberhard Lämmert and Franz K. Stanzel in the 1950s and 1960s, a corresponding understanding of narratology lay behind the German-language study of narrative from an early date, see, for instance, Lämmert (1955: 17-18); Stanzel (1959: 127-128; 1964: 9-10). Only recently have efforts been made to explicate this idea, for example in Stanzel (2002b), on which see Kindt (2003). Genette (1988: 155).

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tology has always been “to present concepts and theories that prove their value as ‘discovery tools’ in dealing with specific works” (Stanzel 2002b: 1920). The outlined explication is in principle an exhaustive answer to the question what narratology is or should be; there is, in other words, no need for further remarks on the issue. In the present context, however, it seems advisable to add some conceptual comments on narratology. Such comments might be of help here because heuristic usefulness with regard to interpretation is of course not a unique selling point for narratology and its concepts. With regard to the interpretation of literary narratives, many different kinds of thing may turn out to be heuristically valuable, even interpretations or theories of interpretation. There are, for example, many deconstructive readings of literary texts that draw on the results of existing hermeneutic interpretations based on structuralist analyses of the works in question. Hence, it seems reasonable to briefly explicate what kind of theory narratology is and where the differences between theories like narratology and theories of interpretation lie. From a conceptual perspective, narratology is an object-theory; it is, in other words, a more or less complex model of the object narrative, narration, or the like. Normally, such a model rests on a conception of the necessary and sufficient properties of its object, but it also contains an idea of its typical features, and different ways in which its main aspects can be shaped.10 By virtue of providing object-models, theories like narratology can be understood as methods or methodologies—in this case, the elements of the model are conceived as components of instructions for analytical operations.11 However, no such analysis yields a fully fledged interpretation—and the reason for this becomes obvious if one takes a look at the fundamental structural features of theories underlying literary interpretation. However differently theories of interpretation are conceptualized from a meta-theoretical point of view, it seems to be a unanimous assumption that they basically comprise (at least) two elements: a ‘conception of meaning’ specifying the type of meaning sought (this could be called the “goal component” of an interpretation theory) and a ‘conception of interpretation’ i. e. a set of assumptions and rules as to how such meaning is to be identified (this could be called the ‘methodological component’ of an interpretation theory).12 Even from this sketchy characterization it should be clear what the main conceptual differences between theories of narrative and theories of interpretation are: interpretation theories as a rule comprise object-theories but 10 11 12

See, for example, Jahn’s reconstruction of Genette’s proposal, Jahn (1995: 33). See Kindt (2003). On this idea, see Danneberg/Müller (1981; 1983; 1984a; 1984b), Stout (1982; 1986), Hermerén (1983), Strube (2000).

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do not coincide with them; narratology, in contrast, has neither a conception of meaning nor a conception of interpretation at its disposal, and is therefore unsuitable for either guiding or evaluating interpretations. The preceding deliberations do not of course constitute a knock-down argument against the attempt to reconceptualize narrative theory, but they do point towards some questions anyone committed to the expansionist project must answer. For instance, why should narratologists ignore the existing links between narrative theory and adjacent areas of theory formation in literary studies, such as theories of fiction, genre, interpretation, and so forth? Why should they concern themselves with problems such as the relationships between texts and their contexts which have already been addressed and convincingly solved by many established approaches to textual interpretation? Why should they obscure the differences between two distinct kinds of operation in textual analysis, namely, describing and assigning meaning? Why should they reinvent the wheel and transform narrative theory into yet another theory of interpretation? At first sight it might be surprising that the supporters of reconceptualizing narrative theory as a theory of interpretation hesitate to ask, let alone to answer, these questions. However, a closer look at the manifestos for such a renewal of narratology quickly reveals that its advocates simply misunderstand their own aspirations; they seem to have other objectives than they suppose themselves to have. What they are actually aiming at is not a fundamental transformation, but a diligent application of narrative theory. In short, they stand for narratologically informed interpretations. There should be no need to show in any detail that this reasonable goal can be achieved without the slightest revision of narrative theory. 2. Narratology and the Humanities As noted above, narratological expansionism is by no means restricted to literary studies. The development that is now, following Martin Kreiswirth, generally referred to as the ‘narrative’ or ‘narrativist turn’ in the humanities has prompted another expansionist position that seeks to remodel narrative theory as a foundational discipline for the humanities as such, one that deals with narrative phenomena in different cultural spheres. This widening territorial claim forms the basis of quite a number of recent proposals for a transgeneric, intermedial or interdisciplinary narratology; but it is also implied in many attempts to demonstrate the relevance of narrative in specific disciplinary contexts.13 Since narrative seems to be a ubiquitous cultural phe13

See, with references to further reading, Nünning/Nünning (2002b), Meister/Kindt/Schernus (2005), or Kindt/Köppe (2009).

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nomenon, so the advocates of this type of expansionism argue, narratology can appropriately play a constitutive role across all the human sciences. After a very brief look at the current situation of narrative research in the humanities, I shall address some consequences for narratology that are often drawn from the narrative turn: first of all, I will examine the assumption that the narrative turn gives reason to remodel narrative theory. Thereafter, I shall consider the proposal to transform narrative theory into a foundational discipline for the humanities; in doing so, I will specify why I doubt that such a remodeling is worthwhile. As early as 1992 Kreiswirth (1992: 629) noticed a trend in the human and social sciences which he proposed to call the “narrative turn”: “there has recently been a virtual explosion of interest in narrative and in theorizing about narrative; and it has been detonated from a remarkable diversity of sites both within and without the walls of the academia”.14 Since then, this interest has not leveled off—quite the contrary: today, it would be difficult to spot a division within the humanities that does not deal with narrative in one of its many manifestations. Historians focus on the narrative shaping of their reports, psychologists investigate the relation between narrativity and conceptions of the self, exponents of law examine the place of narrative in the courtroom, philosophers reflect on the role of narrative in argumentation and explanation, theologians consider the narrative structure of the Bible, exponents of management studies discuss the potential of narrative to resolve business conflicts—and the list could go on. In the course of this development it has become hard to ignore that the phenomenon of narrative has evolved into a point of contact between a large number of disciplines within the humanities. However, this observation has not so far given rise to any noteworthy cooperation between different fields of research that one might count as examples of interdisciplinary collaboration, even allowing a permissive concept of interdisciplinarity. Beyond disciplinary efforts to come to grips with the phenomenon of narrative, there have been at best a few attempts by individual scholars to combine methods and concepts of multidisciplinary origin, accompanied by more insistent proposals for dialogue and collaboration between different divisions of the humanities.15 However, while the heightened awareness of narrative ubiquity has so far not stimulated any considerable interdisciplinary enterprise, it has obviously had a notable impact on the programmatic controversy about narratology and its future conceptualizations. Quite a number of proposals for a renewal of narrative theory have been put forward in the light of the narrative turn. 14 15

On the ‘narrative turn’, see Polkinghorne (1987), Nash (1990), Hinchman/Hinchman (1997), Kreiswirth (2000; 2005), Fireman/McVay/Flanagan (2003). See, for instance, Herman (1999; 2002; 2003; 2005b).

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However different these proposals may be in some respects, they unanimously rest on a pattern of reasoning that one might call the ‘corpus argument’. The existing narratologies, so the argument goes, rely on sets of data that are unsuitable to serve as a foundation for building a solid theory. More concretely, the corpora of texts that have so far been taken into account by narrative theories are either too small or too unbalanced or both. On this account, the advocates of the corpus argument stand for a reconceptualization of narratology based on more comprehensive, and thus more representative, data. The corpus argument is normally developed not systematically but exemplarily; in most cases, it is spelled out with reference to existing narratologies that are assumed to be in some way deficient. Following this vein, advocates of the corpus argument, for example, claim that Genette’s narratology is problematic and in need of revision because it almost exclusively refers to a single literary narrative, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Or they criticize Stanzel’s approach to narrative theory for relying solely on canonical European novels of the 18th and 19th century. In some cases the corpus argument is not put forward by addressing established narratologies but by alluding to the results of the steadily increasing multidisciplinary research in narrative. Within the framework of existing narrative theories, so some supporters of the argument claim, one cannot take account of these results. Based on such considerations Martin Kreiswirth (2005: 378), in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, gives the following explanation for a skepticism with regard to classical narratology that has become prevalent in the age of the narrative turn: In the last decade narrative has become a significant focus of inquiry in virtually all disciplinary formations, ranging from the fine arts, the social and natural sciences, to media and communication studies, to popular therapy, medicine, and managerial studies […]. Yet, with each shift in disciplinary orientation or research tradition, as many new questions have arisen as answers. As soon as we begin to feel secure about our findings, we learn that this or that subspecies has been forgotten, this phenomenon or characteristic overlooked or suppressed, this function or structure neglected.

At first sight, the corpus argument as outlined above might look convincing; it simply seems evident that the corpus of texts on which a systematic approach to narrative relies should exert some influence on the theory’s shape. However, closer consideration reveals that this impression is deceptive. If one criticizes a narratological approach with reference to the corpus of texts it is built on, one mistakes elements of the theory’s context of discovery (or presentation) for elements of its context of justification. Narrative theories use narrative texts like Proust’s À la recherche or the classic European novels for heuristic or illustrative purposes, but they are not ‘based’ on them in the strict sense of the word. There are serious reasons to doubt that the relation

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between narrative theories and the corpora of texts they rely on should be understood (as the advocates of the corpus argument suggest) by interpreting the concepts and models of narratology as empirical generalizations. Such an interpretation might seem tempting, because empirical observations do without doubt play an important role in the process of developing a narrative theory. But it should not be concluded from this finding that narrative theories are empirical theories. In fact, narratologies are not empirical generalizations but more or less systematized schemes of conceptual stipulations. Such conceptual schemes cannot be validated empirically; on the contrary, they have to be evaluated with regard to criteria like applicability, simplicity, coherence, unity, etc. Keeping this in mind, it is also hard to see how the results of multidisciplinary narrative research should have the impact on narratology that the adherents of the corpus argument suppose them to have. An exploration of narrative structures necessarily presupposes at least a tentative conception of narrative. On this account, narrative research in whatever discipline or field of study cannot supply good reasons for a reconceptualization of established notions of narrativity: it either rests on those very notions or is based on rival concepts right from the start. Of course, this does not mean that narrative research in, for instance, historiography, philosophy or psychology might not provide reasons for modifying existing narrative theories; but such modifications would not be what the advocates of the corpus argument had in mind when they put forward their claim. As indicated above, the corpus argument serves as a starting point for a number of different proposals for a renewal of narratology. With reference to their particular idea of what a reshaping of narrative theory should look like, it seems reasonable to distinguish between moderate and radical varieties of such proposals. In this last paragraph of my paper, I will confine myself to considering a radical consequence for narrative theory that is often drawn from the narrative turn, namely, the expansionist idea of a narratology possessing foundational status within the human sciences. To avoid any misunderstanding: my comments on this idea are not intended to demonstrate that such a conception of narratology is theoretically flawed and cannot be made to work; rather, I will try to highlight two more or less basic limitations to the proposed modeling of narrative theory—the limitations of fundamentality and functionality. The limitation of fundamentality: Roland Barthes (1966) was surely right, when, in his seminal essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” he claimed narrative to be a ubiquitous phenomenon. However, his followers obviously overstated the matter by asserting that “narrative is everywhere” (Richardson 2000: 168). The plain fact is: narrative is not everywhere. And, what is more, even if narrative is somewhere, it is often of sub-

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ordinate or even no importance to the subject at hand. As Peter Lamarque showed in his impressive article “On Not Expecting Too Much of Narrative”, narrative and narrativity do not always play a central role whenever they appear or can be identified. To presume the opposite is a false assumption that follows from taking “some particular modes of narrative, notably fictional narrative, as arche-typal” (Lamarque 2004: 406). The consequences of these observations for the narratological approach are obvious: the theory appears to be much less fundamental than its supporters tend to assume; at best, the approach might be justified in claiming responsibility for narrative whenever it occurs, but not for all the cultural contexts in which it occurs. The limitation of functionality: The advocates of the proposal in question not only misconceive the fundamentality of the theory they are striving for; they also seem to have no clear conception of its scope or structure. Given the tremendous diversity of manifestations of narrative that such a theory would have to take into account, there can be no doubt that it would consist of nothing more than a very broad and therefore insignificant notion of narrative or narrativity.16 Due to its lack of complexity the proposed narratology would be of restricted usefulness, to say the least. It is evident that a narrative theory which merely coincides with a basic notion of narrative can neither adequately describe nor explain the various manifestations of narrative that different fields of research are dealing with. There seems to be just one function left for a narratology conceived as a foundational discipline for the humanities, namely, that of providing a benchmark for identifying narrative in different cultural spheres. The history of the humanities can inter alia be interpreted as a history of failed attempts to implement a foundational discipline. Narratologists are well advised to try and save their theory from becoming yet another episode of that history. In the wake of the narrative turn, it has not only become common to expect too much of narrative but, likewise, of narratology. 3. Towards a Classical Narratology To sum up: I have sought to characterize and criticize two central types of narratological expansionism. Firstly, I have aimed to show the inconsistency of the claim that narrative theory can provide a theory of interpretation; secondly, I have attempted to demonstrate some of the consequences of the narrative turn for narratology, and specifically to highlight the limitations of the idea of reconceptualizing narratology as a foundational discipline within 16

In the light of the difficulties that have emerged in the debates on the definition of narrower concepts of narrative, like, for example, that of literary narrative, one might question whether going after an all-embracing notion of narrative is a promising project.

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the human sciences. It should have become apparent along the way that the two types of expansionist proposal are, in fact, at odds with each other: the first type amounts to an endeavor to make narrative theory more specific, the second type attempts to make it more general. In my view, we should leave narratology as it is. Works Cited Allrath, Gaby and Marion Gymnich. 2002. “Feministische Narratologie”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 35-72. Bal, Mieke. 1985. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press. Barthes, Roland. 1966. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”. In: Susan Sontag (ed.). A Barthes Reader. New York: Hill and Wang 1982, p. 251-295. Birk, Hanne and Birgit Neumann. 2002. “Go-between. Postkoloniale Erzähltheorie”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 35-72. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. “What Can We Learn from a Contextualist Narratology?” In: Poetics Today 11, p. 309-328. Cornils, Anja and Wilhelm Schernus. 2003. “On the Relationship between the Theory of the Novel, Narrative Theory, and Narratology”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 137-174. Danneberg, Lutz and Hans-Harald Müller. 1981. “Probleme der Textinterpretation. Analytische Rekonstruktion und Versuch einer konzeptionellen Lösung”. In: Kodikas/Code 3:2, p. 133-168. Danneberg, Lutz and Hans-Harald Müller. 1983. “Der ‘intentionale Fehlschluß’ – ein Dogma? Systematischer Forschungsbericht zur Kontroverse um eine intentionalistische Konzeption in den Textwissenschaften”. In: Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 14, p. 103-137; 376-411. Danneberg, Lutz and Hans-Harald Müller. 1984a. “Wissenschaftstheorie, Hermeneutik, Literaturwissenschaft. Anmerkungen zu einem unterbliebenen und Beiträge zu einem künftigen Dialog über die Methodologie des Verstehens”. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 58, p. 177-237. Danneberg, Lutz and Hans-Harald Müller. 1984b. “On Justifying the Choice of Interpretive Theories. A Critical Examination of E. D. Hirsch’s Arguments in Favor of an Intentionalist Theory of Interpretation”. In: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, p. 7-16. Darby, David. 2001. “Form and Context. An Essay in the History of Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 22, p. 829-852. Darby, David. 2003. “David Darby. Form and Context Revisited”. In: Poetics Today 24, p. 423437. Diengott, Nilli. 1988. “Narratology and Feminism”. In: Style 22, p. 42-51. Erll, Astrid and Simone Roggendorf. 2002. “Kulturgeschichtliche Narratologie. Historisierung und Kontextualisierung kultureller Narrative”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 73114.

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Fireman, Gary; Ted McVay and Owen Flanagan (eds.). 2003. Narrative and Consciousness. Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 2000. “Beyond Structuralism in Narratology: Recent Developments and New Horizons in Narrative Theory”. In: Anglistik 11, p. 83-96. Fludernik, Monika. 2005. “Histories of Narrative Theory (II). From Structuralism to the Present”. In: Phelan/Rabinowitz 2005, p. 36-59. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press. Herman, David (ed.). 1999. Narratologies. New Perspectives in Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David. 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Herman, David. 2005a. Histories of Narrative Theory (I). A Genealogy of Early Developments. In: Phelan/Rabinowitz 2005, p. 19-35. Herman, David. 2005b. “Quantitative Methods in Narratology. A Corpus-Based Study of Motion Events in Stories”. In: Meister et al. 2005, p. 125-149. Hermerén, Göran. 1983. “Interpretation. Types and Criteria”. In: Grazer Philosophische Studien 19, p. 131-161. Hinchman, Lewis P. and Sandra K. Hinchman. 1997. Memory, Identity, Community. The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. New York: State University of New York Press. Jahn, Manfred. 1995. “Narratologie. Methoden und Modelle der Erzähltheorie”. In: Ansgar Nünning (ed.): Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorien, Modelle und Methoden. Trier: WVT, p. 29-50 Jahn, Manfred and Ansgar Nünning. 1994. “A Survey of Narratological Models”. In: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 27, p. 283-303. Kindt, Tom. 2003. “Die Quadratur des Typenkreises. Franz K. Stanzels Überlegungen zu einer Erzähltheorie für Leser [Rez. Franz K. Stanzel: Unterwegs – Erzähltheorie für Leser]”. In: IASL-online (update vom 26.3.2003). Kindt, Tom and Tilmann Köppe. 2009. “Das Selbst – eine Erzählung?” In: Julia Abel, Andreas Blödorn and Michael Scheffel (eds.). Ambivalenz und Kohärenz. Untersuchungen zur narrativen Sinnbildung. Trier: WVT (forthcoming). Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.). 2003a. What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter (= Narratologia 1). Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003b. “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 205-220. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003c. “Narratology and Interpretation. A Rejoinder to David Darby”. In: Poetics Today 24:3, p. 413-421. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003d. “Wieviel Interpretation enthalten Beschreibungen? Überlegungen zu einer umstrittenen Unterscheidung am Beispiel der Narratologie”. In: Fotis Jannidis et al. (eds.). Regeln der Bedeutung. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, p. 296-304. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2006. The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter (= Narratologia 9).

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Kreiswirth, Martin. 1992. “Trusting the Tale. The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences”. In: New Literary History 23, p. 629-657. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2000. “Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences”. In: Poetics Today 21, p. 293-318. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2005. “Narrative Turn in the Humanities”. In: David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London and New York: Routledge, p. 377-382. Lämmert, Eberhard. 1955. Bauformen des Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler 1955. Lamarque, Peter. 2004. “On Not Expecting Too Much of Narrative”. In: Mind & Language 19, p. 393-408. Lanser, Susan S. 1986. “Toward a Feminist Narratology”. In: Style 20, p. 341-363. Lanser, Susan S. 1988. “Shifting the Paradigm. Feminism and Narratology”. In: Style 22, p. 52-60. Meister, Jan Christoph; Tom Kindt and Wilhelm Schernus (eds.). 2005. Narratology beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality – Disciplinarity. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter (= Narratologia 6). Nash, Christopher (ed.). 1990. Narrative in Culture. The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature. London: Routledge. Nünning, Ansgar. 2000. “Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology. A Survey of Diachronic Approaches, Concepts, and Research Projects”. In: Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts (eds.). Anglistentag 1999 in Mainz. Proceedings. Trier: WVT, p. 345373. Nünning, Ansgar. 2003. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 239-275. Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nünning (eds.). 2002a. Neue Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie. Trier: WVT (= Handbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium 4). Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nünning (eds.). 2002b. Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT (= Handbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium 5). Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nünning (eds.). 2004. Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Polkinghorne, Donald E. 1987. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. New York: State University of New York Press. Prince, Gerald. 1996. “Narratology, Narratological Criticism and Gender”. In: Calin-Andrei Michailescu and Walid Harmaneh (eds.). Fiction Updated. Theories of Fictionality, Narratology and Poetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 159-164 Richardson, Brian. 2000. “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory”. In: Style 34:2, p. 168-175. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. “Towards … Afterthoughts, Almost Twenty Years Later”. In: S. R.-K.: Narrative Fiction Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, p. 134-149. Sommer, Roy (ed.). 2004. European Journal of English Studies 8. Special Issue: Beyond “Classical” Narratology.

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Sommer, Roy. 2007. “‘Contextualism’ Revisited. A Survey (and Defence) of Postcolonial and Intercultural Narratologies”. In: JLT – Journal of Literary Theory 1:1, p. 61-80. Stanzel, Franz K. 1959. Episches Praeterium, erlebte Rede, historisches Praesens. In: Stanzel 2002a, p. 127-141. Stanzel, Franz K. 1986. A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986. Stanzel, Franz K. 2002a. Unterwegs – Erzähltheorie für Leser. Ausgewählte Schriften mit einer biobibliographischen Einleitung und einem Appendix von Dorrit Cohn. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Stanzel, Franz K. 2002b. “Eine Erzähltheorie für Leser”. In: Stanzel 2002a, p. 9-109. Stout, Jeffrey. 1982. “What is the Meaning of a Text?” In: New Literary History 14, p. 1-12. Stout, Jeffrey. 1986. “The Relativity of Interpretation”. In: The Monist 69, p. 103-118. Strube, Werner. 2000. “Die literaturwissenschaftliche Textinterpretation”. In: Paul Michel and Hans Weder (eds.). Sinnvermittlung. Studien zur Geschichte von Exegese und Hermeneutik. Zürich: Pano, p. 43-69 Tolliver, Joyce (1997): “From Labov and Waletzky to ‘Contextualist Narratology’. 19671997”. In: Journal of Narrative and Life History 7, p. 53-60.

ANSGAR NÜNNING (Giessen)

Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials1

1. “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?” In the title of an essay published in Poetics Today in 1990, Seymour Chatman raised the question “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?” Anyone who tries to survey the field almost twenty years later will have to admit that we still do not really know. What is worse, we do not even know for sure what ‘contextualist narratology’ really is. Since structuralist narratology was interested in anything but context, ‘contextualist narratology’ may sound suspiciously like an oxymoron. Anyone trying to provide a survey of contextualist narratologies is therefore well advised to add a somewhat cautious and tentative subtitle. As the word ‘towards’ in my subtitle already indicates, I am well aware of the fact that all one can hope to offer at this stage is a rough outline of some of the approaches and concepts associated with the notion of a contextual, cultural or historical narratology, but I will certainly not reach the as yet only dimly discernible outlines of the winning-post. It is a consoling thought, however, that for some time many narratologists and other literary theorists have been on the move towards some end or other. In fact, narratologists always seem to be moving towards new destinations, but apparently they hardly ever get there, as is shown by the impressive number of titles of books and articles beginning with the word ‘towards’. Among the dozen or so examples that I have come across are Mary Louise Pratt’s Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977), Andrew Gibson’s Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (1996), Manfred Jahn’s “Towards a Cognitive Narratology” (1997), Susan Lanser’s double move “Toward a Feminist Narratology” (1986) and “Toward a Gendered Poetics of Narrative Voice” (1999), and a volume called Toward a Critical Narratology (Fehn et al. 1992). 1

The present essay is an updated, revised and expanded version of ideas first broached in some of my earlier articles; see e. g. Nünning (2000; 2003; 2004). I should like to thank Simon Cooke and Roy Sommer for their valuable suggestions.

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It may be worth mentioning in passing, however, that narratologists are not alone in their unflagging restlessness, always moving towards some specified, but apparently unattainable destination. In fact, they move in very good circles, perhaps in more ways than one, as a brief glance at some prominent scholars from other disciplines who have chosen similar titles may illustrate. In 1973 Clifford Geertz was still plodding along “Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, but at least discovering ‘Thick Descriptions’ on his way, Lionel Gossman has for some time been moving Towards a Rational Historiography (1989), and Stephen Greenblatt’s heroic quest “Towards a Poetics of Culture” (1989) has by now turned into a veritable pilgrimage of thousands of ‘New Historicists’. Given that with the possible exception of Monika Fludernik, who has definitely made it Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), no one has yet managed to return with the holy grail, I feel no need to apologize for the fact that I won’t either. Though it may be a consoling thought that even such luminaries as Geertz, Gossman, and Greenblatt, as well as eminent narratologists like Fludernik, Gibson, and Lanser, seem to have been content with moving towards some goal or other, mere movement ‘towards’ can be anything but satisfactory for anyone seriously interested in developing a new approach such as a contextualist or cultural narratology. It hardly comes as a surprise, therefore, that proponents of contextualist narratology have been taken to task for failing to deliver the goods. As Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003b: 210) rightly observe, “programmatic proposals for a contextualist narratology are often advanced but rarely implemented”. Similarly, Roy Sommer (2007: 66) bluntly but rightly emphasizes that “the ubiquity of ‘across’, ‘towards’ or ‘beyond’ in the titles of (contextualist) narratological essays doesn’t signal exciting future developments but, soberingly, unfinished business. If we want progress rather than movement, those queuing up for ‘departure’ will eventually have to show up at ‘arrivals’.” The fact that even an ardent and versatile advocate of postcolonial and intercultural narratologies like Sommer has begun to get impatient with the unfinished business of contextualist narratology should not only give us reason to pause, but should be understood as a clarion-call that it is high time to move beyond programmatic proposals. Using this as a point of departure, the present article will make a modest attempt to survey the approaches associated with the notion of a contextual, (inter)cultural, postcolonial and historical narratology, and provide an outline of some of their main concepts and promises. Instead of offering yet another wide-ranging survey of recent developments in narratology,2 I shall 2

For informative overviews of the state of the art in narratology, or the various narratologies for that matter, see Barry (1990), Fludernik (1993; 1998; 2002a), Herman (1999a; 1999b), Kindt/

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argue that in the age of interdisciplinary narrative research, narratology would stand to gain a lot by taking various contexts into account, and that cultural analyses and context-sensitive interpretations of narratives would stand equally to gain by actually applying and refining the categories provided by narratology. The present essay pursues two modest goals: first to sketch out some of the premises, concepts and methods of a contextualist or cultural narratology that puts the analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of a context-sensitive interpretation of narrative, and second to indicate how narratological categories may be used in order to tease out the epistemological, ethical and normative implications of narrative. After a brief discussion of some of the problems and pitfalls involved in the project of a contextualist narratology (section 2), section 3 will provide a survey of the main approaches conveniently subsumed under the wide umbrella-term ‘contextualist narratology’. Section 4 is devoted to a delineation of some of the main premises and concepts that provide the backbone of contextualist or cultural approaches to narrative. The brief conclusion argues that a cultural narratological framework holds a number of distinct promises, opening up narratology to the various fields of cultural history (section 5). 2. Problems and Pitfalls of Programmatic Proposals Anyone who wants to sing the praises of yet another new approach to narratology might be well-advised, however, to begin by admitting that there are many unresolved problems surrounding the project of a contextualist narratology. The most pressing of these seems to be that the relation between literary texts and what used to be called ‘contexts’ is under-theorized at best (see Fohrmann 1997; Glauser/Heitmann 1999). This should not, however, discourage anyone from exploring areas around which traditional narratologists put up notices declaring ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’. What structuralist narratology ignored and left unanswered is the crucial question of “how literary production is engaged in the ongoing process of cultural construction” (Bender 1987: xv). Though I will certainly not be able to resolve the many complex problems with which neither New Historicism nor other approaches interested in contextualization (see Gymnich/Neumann/Nünning 2006) have effectively come to grips, I hope the argument advanced below will go some way towards crossing the border between narratology and the various contexts of cultural history, bridging a gap that has so far separated the two disciplines to the detriment of both. Müller (2003a), Nünning (2000; 2003), Onega/García Landa (1996), Richardson (2000). See also the two volumes edited by Nünning/Nünning (2002a; 2002b).

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Anyone seriously interested in promoting the cause of a contextualist narratology that relates narratives to their cultural contexts must have been somewhat dismayed by David Darby’s controversial article “Form and Content: An Essay in the History of Narratology” (2001), which pits classical narratology, viewed historically, against the history of German narrative theory. Although Darby argues that narratology should be remodelled into a contextualist theory of interpretation, his essay does not provide much in the way of enlightenment as to how this could actually be done. It thus comes as no surprise that other narratologists have criticized both Darby’s presentation of German narrative theory and his suggestion that a “contextualist narratology” necessarily requires the ill-defined concept of the implied author. Monika Fludernik (2003) has pointed out that German contributions to narrative studies are much broader and more varied than Darby’s essay suggests. And Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003) have taken Darby to task for failing to give convincing reasons either for a change in narratology’s aims or for the purported need to widen its research domain. More recently, there have been heated debates about the pros and cons of contextualist approaches like feminist, intercultural and postcolonial narratologies. While narratologists interested in both narrative theory and the analysis and interpretation of narrative texts have argued for the development of feminist, intercultural and postcolonial approaches to narrative,3 present-day classical structuralist narratologists have expressed severe doubts about the whole project of a contextual narratology. Tom Kindt and HansHarald Müller (2003) have repeatedly complained about what they regard as “narratological expansionism and its discontents”, as the title of Kindt’s contribution to the present collection has it, arguing that the idea of a contextual narratology rests on a number of fundamental misunderstandings about what narratology is (see Kindt/Müller 2003a) and what it is not. Their answer to the question of ‘whether we need an intercultural narratology’ (Kindt/Müller 2004) is both clear and short: ‘no, we don’t’. Roy Sommer (2007), on the other hand, has convincingly argued against any such strict distinctions between foundational narratological research exclusively concerned with theoretical modelling, and contextualist approaches studying the cultural embedding of narratives in specific cultural and historical contexts. These controversies and the different accounts the participants have offered of the history of narrative theory and of the pros and cons of contextualist, intercultural and postcolonial narratologies are not only interesting from the point of view of the light they shed on the complex developments 3

See, for example, Fludernik (1999), Nünning (2000, 2004), Birk/Neumann (2002), Erll/Roggendorf (2002), Nünning/Nünning (2002a; 2004), Orosz (2004), Orosz/Schönert (2004), and, most recently, Sommer (2007) and Birk (2008).

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and international ramifications of narratology. They also metonymically illustrate what is at stake in current debates about the directions in which narratology is moving. Hard-core structuralist narratologists are very sceptical about the so called “new narratologies” collected in David Herman’s excellent volume Narratologies (Herman 1999a), suspecting that they will inevitably lead to a contamination that infects ‘pure’ and ‘neutral’ description with the taint of ideology and relativism. In contrast to the purists who want to make “the world safe for narratology”, as John Bender (1995) aptly put it, practitioners of the various contextualist narratologies intrepidly rush in where structuralists fear to tread. Whether or not they are fools in doing so, may be an open question, but their work has arguably uncovered productive lines of research for both narrative theory and the analysis and interpretation of narratives. Nonetheless, one cannot fail to notice that the question asked in the title of an illuminating collection of articles edited by Tom Kindt and HansHarald Müller, What is Narratology?, has recently received quite different and even contradictory answers. There no longer seems to be a consensus either about the main aims and objectives of narratology or about the extension of its research domains. Echoing Christine Brooke-Rose’s title “Whatever Happened to Narratology”, one may at this stage well ask “Whither narratology?”, be it contextualist narratology or one of its many siblings. Instead of reviewing these debates, or trying to act as arbiter of their hostilities, I should like to argue that such dichotomies as the one between “the uncontaminated fields of ‘classical’ narratology” and the “contextualist dimensions of contemporary ‘postclassical’ narratological scholarship” (Darby 2001: 423) should not be exaggerated. They present us, surely, with a set of false choices: between text and context, between form and content as well as form and context, between formalism and contextualism, between bottom-up analysis and top-down synthesis, and between ‘neutral’ description and ‘ideological’ evaluation. The problem with such binarisms is not so much the ingrained structuralist fear that the formalist and descriptivist paradigm will inevitably be polluted by the invasion of ideological concerns, as the failure of such rigid distinctions to do justice to the aims and complexities of textual analysis, interpretation, and cultural history. It is the attempt to address these complexities, to cross the border between textual formalism and historical contextualism, and to close the gap between narratological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis that is the motivating and driving force behind the project of a contextualist narratology sensitive to the cultural and historical contexts, as well as the ideological and epistemological implications, of narratives. My project in the next sections will be to argue that classical narratology and context-sensitive analyses and interpretations of narrative, despite their

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contrasting theoretical and methodological assumptions, are not as incompatible as is suggested by their respective practitioners, who tend to ignore, or violently attack, each other’s work. I will argue that the more narratological interpretation and contextualisation become and the more culturally and historically oriented narratological theory and analysis become, the better for both. An alliance between narratology and cultural history can open up productive new possibilities for the analysis both of the dialogic relationship between novels and their cultural contexts and of the epistemological, historical, and cultural implications of narrative strategies. 3. Surveying Contextualist Narratologies and their Main Concerns In comparison to the main variants of structuralist or ‘classical’ narratology, which share key theoretical and methodological assumptions, the many and disparate approaches of ‘postclassical narratology’ testify to the erosion of any structuralist and narratological consensus. Given the plethora of new directions and approaches in narrative theory, the sheer number of which might make one rub one’s eyes in astonishment, it definitely looks as though narratology has not only survived the challenges of poststructuralism, feminism, the New Historicism, and postcolonialism, but has also developed in a number of interesting new directions. As Herman (1999b: 14ff.) has shown, however, in his concise overview of new “Directions in Postclassical Narratology”, there has not only been a proliferation of new approaches, the field of narrative theory has also undergone a number of sea changes which have ushered in new phases in the study of narrative. First, the development of narratology has followed a course away from the identification and systematization of the ‘properties’ of narrative texts in the direction of a growing awareness of the complex interplay that exists not only between texts and their cultural contexts but also between textual features and the interpretive choices and strategies involved in the reading process. Second, classical narratology’s preference for describing textual features within a structuralist and formalist paradigm has given way to a general “move toward integration and synthesis” (Herman 1999b: 11) and towards ‘thicker descriptions’, to adopt Clifford Geertz’s well-known metaphor. Third, while structuralist narratology was a more or less unified discipline interested mainly in the synchronic dimension of the poetics of narrative and managing to evade both moral issues and the production of meaning (see Ginsburg/Rimmon-Kenan 1999: 71), most of the new approaches that have been subsumed under the wide umbrella of the term ‘postclassical narratologies’ represent interdisciplinary projects which display a keen interest in the changing forms and functions of a wide range of narratives as well as in the

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dialogic negotiation of meaning. Fourth, postclassical narratology tends to focus on issues like context, culture, gender, history, interpretation, and the reading process, highlighting those aspects of narrative bracketed out by structuralist narratology. Moreover, significant methodological advances have been made, lucidly summarized by Manfred Jahn as follows: where classical narratology preferred an ahistorical/panchronic vantage, postclassical narratology today actively pursues historical/diachronic lines of inquiry; where many first-generation narratologists insisted on an elementarist (or analytic, or combinatorial, or ‘bottom-up’) approach […] postclassical narratology today welcomes the uses of synthetic and integrative view […]; and, finally, where classical narratology assumed a […] retrospective stance, there is an increasing tendency today to pick up the thread of Sternberg’s and Perry’s explorations into the cognitive dynamics of the reading process. (Jahn 1999: 169)

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the various new directions in narrative studies should actually be designated ‘narratologies’, I have elsewhere tried to provide provisional classifications of the different kinds of new approaches in the form of a model or map (see Nünning 2003). Since the focus of the present essay is on contextualist narratologies, I will have to ignore such exciting approaches as cognitive and transmedial narratology, focussing instead on a range of innovative trends which bear directly on the topic in hand, i. e. on approaches that can at least for convenience sake be subsumed under the umbrella of the term ‘contextualist narratology’. The following list presents a selective and schematic survey of the most important new directions in contextualist narrative studies and its applications as well as of the names of some of the major proponents or practitioners of the respective trends. While some of the approaches mentioned in the list have already produced a significant body of scholarly work (e. g. feminist narratology), the labels of some other narratologies are merely ad hoc coinages. Approaches that belong to this category are put in quotation marks, with the name of those who have coined or used the respective phrase in parentheses, whereas new narratologies that are fairly well established by now are printed in small caps. In some cases I have used single inverted commas in order to indicate that the labels I have used are merely provisional. Contextualist, Thematic, and Cultural Approaches: Applications of Narratology in Literary and Cultural Studies ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ

“Contextualist Narratology” (Seymour Chatman) “Narratology and Thematics” (Ian MacKenzie) “Comparative Narratology” (Susana Onega/José Ángel García Landa) “Applied Narratology” (Onega/García Landa, Monika Fludernik)

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ƒ ƒ

‘Marxist Narratology’ – Fredric Jameson, John Bender FEMINIST NARRATOLOGY – Mieke Bal, Alison Booth, Alison Case, Susan Lanser, Kathy Mezei, Robyn Warhol, Gaby Allrath, Andrea Gutenberg, Marion Gymnich ƒ ‘Lesbian and Queer Narratology’ – Marilyn Farwell, Judith Roof, Susan Lanser ƒ ‘Ethnic Narratology’ – Laura Doyle ƒ Intercultural Narratology – Magdolna Orosz, Jörg Schönert, Roy Sommer ƒ POSTCOLONIAL (APPLICATIONS OF) NARRATOLOGY – Monika Fludernik, Marion Gymnich, Roy Sommer, Hanne Birk, Birgit Neumann ƒ “Socio-Narratology” (Mark Currie) ƒ COGNITIVE NARRATOLOGY – Jonathan Culler, Monika Fludernik, David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Menakhem Perry, Meir Sternberg, Ralf Schneider ƒ ‘NATURAL’ NARRATOLOGY – Monika Fludernik ƒ “New Historical Narratologies” (Mark Currie) – Nancy Armstrong, John Bender, Susan Suleiman ƒ “Cultural and Historical Narratology” (Ansgar Nünning) – Ansgar Nünning, Carola Surkamp, Bruno Zerweck ƒ ‘Diachronic Narratology’/Applications of Narratology to the Rewriting of Literary History – Monika Fludernik, Ansgar Nünning, Christoph Reinfandt, Werner Wolf, Bruno Zerweck Hardcore, that is ‘real’, narratologists will probably argue that most of the approaches listed here are not really ‘narratologies’ at all, but merely applications of narratological models and categories to specific texts, genres, or periods. With the possible exception of feminist narratology, which has arguably contributed genuinely narratological insights,4 shedding new light on “narrative qua narrative” (Prince 1995a: 79), most of the contextualist, cultural, thematic, and ideological approaches have been concerned with issues that are not really germane to narratology. I should therefore like to suggest that mere applications should be distinguished from ‘narratology proper’, while hastening to add, of course, that this distinction between narratology and ‘narratological criticism’ is meant to be entirely value-free and neutral and does not constitute a binary opposition but rather a gliding scale between the poles of ‘narratology proper’ and ‘applications of narratology’ or ‘narratological criticism’. Though many contextualist narratologies, in other words, can be conceived of as applications of narratological categories to the context-sensitive 4

For balanced accounts, see Prince (1995a; 1995b). For overviews of feminist narratology, see Lanser (1992; 1995; 1999), Allrath (2000), and Nünning (1994).

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analysis and interpretation of narratives, it is by no means the case that narratologists interested in exploring the relations between narrative and its various contexts are in principle unable to make valuable contributions to narratology or have failed to do so. On the contrary, as the exciting developments in feminist narratology, the more recent variant of a narrative theory informed by gender studies (Nünning/Nünning 2004), and the directions known as ‘intercultural’ and ‘postcolonial narratology’ have by now amply demonstrated,5 proponents of contextualist approaches have “successfully engaged with theoretical issues” (Sommer 2007: 65). What is more, they have shown that the application of narratological categories, models and methods to a context-sensitive analysis and interpretation of narratives can yield fruitful results, throwing new light, for instance, on the cultural specificity of narrative forms, as well as forms of memory and remembering (see e. g. Birk 2008). 4. Premises and Concepts of Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies To present the outlines of what I have provisionally called a contextualist and cultural narratology, we need to historicize and contextualize the debates in which I propose, however modestly, to intervene. When narratology was invented in the late sixties, three of the things that were lost were context, cultural history and interpretation. Although we have recently witnessed both a cultural turn and a great revival of interest in the study of narrative across various disciplines, narratology and context-sensitive interpretations of narratives still seem oceans apart. This holds especially for classical narratology, whereas rhetorical approaches to narrative like those championed by James Phelan (1996; 2004) and some of the better developed recent approaches in contextualist narrative theory, e. g. feminist and postcolonial narratology, are more intensely committed to interpretive concerns. From today’s vantage-point, it definitely looks as though narratology has not only survived the challenges of deconstruction and poststructuralism, it has also developed in a number of interesting directions. One of the reasons why narratology survived the onslaughts of deconstruction, having recently risen as a phoenix from its ashes, is that the critical climate has become increasingly receptive to genuine narratological concerns. Narratology has arguably benefited from “the return to history” (Currie 1998: 76), from “the Revival of Narrative” (Burke 1991) in historiography, and from the renewed interdisciplinary interest in storytelling, both as an object of study and as a 5

See e. g. Fludernik (1999), Sommer (2001; 2007), Birk/Neumann (2002), and Birk (2008).

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mode of scholarly writing. Moreover, a number of wide-ranging changes or “turns” in literary and cultural theory have been conducive to the growth of interest in both narratology and the cultural and historical significance of narrative. These “cultural turns” (Bachmann-Medick 2006), complex changes in the theoretical and critical climate, which have been dubbed respectively the “historical turn”, “anthropological turn”, “ethical turn”, and “narrative” or “narrativist turn”, have greatly increased interest in what Jerome Bruner (1991) called “The Narrative Construction of Reality”. The incorporation of new methodologies and the concomitant widening of the scope of narrative theory has led to such a proliferation of new approaches that it seems perfectly justified to speak of a “narratological renaissance at this juncture” (Herman 1999b: 2), or of a “renaissance in narrative theory and analysis” (Richardson 2000: 168). Given the plethora of new narratological approaches, however, it no longer seems appropriate to talk about narratology as though it were a single approach or a monolithic discipline. As the programmatic and felicitous use of the plural—Narratologies—in the title of the collection of essays recently edited by David Herman (1999a) indicates, in the age of interdisciplinary narrative research there is no longer one capital-“N” narratology. What was once a more or less unified structuralist enterprise has branched out into different fields, producing a wide diversity of new approaches, many of which display little if any family resemblance to their formalist greatgrandfather.6 Some surveys of recent developments in narratology have set out to chart the new worlds created by what Barry (1990) aptly called “Narratology’s Centrifugal Force”. But the sheer wealth of new approaches in narrative theory, many of which are as important as they are difficult to categorize, precludes any single account of the development(s) of and in narrative theory. Any given story could trace only one “of the countless possible plots” in a field that has recently turned into “a garden of forking paths” (Onega and García Landa 1996: 36): 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 6

For the use of the plural, see Herman (1999b) and Fludernik (2000); Currie (1998: 96) vaguely refers to “the new narratologies”. For short, but excellent, overviews of the various new directions in postclassical narratology, see Herman (1999a) and Fludernik (2000). As I have elsewhere (Nünning 2000a; 2003) provided both a critique of the inflationary use of the term ‘narratology’ and some modest proposals for its future usage, I should merely like to reiterate that the various new approaches developed in the interdisciplinary study of narrative on the one hand, and such key terms as ‘narrative studies’, ‘narrative theory’, ‘narratology’, and ‘narratological criticism’ on the other, should be much more clearly distinguished from each other than is generally the case.

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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. (Richardson 2000: 172)

The message is clear—which is why, instead of telling one particular story about narratology,7 I have elsewhere tried to pinpoint the main differences between structuralist (‘classical’) narratology and the new ‘postclassical narratologies’ and to reassess and systematize recent developments in the field by providing a preliminary synchronous map of the new theoretical approaches that have emerged, dividing them into eight groups.8 Most of the new narratologies have either resulted from modifications, elaborations, and applications of previous insights and models, or they have been produced by fruitful encounters between structuralist narratology and other theoretical approaches or critical schools from which various features have been assimilated into narratology. Monika Fludernik and Brian Richardson (2000) divide recent work on narrative, by approach or emphasis, into ten groups: Structuralist and Linguistic Approaches; Rhetorical, Bakhtinian, and Phenomenological Accounts; New Interdisciplinary Approaches; Postmodern Narratology; Ideological Approaches; Psychological Approaches; Poststructuralist Approaches; Popular Culture; Asian Poetics; Important Anthologies. Heuristically useful as such a provisional classification no doubt is, the groups designated ‘Structuralist and Linguistic Approaches’ and ‘Rhetorical, Bakhtinian, and Phenomenological Accounts’ would arguably deserve further subdivision, being far too heterogeneous to warrant the umbrella term ‘group’, whereas ‘Postmodern Narratology’ and ‘Poststructuralist Approaches’ share so many features that one might as well lump them together. Two of the results of the current diversification of approaches have been an increasing interest in the forms and functions of narrative within cultures and a shift of attention towards the question of how narrative forms contribute to our understanding of such phenomena as gender, history, and subjectivity. While the merely systematic and formalist analysis of narrative (once the focal point of narratology) has largely gone out of fashion, narrative theorists have begun to turn their attention to what Mieke Bal (1999) has called ‘cultural analysis’. Many practitioners of such new contextualist ap7

8

For a brief informative and perspicacious history of theories of the novel (Romantheorie), narrative theory (Erzähltheorie), and narratology in Germany, see the illuminating article by Anja Cornils and Wilhelm Schernus (2003), which throws new light on the history and international ramifications of narratology. See also Fludernik (2000), Nünning (2000a), and Richardson (2000). See Nünning (2000; 2003). In the new concluding chapter to the second edition of her invaluable textbook Narrative Fiction, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 142) has reproduced the table in which I tried to systematize those features that set the new postclassical narratologies off from the structuralist paradigm of classical narratology.

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proaches as feminist narratology, intercultural narratology, or postcolonial narratology are now putting the analytic toolkits of narratology “to the service of other concerns considered more vital for cultural studies”, as Bal put it in an article tellingly entitled “The Point of Narratology” (Bal 1990: 729). Bal was herself the first narratologist to ask the question, as invaluable as it is simple, “what’s the point?” (729) Quite a number of the ‘new narratologies’, e. g. feminist narratology and postcolonial narratology, have demonstrated what the point of narratology might be by applying its insights and categories to the analysis of a broad range of texts. Shifting its attention to the ways in which narrative forms function as an active cognitive force in their own right—and one that is involved in the actual generation of attitudes, discourses, ideologies, values, and ways of thinking—cultural narratology focuses on what structuralist narratology ignored and, therefore, left unanswered: viz. the crucial question “of how literary production is engaged in the ongoing process of cultural construction” (Bender 1987: xv). For want of a better term, I have elsewhere suggested that one might call such an approach “cultural and historical narratology” (see Nünning 2000a). The following suggestions are offered as a rough outline—but that, at least, is greater detail than previous uses of the term ‘cultural narratology’ have displayed9—of some conceptual and methodological premises for a context-sensitive and cultural approach to narratives that is still rooted in narratology. By contextualist narratology I mean a kind of integrated approach that puts the analytical tools provided by narratology to the service of a cultural analysis of narrative fictions. Focusing on “the study of narrative forms in their relationship to the culture which generates them” (Onega and García Landa 12), cultural narratology explores “cultural experiences translated into, and meanings produced by, particular formal narrative practices” (Helms 2003: 14). Drawing upon the categories of narrative theory and the many new insights and research strategies developed in cultural history, such an approach can arguably shed light on both the semantic potential of narrative forms and the changing functions that narrative strategies have fulfilled. It is the task of such a project to contextualize literary fictions by situating them within the broader spectrum of discourse that constitutes a given culture. It is time for narratology to catch up with the cultural turn in literary criticism 9

As far as I know, the terms ‘cultural narratology’ and ‘historical narratology’ are still anything but firmly established; for brief, albeit very vague and unspecific uses of the term, see Currie (1998: 96), Onega and García Landa (1996: 12), and Bal (1999: 34), who talks about “a narratology of culture”. See, however, the well-developed ideas about a cultural narratology put forward in Helms (2003), which are very similar to those outlined here; I am grateful to the late Gabriele Helms for drawing my attention to her use of the concept, of which I knew nothing at the time I started developing the idea of a ‘cultural narratology’.

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and theory, but cultural studies and cultural history can also profit from drawing upon the analytical tools provided by narratology. As Bal (1999: 39) pointedly observed, what is needed is “a narratological analysis of culture” and “a cultural analysis of narratives”. The project of a contextualist narratology is, of course, deeply indebted to the various new narratologies that have recently emerged. It has most in common with the approaches subsumed under such headings as “Thematic Narratology” (Fludernik 2000), “Contextualist and Thematic Narratologies” (see Chatman 1990; Nünning 2000a: 351) or “Ideological Approaches” (Fludernik/Richardson 2000: 319) in some of the previous surveys of the state of research in this blossoming field. Helms (2003: 15) is certainly right, however, to emphasize firstly that the term ‘cultural narratology’ should be set clearly apart from what Chatman called ‘contextualist narratology’—by which he means approaches that focus exclusively on “the acts in the real world that generate literary narratives” (Chatman 1990: 310)—and secondly that the project of a cultural narratology has “its roots in narratology” (Helms 2003: 15). Each of these new narratological approaches moves, in its own way, from a description of textual phenomena to broader cultural questions and contexts. According to Herman, the differences between structuralist narratology and the new narratologies “point to a broader reconfiguration of the narratological landscape. The root transformation can be described as a shift from text-centered and formal models to models that are jointly formal and functional—models attentive both to the text and to the context of stories” (Herman 1999b: 8). At the risk of oversimplification, one can attempt to provide a sketch of the parallels of concern that contextualist narratologies share with other new narratologies. Although the dichotomy between ‘classical narratology’ and ‘postclassical narratologies’ suggests unwarranted assumptions of homogeneity, and does not do justice to the diversity, breadth and scope of the different approaches subsumed under the wide umbrellas of the two terms, it may serve to highlight some of the innovative trends that have recently emerged. First, the development of narratology has followed a course away from the systematic description of the properties of texts in the direction of a growing awareness of the complex interplay that exists both between texts and their cultural contexts and between textual features and the interpretive choices involved in the reading process. Second, classical narratology’s preference for describing textual elements within a structuralist paradigm has given way to a general “move toward integration and synthesis” (Herman 1999b: 11). Proceeding from the assumption that an analysis of narrative forms can shed new light on the ideological and epistemological implications of narrative, cultural narratology strives to cross the border between textual formalism and historical contextualism, and, as I suggested above, to close the gaps

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between narratological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis by putting the analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of context-sensitive interpretations of novels. Though the ubiquity of narrative makes it difficult to establish the boundaries of such a culture-oriented project, it is possible to outline some of the conceptual and methodological consequences that it entails. First, a cultural narratological framework conceptualizes culture not as ‘text’, but as an ensemble of narratives. From this point of view, cultures are not so much ‘imagined communities’ (sensu Anderson 1983) but ‘narrative communities’, i. e. communities forged and held together by the stories their members tell about themselves and their culture as well as by conventionalized forms of storytelling and cultural plots. In what is arguably the best narrative or narrativist theory of culture to date, Wolfgang Müller-Funk (2002: 53) has argued that cultures differ not only with regard to the subjects and themes they are particularly interested in, but also with regard to their favoured modes of storytelling, their ways of constructing narratives. MüllerFunk has therefore made the valuable suggestion that cultures should be conceptualized as ‘narrative and memorial communities’: Without any doubt it is narratives that form the basis of collective, national memories and that constitute politics of identity and difference. Cultures should always also be conceived of as narrative communities which are distinguished from each other by their reservoir of narratives.10

Second, though it leaves the narrow confines of structuralist taxonomy, a contextual and cultural narratological framework is informed by a critical practice that only the toolbox of classical narratology and thorough training in the precise semiotic analysis of narratives can provide. Denying or ignoring the many achievements of structuralist narratology would thus be foolish, a way of throwing the conceptual baby out with the formalist bathwater. As the controversy between Dorrit Cohn (1995) and John Bender (1995) in New Literary History has shown, it does make a difference whether we can establish a consensus about textual features or not, and it is the descriptive toolkit of narratology that provides us with the terminological categories needed for rational argument. Third, questioning the traditional notion that the relationship between fiction and reality is based on mimesis, cultural narratology proceeds from the assumption that it is more rewarding to conceptualize narrative as an active force in its own right: one that is involved in the actual generation of the ways of thinking and attitudes that stand behind historical development. 10

Müller-Funk (2002: 14; my translation): “Zweifelsohne sind es Erzählungen, die kollektiven, nationalen Gedächtnissen zugrunde liegen und Politiken der Identität bzw. Differenz konstituieren. Kulturen sind immer auch als Erzählgemeinschaften anzusehen, die sich gerade im Hinblick auf ihr narratives Reservoir unterscheiden.”

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In his seminal work Imagining the Penitentiary, in which he argued that widespread attitudes towards prison were formulated in English fiction, and that these facilitated the conception of the eighteenth-century penitentiary, Bender sums up this new understanding of the active and constitutive role that fictions play in the process of forming institutions and shaping mentalities: I consider literature and the visual arts as advanced forms of knowledge, as cognitive instruments that anticipate and contribute to institutional formation. Novels as I describe them are primary historical and ideological documents; the vehicles, not the reflections, of social change. (Bender 1987: 1)

Conceptualizing narrative fictions as cognitive forces, cultural narratology thus explores the ways in which the formal properties of novels reflect and influence the unspoken mental assumptions and cultural issues of a given period. It focuses on the power of narrative fictions “to represent a medley of voices engaged in a conversation and/or a struggle for cultural space” (Scholes 1998: 134). Such problems as the relationship between the polyphonic structure of novels and their challenge to dominant cultural discourses require narratological tools for their description and analysis. It may be noted in passing that, despite two decades of intense reception of Bakhtin’s works, his theory of dialogism, which has perhaps been hovering at the back of many narratologists’ minds for some time, has only recently been incorporated into feminist and cultural narratology.11 As Gabriele Helms (2003) has convincingly demonstrated, the framework of a cultural narratology is germane to both Bakhtin’s intense concern with social norms and values and to his perceptive attempts to relate the dialogic structure of novels to the world views and ideologies of the societies in which they originated. Helms argues that the “term ‘cultural narratology’ describes the place where dialogism and narrative theory meet, allowing the analysis of formal structures to be combined with a consideration of their ideological implications” (Helms 2003: 10). In contrast to other narrative theorists who use the term ‘cultural narratology’ without developing or explaining it, Helms is one of the first narratologists to provide a conceptual and methodological outline of a cultural narratology and to actually test its usefulness. Such an approach implies, of course, that formal techniques are not just analyzed as structural features of a text, but as narrative modes which are highly semanticized and engaged in the process of cultural construction. As Helms (2003: 7) emphasizes, “a cultural narratology would enable us to recognize that narrative techniques are not neutral and transparent forms to be filled with content, and that dialogic relations in narrative structures are ideo11

See the collection of articles edited by Kathy Mezei (1996) and Gabriele Helms’ (2003) brilliant monograph on dialogism and narrative technique in Canadian novels respectively.

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logically informed”. In this respect the project of a cultural narratology can draw on Fredric Jameson’s concept of the “ideology of the form” (Jameson 1981: 141), which implies that “form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right”: What must now be stressed is that at this level ‘form’ is apprehended as content. The study of the ideology of form is no doubt grounded on a technical and formalistic analysis in the narrower sense, even though, unlike much traditional formal analysis, it seeks to reveal the active presence within the text of a number of discontinuous and heterogeneous formal processes. But at the level of analysis in question here, a dialectical reversal has taken place in which it has become possible to grasp such formal processes as sedimented content in their own right, as carrying ideological messages of their own, distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the works. (Jameson 1981: 99)

If one accepts the idea of a semanticization of narrative forms, any literary and cultural historian who wants to address ethical, ideological, or political issues raised in or by narratives can, therefore, profit from the application of the toolbox that narratology provides. Context and form, content and narrative technique, are, after all, more closely intertwined than structuralist narratologists have tried to make us believe. It is not only the problem of the reception of literary character that inevitably draws critics’ attention to the interrelationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also the key questions asked by postcolonial, feminist, and Afro-American studies. Moreover, cultural and historical analyses of narratives require thicker descriptions than those offered by structuralist narratology, descriptions which take into account both thematic and formal features of texts and the ways in which epistemological, ethical, and social problems are articulated in the forms of narrative representations: “The political enters the study of English primarily through questions of representation: who is represented, who does the representing, who is object, who is subject—and how do these representations connect to the values of groups, communities, classes, tribes, sects, and nations?” (Scholes 1998: 153) Such questions have always been genuine concerns of narratology, and the categories and models created by narratology for the analysis of narrative provide useful tools for getting to grips with them. Key narratological concepts like focalization, unreliable narration, and narrative perspective have proved very fine descriptive tools, but they need to be applied before they can yield the insights considered vital for literary and cultural history. As Bruno Zerweck (2001) has shown, the development of narrative forms like unreliable narration can fruitfully be interpreted as a reflection of changing cultural discourses. Given the foregoing conceptual underpinning, it would certainly be desirable to outline some practical directions of research that the kind of contextual and cultural narratology delineated above might open up. As I have elsewhere tried to show (Nünning 2004), the postmodern genre of the his-

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torical novel that Linda Hutcheon (1988: 5) christened “historiographic metafiction” provides a particularly fruitful paradigm for testing the usefulness of “a cultural-narratological approach” (Helms 2003: 20) in that it is dialogically related to the cultural discourses of the last two decades and at the same time deeply involved in telling and rewriting history. Moreover, historiographic metafiction often challenges hegemonic cultural discourses by recontextualizing them and offering alternative versions, thus foregrounding the epistemological and ethical questions involved in writing history (see Kotte 2001). Using historiographic metafiction as a case-study, I have attempted to demonstrate that the analytical tools provided by classical narratology can be of great use for the cultural analysis and context-sensitive interpretation of historiographic metafictions (and of course of other narratives), as well as for the further concerns of contemporary ‘postclassical’ narratologies, including generic categorization.12 The narratological categories that are particularly helpful in the attempt to come to terms with the epistemological, historiographic and ethical implications of postmodern historical novels—but arguably also of novels from other periods and cultures—include the structure of narrative transmission, especially unreliable narration, and the notion of the perspective structure of narrative texts.13 5. Potentials of a Contextualist and Cultural Narratological Framework: The Opening of Narratology to Cultural History, Economics and Politics What’s the point, then, of a contextualist or cultural narratology? Cultural narratology recognizes that, since “ideology is located in narrative structures themselves” (Helms 2003: 14), analyses of the semanticization of narrative forms can shed light on the unspoken assumptions, attitudes, and ideologies, as well as on the values and norms prevalent in any given text, genre and period. Once narrative forms are understood as socially constructed cognitive forces, narratives become valuable sources for cultural history and cultural studies, because analyses of “their narrative forms provide information about ideological concepts and world views” (Helms 2003: 14). Helms has lucidly summarized the main reasons why a cultural narratology promises to be able to cross the border between narratology and cultural history and to bridge the gap that has so far separated the two disciplines, to the detriment of both, one might add: A cultural narratological framework holds two distinct promises: (1) the semanticizing of narrative forms will move narratology beyond its notorious a-historicity; and 12 13

See e. g. Fludernik (2000), who has convincingly demonstrated how useful narratological tools can actually be for the purposes of generic categorization. See Nünning/Surkamp/Zerweck (1998), Nünning (2000b), and Nünning/Nünning (2000).

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(2) by providing adequate descriptive tools, it will enable cultural critics to attend to the specific tools and strategies that are characteristic of narratives in a wide range of media. (Helms 2003: 15)

What I hope to have shown in my own argument is that contextualist and cultural narratology does indeed provide useful descriptive and analytical tools enabling literary and cultural critics to attend both to the narrative forms and strategies that are characteristic of different kinds of narrative, and to the epistemological and ethical issues involved in them. Rather than being an end in itself, the kind of contextual and cultural narratology conceptualized here can open up fertile areas of investigation for literary and cultural history, provided, however, it leaves behind the self-imposed fetters that have prevented narratology all too long from dealing with questions relevant to a better understanding of the cultural dimensions of narratives and of literary and cultural history at large. Offering a preliminary and very skeletal sketch of a contextualist narratology, I have tried to outline a few directions in which the cultural investigation of narrative forms might be pursued. Nevertheless, the various approaches that have come to be known as (inter)cultural, historical, and postcolonial narratologies still have the bulk of their work ahead of them. I should like to conclude by emphasizing once again that both the analytical toolbox provided by structuralist narratology and the new postclassical narratologies can be of great practical value to literary criticism, genre theory and cultural history. However, it is high time that narratologists made more sustained efforts to contextualize the texts that they subject to such close scrutiny, and to historicize their critical practice: in short, to demonstrate “the usefulness of narratology” (Bal 1990: 729)—something that Gabriele Helms, for instance, has convincingly done in her seminal culturalnarratological monograph Challenging Canada. Dialogism and Narrative Technique in Canadian Novels (2003).14 The pace at which the proliferation of new narratologies has been proceeding testifies to the current “return to narratology” (Bal 1999: 19, 39), but it also shows that it is still too early to assess the usefulness and success of the various contextualist approaches that have recently been developed. Given the widespread interdisciplinary interest in the “narrative construction of reality” (Bruner 1991) and the ubiquity, as well as importance, of narratives in contemporary media cultures, there is certainly every reason to share Fludernik’s (1993: 757) “measured optimism” about narratology’s continued survival. In a short-lived age like ours, in which the time-span between the invention of new theoretical approaches and their expiry is continuously 14

For other successful attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of a cultural-narratological framework, see Warhol (1999), who has demonstrated “What Feminist Narratology Can Do for Cultural Studies”, Sommer (2001), Zerweck (2001), Birke (2008) and Birk (2008).

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shrinking, it is impossible to predict whether or not the various new narratologies will actually fulfil the high hopes that many of their proponents currently hold; but the kind of cultural narratology outlined and applied above promises to show what the point of narratology is, or at least what it could be. It seems wise, however, to leave at least the penultimate word to John Bender, who strikes the right sort of balance between, on the one hand, acknowledging the undoubted usefulness of the narratological toolbox and, on the other, emphasizing both the need to move beyond a merely descriptive poetics of narrative and the benefits of understanding that the crossing of disciplinary boundaries affords: If the opening of literary studies to cultural history is to continue [...], we must value the finely crafted tools but leave the boundaries behind. A world made perfectly safe for narratology may offer the delights of Candide’s garden to the wise. But their contentment should not be bought at the cost of denying others the risks of intellectual travel. (Bender 1995: 33)

As far as the promises of a contextualist and cultural narratological framework are concerned, what is arguably more important than anything else, therefore, is that such a framework should draw narratologists’ and cultural theorists’ attention to issues that are of crucial importance in an age both of interdisciplinary narrative research and of inter-, multi- and trans-culturalism. With regard to interdisciplinary cooperation, the framework delineated above opens up new possibilities for fruitful collaborative ventures between narratology and narrative inquiry in other areas and disciplines like cultural history, cultural memory studies, psychology, ritual studies, and interdisciplinary research into identity-formation. In an age in which even economists and politicians have for some time realized the crucial importance of storytelling and narratives to the modern economy, to organizations and to the world of politics,15 it certainly seems high time that narrative theorists should also begin to leave behind the boundaries that structuralist narratologists seem so keen to retain. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the wide-ranging and important cultural and ideological functions that narratives and storytelling actually fulfil in our present-day media culture needs to take into account the contexts on which contextualist approaches to narrative are currently focusing. ‘Narrative’, ‘narrativity’ and ‘storytelling’ have been travelling concepts for quite some time now, and in an age of intense interdisciplinary interest in narratives and storytelling, narrative theory would stand to gain a lot if narratologists started to do some travelling as well. Only then will they be in a position to take ac-

15

For an excellent overview, see Salmon (2007), who summarizes the main developments, and the works of Stephen Denning, the ‘guru’ of the storytelling approach in management. See also Denning (2005) and Brown et al. (2005).

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count of the contexts as well as the cultural functions of narratives as crucial ways of world-making. Works Cited Allrath, Gaby. 2000. “A Survey of the Theory, History, and New Areas of Research of Feminist Narratology”. In: LWU 33:4, p. 387-410. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. 2006. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Bal, Mieke. 1990. “The Point of Narratology.” In: Poetics Today 11:4, p. 727-753. Bal, Mieke. 1999. “Close Reading Today: From Narratology to Cultural Analysis”. In: Grünzweig and Solbach 1999, p. 19-40. Barry, Jackson G. 1990. “Narratology’s Centrifugal Force. A Literary Perspective on the Extensions of Narrative Theory”. In: Poetics Today 11:2, p. 727-753. Bender, John. 1987. Imagining the Penitentiary. Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in EighteenthCentury England. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Bender, John. 1995. “Making the World Safe for Narratology. A Reply to Dorrit Cohn”. In: New Literary History 26:1, p. 29-33. Birk, Hanne. 2008. AlterNative Memories. Kulturspezifische Inszenierungen von Erinnerung in zeitgenössischen Romanen autochthoner Autor/innen Australiens, Kanadas und Neuseelands. Trier: WVT. Birk, Hanne and Birgit Neumann. 2002. “Go-Between. Postkoloniale Erzähltheorie”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 115-152. Birke, Dorothee. 2008. ‘Memory’s Fragile Power’. Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels. Trier: WVT. Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1990. “Whatever Happened to Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 11:2, p. 283-294. Brown, John Seely; Stephen Denning, Katalina Groh and Laurence Prusak. 2005. Storytelling in Organizations. Why Storytelling is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality”. In: Critical Inquiry 18, p. 1-21. Burke, Peter. 1991. “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative”. In: P. B. (ed.). New Perspectives on Historical Writing. London: Polity Press, p. 233-248. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?” In: Poetics Today 11:2, p. 309-328. Cohn, Dorrit. 1995. “Optics and Power in the Novel”. In: New Literary History 26:1, p. 3-20. Cornils, Anja and Wilhelm Schernus. “On the Relationship between the Theory of the Novel, Narrative Theory, and Narratology”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 137-174. Currie, Mark. 1998. Postmodern Narrative Theory. Basingstoke, London: Macmillan. Darby, David. 2001. “Form and Context: An Essay on the History of Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 22:4, p. 829-852. Denning, Stephen. 2005. The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Erll, Astrid and Simone Roggendorf. 2002. “Kulturgeschichtliche Narratologie. Die Historisierung und Kontextualisierung kultureller Narrative”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 73-113. Fludernik, Monika. 1993. “Narratology in Context”. In: Poetics Today 14, p. 729-761. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 1998. “Narratology”. In: Paul E. Schellinger (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Novel. 2 vols., vol. 2: M-Z. Chicago, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 900-905. Fludernik, Monika. 1999. “‘When the Self is an Other’. Vergleichende erzähltheoretische und postkoloniale Überlegungen zur Identitäts(de)konstruktion in der (exil)indischen Gegenwartsliteratur”. In: Anglia 117:1, p. 71-96. Fludernik, Monika. 2000. “Beyond Structuralism in Narratology. Recent Developments and New Horizons in Narrative Theory”. In: Anglistik 11:1, p. 83-96. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “History of Narratology. A Rejoinder”. In: Poetics Today 24:3, p. 405411. Fludernik, Monika and Brian Richardson. 2000. “Bibliography of Recent Works on Narrative”. In: Style 34:2, p. 319-328. Fohrmann, Jürgen. 1997. “Textzugänge. Über Text und Kontext”. In: Scientia Poetica: Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Literatur und der Wissenschaften 1. Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 207-223. Ginsburg, Ruth and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. 1999. “Is There a Life after Death? Theorizing Authors and Reading Jazz”. In: Herman 1999a, p. 66-87. Glauser, Jürg and Annegret Heitmann (eds.). 1999. Verhandlungen mit dem New Historicism: Das Text-Kontext-Problem der Literaturwissenschaft. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Grünzweig, Walter and Andreas Solbach (eds.). 1999. Grenzüberschreitungen. Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries. Narratology in Context. Tübingen: Narr. Gymnich, Marion; Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). 2006. Kulturelles Wissen und Intertextualität: Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien zur Kontextualisierung von Literatur. Trier: WVT. Helms, Gabriele. 2003. Challenging Canada. Dialogism and Narrative Technique in Canadian Novels. Montreal, Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Herman, David (ed.). 1999a. Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Herman, David. 1999b. “Introduction. Narratologies”. In: Herman 1999a, p. 1-30. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York, London: Routledge. Jahn, Manfred. 1999. “‘Speak, friend, and enter’. Garden Paths, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology”. In: Herman 1999a, p. 167-194. Jameson, Fredric. 1983 [1981]. The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.). 2003a. What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003b. “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 205-219. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003c. “Narratology and Interpretation. A Rejoinder to David Darby”. In: Poetics Today 24:3, p. 413-421.

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Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2004. “Brauchen wir eine interkulturelle Narratologie? Über Nutzen und Nachteil eines ‘contextualist turn’ in der Erzähltheorie”. In: Orosz & Schönert 2004, p. 141-148. Kotte, Christina. 2001. Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction. Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively. Trier: WVT. Lanser, Susan. 1992. Fictions of Authority. Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lanser, Susan. 1995. “Sexing the Narrative. Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratology”. In: Narrative 3:1, p. 85-94. Lanser, Susan. 1999. “Sexing Narratology. Towards a Gendered Poetics of Narrative Voice”. In: Grünzweig & Solbach 1999, p. 167-183. Mezei, Kathy (ed.). 1996. Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press. Müller-Funk, Wolfgang. 2002. Die Kultur und ihre Narrative. Eine Einführung. Wien/New York: Springer. Nünning, Ansgar. 1994. “Gender and Narratology. Kategorien und Perspektiven einer feministischen Narrativik”. In: ZAA 42:2, p. 102-121. Nünning, Ansgar. 2000a. “Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology. A Survey of Diachronic Approaches, Concepts, and Research Projects”. In: Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts (eds.). Anglistentag 1999 Mainz. Proceedings. Trier: WVT, p. 345-373. Nünning, Ansgar. 2000b. “On the Perspective Structure of Narrative Texts. Steps toward a Constructivist Narratology”. In: Seymour Chatman and Willie van Peer (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press 2000, p. 207-223. Nünning, Ansgar. 2003. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term”. In: Kindt & Müller 2003, p. 239-75. Nünning, Ansgar. 2004. “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet. Towards an Applied Cultural Narratology”. In: Monika Fludernik and Uri Margolin (eds.). Recent Developments in German Narratology. Style 38.3, p. 352-375. Nünning, Ansgar. 2005. “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration. Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches”. In: Phelan & Rabinowitz 2005, p. 89-107. Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nünning (eds.). 2000. Multiperspektivisches Erzählen. Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT. Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nünning (eds.). 2002a. Neue Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie. Trier: WVT. Nünning, Vera and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). 2002b. Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT. Nünning, Vera and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). 2004. Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies. Stuttgart: Metzler. Nünning, Ansgar; Carola Surkamp and Bruno Zerweck (eds.). 1998. Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: WVT. Onega, Susana and José Ángel García Landa. 1996. “Introduction”. In: S. O. and J. A. G. L. (eds.). Narratology. An Introduction. London/New York: Longman, p. 1-41.

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Orosz, Magdolna. 2004. “Vom ‘interkulturellen Erzählen’ zur ‘interkulturellen Narratologie’. Überlegungen zur Erweiterung der Narratologie und zu ihrer Anwendung auf spezifische Gegenstandsbereiche”. In: Orosz & Schönert 2004, p. 149-166. Orosz, Magdolna and Jörg Schönert (eds.). 2004. Narratologie interkulturell. Entwicklungen – Theorien. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric. Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Phelan, James. 2004. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Prince, Gerald. 1995a. “On Narratology. Criteria, Corpus, Context”. In: Narrative 3:1, p. 7384. Prince, Gerald. 1995b. “Narratology”. In: Raman Selden (ed.). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. VIII: From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 110-130. Prince, Gerald. 2005. “On a Postcolonial Narratology”. In: Phelan & Rabinowitz 2005, p. 372-381. Richardson, Brian. 2000. “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narrative of Narrative Theory”. In: Style 34:2, p. 168-175. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Salmon, Christian. 2007. Storytelling. La machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits. Paris: La Découverte. Schönert, Jörg. 2004. “Narratologie als Texttheorie – mit Perspektiven für die textanalytische Praxis interkultureller Narratologie”. In: Orosz & Schönert 2004, p. 179-188. Scholes, Robert. 1998. The Rise and Fall of English. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Sommer, Roy. 2001. Fictions of Migration. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: WVT. Sommer, Roy. 2007. “‘Contextualism’ Revisited. A Survey (and Defence) of Postcolonial and Intercultural Narratologies”. In: JLT – Journal of Literary Theory 1, p. 61-79. Warhol, Robyn R. 1999. “Guilty Cravings. What Feminist Narratology Can Do for Cultural Studies”. In: Herman 1999a, p. 340-355. Zerweck, Bruno. 2001. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration. Unreliability in Narrative Fiction as Reflection of Cultural Discourses”. In: Style 35:1, p. 151-178.

DAVID HERMAN (Columbus)

Narrative Ways of Worldmaking

1. Synopsis This essay begins from the assumption that mapping words onto worlds is a fundamental—perhaps the fundamental—requirement for narrative sense making. To explore how people use storytelling practices to build, update, and modify narrative worlds, the essay extends Goodman’s (1978) account of “ways of worldmaking.” Narrative worldmaking, I argue, involves specific, identifiable procedures set off against a larger set of background conditions for world-creation—irrespective of the medium in which the narrative practices are being conducted. Using three kinds of storytelling practices to suggest the transmedial scope of my analysis—a print narrative, face-to-face storytelling, and a graphic novel—I outline basic and general procedures for world-construction in narrative contexts. More specifically, my concern is with the cognitive processes underlying narrative ways of worldmaking. Focusing on how stories are launched, I suggest that configuring narrative worlds entails mapping discourse cues onto WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN dimensions of a mentally configured storyworld—dimensions whose interplay accounts for the ontological make-up and spatiotemporal profile of the world in question. Studying narrative ways of worldmaking requires analysts to synthesize ideas from multiple fields of inquiry, while conversely revealing the importance of narrative scholarship for a range of disciplines, from philosophy, linguistics, and comparative media studies, to historiography, ethnography, and the arts. 2. Narrative Worldmaking: A Sketch The classical, structuralist narratologists failed to come to terms with the referential or world-creating properties of narrative, partly because of the exclusion of the referent in favor of signifier and signified in the Saussurean language theory that informed the structuralists’ approach. By contrast, over

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the past couple of decades, one of the most basic and abiding concerns of narrative scholars has been how readers of print narratives, interlocutors in face-to-face discourse, and viewers of films use textual cues to build up representations of the worlds evoked by stories, or storyworlds. Such worldmaking practices are of central importance to narrative scholars of all sorts, from feminist narratologists exploring how representations of male and female characters pertain to dominant cultural stereotypes about gender roles, to rhetorical theorists examining what kinds of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes have to be adopted by readers if they are to participate in the multiple audience positions required to engage fully with fictional worlds, to analysts (and designers) of digital narratives interested in how interactive systems can remediate the experience of being immersed in the virtual worlds created through everyday narrative practices. This ongoing re-engagement with the referential, world-creating potential of narrative can be characterized as a subdomain within “postclassical” narratology (Herman 1999). At issue are frameworks for narrative inquiry that build on the work of classical, structuralist narratologists but supplement that work with concepts and methods that were unavailable to story analysts such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov during the heyday of the structuralist revolution. In the case of research on narrative worldmaking, analysts have worked to enrich the original base of structuralist concepts with ideas either ignored by or inaccessible to the classical narratologists, thereby developing new strategies for studying how storyworlds are made and remade. Indeed, accounts of the worldcreating potential of narrative have received impetus from theoretical studies in a number of fields—studies conducted by philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and others concerned with how people use various kinds of symbol systems to refer to aspects of their experience. In the present essay, I draw on some of this work to explore the range of cognitive processes that support inferences about the modal status, inhabitants, and spatiotemporal profile of a given storyworld. I also consider which processes constitute distinctively narrative ways of worldmaking, in contrast with the forms of world-construction enabled by syllogistic arguments, statistical analyses, or descriptions of the weather. In this context, and in parallel with the account developed in Herman (2002: 9-22), I use the term storyworld to refer to the world evoked implicitly as well as explicitly by a narrative, whether that narrative takes the form of a printed text, film, graphic novel, sign language, everyday conversation, or even a tale that is projected but is never actualized as a concrete artefact—for example, stories about ourselves that we contemplate telling to friends but then do not, or film scripts that a screenwriter has plans to create in the future. Storyworlds are global mental representations enabling interpreters to frame inferences about

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the situations, characters, and occurrences either explicitly mentioned in or implied by a narrative text or discourse. As such, storyworlds are mental models of the situations and events being recounted—of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what manner. Reciprocally, narrative artifacts (texts, films, etc.) provide blueprints for the creation and modification of such mentally configured storyworlds.1 In discussing the scope and nature of processes of narrative worldmaking, I present here a kind of thumbnail sketch of some of the ideas explored in greater detail in a forthcoming book, Basic Elements of Narrative (Herman 2009). The book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of stories; drawing on several frameworks for inquiry, including theories of categorization processes, sociolinguistic research on communicative interaction, and ideas from the philosophy of mind, the study also suggests that narrative can be viewed under several profiles: as a cognitive structure or way of making sense of experience, as a type of text (i. e., a text-type category [Herman 2008]), and as a resource for communicative interaction. I then use this multidimensionality of narrative as a basis for analyzing it into its fundamental elements. I specify four such elements, arguing that they will be realized in any particular narrative in a gradient, “more-or-less” fashion; hence the following elements in effect constitute conditions for narrativity, or what makes a story (interpretable as) a story: A prototypical narrative can be characterized as (i) A representation that is situated in—must be interpreted in light of—a specific discourse context or occasion for telling. (ii) The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw inferences about a structured time-course of particularized events. (iii) In turn, these events are such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc. (iv) The representation also conveys the experience of living through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue. Thus—with one important proviso—it can be argued that narrative is centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the sense of ‘what it is like’ for someone or some1

Hence, as discussed in Herman (2002: 9-22), the notion storyworld is consonant with a range of other concepts proposed by cognitive psychologists, discourse analysts, psycholinguists, philosophers of language, and others concerned with how people go about making sense of texts or discourses. Like storyworld, these other notions—including deictic center, mental model, situation model, discourse model, contextual frame, and possible world—are designed to explain how interpreters rely on inferences triggered by textual cues to build up representations of the overall situation or world evoked but not fully explicitly described in the discourse.

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thing to have a particular experience. The proviso is that recent research on narrative bears importantly on debates concerning the nature of consciousness itself. For convenience of exposition, I abbreviate these elements in my account as (i) situatedness, (ii) event sequencing, (iii) worldmaking/world disruption, and (iv) what it’s like. The focus of the present essay is on (aspects of) the third element, or worldmaking/world disruption. Further, in referring to narrative representations, I have in mind all representations that can be included within the text-type category ‘narrative’, regardless of the semiotic environment in which a given representation is designed or disseminated. Hence my use of illustrative narratives presented in several storytelling media—in particular, three case studies that I should now go on to describe in somewhat more detail. In Daniel Clowes’ 1997 graphic novel Ghost World, the narrative focuses on two teenage girls, Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, trying to navigate the transition from high school to post-high-school life. Closer in spirit to the female Bildungsroman than superhero comics, Ghost World, which was originally published as installments in the underground comics tradition and subsequently assembled into a novel, overlays a graphic format on content matter that helped extend the scope and range of comics storytelling generally. For its part, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1987 [1927]) centers on a conversation between an unnamed male character and Jig, the woman who has been impregnated by the male character (the reader assumes). As they wait for the train to Madrid, the two characters briefly discuss the appearance of the landscape surrounding them (specifically, Jig mentions that the hills across the valley look like white elephants), then order drinks and engage in a sometimes tense conversational exchange about the possibility of Jig’s having an abortion. Finally, the story that I have titled UFO or the Devil (based on a phrase used by the storyteller in the first line, or what Labov 1972 would term the “abstract” of the story) was told as part of a larger sequence of narratives through which Monica cumulatively presents a portrait of herself.2 The narrative that I have excerpted from this much more extended interaction (the total duration of the tape-recording is more than 145 minutes) concerns not only Monica’s and her friend’s encounter with what Monica characterizes as a supernatural apparition—a big, glowing orange ball that rises up in the air and pursues them menacingly—but also 2

The narrative was recorded on July 2, 2002, in the mountainous western portion of the state of North Carolina, near where the events being recounted are purported to have occurred. The storyteller is identified as “Monica,” a pseudonym for a 41-year-old African American female. A full transcript of the story, together with an account of the transcription conventions used in my analysis and discussion, can be found on the following webpage: http://people.cohums. ohio-state.edu/herman145/UFO.html.

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Monica’s and Renee’s subsequent encounter with Renee’s grandmother, who disputes whether the girls’ experience with the big ball really occurred. 3. Narrative Worldmaking across Media, Genres, and Communicative Contexts Storytellers use the semiotic cues available in a given narrative medium to design blueprints for creating and updating storyworlds.3 In print texts, the cues include the expressive resources of (written) language, including not just words, phrases, and sentences, but also typographical formats, the disposition of space on the printed page (including spaces used for section breaks, indentations marking new paragraphs, etc.), and (potentially) diagrams, sketches, and illustrations. In graphic novels, by contrast, the non-verbal elements play a more prominent role: the arrangement of characters in represented scenes, the shapes of speech balloons, and the representations of the scenes in panels that are part of larger sequences of images and textual elements can convey information about the storyworld that would have to be transmitted by purely verbal means in a novel or short story without a comparable image track. Meanwhile, storytellers in face-to-face interaction can use gestures as well as utterances to prompt the construction of narrative worlds—recruiting from elements of the here-and-now circumstances of a current interaction as scaffolding for the world-building process. Reciprocally, interlocutors in contexts of face-to-face storytelling, readers of short stories and novels, and members of the audience watching a film draw on such medium-specific cues to build on the basis of the discourse or sjuzhet a chronology for events, or fabula (what happened when, or in what order?); a broader temporal and spatial environment for those events (when in history did these events occur, and where geographically?); an inventory of the characters involved; and a working model of what it was like for these characters to experience the more or less disruptive or non-canonical events that constitute a core feature of narrative representations, which may in turn be more 3

In characterizing narrative texts as blueprints for building storyworlds, I am drawing implicitly on Reddy’s (1979) critique of what he termed the conduit metaphor for communicative processes (see Green 1989: 10-13 for a useful discussion). According to this metaphor, linguistic expressions and other means for communication are viewed as mere vessels or vehicles for channeling back and forth thoughts, ideas, and meanings. Reddy suggested, instead, that sentences are like blueprints, planned artifacts whose design is tailored to the goal of enabling an interlocutor to reconstruct the situations or worlds after which the blueprints are patterned. Further, in contrast with the conduit metaphor, which blames miscommunication on a poorly chosen linguistic vessel, the blueprint analogy predicts that completely successful interpretation of communicative designs will be rare—given the complexity of the processes involved in planning, executing, and making sense of the blueprints.

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or less reportable within a particular discourse context or occasion for telling.4 At the same time, interpreters seeking to build a storyworld on the basis of a text will also take into account complexities in the design of the blueprint itself—complexities creating additional layers of mediation in the relationship between narrative blueprint and the storyworld that it evokes. (Here I am touching upon issues connected with the first basic element of narrative listed in my previous section, i. e., situatedness.) Such mediation affects the interpretive process in, for example, cases of unreliable narration such as Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” where the teller of a story cannot be taken at his or her word, compelling the audience to ‘read between the lines’—in other words, to scan the text for clues about how the storyworld really (or probably) is, as opposed to how the narrator says it is. Likewise, in Clowes’s Ghost World, during a sequence in which Enid fantasizes about one of her teachers, Mr. Pierce, the use of a distinctive font or typeface within the speech balloons (not to mention the content of the sequence—e. g., Enid naked in the shower with Mr. Pierce clad in a formal suit) indicates that the represented scenes and utterances are ones that Enid has imagined, rather than events that took place within the storyworld to which the characters orient as actual or real (Clowes 1997: 32). Both of these examples entail complex processes of worldmaking. On the one hand, the Browning poem compels readers to sift out from the Duke’s elliptical, distorted version of events a divergent or, rather, more complete account of what happened, affording through these indirect means a blueprint for building the domain of factual (or at least probable) occurrences. The world that emerges through this process is one in which the Duke, despite or indeed because of his own best efforts at spin or damage control, figures as an insanely jealous, homicidally possessive and controlling spouse. On the other hand, Enid’s erotic fantasy demonstrates in another way the multifacetedness of storyworlds, which typically encompass not just worlds that are socially and institutionally defined as ‘given’ but also private worlds (Ryan 1991) or subworlds (Werth 1999) consisting of characters’ beliefs, desires, intentions, memories, and imaginative projections. Some of these subworlds may never be expressed outwardly to other characters, as is likely the case with Enid’s fantasy— hence Clowes’s use of a typeface that distinguishes this sequence from other conversational exchanges represented in the text. 4

On the notion of ‘what it is like’ as a term of art used to describe the states of felt, subjective awareness associated with the having of conscious experiences, see Nagel (1974) and Herman (2009: chapter 6). Further, on the relationships between narrativity (or the degree to which a representation is amenable to being interpreted as a story), occurrences that disrupt the canonical order of events in a storyworld, and reportability or tellability, see, again, Herman (2009: chapter 6).

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But what would a more general account of how narratives evoke storyworlds look like? And how do narrative ways of worldmaking differ from other representational practices that involve the construction or reconstruction of worlds, in a broad sense? In other words, when it comes to worldcreation, what distinguishes narrative representations from other contexts in which people design and manipulate symbol systems for the purpose of structuring, comprehending, and communicating aspects of experience? The four basic elements—i. e., the gradient, “more-or-less” conditions for narrativity—of situatedness, event sequencing, worldmaking/world disruption, and what it's like can be redescribed as procedures specific to narrative ways of worldmaking. In lieu of a fuller explication of all these procedures (see Herman 2009), the remainder of my analysis dwells on just a few of the salient aspects of the process of building storyworlds viewed as a special type of world-creation. 4. Background Conditions for Narrative Worldmaking: Nelson Goodman’s Account In his study Ways of Worldmaking, the philosopher Nelson Goodman develops ideas that afford context for my analysis. Adopting a pluralist instead of a reductionist stance, Goodman argues that “many different world-versions are of independent interest and importance, without any requirement or presumption of reducibility to a single base” (Goodman 1978: 4), for example, the world-version propounded in physics. As Goodman puts it, “[t]he pluralists’ acceptance of [world-versions] other than physics implies no relaxation of rigor but a recognition that standards different from yet no less exacting than those applied in science are appropriate for appraising what is conveyed in perceptual or pictorial or literary versions” (1978: 5). More generally, Goodman asks, In just what sense are there many worlds? What distinguishes genuine from spurious worlds? What are worlds made of? How are they made? What role do symbols play in the making? And how is worldmaking related to knowing? (Goodman 1978: 1)

Arguing that worldmaking “as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking,” Goodman goes on to identify five procedures for constructing worlds out of other worlds (7-16): composition and decomposition; weighting; ordering; deletion and supplementation; and deformation. Brief definitions and examples of each procedure follow: ƒ composition and decomposition: “on the one hand [...] dividing wholes into parts and partitioning kinds into subspecies, analyzing complexes into component features, drawing distinctions; on the other hand

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[...] composing wholes and kinds out of parts and members and subclasses, combining features into complexes, and making connections” (7). Ethnographic investigation of an indigenous population, for example, may uncover the presence of several subcultures where only one had been recognized previously; conversely, the formation of new ‘hybrid’ disciplines or subdisciplines (algebraic geometry, biochemistry, information design) results in new, more complex world-versions. ƒ weighting: “Some relevant kinds of the one world, rather than being absent from the other, are present as irrelevant kinds; some differences among worlds are not so much in entities comprised as in emphasis or accent, and these differences are no less consequential” (11). From a macrohistorical perspective, the shift from a religious to a secularscientific world-version entailed a re-weighting of the particulars of the phenomenal world, which came to occupy a focus of attention formerly reserved for the noumenal or spiritual realm. ƒ ordering: “modes of organization [patterns, measurements, ways of periodizing time, etc.] are not ‘found in the world’ but built into a world” (14). Taxonomies of plants, animals, or other entities are in effect worldversions built on a hierarchical system of categories that may be more or less finely grained (and more or less densely populated), depending on whether one has expert or only a layperson’s knowledge of a given domain (Herman and Moss 2007). My world-version currently contains names for (and concepts of) only a few common types of insects, in contrast with the world-version of an entomologist. ƒ deletion and supplementation: “the making of one world out of another usually involves some extensive weeding out and filling—actual excision of some old and supply of some new material” (14). I might study entomology, and supplement my world-version with new knowledge and new beings; alternatively, if because of climate change an insect species becomes extinct, the entomologist’s world-version will undergo compulsory excision. ƒ deformation: “reshapings or deformations that may according to point of view be considered either corrections or distortions” (16). Here one may think of arguments for a new scientific theory in favor of an older one (e. g., the geocentric vs. the heliocentric models of the solar system) from the perspective of those who are parties to the debate. As my examples of each worldmaking procedure indicate, there is nothing distinctively story-like about the worlds over which Goodman’s account ranges, though there is nothing about the analysis that excludes storyworlds, either. Narrative worlds, too, might be made through processes of composition and decomposition: think of allegories fusing literal and symbolic worlds, or decomposition in texts such as The Canterbury Tales, where the

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narrative ramifies into a frame tale that constitutes the main diegetic level and, embedded within it, various hypodiegetic levels created when characters within that frame tell stories of their own. Weighting may also be a generative factor: consider postmodern rewrites that evoke new world-versions by reweighting events in their precursor narratives, as when Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea generates a new storyworld on the basis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by using as a metric for evaluating events not Jane Eyre’s or Edward Rochester’s perspective (as refracted through Jane’s telling) but rather Antoinette Cosway’s. So too with ordering: narrative worlds can be made when new time-scales are deployed, as when Alain Robbe-Grillet as a practitioner of the nouveau roman in France produced novel worlds by drastically slowing the pace of narration (Robbe-Grillet 1965 [1957; 1959]), or when the average shot length in Hollywood films diminished over time to produce more rapid cuts between scenes (Morrison [forthcoming]). Deletion and supplementation likewise find their place in the building of storyworlds. I may tailor my recounting of my own life experiences to adjust for differences among groups of interlocutors, going into more detail among close friends and less detail when asked a question during a job interview. And as for deformation, Terry Zwigoff’s (2001) film version of Ghost World can be viewed as a reshaping of the graphic novel version, and more generally any adaptation of a prior text in another medium for storytelling will result in alterations of the sort that Goodman includes under this rubric (see Genette 1997). Against the backdrop afforded by Goodman’s broad, generic account of worldmaking procedures, operative in both non-narrative and narrative contexts, my next section zooms in on the way narrative openings trigger particular kinds of world-building strategies. These strategies cut across storytelling media and narrative genres, but they are also inflected by the specific constraints and affordances of various kinds of narrative practices. 5. Narrative Beginnings as Prompts for Worldmaking: Taking up Residence in Storyworlds Story openings prompt interpreters to take up residence (more or less comfortably) in the world being evoked by a given narrative. Openings from different story genres can be compared and contrasted along this dimension, underscoring how part of the meaning of “genre” consists of distinctive protocols for worldmaking—though again, the approach being outlined in this essay predicts that a common core of worldmaking procedures, specific to the narrative text type, cuts across such generic differences. Likewise, the model predicts that distinctively narrative processes of world creation obtain

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in various media for storytelling. Here the issue is how the analyst, when comparing and contrasting a variety of narrative openings, might distinguish generically narrative from medium-, genre-, and even text-specific worldmaking procedures. Consider the beginning of “Hills Like White Elephants”: [1] The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. [2] On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. [3] Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. [4] The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. [5] It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. [6] It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid. [7] “What should we drink?” the girl asked? [8] She had taken off her hat and put it on the table. (211)

How do these eight sentences evoke (a fragment of) a narrative world? What specific textual cues allow readers to draw inferences about the structure, inhabitants, and spatiotemporal situation of this world? Further, how does the worldmaking process here differ from that triggered by the following 7sentence paragraph at the beginning of Richard Morgan’s science fiction novel Altered Carbon? [1a] Chemically alert, I inventoried the hardware on the scarred wooden table for the fiftieth time that night. [2a] Sarah’s Heckler and Koch shard pistol glinted dully at me in the low light, the butt gaping open for its clip. [3a] It was an assassin’s weapon, compact and utterly silent. [4a] The magazines lay next to it. [5a] She had wrapped insulating tape around each one to distinguish the ammunition: green for sleep, black for the spider-venom load. [6a] Most of the clips were black-wrapped. [7a] Sarah had used up a lot of green on the security guards at Gemini Biosys last night. (Morgan 2002: 3, emphases added)

As Paul Werth points out (1999: 56), story openings that like Hemingway’s and Morgan’s include noun phrases with definite articles and demonstrative pronouns (the American and the girl, that night) can be aligned with what the philosopher David Lewis (1979) termed the process of accommodation. Through accommodation, a text can economically evoke the storyworld (or “text world” in Werth’s terms) to which readers of a fictional text must imaginatively relocate if they are to interpret referring expressions (a curtain, the open door, the hardware, the scarred wooden table, the spider-venom load, etc.) and deictic expressions (on this side, last night) properly5—mapping them onto the world evoked by the text rather than the world(s) that the text producer and text interpreter occupy when producing or decoding these textual signals. Thus, readers of Morgan’s text assume that the scarred wooden table in sentence 1a occupies the world inhabited by the earlier, experiencing-I but not 5

Deictic terms like I, here, and now are expressions whose meaning changes depending on who is uttering them in what discourse context.

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(necessarily) the world of the older, narrating-I looking back retrospectively on this scene. Likewise, in sentence 7a the phrase last night has to be interpreted in light of what some narratologists have termed the story-NOW, rather than the discourse-NOW: last night refers to the night prior to the one in which Sarah and the experiencing-I sit together at the table, not the night prior to the moment occupied by the narrating-I at the time of the telling. But if readers rely on similar sorts of textual cues to accommodate to Hemingway’s and Morgan’s story openings, this being part of what it means to interpret both texts as members of the text-type category narrative, the process of accommodation unfolds differently in each case—in ways that can be correlated with the generic differences between the texts. Ryan’s (1991) account of “fictional recentering,” and her related notion of the principle of minimal departure, can be used to explore the differences involved. In Ryan’s account, developed under the auspices of a possible-worlds approach to narrative, the storyworld evoked by a fictional narrative can be described as an alternative possible world to which interpreters are openly prompted to relocate, such that, for the duration of the fictional experience, “the realm of possibilities is [...] recentered around the sphere which the narrator presents as the actual world” (Ryan 1991: 22). The world evoked by the text may be more or less accessible to the world(s) in which that narrative is produced and interpreted, providing the basis for a typology of genres (31-47). As compared with the reference world of a news report, for instance, the storyworld evoked by a science fiction novel about a superrace with telekinetic powers—or for that matter, a world in which Heckler and Koch shard pistols can shoot spider-venom loads—is less accessible to (less compatible with the defining properties of) the world of the here and now. Yet if no textual or paratextual indicators block their default interpretive stance, readers or film viewers will abide by what Ryan terms the principle of minimal departure, which states that “when readers construct fictional worlds, they fill in the gaps [...] in the text by assuming the similarity of the fictional worlds to their own experiential reality” (2005: 447). Thus readers of Hemingway’s story assume that the interlocutors are human beings rather than murderous aliens who have bodysnatched male and female earthlings in order to dupe the waitress and the other people at the bar. Even more crucially, perhaps, readers assume that the Ebro in the story is the same Ebro that exists in the actual world and runs through a particular valley in Spain (1). By contrast, in the case of Morgan’s text readers are prompted, not only by the book’s opening paragraphs but also by the futuristic design on its cover as well as its placement in the science fiction section of the library or local bookstore, to engage in strategies for worldmaking that are not fully continuous with those used to make sense of their everyday experience. In

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this world (set 500 years in the future), different kinds of ammunition for the same gun have either a narcotizing effect or a lethal deadliness (2a); what is more, the use of chemical stimulants to enhance alertness is so common that it can be mentioned elliptically in a subordinate clause, as in sentence (1a). Yet the principle of minimal departure continues to apply. Unless cued to do otherwise, readers will assume that Sarah’s use of the sleep-inducing ammunition instead of the spider-venom variety reflects her commitment to killing only when necessary—not, say, a perverse fixation on putting people to sleep, or a mere random tic on her part. Hemingway’s and Morgan’s texts show how a common stock of procedures for narrative worldmaking can be inflected differently when different genres are involved. By the same token, worldmaking procedures in narrative contexts are also affected by differences of medium. Consider the opening of Monica’s story: Monica:

(1) So that’s why I say..UFO or the devil got after our black asses, (2) for showing out. (3) > I don’t know what was < (4) but we walkin up the hill, (5) this ^way, comin up through here. Interviewer 1: (6) Yeah. Monica: (7) And..I’m like on this side and Renee’s right here.

In this context, procedures for worldmaking are affected by a different system of affordances and constraints than the system that impinges on written narrative texts, whatever their genre. On the one hand, properties associated with written discourse, particularly its deliberate or “worked-over” nature in contrast with the relative spontaneity of spoken discourse (Chafe 1994), allow producers of literary narrative to situate participants in quite richly detailed storyworlds—of the sort already evoked in a single paragraph from each of the two texts cited above. The increased span of time separating the production of the narrative from its interpretation, and for that matter the longer span of time allowed for interpretation of literary narratives, facilitates denser concentrations of detail than would be typical for face-to-face storytelling (Herman 2004). Yet contexts of face-to-face narration are enabling when it comes to other worldmaking procedures—procedures that are, conversely, subject to constraints imposed by the nature of written communication. Producers of fictional narratives (in whatever genre) have to rely on the process of accommodation and the principle of minimal departure to prompt readers to relocate to the distinct spacetime coordinates of the world evoked by a written text. In contrast, because she is telling her story on-site or where the events being recounted are purported to have occurred, by using deictic expressions such as this way and here in line 5 and this side and

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right here in line 7 Monica can prompt her interlocutors to draw on information available in the present interactional context—specifically, information about the layout of the scene and its terrain—to build a model of the overall spatial configuration of the storyworld she is attempting to evoke. In this way, in the case of spatial deictics—expressions like here and there—face-toface storytelling affords more options for anchoring texts in contexts of interaction than do literary narratives. To help their interlocutors assign referents to such expressions, storytellers can cue their interlocutors to draw analogies between the spatial configuration of the storyworld and that of the world in which the narrative is being told and interpreted. Thus, in using the deictic expressions I have highlighted in lines 5 and 7, Monica prompts her interlocutors to project a storyworld-external space onto a storyworld-internal space, and vice versa. Arguably, these hybrid or blended locations are richer than those that readers can access through the process of accommodation triggered by spatial deictics in a written, literary narrative such as Hemingway’s or Morgan’s. As is characteristic for literary narratives, accommodation in these texts results not in a blending of spatiotemporal coordinates but rather a deictic shift (see Segal 1995; Zubin/Hewitt 1995; Herman forthcoming a) from the here and now orienting the act of interpretation to that orienting participants in the storyworld.6 In Clowes’s Ghost World, meanwhile, still other medium-specific affordances and constraints (along with particular textual and paratextual cues) impinge on the process of narrative worldmaking. Exploiting the visual dimension of graphic storytelling, the cover of the novel features uncaptioned images of the two main characters that serve immediately to orient readers within the storyworld evoked by the text. The cover signals the complex lifesituation of protagonists who are struggling to make the transition from adolescence to adulthood: Rebecca is shown blowing a bubble with her chewing gum, while Enid is portrayed with serious-looking thick-framed glasses that she perhaps wears to appear older than she actually is. The front matter of the volume continues to shape readers’ inferences about what kind of storyworld they are about to enter, drawing on the verbal as well as the visual information track to do so. One panel represents what can be assumed in retrospect to be Enid’s bookshelf, with a heterogeneous set of texts ranging from 2000 Insults to Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Oedipus Rex, and Scooby Doo, to Nora Brown’s novel Henry Orient (the basis for a 1964 comedy 6

Although literary narratives do not allow for ‘blended’ spatial deixis of this sort, narrative fictions told in the second person can in some cases create analogous effects by way of person deixis. More specifically, some instances of narrative you can create blends by referring simultaneously (and ambiguously) to a narrator-protagonist and to a current recipient of the story, superimposing the spacetime coordinates of a storyworld-internal entity upon those of a storyworld-external entity, and vice versa (see Herman 2002: 331-71).

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starring Peter Sellers), to a CD by the French pop singer France Gall— suggesting not only Enid’s eclectic tastes but also the bewilderingly diverse narratives circulating in the culture and converging on the two characters as they try to navigate surrounding social expectations, family and educational contexts, and their own evolving relationship. Two other images (without accompanying text) included in the front matter show Enid and Rebecca at a younger age standing in front of a cemetery marker—again, in retrospect, readers can assume that this is Enid’s mother’s grave—and then the two characters dressed in their caps and gowns for high school graduation, with Enid making an obscene gesture at something (the entire graduation scene?) toward which she and Rebecca are facing. Accordingly, by the time readers get to the first page of chapter 1 of the novel, the visual and verbal cues already provided up to this point provide crucial context for narrative worldmaking. True, local links between neighboring panels assist with basic aspects of the world-creation process, as when, in the first panel, Enid asks “Why do you have this?” and is then seen holding a copy of Sassy magazine in the next panel. Here the image of the magazine is a correlative, in a different semiotic medium, of the particular features of the landscape to which Monica points when she uses forms like this way and this side to launch her own story. But more than this, when Enid critiques Rebecca’s purchase of the magazine by asserting that “These stupid girls think they’re so hip, but they’re just a bunch of trendy stuck-up preschool bitches who think they’re ‘cutting edge’ because they know who ‘Sonic Youth’ is!” (Clowes 1997: 9), this remark carries world-creating implications because of the context already afforded by the cover and the front matter. Whereas in another storyworld an utterance of this sort might be interpreted as a digression about a character’s pet peeves, given Enid’s life experiences and the contents of her bookshelf her comment can be construed as one that bears on her and Rebecca’s central concerns, the questions they seek to answer (and it is this questioning process that drives the narrative forward): namely, how to position themselves relative to more or less dominant social norms and practices, including those that seek to pass themselves off as counter-cultural trends but that in actual fact contribute to the masking and thus perpetuation of the status quo. My most general point about the opening of Ghost World is that Clowes exploits the medium-specific resources of graphic storytelling to facilitate readers’ relocation to this narrative world. Clowes relies on both images and words to enable this process of accommodation or rather transportation, which can also be accomplished through particular kinds of verbal expressions, as in written fiction, or a combination of verbal and gestural productions, as in face-to-face storytelling. Yet in my previous paragraph I have also begun to touch on other, more complex dimensions of narrative worldmak-

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ing—dimensions that arise from a temporally extended experience of, and not just one’s initial migration to, a storyworld. Given the scope of the present essay, I cannot address here these aspects of world-construction, but must instead refer readers to the fuller discussion in the study mentioned previously (Herman 2009). Chapter 5 of that study suggests how ideas from various perspectives can throw light on this more temporally extended process of experiencing narrative worlds. 6. Narrative Worldmaking, Postclassical Narratology, and Interdisciplinary Narrative Research The approach sketched in this essay seeks to weave together two strands of postclassical narratology, namely, transmedial narratology (Herman 2004; Ryan 2004) and cognitive narratology (Herman 2003; 2007; forthcoming b; Jahn 1997; 2005). Transmedial narratology is premised on the assumption that, although narrative practices in different media share common features insofar as they are all instances of the narrative text type, stories are nonetheless inflected by the constraints and affordances associated with a given medium (e. g., print texts, film, comics and graphic novels, etc.). Unlike classical narratology, transmedial narratology disputes the notion that the story level of a narrative remains wholly invariant across shifts of medium. However, it also assumes that stories do have ‘gists’ that can be remediated more or less fully and recognizably—depending in part on the semiotic properties of the source and target media. Meanwhile, cognitive narratology can be defined as the study of mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices, wherever—and by whatever means—those practices occur. As this definition suggests, cognitive narratology, too, is transmedial in scope; it encompasses the nexus of narrative and mind not just in print texts but also in face-to-face interaction, cinema, radio news broadcasts, computer-mediated virtual environments, and other storytelling media. In turn, ‘mind-relevance’ can be studied vis-à-vis the multiple factors associated with the design and interpretation of narratives, including the story-producing activities of tellers, the processes by means of which interpreters make sense of storyworlds evoked by narrative representations or artifacts, and the cognitive states and dispositions of characters in those storyworlds. In addition, the mind-narrative nexus can be studied along two other dimensions, insofar as stories function as both (1) a target of interpretation and (2) a means for making sense of experience—a resource for structuring and comprehending the world—in their own right. Research on narrative worldmaking affords opportunities for story analysts working in both of these areas—transmedial narratology and cognitive narratology—to integrate concepts and methods that promise to be richly

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productive if brought into a more synergistic interplay. Reciprocally, the study of narrative as both a tool and a target for sense-making procedures operative in a variety of discourse genres and communicative contexts has cross-disciplinary relevance, enabling closer dialogue between theorists of narrative and scholars in other fields. In short, exploration of the protocols for making, unmaking, and remaking storyworlds is one of the exciting new frontiers of narratology in the age of interdisciplinary narrative research.7 Works Cited Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time. The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clowes, Daniel. 1997. Ghost World. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books. Genette, Gérard. 1997 [1982]. Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett. Green, Georgia M. 1989. Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hemingway, Ernest. 1987 [1927]. “Hills Like White Elephants”. In: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 211-214. Herman, David. 1999. “Introduction”. In: D. H. (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, p. 1-30. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David (ed.). 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford, CA: Publications of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. Herman, David. 2004. “Toward a Transmedial Narratology”. In: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.). Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p. 47-75. Herman, David. 2007. “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction.” In: Narrative 15:4, p. 306-334. Herman, David. 2008. “Description, Narrative, and Explanation: Text-type Categories and the Cognitive Foundations of Discourse Competence”. In: Poetics Today 29:3, p. 437-472. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Herman, David (forthcoming a). “Teaching Time, Space, and Narrative Worlds.” In: D. H., Brian McHale, and James Phelan (eds.). Options for Teaching Narrative Theory. Herman, David (forthcoming b). “Cognitive Narratology”. In: John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert, Peter Hühn (eds.). The Living Handbook of Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter.

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Parts of this essay are based on material contained in my book Basic Elements of Narrative (Herman 2009). I am grateful to Wiley-Blackwell for permission to use this material.

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Herman, David and Susan Moss. 2007. “Plant Names and Folk Taxonomies. Frameworks for Ethnosemiotic Inquiry”. In: Semiotica 167:1/4, p. 1-11. Jahn, Manfred. 1997. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives. Towards a Cognitive Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 18, p. 441-468. Jahn, Manfred. 2005. “Cognitive Narratology”. In: David Herman, Manfred Jahn and MarieLaure Ryan (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, p. 67-71. Labov, William. 1972. “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax”. In: Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 354-396. Lewis, David. 1979. “Scorekeeping in a Language Game”. In: Journal of Philosophical Logic 8, p. 339-359. Morgan, Richard. 2002. Altered Carbon. New York: Del Rey. Morrison, James. (forthcoming). “Narrative Theory in the Film Studies Classroom; or, Old Movies and the New Disorder”. In: David Herman, Brian McHale and James Phelan (eds.). Options for Teaching Narrative Theory. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In: The Philosophical Review 83:4, p. 43550. Reddy, Michael J. 1979. “The Conduit Metaphor – a Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language”. In: Andrew Ortony (ed.). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 284-324. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965 [1957, 1959]. Two Novels, by Robbe-Grillet [La Jalousie and Dans le Labyrinthe]; trans. R. Howard. New York: Grove Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.). 2004. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Possible-Worlds Theory”. In: David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, p. 446-450. Segal, Ernest M. 1995. “Narrative Comprehension and the Role of Deictic Shift Theory.” In: Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder and Lynn E. Hewitt (eds.). Deixis in Narrative. A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 3-17. Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds. Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman. Zubin, David; Hewitt, Lynn E. 1995. “The Deictic Center. A Theory of Deixis in Narrative”. In: Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder and Lynn E. Hewitt (eds.). Deixis in Narrative. A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 129-155. Zwigoff, Terry. 2001. Ghost World. MGM.

ROY SOMMER (Wuppertal)

Making Narrative Worlds: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Literary Storytelling 1. Introduction: Narrative Composition and Narrative Comprehension The title of this essay makes reference to Richard Gerrig’s study Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993) and David Herman’s chapter on “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking” in this volume as well as to Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories (2002). These three works, and many others which may be subsumed under the broad heading of ‘cognitive approaches to narrative’ or ‘cognitive narratology’, have helped to expand our understanding of the reception process by pointing out that acts of reading are framed by narrative schemata which are part of our mental disposition, and that such frames or schemata are triggered through textual cues. It is the aim of this essay to explore whether such cognitive principles may also be usefully applied to the creative process. To what extent can narrative composition, i.e. the process of writing narrative fiction, be modelled and described in analogy to narrative comprehension, the act of reading a fictional narrative? Are there parallels between these processes which, according to well-established communication models of narrative fiction, constitute the core of extratextual literary communication? Such questions clearly transcend the traditional boundaries of structuralist narratology. The ongoing cognitive turn in literary narratology and the emergence of interdisciplinary narrative research, however, enable us to see narrative composition and narrative comprehension as two distinct, but structurally related, sense-making activities. In the introduction to his seminal study Story Logic, Herman (2002: 1) observes that “story recipients, whether readers, viewers, or listeners, work to interpret narratives by reconstructing the mental representations that have in turn guided their production”. Similarly, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama (2005: 180) contends that “all normally developing humans capable of understanding stories are capable of telling stories, and vice versa. In other words, telling a story requires and engages the same cognitive software as listening to a story”.

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Based on schema theory and early linguistic studies of text comprehension in the 1970s and 1980s, cognitive narratology has developed sophisticated models of this ‘software’ used by readers in the process of narrative comprehension. Less attention, however, has been paid by narratologists to the processes involved in the generation of stories. Narrative researchers in other disciplines have explored creativity in general and storytelling as a creative activity in particular from the perspectives of psychological and artificial intelligence research. From the cross-disciplinary take on narrative which this volume seeks to establish, bringing the research from these disciplines together seems a very promising endeavour. While cognitive narratology might benefit from incorporating concepts of creativity and models of storytelling into its theoretical framework, other disciplines might be interested in the state of the art in literary narratology in order to refine existing concepts such as the ‘domain’ of literary creativity and the phase of ‘narrative design’ in models of the creative process. This paper takes a first step towards such a cross-disciplinary model of story generation or narrative composition. The overall aim is to refine our understanding of what happens in the process of storytelling.1 Restrictive narratologists might object, of course, that storytelling and narrative design belong to the realm of creative writing. The aims and methodological standards of narratological approaches to storytelling, however, differ considerably from those of creative writing. Whereas creative writing is aimed at encouraging and supporting aspiring writers and at improving their creative output, narratology provides systematic descriptions of the elements of narrative and their functional relationships and of the cognitive processes involved in their reception (and, as suggested here, also in their production) within an overall framework of a general theory of narrative. Apart from the cognitive turn in narratology, two narratological approaches have transcended the structuralist focus on narrative poetics in favour of a more holistic view of the interaction of author, text and reader: these are, firstly, the communication model of narrative fiction and, secondly, rhetorical approaches to narrative based on linguistic speech act theory. The potential and the limitations of these approaches for a model of the storytelling process will be discussed in section 2. Section 3 will then offer a survey of creativity research which provides conceptual alternatives to communication theory and speech act theory as a starting point for a concept of narrative production. The survey will also demonstrate, however, that psy1

‘Narrative comprehension’ and ‘story generation’ are the terms used in linguistics and artificial intelligence respectively to designate what is commonly known as ‘storytelling’. Despite their slightly different connotations, these three terms are treated as synonyms in this paper, whereas the term ‘narrative design’ (which is sometimes used as another synonym of storytelling in creative writing) refers to a specific stage of the storytelling process (cf. section 5).

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chological research lacks the domain-specific knowledge required for an analysis of storytelling. Section 4 will therefore propose a concept of narrative design which integrates psychological and narratological research. 2. Narratology and Extratextual Literary Communication: Communication Models, Speech Act Theory and Cognition In their discussion of levels of communication in narrative fiction, Neumann and Nünning (2008: 25) proceed from an understanding of literature as a specific form of communication: “From a communicative perspective, narrative fiction is regarded as an interaction between an author and the readers through the medium of a text.” Simple communication models assume that an addresser (author) sends a message which makes use of a material medium of transmission and is based on a code shared by all participants in the communicative process to an addressee (reader). Narratological models of literary communication realize that there are significant differences between face-to-face oral communication and written communication, such as the time lag between production and reception and the lack of direct interaction between addresser and addressee (ibid.: 26). A third, equally important difference between verbally transmitted messages in everyday communication and literary communication via literary texts results from the specific characteristics of fictional narratives which themselves stage communicative processes. Narratologists have accounted for this phenomenon by making a clear distinction between extratextual literary communication on the one hand, and intratextual communication on the other. The latter is usually conceived in terms of two hierarchically structured levels of textual communication in relation to the storyworld (diegesis): the extradiegetic level of narrative mediation or narratorial discourse, and the intradiegetic level of the story. The distinction between the participants in extratextual communication (real author and real reader) and intratextual communication (extradiegetic narrators and narratees, and/or implied author and implied reader, depending on the preferred theoretical framework) is a key concept of narratological models of literary communication. The concepts and categories introduced by rhetorical theories of narrative appear to be less rigid in this respect, but at least in principle the distinction between the two types of communicative processes involved in literary communication also applies here. Although models of the narrative-communication situation acknowledge that the real author and the real reader, both situated “outside the narrative transaction as such” (Chatman 1980: 151), are “indispensable to it in an ultimate practical sense” (ibid.), and that the author is a vital concept for the

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understanding of relationships between texts and their historical and cultural contexts,2 the focus of narratological research has traditionally been on intratextual communication (cf. Nünning 1989). The inclusion of the ‘level’ of extratextual communication in narratological models is, then, a matter of systematics rather than a reflection of genuine narratological research interests. This explains why narratology has so far been content with using the same concept of communication (the rule-based transmission of a message from a sender to a recipient) for extratextual and intratextual communication, although there can be little doubt that there are significant differences between actual exchanges between authors and readers (for instance in the context of a public reading or a creative writing workshop), the ‘communication’ between an author and his or her text in the creative process, or the ‘communication’ between readers and texts on the extratextual ‘level’ of story comprehension on the one hand, and the literary staging of communicative acts involving narrators, narratees and characters within a novel on the other. Whereas communication models don’t elaborate on the nature of extratextual literary communication, rhetorical approaches to narrative conceive of narrative as “a purposive communicative act” (Phelan 2006: 300), postulating “a recursive relationship among authorial agency, textual phenomena (including intertextual relations), and reader response” (ibid.). Rhetorical approaches to narrative, then, offer a more holistic view of literary communication, which integrates the author within its theoretical framework instead of drawing a strict boundary between extratextual and intratextual communication: Texts are designed by authors in order to affect readers in particular ways; those designs are conveyed through the words, techniques, structures, forms and intertextual relations of texts; and reader responses are a function of and, thus, a guide to how authorial designs are created through textual phenomena. (ibid.)

In his survey of the theoretical foundation of what he terms ‘rhetorical narratology’, Michael Kearns (1999) describes how speech act theory locates meaning in the use to which an utterance is put and how it allows us to see the author’s illocutionary stance towards his or her work as the key to fictionality. Building on Marie-Louise Pratt’s (1978) work on speech act theory and literary discourse, as well as on cognitive linguistics, Kearns then shows how situational and cultural contexts need to be taken into account when analysing narratives, and discusses which cognitive and communicative prin-

2

Cf. Neumann/Nünning (2008: 29f.): “It is generally understood today that the author is the central link between a narrative text and its historical context: The analysis of the interplay between narrative fiction and its pertinent cultural context necessarily entails the recognition of the author.”

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ciples help to establish meaningful communication between authors, texts and readers. As rhetorical criticism tends to view a work of fiction as an intentional utterance, the role of the author as “flesh-and-blood person” (Booth 2005: 76) is stronger in this theoretical framework than in the more text-oriented narratological models of literary communication. As a consequence rhetorical critics have introduced concepts such as authorial audience or intended audience in order to account for an author’s intentions, and have defended the controversial concept of the implied author as necessary for a “complete description of a narrating situation”.3 Despite the theoretical insistence on the author and his or her role in literary communication, however, rhetorical criticism is more concerned in practice with how readers approach and understand narratives than with how authors produce them. When extratextual communication involves the author, he or she tends to be viewed through the lens of reconstructed intentionality, as a reader construct. A discussion of the implied author is not required here, firstly, because all the arguments have been exchanged over and over again without critics and proponents of the ‘implied author’ succeeding in convincing the opposing side of the concept’s adequacy or inadequacy—despite continued efforts to shed “new light on stubborn problems”, as the section on unreliability in Phelan and Rabinowitz (2005) is titled; and secondly, because the debate itself has recently been reviewed systematically and in great detail in Kindt and Müller’s (2006) study. Thirdly, for the purpose of the present essay the phenomenon traditionally described by the implied author, namely the construction of an author image by a reader as the source of an intentional literary speech act, diverts attention from the main question addressed in this essay, i.e. how, to quote Phelan (2006: ix), “living gets converted into […] telling”. Phelan’s phrase succinctly expresses the change of perspective explored in this paper, a shift of attention from the well-researched relationship between text and reader, or reader and (implied) author, to the author’s side of extratextual literary communication. The focus is not on how the author’s intention can be reconstructed from the narrative structure, but on how the flesh-and-blood person ‘dissolves’ in narrative, metaphorically speaking, leaving (intentionally?) sufficient textual traces of his or her (implied) personality (such as authorial irony, authorial audiences, or narrative excess) to remind us that, despite all theoretical justifications of the structuralist move

3

Cf. Kearns (1999: 28): “The traditional concept of a single, live author is necessary for any meaningful discussion of constructive intention, while the concepts of authorship as a socially constituted role and author as implied by any speech act or text are needed for a complete description of a narrating situation.”

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from work to text (cf. Barthes 2001 [1971]), at least in the eyes of the ‘ideal’ or ‘intended’ reader, the text always also remains a ‘work’. As has been shown above, both communicative and rhetorical approaches to the analysis of fictional narrative acknowledge the importance of the author in principle, either as a link between the text and its cultural context or as the source of the fictional discourse; neither approach, however, provides a starting point for a well-constrained description of the storytelling process, as their core interests, where extratextual communication is concerned, lie with model readers and the reception process rather than with model authors and narrative composition. Extending narratological research from the reception to the production of narrative therefore requires a third component. This missing link is provided by cognitive approaches to the study of narrative, both within literary narratology and in related disciplines such as cognitive psychology (cf. Bortolussi/Dixon 2003), psycholinguistics (cf. Gerrig 1993) and artificial intelligence research (cf. Dartnall 1994, Turner 1994). Important work in this field includes the studies by Fludernik (1996), Schneider (2000) and Herman (2002), and the contributions in Herman (2003). A short survey of cognitive approaches to narrative can be found in Jahn (2005). These cognitive approaches should not be considered as a theoretical and methodological alternative either to communication models or to rhetorical narratology, which view similar phenomena from different perspectives, using different theoretical frameworks, concepts and terminologies. Cognitive research functions, rather, as a ‘meta-discourse’ or foundational discipline which provides both text-oriented and contextual narratologies either with concepts for explaining narrative phenomena which transcend textual boundaries, such as unreliability, or with models of interaction between texts and readers. Cognitivist studies of narrative fiction have so far concentrated mainly on narrative comprehension. The fundamental nature of the mental processes involved in reading, as well as the generic nature of the narrative frames and schemata which are activated in the reception process—Kearns (1999) even talks of “ur-conventions”—suggest that the generation of stories should follow similar, though presumably not identical, rules and procedures. Phelan (2005: 49), for instance, assumes that “if readers need conceptual schema [sic] to construct interpretations, authors also need conceptual schema [sic] to construct structural wholes”. Gerrig and Egidi (2003: 41) discuss more explicitly how authors may benefit from knowledge of schemata applied in the reading process, as their confirmation or violation allows for efficient representations of characters, actions and objects as well as for

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subtle indications of deviations from expected behaviour.4 Michelle Scalise Sugiyama contends that “art behaviors are cognitively discrete” (2005: 179) and encourages us to “think of art behaviors in terms of the cognitive and physical features involved in their generation or processing” (ibid.). To sum up, it seems likely that similar, though not identical, mental schemata are at work in the processes of creating and interpreting narrative worlds, and that these processes differ in complexity: storytelling involves more factors and variables than story comprehension, where we are ‘merely’ concerned with the interaction between readers and texts. Existing models of extratextual literary communication, however, are not sophisticated enough to account for the processes involved in narrative composition. Speech act theory does not provide a good starting point, either, as existing rhetorical approaches to narrative don’t deal with pre-textual phenomena. For a description of the storytelling process an alternative theoretical framework is, therefore, required. As there can be no doubt that storytelling, especially the production of fictional stories, is a creative activity, the following section will introduce some psychological theories of creativity and creative behaviour. 3. Creativity and Storytelling Creativity has been defined by behavioural scientists as “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)” (Sternberg/Lubart 1999: 3). In their survey of psychological theories, Sternberg and Lubart discuss and evaluate six approaches to creativity: pragmatic, psychodynamic, psychometric, cognitive, social-personality and confluence approaches. Proponents of pragmatic approaches, most famously Edward de Bono, are rejected for their lack of interest in theoretical and methodological issues and their commercialization of creativity theory. Psychodynamic approaches which, due to their psychoanalytical roots, are situated outside the mainstream of scientific psychology, are accused of theoretical and methodological shortcomings. Whereas the psychodynamic approaches rely on case studies of eminent creative people, psychometric approaches have devised and conducted tests to evaluate a person’s creative skills. The results may be valid as far as they go, yet these simple problem-solving tests only yield trivial results which cannot shed light on more complex creative processes. 4

Cf. Gerrig/Egidi (2003: 41): “Reader’s use of schemas provides at least two benefits to authors. First, as we have noted, schemas allow them to delineate a scene with quick gestures. Once, for example, a restaurant scene has been minimally set, waiters, clattering trays, and wandering violinists can be addressed with little cognitive cost. Second, schemas allow authors to call quiet attention to departures from the norm. It is not, for example, an ordinary event to be served food in a restaurant which one has not ordered.”

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Having rejected pragmatic, psychodynamic and psychometric approaches, Sternberg and Lubart then turn to three alternatives which seem to be more promising. Cognitive approaches to creativity distinguish between a generative and an exploratory phase of creativity and analyse the mental processes which characterise creative invention, such as processes of retrieval, association, synthesis, transformation, analogical transfer, and categorical reduction (cf. ibid. 7f.). Social-personality approaches focus both on the sources of creativity (personality variables, motivational variables, sociocultural environment) and its motivation (e.g. intrinsic motivation or the need for order or achievement). Due to the complexity of the phenomenon, Sternberg and Lubart conclude, neither approach can explain and evaluate creativity on its own.5 What is needed, they consider, is a confluence of approaches proceeding from the assumption “that multiple components must converge for creativity to occur” (ibid.: 10). The examples of such approaches cited by Sternberg and Lubart include studies analysing the confluence of intrinsic motivation, domain-relevant knowledge and abilities and creativity-relevant skills (cf. Amabile 1983), or the developmental evolving-systems model for understanding creativity (cf. Gruber 1988). A third confluence approach, and the one which will be discussed in detail here as it lends itself best to the requirements of an overall framework model for narrative design, is Csikszentmihalyi’s (1997) sociological theory of creativity, which is based on the distinction between field, domain and person.6 Csikszentmihalyi (1997: 23) points out that definitions of creativity tend to be too vague to be useful, with usage ranging from the inner assurance of a person that what he or she does or has achieved is new and valuable to the belief that this inner assurance must be confirmed by experts in the field before we can agree to call a person creative and his or her effort new and valuable: “The problem is that the term ‘creativity’ covers too much ground”. As a consequence, Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of creativity turns to systems theory in order to restrict the range of phenomena to be defined. Csikszentmihalyi argues that “creativity can be observed only in the interrelations of a system made up of three main parts” (1997: 27) namely the ‘domain’ (i.e. a set of symbolic rules and procedures), the ‘field’ (i.e. the institutions and persons who act as gatekeepers to the domain) and the creative 5

6

Cf. Sternberg/Lubart (1999: 9): “The cognitive and social-personality approaches have each provided valuable insights into creativity. However, if you look for research that investigates both cognitive and social-personality variables at the same time, you will find only a handful of studies. The cognitive work on creativity has tended to ignore or downplay the personality and social system, and the social-personality approaches have tended to have little or nothing to say about the mental representations and processes underlying creativity.” Csikszentmihalyi’s findings are based on interviews with 91 exceptional creative individuals including scientists, artists, musicians and writers.

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person: “Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given domain such as music, engineering, business, or mathematics, has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain.” (ibid.: 28) These three elements of creativity defined by Csikszentmihalyi and others from a sociological and psychological angle—person, field and domain—will now be examined more closely and correlated with corresponding literary theories and concepts of author, literary system and narrativity. 3.1 Approaching the Creative Personality: Flesh-and-Blood Authors and Reader Constructs There is a general consensus that human beings are not equally creative. Psychological research has tried to establish degrees of creativity, to distinguish more and less creative personalities, to compare the motivational patterns of creative individuals, and to discover evidence of a creative disposition in individuals.7 Although there seems to be a relationship between intelligence and creativity,8 researchers today agree that a person’s creativity depends on the context in which they work, i.e. the interaction between the individual and his or her chosen domain and the field: “the essence of creativity cannot be captured as an intrapersonal variable” (Sternberg/Kaufman/Pretz 2002: 1). Although creativity is not an intrapersonal variable, there is also a consensus that creativity can be measured and developed in some degree (cf. Sternberg 2006: 2). Psychologists continue to study behavioural and developmental variables in order to correlate personality with creativity (cf. Baer/Kaufman 2006: 18). Csikszentmihalyi (1997: 57f.) holds that creative people adapt to new situations easily, they have learnt to operate in the symbolic system of their domain intuitively, they manage to gain access to the field (through communicative competence and good connections), and they are characterised by the ability to reconcile contrasting personality traits. He then identifies ten pairs of “antithetical traits that are often both present in such individuals and integrated with each other in a dialectical tension” (ibid.: 1997: 57f.).9 Other researchers have assembled lists of personality traits asso7 8

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References to the relevant psychological research can be found in the brief ‘state of the art’ in Sternberg/Kaufman/Pretz (2002: 1f.). Cf. the survey by Baer and Kaufman (2006: 15) who point out that “creative people tend to have above-average IQs” but also find that “[a]bove an IQ level of 120, the correlation between IQ scores and creativity appears to weaken”. These ten antithetical pairs are (1) a great deal of (focused) physical energy vs. long phases of idleness and reflection, (2) being smart and naïve at the same time, (3) responsibility and irresponsibility, (4) alternation between imagination and a rooted sense of reality, (5) extroversion

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ciated with creativity, such as “independence of judgements, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation, tolerance for ambiguity, openness to experience, psychotism, risk taking, androgyny, perfectionism, persistence, resilience, and self-efficacy” (cf. Baer/Kaufman 2006: 17f.).10 Recently, creativity studies have also paid attention to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of creative behaviour (cf. ibid.: 18). In literary studies, the author as ‘person’ has been a problematic and, at times, highly controversial issue ever since Wimsatt and Beardsley (1947) exposed the ‘intentional fallacy’ (i.e. drawing conclusions from text to author) and thus initiated the move towards the text which characterised the school of New Criticism and its method of close reading. The sole focus on the text was also characteristic of structuralist narratology from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Context-oriented approaches such as the New Historicism likewise discard the author as the originator of the literary text, turning to Foucault’s discourse theory instead. Those approaches that still insist on talking of “flesh-and-blood authors” (Booth 2005) usually do so within the frameworks of intentionality and ethical criticism, whereas most critics regard the (implied) author predominantly as a reader construct, i.e. as the image(s) of the author which readers develop in the reception process (cf. Jannidis 2005). 3.2 Surveying the ‘Field’: Schmidt’s Empirical Theory of Literature Systems theory provides the link between social psychology and the confluence approach to creativity on the one hand, and literary theory and existing models of extratextual literary communication on the other. The general structure of the literary field and domain-specific constraints have been described exhaustively by Schmidt (1991 [1980]), whose empirical theory of literature includes an in-depth analysis of the preconditions of literary communication. Schmidt (ibid: 72) differentiates between general and specific aspects that can influence the writing process.11 The former include a variety of competencies and skills (linguistic competence, writing skills, concentration, empathy, knowledge of values and norms, relevant cultural discourses,

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vs. introversion, (6) modesty and pride, (7) dominant and submissive behaviour (‘psychological androgyny”), (8) traditionalism and conservativism vs. rebellious and iconoclastic behaviour, (9) attachment vs. detachment with respect to one’s work, and (10) suffering and pain vs. enjoyment (cf. Csikszentmihalyi 1997: 58-76). Piirto’s list of personality traits, based on a survey of the literature, offers similar results (2005: 4f.). Cf. Schmidt (1991 [1980]: 71): “Die Bedingungen des K[ommunikations]-Voraussetzungssystems können generell eingeteilt werden in allgemeine und spezielle Handlungsbedingungen, denen Kommunikationsteilnehmer zum Handlungszeitraum unterliegen”.

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standards of communication etc.), motivations, needs and intentions, as well as four types of contextual constraint.12 Schmidt (ibid.: 262ff.) identifies economic conditions (both in a general sense of the dominant economic system, e.g. socialism or capitalism, and in the specific sense of personal income and the author’s dependence on—or independence from—the economic success of his/her literary work), including the situation of the literary market and the availability of media for literary content; social conditions, i.e. the influence of institutions such as schools and universities, the court, literary schools and circles, as well as the dominant author images in a society; political conditions (political system, class structure and class of author); and, finally, cultural conditions (values and norms, dominant aesthetic theories and religious beliefs, as well as the individual author’s knowledge of literary traditions, forms and genres). In addition to these general preconditions of literary communication, a variety of specific aspects may influence the production of literary texts, including the writer’s assumptions about the competencies, skills, motivations and expectations of other participants in the system of extratextual literary communication (such as editors, publishers and readers), the writer’s awareness of his or her own role within the literary system, and his or her psychological and physical dispositions. 3.3 The ‘Domain’: Prototype Theory and Equivalence Hypothesis The concept of the ‘domain’ has been defined as “a formally organized body of knowledge that is associated with a given field” (Feldman/Csikszentmihalyi/Gardner 1994: 20) and, somewhat more precisely, as “a set of symbolic rules and procedures” (Csikszentmihalyi 1997: 27). Sternberg (2005: 301) supports the latter definition, holding that “a domain is probably better defined as a combination of mental representations and processes rather than solely in terms of the mental representations (i.e. symbol systems)”. Whereas fields consist of people, institutions and cultural practices, domains, therefore, are symbolic systems defining rules and procedures for creative activities. As Piirto (2005: 2) points out, fields may contain several domains: “Mathematics is a field, but algebra, geometry, number theory, are domains. Literature is a field, but poetry is a domain.” Her examples, however, reveal a problem characteristic of psychological discourse on domains: a subdiscipline in mathematics is not necessarily equivalent to a literary genre. And a literary genre, as will be argued in section 4, does not necessarily constitute a domain within the literary field, but rather a field of its own. 12

Schmidt’s list of contextual factors mixes aspects of person, field and domain which I prefer to call ‘constraints’ rather than ‘frames’ (unless specific cognitive parameters are meant).

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The underlying problem here is the realization in more recent research that creativity cannot be considered as a domain-independent personality trait, as early psychometric approaches in the 1940s assumed. Proceeding from the assumption that creativity is neither wholly domain-specific nor wholly domain-general, experts in creativity research have come to the conclusion that domain-specific elements need to be examined more closely: “The potential to be creative may have some domain-general elements, but to gain the knowledge one needs to make creative contributions, one must develop knowledge and skills within a particular domain in which one is to make one’s creative contribution.” (Sternberg 2006: 2). As the domains include such diverse things as algebra and poetry, it comes as no surprise that “the important skills, attitudes, ways of working, guiding metaphors, and standards for assessing creative performance vary widely from domain to domain” (Kaufman/Baer 2005b: xiv). On the other hand, according to Kaufman and Baer (ibid.), “[e]ven in domains that seem closely related, such as writing poetry and writing short stories […], it appears that the underlying processes may be quite different”. The domain-specific nature of creativity is one part of the challenge, the ongoing extension of the objects of psychological studies of creativity another. According to Kaufman and Baer (2005b: xiv), creativity “has a much wider purview than it once did; no longer confined to just a few areas in the arts and sciences, creativity is now considered important in performances and products of all kinds.” In order to cope with the “sometimes confusing theoretical diversity that domain specificity has spawned” (ibid.), psychologists need either to concentrate on domain-general aspects of creativity or to collaborate more closely with experts on domain-specific systems, rules and procedures in the arts, sciences and other fields involved. An example of the first type of study is the Routledge Companion to Creativity (Rickards/Runco/Moger 2009) which brings together a wide range of commissioned articles on different aspects of creativity in organizational and professional domains. By concentrating on a specific type of domain, the editors manage to establish thematic coherence between contributions. The propulsion model of kinds of creative contribution, developed by Sternberg, Kaufman and Pretz (2002), is an example of the second type: here, the focus is on the quality of creative contributions, regardless of the field and domain: “The examples we give are from science and technology, arts and letters, and popular culture, but we believe that the model applies to creativity in all fields” (ibid.: 4). The results of such an approach will probably be judged differently in different fields; from the point of view of literary studies it is rather questionable whether the claims made here would stand (or even deserve) closer scrutiny—questions such as “Is Agatha Christie more creative than James Joyce?” are insignificant for the field, and the generic conven-

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tions which are used in this study to measure the ‘novelty’ of a novel fail to do justice to the complexity of the domain. These examples help to demonstrate that creativity research, when it involves domains rather than general personality traits, needs to use domainspecific criteria in order to yield coherent and relevant results. The difficulty, of course, is that psychologists are only experts in their own domains and have to draw on other disciplines and discourses in order to avoid theoretical or methodological shortcomings. Sternberg (2005: 300) argues that “exactly what a domain is has never been defined very well”. While it is probably true that domains have not been defined by psychologists, it is very likely that experts in the respective fields have a clear understanding of the specific features of their domains. Narratology, for instance, offers very sophisticated theories of narrativity and models of forms and functions of narrative structure which have so far been ignored in creativity research. It is equally true, however, that literary scholars don’t offer their knowledge to other disciplines such as psychology in a systematic way. There are no entries for ‘creativity’ and ‘domain’ in the prestigious Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, for instance, as these are not established concepts within narratological discourse. Thus psychologists, even if they were interested, would be hard pressed to realize the significance of narrative theory for definitions of the novelist’s domain. Cross-disciplinary collaboration requires some effort to ‘translate’ and ‘label’ disciplinary knowledge in such a way that it becomes more easily accessible to experts from other fields. The following section will therefore try to demonstrate how narratologists might define the domain of narrative fiction. 4. The Novelist’s Domain: Some Principles of Narrative Design Cognitive approaches to narrative and narrativity proceed from two related premises: prototype theory and the ubiquity of storytelling in culture. The prototype theory as proposed by Fludernik (1996: 19) holds that “spontaneous forms of storytelling can be imagined as natural and prototypical since they provide a generic and typological resource for more subtly and complexly textured artifacts of creative structuration”. Oral storytelling in everyday conversation, according to this theory, can be considered as the prototype of more elaborate forms of fictional and non-fictional storytelling, regardless of the medium in which the story is told or the narrative transmitted. Herman’s (2002) concept of storyworlds equally applies to both fictional and nonfictional narratives.13 13

Herman’s (2002: 20) term ‘storyworld’ designates “models built up on the basis of cues contained in narrative discourse”.

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The second, closely related premise holds that storytelling is a transcultural phenomenon and is omnipresent in everyday life: “Narrative is everywhere a major genre of verbal art, occurring all the way from primary oral cultures into high literacy and electronic information processing” (Ong 1988: 140). Access to the domain starts in early childhood, according to Peter Brooks (1984: 3): “Children quickly become virtual Aristotelians, insisting upon any storyteller’s observation of the ‘rules’, upon proper beginnings, middles, and particularly ends.” Through frequent exposure to stories they are made familiar not only with narrative plot “as a dominant mode of ordering and explanation” (ibid.: 6) but also with all other recurrent features of narrative. As a result, the implicit knowledge of narrative frames and generic conventions expands as listeners become readers and discover new narrative genres and media. In the course of a reader’s biography an intuitive set of reading strategies (including suspension of disbelief, empathy, mental modelling) is constantly refined—readers are experts in creating mental representation and storyworlds (cf. Herman 2002). To these established premises we can add a third, which one might call an equivalence hypothesis: the generic and typological resources for story comprehension are similar to those required for story generation. The generic conventions, dramaturgical schemata and narrative frames that readers need to be acquainted with in order to be able to make sense of a story also form the regularities and principles that constitute the narrative domain. These regularities and principles frame readers’ aesthetic experiences and at the same time serve as domain-specific constraints for authors (as opposed to the economic, social, technological and ideological constraints of the literary field): generic conventions, dramaturgy and narrative frames form the horizon of storied worlds shared by flesh-and-blood storytellers with their real-world audiences. The process by which a writer goes “beyond the intuitive grasp of form to the deliberate construction of form” (Bell 2000: 22) is now commonly referred to as ‘narrative design’. The concept as used by novelist and creative writing teacher Madison Smartt Bell (2000) emphasizes the fact that intuition alone does not suffice to create a longer work of fiction, such as a novel: “One’s intuitive idea of a novel’s design must be propped up with some sort of scaffolding, in order to last out a longer period of composition.” (Ibid.: 26) Despite its extensive use of metaphors, the latently prescriptive, goaloriented approach to storytelling—“For the writer, some sense of the final formal design of the work really ought to precede the first stages of composition” (ibid.: 25)—and the rather schematic opposition of linear vs. modular design, Bell’s concept offers itself as an interface between the creative process and the finalized narrative structure.

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As well as being descriptive and process-oriented, the narratological concept of narrative design proposed here looks at narrative from the author’s creative perspective. It thus serves as an umbrella term for three related aspects of the domain-specific constraints mentioned above, i.e. generic, dramaturgical and narrative conventions: for narrative design as a decisive stage in the creative process involves generic decisions (such as the selection of a genre and the decision to conform to a well-established formula, or the deliberate deviation from generic conventions), as well as dramaturgical planning (linear or modular design, in Bell’s terminology). The third component of narrative design, termed “storyworld design” by Herman (2002: 86),14 is a much more complex concept which subsumes a variety of mental models or cognitive strategies shared intuitively by writers and readers. Whereas generic and dramaturgical constraints are specific features of the domain of fictional narrative, storyworld design, according to the prototype hypothesis, applies to fictional and non-fictional storytelling alike. It is therefore a domain-specific aspect of narrative rather than of fiction, a distinction which might be important for domain-specific creativity research. Storyworld design involves several core principles explored in cognitive approaches to narrative in recent years, such as cognitive maps of fictional spaces, personality theories and theories of emotion, and frames and scripts. Although this list cannot claim to be exhaustive, there is no doubt that these concepts describe core aspects of storyworlds. Narrative fiction provides its readers with textual cues which allow for temporal and spatial orientation within the storyworld. Based on these cues, readers create mental models of spatial relations in the fictional world which Marie-Laure Ryan (2003: 215) calls ‘cognitive maps’. From a narrative design perspective the crucial question is how this interaction between texts and readers is achieved: “Through what strategies do texts facilitate the conceptualization of these relations [i.e. spatial relations between objects]?” (ibid. 216) Cognitive maps are based on deictics, on descriptions and spatial frames, and on scripts and schemata. Deictics are “linguistic expressions whose prototypical function is to contribute to acts of definite reference” (Hanks 2005: 99); they play a central role in narrative texts “in anchoring description to perspective and also co-articulating multiple perspectives” (ibid.). Descriptions provide readers with cues with respect to the temporal and spatial setting of the narrative. The function of deictics and descriptions 14

Herman’s seminal study of principles of storyworld design in narrative comprehension introduces a distinction between narrative microdesign on the one hand, and narrative macrodesign on the other (cf. Herman 2002: 6). The terminological and conceptual parallels suggest that Herman’s findings might be systematically related to the study of narrative design in narrative composition envisaged here. Such a systematic approach, which might connect these closely related theoretical frameworks, unfortunately by far exceeds the scope of the present chapter, which can only offer preliminary hypotheses and exploratory observations.

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in narrative is not to create complete representations of objects but to provide sufficient data for readers to engage in cognitive processing of textual information. As cognitive approaches to narrative have amply demonstrated, this cognitive mapping relies heavily on frames, scripts and schemata (Fludernik 1996: 17f.). Ryan’s essay draws attention to the amount of textual data required to construct a cognitive map. Her experimental approach to the comparative analysis of cognitive maps demonstrates that there are significant differences between individual readers with respect to the mapping of the fictional world. Whereas literary scholars may use close reading techniques in order to arrive at a precise understanding of the temporal and spatial relation within a novel, the stance of “pure surveyor” (ibid.: 218), for example, is the exception rather than the rule. In general, readers “do not construct narrative space for its own sake, but as a background for the understanding of plot, character motivation, and the moral issues articulated in the text” (Ryan 2003: 216). Of course, generic conventions and dramaturgical constraints influence the amount and detail of temporal and spatial information provided by the author, who also decides to what extent this information is semantically loaded. The second key component of storyworld design is personality theories and theories of emotion, which guide the production as well as the reception of literary characters. Characters, or storyworld participants, are vital ingredients of fictional narratives, although there are experimental examples (such as the middle chapter in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse) where the contribution of characters to events within the storyworld is reduced to a minimum. Cognitive theories regard literary characters as mental models of persons constructed by readers on the basis of their existing knowledge structures. Readers normally construct their mental images of literary characters in analogy to flesh-and-blood persons. In this process of anthropomorphisation (i.e. the process by which human motivations, behavioural patterns or character traits are attributed to nonhuman organisms or objects) they make use of personality theories in categorisation and attribution processes (cf. Schneider 2001: 612). The dynamics of mental-model construction in the reception of characters have been studied in detail by Ralf Schneider (2000, 2001) who has also proposed a sophisticated model of the cognitive processes involved (Schneider 2001: 618, 627). Again, as writers share culture-specific implicit personality theories with their readers, it is safe to assume that their attitudes towards certain types, as well as their evaluation of psychological dispositions, are roughly equivalent.15 If this wasn’t the case, empathy would be hard, if not impossible, to 15

Empirical research in experimental and social psychology may provide literary scholars with (synchronic) prototypes for emotion concepts (cf. Hogan 2003). Whether these can really be

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achieve.16 As with cognitive maps, a limited number of character traits suffices to enable the reader to create a complex mental image of a person. It is a matter of narrative design what techniques of characterisation are employed, which character traits are used to portray a specific type, or how the impression of psychological complexity is achieved. As Schneider (2001: 625) points out, authors can also distribute character-related information over longer stretches of text, “so that there is never quite enough information available for fitting the character into a category”. This effect can be achieved through various techniques, for instance “by introducing characters in action without previous narratorial commentary, by engaging them in dialogue on their first appearance, by having them described in contrasting terms by different other characters or by presenting the complex workings of a character’s consciousness” (ibid.). Action structures, i.e. scripts based on stereotyped sequences of events and actions, constitute a third factor in storyworld design. Herman (2002: 83) defines action structures as “principles of organization based on inferences about participants’ (emergent) beliefs about the world”. Such action structures help readers to “connect nonadjacent occurrences and to construe them as elements of an ongoing, coherent narrative” (ibid.). Again, it is up to the author to design his or her narrative in such a way that readers may activate their knowledge structures in order to complement textual cues with contextual frames. Efficient storytelling anticipates the participation of readers in the process of sense-making, and creates spaces for readers to engage in a process of constructing and reconfiguring the storyworld. 5. Conclusion There are a number of issues that this chapter hasn’t even begun to address, especially the processual character of creativity. Cognitive psychologists have developed a variety of models of the creative process, ranging from the twostage model of creative thinking (generative vs. exploratory phase) proposed by Finke, Smith and Ward to models distinguishing several phases of the creative process such as Hadamard’s classical four-stage model (cf. Baer and Kaufman 2006: 19). Csikszentmihalyi’s (1997: 79 ff.) model of creative processes has five components or phases, namely ‘preparation’ (“becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting

16

correlated with “universal narrative structures, heroic and romantic tragic-comedy” (11), however, which Hogan regards as “contextually dependent universal prototypes for happiness” (ibid.), is open to debate. Cf. Schneider (2001: 614): “In portraying a character, authors will, if they want to achieve a certain disposition towards that character, try not to deviate too much from the standards of evaluation they expect their readers to apply.”

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and arouse curiosity”), ‘incubation’ (“during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness”), ‘moments of insight’ (which occur several times throughout the creative process), ‘evaluation’ (based on the internalized criteria of the domain and opinions of the field), and, finally, ‘elaboration’. A proper model of fictional storytelling, then, would have to move beyond the relationship of domain-specific features in order to account systematically for the processes such as creative ‘flow’ involved in story generation (cf. Piiro 2005). A second omission which can only be justified by a lack of space is the linguistic aspect of writing as a cognitive activity. After all, the dynamics of storytelling include not only issues of creativity such as motivation or flow (cf. Piiro 2005) but also the mechanisms and procedures involved in creating a written narrative as opposed to a verbally transmitted story or dictation. The rich tradition of cognitive writing research since the 1980s provides not only a link between psychological studies of creativity as process and the narratological analysis of narrative design, but also significant insights into the cognitive functions of writing, the role of revision, and the relationships between the processes and procedures of writing on the one hand and its results on the other (cf. Baurmann/Weingarten 1995). Despite these omissions, the present chapter has shown why the extension of cognitive and psychological principles from narrative comprehension to narrative composition not only closes a systematic gap in existing models of extratextual literary communication but gives scholars from the field of literary studies the opportunity to bring their specific experience and expertise to the cross-disciplinary project of creativity research. Literature is of paradigmatic importance for understanding domain-specific processes and constraints, as writing and storytelling are easier to observe than other types of creative behaviour.17 In addition to the cross-disciplinary potential of storytelling, the research project outlined here may also make a contribution to the future development of cognitive narratology. Exploring the principles of narrative design and storytelling processes will advance our understanding not only of creativity, but also of the domain-specific constraints and restrictions that authors have to learn to navigate successfully in order to create storyworlds. If narratology includes processes of production as well as of reception within its object of study, and collaborates with other disciplines interested in cognition and creativity “on the far side of the narrator” (Genette 1991: 148)18, 17 18

Cf. Csikszentmihalyi (1997: 237) who points out that “of all the cultural domains literature may nowadays be the most accessible”. For the context of this rather cryptic remark, cf. Genette (1991: 148): “In narrative, or rather behind or before it, there is someone who tells, and who is the narrator. On the narrator’s far side there is someone who writes, who is responsible for everything on the near side. That someone—big news—is the author”.

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there is a good chance that we’ll be able to describe more systematically the creative processes in which narrative worlds are made. Works Cited Amabile, Teresa M. 1983. The Social Psychology of Creativity. New York: Springer Verlag. Baer, John and James C. Kaufman. 2006. “Creativity Research in English-Speaking Countries.” In: Kaufman/Sternberg 2006, p. 10-38. Barthes, Roland. 2001 [1971]. “From Work to Text.” In: Leitch et al. 2001a, p. 1470-1475. Baurmann, Jürgen and Rüdiger Weingarten (eds.). 1995. Schreiben. Prozesse, Prozeduren, Produkte. Eine Hinführung zur Schreibforschung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Bell, Madison Smartt. 2000. Narrative Design. Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form. New York/London: Norton. Booth, Wayne C. 1983 [1961]. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Booth, Wayne C. 2005. “Resurrection of the Implied Author. Why Bother?” In: Phelan/Rabinowitz 2005, p. 75-88. Bortolussi, Marisa and Peter Dixon. 2003. Psychonarratology. Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf. Bruner, Jerome. 2002. Making Stories. Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Chatman, Seymour. 1980. Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1997. Creativity. Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins. Dartnall, Terry (ed.). 1994. Artificial Intelligence and Creativity. An Interdisciplinary Approach. Dordrecht et al.: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Feldman, David; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner (eds.). 1994. Changing the World. A Framework for the Study of Creativity. Westport, CT: Praeger. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London/New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1990 [1983]. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press. Gerrig, Richard J. 2003. Experiencing Narrative Worlds. On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gerrig Richard J. and Giovanna Egidi. 2003. “Cognitive Psychological Foundations of Narrative Experiences.” In: Herman 2003, p. 33-55. Gruber, Howard E. 1988. “The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.” In: Creativity Research Journal 1, p. 27-51. Hanks, William F. 2005. “Deixis.” In: Herman/Jahn/Ryan 2005, p. 99-100. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David (ed.). 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Herman, David; Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London/New York: Routledge.

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Jahn, Manfred. 2005. “Cognitive Narratology.” In: Herman/Jahn/Ryan 2005, p. 67-71. Jannidis, Fotis. 2005. “Author.” In: Herman/Jahn/Ryan 2005, p. 33-34. Kaufman, James C. and Robert J. Sternberg (eds.). 2006. The International Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufman, James C. and John Baer (eds.). 2005a. Creativity Across Domains. Faces of the Muse. Mahwah, NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kaufman, James C. and John Baer. 2005b. “Introduction. How People Think, Work, and Act Creatively in Diverse Domains.” In: Kaufman/Baer 2005a, p. xiii-xvii. Kearns, Michael. 1999. Rhetorical Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2006. The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Leitch, Vincent B. et al. (eds.). 2001a. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York/London: Norton. Leitch, Vincent B. et al. (eds.). 2001b. “Introduction to Theory and Criticism.” In: Leitch et al. 2001a, p. 1-28. Neumann, Birgit and Ansgar Nünning. 2008. An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. Stuttgart: Klett. Nünning, Ansgar. 1989. Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der erzählerischen Vermittlung. Die Funktion der Erzählinstanz in den Romanen George Eliots. Trier: WVT. Ong, Walter. 1988 [1982]. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Routledge. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell About It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James. 2006. “Narrative Theory, 1966-2006. A Narrative.” In: Robert Scholes; James Phelan and Robert Kellogg (eds.). The Nature of Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 283-336. Phelan, James and Wayne C. Booth. 2005. “Narrative Techniques.” In: Herman/Jahn/Ryan 2005, p. 370-375. Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden, MA et al.: Blackwell. Piirto, Jane. 2005. “The Creative Process in Poets.” In: Kaufman/Baer 2005a, p. 1-22. Pratt, Marie-Louise. 1977. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rickards, Tudor; Mark A. Runco and Susan Moger. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Creativity. London/New York: Routledge. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2003. “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space.” In: Herman 2003, p. 214-242. Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1991 [1980]. Grundriß der Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Schneider, Ralf. 2000. Grundriß zur kognitiven Theorie der Figurenrezeption am Beispiel des viktorianischen Romans. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Schneider, Ralf. 2001. “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character. The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction.” In: Style 35:4, p. 607-640. Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.). 1999. Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sternberg, Robert J. 2005. “The Domain Generality Versus Specificity Debate. How Should It Be Posed?” In: Kaufman/Baer 2005a, p. 299-306. Sternberg, Robert J. 2006. “Introduction.” In: Sternberg/Kaufman 2006, p. 1-9. Sternberg, Robert J.; James C. Kaufman and Jean E. Pretz. 2002. The Creative Conundrum. A Propulsion Model of Kinds of Creative Contributions. New York: Psychology Press. Sternberg, Robert J. and Todd I. Lubart. 1999. “The Concept of Creativity. Prospects and Paradigms.” In: Sternberg 1999, p. 3-15. Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise. 2005. “Reverse-Engineering Narrative. Evidence of Special Design.” In: Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (eds.). 2005. The Literary Animal. Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston/Illinois: Northwestern University Press, p. 177-196. Turner, Scott R. 1994. The Creative Process: A Computer Model of Storytelling and Creativity. Hillsdale, Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wimsatt, William Kurtz and Monroe Beardsley. 2001 [1946]. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In: Leitch et al. 2001a, p. 1374-1387.

MONIKA FLUDERNIK (Freiburg)

The Cage Metaphor: Extending Narratology into Corpus Studies and Opening it to the Analysis of Imagery

1. Introduction In this paper two attempts to extend the range of narrative study will be illustrated with the example of a single metaphor, the cage metaphor. The choice of this specific metaphor does not relate to the narratological aims of this paper but reflects work in progress on prison metaphors, which has supplied a large amount of useful data. Quite unpretentiously, the purpose of this essay is to show how corpus analysis might be fruitfully used in the criticism of narrative texts and, secondly, to argue that narratology should focus more extensively on the function of metaphor in narrative. I will start with the second aspect first. Metaphor in narrative is a curiously under-researched topic. In the wake of Roman Jakobson’s classic essay “Two Aspects of Language” (1956) and David Lodge’s The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), metaphor has predominantly been regarded as a poetic element even when it showed up in fiction, which—so the argument went—it rendered more ‘lyrical’. To the extent that metaphor was analysed in narrative studies at all, the main critical effort was expended on ascertaining whether a particular metaphoric expression belonged to the narrator’s or a character’s language. The question of attribution itself demonstrates that metaphor was seen as a feature of style and, therefore, voice rather than as a structural element of narrative. This situation has not improved since the cognitive revolution in metaphor studies. Lakoff, Johnson and Turner have demonstrated in great detail that our everyday language is steeped in metaphor, that practically all abstract ideas and relations need to be expressed by recourse to metaphor, and that ordinary language, much like any kind of literature, consequently teems with imagery. Although one can go on from there to analyse how specific metaphors current in everyday language are deployed in a literary context—a question that Mark Turner has followed up in his work (Turner 1987; 1991;

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1996)—, cognitive metaphor theory has not resulted in a greater understanding of metaphor in narratives. Indeed, since the Lakoffian paradigm has become dominant in academia, metaphor studies in literary research have taken a downward plunge, at least in English literary criticism. A search in the MLA bibliography for the years 1995 to 2006 under the term metaphor yielded over 1000 entries; but three quarters of these were linguistic essays, and among the literary entries only two (!) concerned metaphor in literature. The rest all discussed specific metaphors in a single work or author.1 It is therefore high time to analyse more extensively the function of metaphor or imagery in prose texts, and to do so also from a narrative perspective. The only recent work on narrative metaphor I am aware of is Benjamin Biebuyck’s analysis of metaphor in the German modernist novel (Biebuyck 1998). Biebuyck manages to demonstrate convincingly how metaphors structure the narrative discourse in Musil and Broich. In the present paper, by focussing on the cage metaphor, I will also try to tease out possible narratologically relevant functions of metaphor in narrative texts. My second point in this paper is to alert humanities scholars to at least one possible use of databases. Although corpus linguists have created and searched numerous databases of various kinds, literary scholars have so far had few uses for the widely available Chadwyck-Healey and other corpora, except to employ them as a kind of diachronic concordance allowing one, say, to find all poems in which snails figure by searching for the word snail(s). A second use that is becoming very widespread is the resort to databases as a means of accessing old texts that are available only in the British Library and then must not be xeroxed. Databases such as Eighteenth-Century-Literature are treasure troves, since they contain many non-canonical texts and allow one to print out and read them. This immeasurably improves one’s source material to include many out-of-the-way texts, particularly if a library with prenineteenth-century holdings in English literature is not conveniently close. A third very important use of databases such as Literature Online consists in the opportunity to find large numbers of lexical items and phrases in less well known texts, and to supplement the OED as a source of checking difficult passages in older texts. Thus, I am currently completing an essay on Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676), a play whose title phrase (plain-dealing) and eponymous hero are something of a mystery in the play. By looking at the over eighty passages that Literature Online’s Prose Drama and Verse Drama databases contain, it became very clear that the meanings of plain-dealing can now be determined much more successfully than the OED’s definition and example sentences allowed, even taking into account the additional material from the CD-ROM version. 1

In German and Romance studies metaphor has apparently held more interest for critics. See: Biebuyck (1994; 1998; 2005) and Coenen (2002).

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Finally, in the present essay, nothing more complex than the search for a single word or phrase is again involved. As I already showed in a recent essay (2007), the search for the source terms in metaphors can be significantly aided by databases. In Fludernik (2007) I was mostly concerned with the word prison as a source domain in metaphors such as MARRIAGE IS PRISON. In what follows, I will be looking at the word cage, which is one of the main prison-related metaphorical source terms. By using a database (here English and American Literature by Directmedia), I have been able to gather a large number of sentences in English fiction and poetry which contain the lexeme cage. After eliminating literal items from the list (such as cages in the zoo)2, the remaining metaphorical entries were analysed. The following section demonstrates what one can do with the results of such a search. 2. Cage Metaphors: Of Birds and Women The metaphors document a wide range of uses including versions of several familiar prison tropes. For instance, the BODY IS A PRISON trope with the soul figured as an imprisoned bird in the cage of the body occurs in a passage from Spenser’s Faerie Queene in Book III, Canto xi, st. 12: Which when she [Britomart] heard, and saw the ghastly fit, Threatening into his [Scudamour’s] life to make a breach, Both with great ruth and terrour she was smit, Fearing least from her cage the wearie soule would flit. (Spenser 1978: 539)3

Scudamour is in despair because he has been unable to rescue his beloved Amoret from the clutches of Busirane. Rochester, in talking to Jane Eyre, also uses this image to suggest that Jane has an enquiring and perceptive mind hidden beneath her bland exterior: The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man [...] or master [...] to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of the cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. (Jane Eyre, xiv; Brontë 1971: 169-70)

Jane’s body, and her good behaviour inculcated at Lowood, are the cage within which Rochester detects the creative, curious and sensible mind (or soul) which is the real Jane, buried by enforced training and self-imposed 2

3

One example of such literal use from Ambrose Bierce’s In the Midst of Life: “the rich, thrilling melody of a mockingbird in a cage by the cottage door” (EAL 103). Numbers given refer to those cited in the EAL database. All emphases in bold italics are mine.

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restraint. It is his hope that this mind can be set free, the bird liberated from its cage and allowed to “soar”, to develop its full potential. In Keats’s “Fancy” the body/mind dichotomy in the cage image is replaced by the brain vs. fancy (or intellect vs. feeling or imagination) opposition: Then let winged Fancy wander [...] Open wide the mind’s cagedoor, She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar. (Keats 1996: 143; ll. 5-8)

One common metaphor is the term jailbird for prisoner. Although the database does not include many references to prisoners as birds4, there is a noteworthy passage from Caleb Williams, Godwin’s prison classic. The passage occurs in the context of Caleb’s realization that even though he is physically at liberty, Falkland and his minions can trace him everywhere, so that the whole of England has become a prison to him: To what purpose serve the restless aspirations of my soul, but to make me, like the frightened bird, beat myself in vain against the inclosure of my cage? (Caleb Williams III, viii; Godwin 1991: 256)

The most famous of such bird images for prisoners occurs in Lear’s remark to Cordelia, “Come let’s away to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage” (Shakespeare 1978, V, iii, 8-9), a remark that evokes the happy prison trope as part of Lear’s overly unrealistic view of their situation. (He does not foresee Cordelia’s murder, though his idea that as prisoners they could “wear out, / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon” (ll. 17-19) could be seen as a politically shrewd estimate in view of Sir Walter Raleigh’s long, though not indefinite, survival.) Many cage metaphors refer simply to rooms or houses that are perceived as confining: “When the dwarf [Quilp] got into the street, he mounted again upon the window sill, and looked into the office for a moment with a grinning face, as a man might peep into a cage” (The Old Curiosity Shop xxxiii; Dickens 2000a: 257). In thus framing Dick Swiveller and Sarah Brass, Mr Quilp the dwarf (a person accustomed to be treated as a curiosity), applies the same strategy of curious surveillance to his antagonist, the helpless Dick. The metaphor is, moreover, appropriate because Dick will come to perceive the lawyer’s office as a place of imprisonment. Sometimes the cage metaphor refers to a location but focuses on the birdlike nature of the inhabitants, rather than on the association of confinement, as in Ananias’s diatribe against sexual licence in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Ananias has encountered Kastril’s sister and thinks her a whore: “The 4

But note, for instance, Mynshul’s depiction of the prisoner as “a poore weather-beaten Bird” (1618: 35) and his sententious remark: “Prisoners to Iaylors, use that wretched trade, / of common fidlers; [...] they must chant merry songs / Like Birds in Cages, and are glad to sing / Sweet tunes to those, who them to thraldome bring” (41).

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place / It is become a cage of unclean birds” (V, iii, 46-7); here the bird metaphor, applied to impure women, extends metonymically to figure the house as a cage. When little Paul Dombey, on the other hand, yearningly looks at the free birds passing by his window, the room in which he is confined through his illness also metaphorically turns into a prison in the shape of a cage: Oh! Could he but have seen [...] the slight spare boy above, watching the waves and clouds at twilight, with his earnest eyes, and breasting the window of his solitary cage when birds flew by, as if he would have emulated them, and soared away! (Dombey and Son, xii; 1985: 236)

Most basically, the cage metaphor refers to a prison location per se (PRISON IS CAGE) rather than, conversely, using the cage as the target domain (CAGE IS PRISON). In Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Arthur Clennam in his room in the Marshalsea appears like a “dull imprisoned bird” in his cage and even takes up the metaphor himself: ‘Try a little something green, sir,’ said Young John; and again handed the basket. It was so like handing green meat into the cage of a dull imprisoned bird, and John had so evidently brought the little basket as a handful of fresh relief from the stale hot paving-stones and bricks of the jail, that Clennam said, with a smile, ‘It was very kind of you to think of putting this between the wires; but I cannot even get this down, today.’ (Little Dorrit, II, xxvii; 1978: 793)

Besides the PRISON IS CAGE equation, the feeling of imprisonment is often figured as encagement, as in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, where Charles Darnay’s delivery to a tribunal under guard is likened to transportation in a cage: Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across the road behind him, but he knew it to be another iron door in the series that was barred between him and England. The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have felt his freedom more completely gone. (A Tale of Two Cities, III, i; 2000b: 255)

This consciousness of captivity closely resembles the LIFE IS A PRISON/ CAGE metaphor, another very general prison metaphor specifically focussing on the cage as metonymic signifier of the source domain, prison: To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage Which preys upon itself alone; To curse the life which is the cage Of fettered grief that dares not groan [...] (“To Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin”; Shelley 1971: 522)

The WORLD IS A PRISON trope likewise shows up in the garb of cage imagery, as in Jonson’s poem “A Farewell for a Gentlewoman, Virtuous and Noble”, where the saeva indignatio of satire targets the lures of the world which threaten to entrap the unwary with their glitter. The prison of the

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world is figured in a combination of source lexemes—all metonyms of captivity: fetters (“gyves”, “chain”, “noose”) and the cage: Yet art thou [False world] falser than thy wares. And knowing this, should I yet stay, Like such as blow away their lives And never will redeem a day Enamoured of their golden gyves? Or, having ’scaped, shall I return And thrust my neck into the noose [...] What bird or beast is known so dull That, fled his cage, or broke his chain, And tasting air and freedom, wull [sic!] Render his head in there again? (ll. 20-32; Jonson 1975: 95)

A second very interesting instance of the WORLD IS A PRISON trope occurs in a passage by Henry James on the French writer Balzac: It comes to us as we go back to him [Balzac] that his spirit had fairly made of itself a cage in which he was to turn round and round, always unwinding his reel, much in the manner of a criminal condemned to hard labour for life. The cage is simply the complicated but dreadfully definite French world that built itself so solidly in and roofed itself so impenetrably over him. (James 1963: 200)

This passage combines the animal in the cage metaphor (of the rodent trapped in the cage or working a wheel) with that of the hard labour prison; as such it merges the Work is Prison trope with the CAGE IS PRISON metaphor. The extract is moreover interesting because it introduces the British concept of penal servitude into a context of American prison architecture, the cage-like prison cells. (British cells did not have bars, and most penal labour outside the crank was performed in halls or outdoors.) Besides these very general metaphors employing the cage as a source term, more specific equations can be found, again in alignment with common prison metaphors. For instance, the CONVENT IS PRISON metaphor current in the Gothic novel can be used with the cage as source lexeme (CONVENT AS CAGE), as in “[...] the Princess Fleur de Marie [...] was sadly ogling out of the bars of her convent cage, in which, poor imprisoned bird, she was moulting away” (Pendennis, II, xiv; Thackeray 1994: 135). In addition to physical prison scenarios, one also finds a number of instances of cage imagery in reference to more clearly psychological, social or political constraints. Thus, in Meredith’s The Egoist, the narrator remarks ironically on Vernon and Clara’s necessary sexual restraint after they have fallen in love. The figure used is that of staying in the cage of decorum and respectable virginity while love is beckoning through the open door of the cage: And if it was hard for him, for both, but harder for the man, to restrain their particular word from a flight to heaven when the cage stood open and nature beck-

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oned, he [Vernon] was practised in self-mastery, and she [Clara] loved him the more. (The Egoist, xlviii; Meredith 1979: 588)

More commonly, it is love itself that is figured as the prison, the cage: The doubt which ye misdeeme, fayre loue, is vaine, That fondly feare to loose your liberty, When losing one, two liberties ye gayne, And make him bond that bondage earst dyd fly. Sweet be the band, the which true loue doth tye, Without constraynt or dread of any ill: The gentle birde feeles no captiuity Within her cage, but singes and feeds her fill. (Amoretti LXV; Spenser 1989: 639)

Most common of all is the MARRIAGE IS PRISON/CAGE metaphor: Rosamond concluded that he [Lydgate] had learned the value of her opinion; on the other hand, she had a more thorough conviction of his talents now that he gained a good income, and instead of the threatened cage in Bride Street provided one all flowers and gilding, fit for the bird of paradise that she resembled. (Middlemarch, “Finale”; Eliot 1985: 893)

Here Rosamond, the egocentric manipulator, shows that her esteem for Lydgate depends on her being treated as a bird of paradise, to be lavishly showered with luxury goods, rather than as a common bird shut up in a miserable little house in Bride Street (“where the rooms are like cages”—lxiv, 710). “Like a Bird i’th’Cage”: The Golden Cage Trope Within her gilded cage confined I saw a dazzling Belle, A Parrot of that famous kind Whose name is NONPAREIL” (“The Parrot and the Wren”; Wordsworth 1936: 130)

In the remainder of this section I want to focus on the two most prevalent images connected with the cage metaphor, the BIRD IN THE CAGE and the BEAST IN THE CAGE. Both metaphors have a number of different readings. Thus, the bird in the cage, as we have already seen, may foreground weakness5, despondency (failing to sing), despair (beating one’s breast against cage bars) or monotonous activity (the simile that Henry James uses, equating the cage with hard labour, the treadmill, with birds or mice going round in a contraption inside the cage). Most common of all, however, is the image of the golden cage, the association of caging with happy prisons that are safe harbours and refuges from a dangerous world of freedom outside, a tempta5

Compare the simile from Melville’s “Billy Budd”, according to which “any demur would have been as idle as the protest of a goldfinch popped into a cage” (EAL, XIII 7).

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tion to idleness and the love of comfort. This image is frequently applied to love, and especially marriage, to address the situation of the wife kept by her husband in luxury but imprisoned either physically at home or in intellectual confinement. The wife as bird is reduced to an ornament or plaything. The woman then resembles a caged canary adorning a lady’s boudoir (though this prison may be perceived by its inmate as paradise, as in the case of Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch). Perhaps one of the most extensive treatments of the golden cage of luxury that kills is D. H. Lawrence’s short story, “The Captain’s Doll” (1921). Lawrence’s novella describes a love triangle in post-World-War-I Germany involving the Scottish Captain Alexander Hepburn, his wife, whom he has left at home and Countess Johanna zu Rassentlow, called Hannele, who is a refugee and survives by making exquisite dolls. Hannele and the captain have fallen in love, but he is curiously unable to articulate his feelings or come to a decision. Hannele has made a doll in the shape of the captain, which his wife sees when she shows up in the village. She suspects Hannele’s companion to be her husband’s mistress and, in her jealousy, tries to have the two women refugees chased from the town by the British military authorities. Then she suddenly falls to her death from a window. We never learn whether the captain pushed her, or whether she realized he loved the other woman and jumped. After a period of mourning and distraction, the captain recognizes that he needs Hannele after all. He finds her and persuades her to marry him on his own terms (without any form of clinging love). After the wife’s death, Hannele and the captain have a conversation in which he depicts his wife Evangeline as a bird dying in a golden cage: “[...] When I was a boy I caught a bird, a black-cap, and I put it in a cage. And I loved that bird. I don’t know why, but I loved it. I simply loved that bird. [...] And it would peck its seed as if it didn’t quite know what else to do; and look round about, and begin to sing. But in quite a few days it turned its head aside and died. Yes, it died.—I never had the feeling again, that I got from that black-cap when I was a boy—not until I saw her. And then I felt it all again. I felt it all again. And it was the same feeling. I knew, quite soon I knew, that she would die. She would pick her seed and look round in the cage just the same. But she would die in the end.—Only it would last much longer.—But she would die in the cage, like the black-cap.” “But she loved the cage. She loved her clothes and her jewels. She must have loved her house and her furniture and all that with a perfect frenzy.” “She did. She did. But like a child with playthings. [...] And it got worse. And her way of talking got worse. As if it bubbled off her lips.—But her eyes never lost their brightness, they never lost that fairy look. Only I used to see fear in them. Fear of everything—even all the things she surrounded herself with. Just like my black-cap used to look out of his cage—so bright and sharp, and yet as if he didn’t know that it was just the cage that was between him and the outside. He thought it was inside himself, the barrier. He thought it was part of his own nature to be shut in. And she

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thought it was part of her own nature.—And so they both died.” (Lawrence 1994: 112-113)

This passage equates the “fairy” (112) look of Alexander’s wife with the imprisoned bird of the captain’s boyhood. This is, however, no ordinary MARRIAGE IS PRISON metaphor, either for the captain or his wife. The captain, tragically, believes that he has killed both bird and wife with his love. Yet the nature of the captain’s love for his wife (and bird) hints at a strong sadistic element, as if he positively enjoyed watching them succumb to their cage and die. However, one can give his story a quite different reading. The blackcap died in captivity through lack of freedom; but Evangeline died because the captain never really loved her, since he was incapable of strong emotional commitment anyway. In fact, he felt imprisoned by his marriage and resisted his wife’s attempts to get him to remain at home, where, one supposes, he felt suffocated. When Hannele thinks over what Evangeline has told her about the captain’s promise on his wedding day, vowing to always make her happy, she muses: “Not that he was afraid of the little lady. He was just committed to her, as he might have been committed to gaol, or committed to paradise” (105). The inherent ambivalence of the marital state as bliss (paradise) or jail (hell) is articulated here in a syllepsis: committed to can be both an intransitive verb (I am committed to my work/duty, to the Movement, etc.) and a passive (to be committed to prison). Whereas the sentence starts out by foregrounding the positive intransitive meaning, it then recasts that structure to produce the negative, passive meaning of the verb. It ends with the paradoxical “committed to paradise”, in which paradise no longer looks like paradise at all, in either sense of the word commit. (Is he committed to thinking of marriage as a paradise, although it is not? Or, is he arrested and committed to paradise as if to a lockup?) Given the captain’s reluctance to show his feelings (thematized at great length between Hannele and himself at the end of the story), one may assume that he killed Evangeline through his refusal to be more than a legal husband. By treating her as an inconsequential being that one needs to humour, rather than as an equal, he in fact treated her like the bird for which he had developed such strong feelings. This comes out clearly in his preposterous answer to Hannele’s question whether he will have sex with his wife during her visit: “Do you want to go to her at the hotel?” asked Hannele. “Well, I don’t, particularly. But I don’t mind, really. We’re very good friends. Why, we’ve been friends for eighteen years—we’ve been married seventeen. Oh, she’s a nice little woman.—I don’t want to hurt her feelings.—I wish her no harm, you know.—On the contrary, I wish her all the good in the world.” He had no idea of the blank amazement in which Hannele listened to these stray remarks.

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“But –” she stammered. “But doesn’t she expect you to make love to her?” “Oh yes, she expects that. You bet she does: woman-like.” “And you—?”—the question had a dangerous ring. “Why, I don’t mind, really, you know, if it’s only for a short time. I’m used to her. I’ve always been fond of her, you know—and so if it gives her any pleasure— why, I like her to get what pleasure out of life she can.” (93)

The captain regards his marriage as a union of pure (but highly unequal) friendship and is therefore quite puzzled by Hannele’s insistence on love. In hindsight, Hannele’s notion that Evangeline’s clothes and furniture are her cage (wealth as a prison) begins to appear naive. It is not that Evangeline is imprisoned in a luxurious golden cage by somebody who loves her to excess, but that she is caught in a loveless marriage for which she compensates by furnishing her cage with trinkets and gadgets. Being unloved by the captain was tolerable as long as she was wooed by other men and he did not care for other women. When she discovers that there is a relationship (though not of the sexual shape that she imagines), she overreacts by wanting to ruin the two women’s lives, and probably incurs her husband’s wrath. Yet, by treating her like a doll, a useless plaything, the captain has been responsible for this problem in the first place. The title of the tale is, therefore, ambiguous—it ostensibly refers to the doll that Hannele makes as an image of the captain (the doll representing the captain), but it also relates to Evangeline as the captain’s doll-like wife, the doll he owns. Does the liaison with Hannele work because she treats him like a doll by producing one that looks like him? The captain himself strongly resents having his likeness taken and considers himself to have been disposed of against his will by her love: “All this about love,” he said, “is very confusing and very complicated.” “Very! In your case. Love to me is simple enough,” she said. “Is it? Is it? And was it simple love which made you make that doll of me?” “Why shouldn’t I make a doll of you? Does it do you any harm? And weren’t you a doll, good heavens! You were nothing but a doll. So what hurt does it do you?” “Yes, it does. It does me the greatest possible damage,” he replied. (147)

This way of looking at things implies that the captain is in the position of Evangeline now, a doll in the cage. On the other hand, since Hepburn insists so much on being honoured and obeyed but not adored, Hannele is perhaps the wrong choice of partner. Hannele, as an independent woman, is unlikely to succumb to dollhood on the lines of Evangeline, and thus escapes from the cage of femininity which attaches to marriage. That the cage may perhaps not be marriage (as Hannele and the captain think) but femininity could be argued on the basis of a passage just prior to the blackcap story, in which the cage is equated with a tomb, another yet more dire prison metaphor:

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“[...] She was a gentle soul [...], but she was like a fairy who is condemned to live in houses and sit on furniture and all that, don’t you know. It was never her nature. [...] All her life she performed the tricks of life, clever little monkey she was at it too. Beat me into fits. But her own poor little soul, a sort of fairy soul, those queer Irish creatures, was cooped up inside her all her life, tombed in. There it was, tombed in, while she went through all the tricks of life, that you have to go through if you are born to-day.” (110-11) “[...] As it was, poor thing, she was always arranging herself and fluttering and chattering inside a cage. And she never knew she was in the cage, any more than we know we are inside our own skins.” (111)

Not only does Hepburn compare his wife to a monkey taken from the jungle (Ireland) to a zoo, literalizing the cage metaphor; he moreover sees her as a wild frightened being unable to survive in civilization. His basic metaphor here is animal-like freedom—she was a wild natural caught by society. The vision that we as readers get of Evangeline differs from this portrait (was it perhaps the captain who felt “tombed in” when he was with her?): she is less a monkey than a dangerous fox-like creature and one who tries to defend her “cage” from intruders. Perhaps what is keeping her hemmed in is the decorum of femininity to which she clings, since this does not allow her to express her love openly. Perhaps, then, the cage is really a metaphor for withering love, love destroyed by the captain’s lack of response, or a meditation on how love goes sour when unrequited except in terms of cold, polite friendship. Does Hannele at the end of the story accept the same role, now that the doll she has made is gone; and is this why she needs to destroy the painting made of the doll as well? Does the doll signify cathexis, and does the cathectic investment on Hannele’s part need to be overcome? Lawrence’s tale is extremely subtle, using the image of the bird in the cage to probe the psychology of the captain, his wife and Hannele. By making a doll of the captain, Hannele seems to counteract victimization through him, yet she eventually relinquishes her symbolic hold. Perhaps the captain should be seen as metaphorically imprisoned in his inability to love, a condition he compensates by turning involuntary jailer to the women who love him. Beasts in Cages After discussing Lawrence’s rather complex treatment of the golden cage trope, I would now like to turn to the second recurring image, that of the beast in the cage. This is not in fact a metaphor, but occurs for the most part in the form of a simile (like a tiger / lion / bear etc. in the cage). The animal in the source domain does not, as one might presume, invariably suggest ferocity as the ground of the comparison.

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EAL has a large number of such similes, with varying connotations. “Like a tiger in a cage” in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) suggests that the colonel who is thus described behaves in a distraught, insane manner (“‘The watch! the watch!’ raved the colonel, pacing to and fro like a tiger in a cage. ‘Give me that man’s watch.’”—EAL, VII, 333). The simile focusses on the energetic movement of the colonel, which may be ‘fierce’ in a metaphoric sense but is not literally ferocious (dangerous). Despair and restlessness also mark the description of Mr. Carson in Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). On the night before the trial of his son’s supposed murderer [...] he felt as if there was no peace on earth for him [...]; no peace either bodily, or mental, for he moved up and down his bedroom with the restless incessant tramp of a wild beast in a cage, and if he compelled his aching limbs to cease for an instant, the twitchings which ensued almost amounted to convulsions, and he recommenced his walk as the lesser evil, and the more bearable fatigue. (xxxii; Gaskell 1985: 381)

Restlessness and excitement of this sort are common analogues of the metaphoric animal’s movement. In Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907), Mr Verloc watches Stevie “gesticulating and murmuring in the kitchen. Stevie prowled round the table like an excited animal in a cage” (The Secret Agent, iii; Conrad 1990: 83), while Verloc himself is described as “turning about the bedroom on noiseless pads like a bear in a cage” (viii, 173)6. Whereas Stevie’s disability is responsible for his apparent purposelessness, giving him the disoriented and anxious aspect of a lost creature, Verloc, the secret agent, moves around stealthily but also like a person of great power and energy caught in a room too small for him. In both cases, therefore, the beast in the cage simile describes not the imprisonment as such but the comportment of the man who moves about in ways evocative of an animal behind bars. Verloc, in particular, is being described as stealthy, fierce and socially inept, unable to become more than a provider for his wife and her son, Stevie. He has the feel of a bull in a china shop (the German Elephant im Porzellanladen is the better image, since elephants are not aggressive), a plodding, awkward man, who fails to take the feelings of other people into account. Sometimes the cage simile betokens despondency or neglect, as in Conrad’s elegiac depiction of a run-down ship in the docks as “a free ship [that] would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage” (The Mirror and the Sea, EAL XII; 111). Hopelessness and hyperactivity are also the intended targets of the simile in Caleb Williams (Caleb, “like a frightened bird beat[ing himself] in vain against the inclosure of [his] cage”—III, viii; Godwin 1991: 256). Restlessness and irritation prevail in the fit of jealousy experienced by Clara in Gissing’s The Nether World: “With burning temples, with feverish 6

Again at xi, 216: “He [Verloc] turned around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large animal in a cage.”

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lips, she moved about her little room like an animal in a cage, finding the length of the day intolerable” (EAL, 293). In all of these texts the men and women characterized by the similes are beside themselves with fear, anxiety or despair; they have lost control over their bodies and minds; they act as if they were no longer rational creatures. By contrast, in a passage from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s narrator depicts a tempest of “equinoctial gales” and of “exceptional violence”. Even in London “we were forced to raise our minds for an instant from the routine of life, and to recognize the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like untamed beasts in a cage” (EAL, 245). It is noteworthy that the simile here inverts the enclosure image, putting the howling storms into a cage and thereby mastering them rather than seeing humankind taking refuge from growling beasts at large inside the barred gates of their civilization. More generally, of course, the animal shut up in the cage can be either a fairly harmless or weak creature or a dangerous beast of prey. The reaction to captivity is usually imagined differently in the two groups—small or weak animals are frightened or pine away, large and ferocious ones chafe at their captivity but in the end may also give up hope. In Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands, thoughts are compared to birds in a cage (Lingard watching the woman breathe: “And nearly a minute passed. One of those minutes when the voice is silenced, while the thoughts flutter in the head, like captive birds inside a cage, in rushes desperate, exhausting and vain”—II: 258)7, and in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Caleb is welcomed by the thieves into their community and contrasts their proud bearing with “the imprisoned felons [he] had lately seen [and who] were shut up like wild beasts in a cage, deprived of activity and palsied with indolence” (III, ii; 1991: 218). The strong captive chafes at the bars and suffers more than the frightened little bird: “The captive thrush may brook the cage, / The prison’d eagle dies for rage”—Scott, “Lady of the Lake”; EAL II: 533). By contrast, in Cooper’s The Deerslayer (1841), the fight between Indians and trappers is rendered in the image of “noises” that “resembled those that would be produced by a struggle between tigers in a cage” (EAL II: 815). Here the ferocity of the Indians is invoked in the simile. The ferocity of lions in a cage can even be used as an image for fire, as in Longfellow’s “Tales of a Wayside Inn”: “seasoned wood, / To feed the much-devouring fire, / That like a lion in a cage / Lashed its long tail and roared with rage” (EAL, 269). The above remarks have demonstrated, I hope, that databases can be a useful complement to traditional literary analysis. They help to trace all the 7

Another rather humorous example comes from Felix Holt where Mr Transome, afraid of his wife’s criticisms, “paused in his work and shrank like a timid animal looked at in a cage where flight is impossible” (i; 1988: 15).

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occurrences of a particular word in one text, providing a complete listing of cross-references within that story. As a result, one can produce better interpretations of such texts, since one is less likely to overlook important passages. More significantly, the range and distribution of lexemes in their various connotations (or meanings) becomes accessible, making it possible to analyse (by author, period, genre, etc.) the imagery in a larger group of writings. I have been mostly concerned so far with the associations of the word cage in English literature, and one of the exciting results of the analysis has been the diversity of local meanings given to an encaged bird or animal, as well as the diversity of literary uses to which the metaphor is put. Having acquired a great deal of material on which to base narrative analysis, let me now focus on narrative questions in relation to imagery in fiction. 3. Metaphor in Narratology—Preliminary Arguments So what, from a narratological perspective, is the purpose of metaphors (or imagery) in narrative texts, and how can metaphoricity be integrated within the narratological paradigm? To the extent that imagery is considered a factor of voice this question is easy to answer and, indeed, has been answered already. In this approach metaphors are simply an expressive factor alignable with narratorial discourse (narration) or with a character’s speech or thought. If the matter rested there, there would be no question to answer. However, metaphors are frequently ruling signifiers of a thematic kind in stories, as is the case in Lawrence’s “The Captain’s Doll” or “In the Cage” by Henry James. In the Lawrence example, the cage metaphor significantly defines the institution of marriage for both men and women. It cannot merely be aligned with the narrator’s discourse, since it operates on both the narratorial and figural (the captain, his wife) levels, and must, therefore, be construed as a structural feature attributable to the ‘implied author’, i. e. to that (constructed) source of textual meaning which the reader intuits to belong to the ‘author’ in one of his/her textual incarnations. “In the Cage” shows this even more clearly. The metaphor relates to a literal caging of the post office clerk, but it acquires multiple symbolic overtones which are foregrounded in the title of the story. The position of the clerk in the cage assumes key significance as a matter of focalization—seeing the world from the vantage point of marginalized spinsterhood—and as a comment on the objects of her observation, who are also discovered to be ‘in a cage’ of decorum, societal norms and social restraints. This implicit linking of focalization and subject matter is difficult to situate on the narratorial level exclusively. It is not commented on, and the narratorial voice

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appears blissfully unaware of the implications of the operative metaphor. Both the metaphor and its implications must, therefore, again be attributed to the ‘implied author’ level of the text. Situating metaphoricity on that level immediately supports the thesis that metaphors or imagery should or can—in those texts that employ them so openly—be compared with narrative strategies like focalization, or with the chronological rearrangement that are usually said to operate in the transformation of a story into narrative discourse. However, unlike focalization, metaphors also serve as stylistic elements; it is only global metaphors that acquire a structural function comparable to focalization and become part of the process of narrative transmission and reading. As a consequence, metaphors upset the neat model in which every category has its place on a distinct level of narratological typology (metaphor as either voice or as structural feature). Against this it may be argued that global metaphors lie in the eye of the beholder (reader, critic) rather than in empirical textual data, since their overall significance—unlike that of global focalization8—seems to be a matter of interpretation. The objection can be answered by pointing out that focalization and voice in their turn often rely for their ostensible ‘presence’ on the interpretation of textual markers that in themselves do not always clinch the case for a particular reading (compare Fludernik 2001). However, these interpretative decisions relate to the local level of the text—there is rarely any doubt about global focalization. It is usually agreed between critics that a particular novel is wholly or largely narrated from the perspective of one or several characters, and is thus a case of figural narrative situation or reflector mode narration. Where there are conflicts in critics’ views, this generally concerns local passages or individual sentences and paragraphs, and occurs mostly in texts situated on what Stanzel has called the authorialfigural continuum, or in texts that utilize less clearly defined modes of telling (such as those outlined in Fludernik 2001). Thus, on the one hand, metaphor at the local level shares with focalization the ambiguity common to all expressive markers; where it adds a new level of ambiguity (or perhaps, rather, ambivalence) is at the overall global level of interpretation, where constructions of ‘authorial’ meaning are anchored (and often defined) as actions or decisions performed by the ‘implied author’, ‘himself’ a figure of critical extrapolation from textual clues. A third and entirely different facet of metaphor should also be noted at this point. As the New Zealand critic Mike Hanne (1999) has observed, narrative and metaphor share important features of sense-making. It is in terms of metaphor and/or narrative that our thinking operates, that we explain the world to ourselves. To that extent, the presence of metaphor in narrative 8

I use this term to refer to the categorization of an entire text as, for instance, reflector mode narrative or authorial narrative.

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texts arguably exploits their explanatory or semantic potential to the full by enriching it with an additional semiotic framework. However, on a more local level linked with narrative discourse, metaphor often combines with narrative to generate mini-stories of “disnarrated” material (Prince 1982; 1988). By means of an extended simile these introduce alternative, purely virtual fictional worlds that parallel, counterpoint or complement the main narrative. An example of the phenomenon is the following: And in the grove, at tyme and place yset, This Arcite and this Palamon ben met. Tho chaungen gan the colour in hir face, Right as the hunters in the regne of Trace, That stondeth at the gappe with a spere, Whan hunted is the leon or the bere, And hereth hym come russhyng in the greves, And breketh bothe bowes and the leves, And thynketh, ‘Heere cometh my mortal enemy! Withoute faille, he moot be deed, or I: For outher I moot sleen hym at the gappe, Or he moot sleen me, if that me myshappe’, So ferden they in chaungyng of hir hewe, As fer as everich of hem oother knewe. (“The Knight’s Tale”, Chaucer 1988, A 1635-48; my emphasis)

The simile which Chaucer here employs in a virtual scenario has all the makings of a story. Palamon and Arcite face one another in expectation of death at each other’s hand and each of them sees his cousin as a mortal enemy, like a threatening animal that is about to devour or maul him. Duelling for love is here compared to the chivalrous activity of hunting; to win in love, as in battle, one must conquer one’s foe. However, another implication might be that the insanity of passion turns men into wild beasts, leading to their excessive hatred and desire to annihilate one another. The story that the simile outlines, however, is one of noble knightly behaviour; the hunter courageously facing the boar or bear coming at him and making ready to meet the danger squarely. In this story of a hunting expedition, knightly exploits and undaunted courage the insanity of love is rendered harmless. The situation anticipates the later tournament in which Palamon and Arcite will battle to win Emelye. Unlike the competitive scenario of their love for Emelye, however, the virtual narrative that each of the two cousins tells himself concentrates on manly prowess and unblenching courage, to the exclusion of any competitive framework. It therefore also implies that Emelye is merely the catalyst for a contention between the two men, whose homosocial bonding has suffered a change from love to hatred, from shared suffering to antagonistic competition. So deadly is their enmity in love that only the annihilation of the other will solve the problem—it will be either the survival of the boar or of the hunter. A simile like this teases the reader by invoking another

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story, one that projects a hunting expedition in which Palamon incautiously gets into conflict with a powerful lion or bear and has to preserve his life. In actual fact, it is Theseus who has gone hunting, and instead of a bear he encounters two animals baiting one another, Palamon and Arcite. He has the power of life and death over the knights, a power that they cannot fight. Unlike the bear scenario, however, the confrontation of Theseus with the two duellists opposes law and mercy, a human rather than animalistic confrontation (death or conquest). Hunting and war are superseded by civilization—justice and mercy. Not only do such mini-narratives invoke contrastive scenarios; they additionally demonstrate that, by virtue of the blend that joins source and target domains, metaphor inherently allows for narrative extrapolation. Thus, in a metaphor such as My surgeon is a butcher (Kövecses 2002; Grady et al. 1999) or a simile such as My love is like a red, red rose (Burns), the blend initially aligns features of the target domain with appropriate aspects of the source domain and marginalizes those features that are irrelevant. The surgeon is imaged as a butcher with a cleaver threatening to turn the patient into a corpse, i. e. the piece of meat that the butcher might handle. But the butcher will not have taken money from the cow, nor will he operate on a live animal. Similarly, the lady in the Burns phrase is perceived by the lover as sweet in aspect, perfume or character. Logically she will blossom into even greater beauty as a consequence of the love affair, but she is certainly not seen as requiring regular watering, or as pricking the lover with her thorns. Besides creating such equivalences, however, metaphors make it possible to imagine alternative or subordinate stories that evolve in pursuit of the alignments suggested by the transfer from source to target domain. Thus the surgeon butcher subliminally raises all sorts of scenarios of an incompetent, cold-hearted or violent doctor that tease the interpreter’s mind with narrative elaborations. It should be noted, nevertheless, that in its actual context the metaphor usually comes in an already elaborated form, and therefore cuts off further, less pertinent, narrative excursions: in a narrative context the metaphor is already constrained in its semiotic impact. Narratologically speaking, this third feature of metaphor—its narrativizability—might suggest that that one could place such virtual storylines on an embedded story level, even though they are generated by the discourse of the narrator. A preliminary and cautious conclusion to these considerations would suggest that narrative metaphors occur on all levels of narrative—the deepstructural story level, the surface-structural discourse level, the level of the narration (in Genette’s model); and the ‘meaning of the text as a whole’ level (N3 in Nünning 1989). It is consequently difficult to integrate metaphor within the standard model. Indeed one can do so only by distinguishing different types of metaphor and treating them in different manners—a practice

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that is theoretically unattractive. Nevertheless, rather than continuing to neglect metaphor within narratology (the customary procedure), this article has tried to show at least where the problem lies, even though we may have to wait for a neat, systematic solution. Works Cited Biebuyck, Benjamin. 1994. “Nietzsche und die Metapher. Zwanzig Jahre später”. In: Recherches Germaniques 24, p. 55-80. Biebuyck, Benjamin. 1998. Die poietische Metapher. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Figürlichkeit. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Biebuyck, Benjamin. 2005. “‘Ein inniges Ineinander von Bildern’. Versuch einer Valenzumschreibung von Verbalmetaphorik und indirektem Vergleich im ersten Buch von Robert Musils Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”. In: Gunter Martens, Clemens Ruther and Jaak de Vos (eds.). Musil anders. Neue Erkundungen eines Autors zwischen den Diskursen. Bern: Peter Lang, p. 171-210. Brontë, Charlotte. 1973 [1847]. Jane Eyre. Ed. Margaret Smith. London: Oxford University Press. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1988. The Riverside Chaucer. Based on the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. F. N. Robinson. Gen. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coenen, Hans-Georg. 2002. Analogie und Metapher. Grundlegung einer Theorie der bildlichen Rede. Berlin: de Gruyter. Conrad, Joseph. 1964 [1896]. An Outcast of the Islands. New York: New American Library. Conrad, Joseph. 1990 [1907]. The Secret Agent. A Simple Tale. Ed. Martin Seymour-Smith. London: Penguin. Dickens, Charles. 1978 [1856-7]. Little Dorrit. Ed. John Holloway. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dickens, Charles. 2000a. The Old Curiosity Shop [1841]. Intr. Norman Page. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin. Dickens, Charles. 2000b [1859]. A Tale of Two Cities. Ed. Richard Maxwell. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin. Eliot, George. 1985 [1871-1872]. Middlemarch. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. English and American Literature. 2002. Database. Berlin: Directmedia. Fludernik, Monika. 2001. “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization and New Writing”. In: New Literary History 32, p. 619-638. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “The Prison as World—The World as Prison. Theoretical and Historical Aspects of two Recurrent Topoi”. In: Symbolism 3, p. 147-189. Fludernik, Monika. 2007. “Carceral Fantasies. A Database Analysis of Prison Metaphors”. In: Anglistik 18:1, p. 27-40. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1985 [1848]. Mary Barton. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. and Gerard J. Steen (eds.). 1999. Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Selected Papers from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Godwin, William. 1991 [1794]. Caleb Williams. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Grady, Joseph, Todd Oakley and Seana Coulson. 1999. “Blending and Metaphor”. In: Gibbs/Steen 1999, p. 101-124. Hanne, Michael. 1999. “Getting to Know the Neighbours. Where Plot Meets Knot”. In: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 26:1, p. 35-49. Jakobson, Roman. 1990 [1956]. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”. In: On Language. Eds. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, p. 115-133. James, Henry. 1963. Selected Criticism. Ed. Morris Shapira. London: Heinemann. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jonson, Ben. 1967 [1612]. The Alchemist. Ed. F. H. Mores. London: Methuen. Jonson, Ben. 1975. “A Farewell for a Gentlewoman, Virtuous and Noble”. In: Poems. Ed. Ian Donaldson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 95-96. Keats, John. 1996. Selected Poetry. Ed. Elizabeth Cook. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Zoltán (2000). Metaphor and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Zoltán and Günter Radden. 1998. “Metonymy. Developing a Cognitive Linguistic View”. In: Cognitive Linguistics 9:1, p. 37-77. Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lawrence, D. H . 1994. “The Captain’s Doll” [1921, 1923]. In: The Fox. The Captain’s Doll. The Ladybird. Ed. Dieter Mehl. London: Penguin. Lodge, David. 1977. The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melville, Herman. 1985. Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Meredith, George. 1979 [1879]. The Egoist. Ed. George Woodcock. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nünning, Ansgar. 1989. Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der erzählerischen Vermittlung. Die Funktionen der Erzählinstanz in den Romanen George Eliots. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Prince, Gerald. 1982. “Narrative Analysis and Narratology”. New Literary History 13:2, p. 179188. Prince, Gerald. 1988. “The Disnarrated”. Style 22, p. 1-8. Scott, Sir Walter. 1992 [1823]. Quentin Durward. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1978 [1607/08]. King Lear. Arden Third Series. Ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Methuen. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1971. “Marenghi”. In: Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 567. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2003. The Major Works Including Poetry, Prose, and Drama. Ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spenser, Edmund. 1987 [1590]. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin.

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Spenser, Edmund. 1989. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Eds. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thackeray, W. M. 1994 [1848-50]. Pendennis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Mark. 1987. Death is the Mother of Beauty. Mind, Metaphor, and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Mark. 1991. Reading Minds. The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wordsworth, William. 1936. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

WOLFGANG HALLET (Gießen)

The Multimodal Novel. The Integration of Modes and Media in Novelistic Narration

1 The Rise of the Multimodal Novel Multimodality is not a concept that has been used in the field of narratology, nor is it an established generic term in literary criticism. Therefore, at the outset of this article, some clarification is advisable of the phenomenon to which the generic term in the title responds. It denotes a type of novel that seems to have emerged visibly over the last twenty years and that is substantially different from the traditional novel which relies totally on the written word in printed form. While still relying to a considerable extent on the traditional language of the novel, multimodal novels incorporate a whole range of non-verbal symbolic representations and non-narrative semiotic modes. Consequently, novelistic narration must now be considered to be an integration of the narrative novelistic mode along with other written modes, as well as various non-verbal modes such as (the reproduction of) visual images like photographs or paintings, graphics, diagrams and sketches or (the reproduction of) handwritten letters and notes (see Fig. 1). In the theory of multimodality, a mode is a semiotic resource “used in recognisably stable ways as a means of articulating discourse” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 25) and of producing cultural meaning, so that colour, a handwritten letter or a black-and-white photograph as well as a newspaper article or a ground plan are all regarded as semiotic modes (see Hallet 2008a; 2008b). In contrast, media are defined as merely physical and material resources “used in the production of semiotic products and events, including both the tools and the materials used (e. g. the musical instrument and the air; the chisel and the block of wood).” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 22) Therefore, modes are abstract semiotic concepts (like, e. g., genres) that “can be realised in more than one production medium.” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 22) The use of non-verbal and non-novelistic elements in a novel cannot be adequately expressed in terms of authorial framing or complementary edito-

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rial elements, parerga or paratexts, such as full colour photographs or illustrations which an author has added or agreed to be included in the edition of a novel or on the cover. On the other hand, any occasional use of visual images and other forms of non-verbal representation or non-novelistic modes could, in itself, not be regarded as a new phenomenon, nor would it justify a new generic term, nor would it affect narratological analysis, let alone narratological and disciplinary concepts. Rather, it is the systematic and recurrent integration of non-verbal and non-narrative elements in novelistic narration that makes the difference. This is the reason why this article concerns itself with a corpus of novels that integrate photographs, all sorts of graphic representations, reproductions of non-narrative texts and genres, texts in different fonts and typographical styles, reproductions of printed texts from other sources and documents, non-verbal types of symbolization and different discursive modes, like transcripts of non-narrative conversation, recorded voices, or telephone-dialogues into the narrative discourse (see Fig. 2). Examples may range from an insertion of (the reproduction of) personal letters or newspaper articles to a complete collage of images, reproductions of documents and other textual elements and styles (e. g. footnotes) that make it difficult to identify a text as novel in the traditional sense at all. After all, traditional novels would not include non-narrative modes like footnotes, which are clear textual markers of an academic mode, or a series of family photographs, which one would expect in a family photo album or in some other documentary book.

8.1. A double-page from Marlene Streeruwitz’s novel Lisas Liebe. Romansammelband (2005: 28-29)

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One of the common features that needs to be emphasized is that in multimodal novels these identifiable textual elements are not in most cases themselves narratives—unlike in the postmodern novel, in which a number of small narratives or multiperspectival narrations by different narrators may constitute the whole of the novel. Apart from visual elements, the modes in a multimodal novel might be lists of some sort, maps in various forms, road signs, envelopes, diagrams and statistics, and even discipline-specific symbolic languages like mathematical formulae or algorithms. Also, the reader of a multimodal novel may encounter whole passages—identifiable independent texts—which are delivered in a different language (content and meaning communicated in the mode of a ‘foreign language’), so that plurilingualism may also be one of the features of the multimodal novel.

8.2. A double-page from Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. (2003: 110-111)

Since it might be argued that elements like these have occurred in one or the other novel before, it must be added that it is also quantity, the sheer number, the recurrent combination and the systematic use of all these elements and different languages, codes, and semiotic modes that constitute a novel’s multimodality. Moreover, although these modes will be identified as originally non-novelistic, they do not in multimodal novels normally have a disruptive or disturbing effect on the reading process. Rather, readers will perceive them as an integral part of the novel and will thus incorporate them in their cognitive construction of the narrated world and narrative meaning.

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Even if this may be a demanding task, readers will realize that they are supposed to perform it. It follows, then, that this article is not about extratextual illustrations, graphic novels, photo-stories, photo-books or the like, but about the integration of non-verbal and non-narrative texts, representations and modes in the otherwise conventional (verbal) narration of a novel. Narratologically speaking, all of these elements are part of the narrative textual world at different diegetic levels: they are directly articulated with the characters that inhabit them, their actions and their cultural environments. A look at a selection of what might be regarded as prototypical of the multimodal novel, will further illustrate the type of novel that is examined here.1 In part 2 I will therefore take a phenomenological approach, using examples from various novels in an attempt to identify and delimit the phenomenon and to provide evidence that ‘the multimodal novel’ makes sense as a generic label. Part 3 will then introduce the concept of multimodality, which originated in visual studies, semiotics, discourse theory and other, quite different areas of cultural studies. In part 4 some novels will be analyzed more systematically, and in greater detail, in an attempt to identify different functions of non-verbal representations and non-narrative elements and their manner of integration into narrative discourse. In part 5 I will try to delineate some of the implications and repercussions of the concept of multimodal narration on narratology, arguing that narratological theories that solely rely on verbal narration are too limited, and that the phenomena represented by the multimodal novel require a transmodal concept of novelistic narration. Such a theory would have to explain how different modes and media are integrated in the narrative discourse of a single novel or other narrative text. It will also explain how narrative meaning, and the reader’s construction of the narrative world, can be regarded as a synthesis of different forms of verbal narration with non-verbal elements and non-narrative texts. 2 Modes, Media and Symbolic Representations in the Multimodal Novel The phenomenological section of this article will attempt to give an exemplary overview of the large variety of symbolizations and modes that one encounters in the novels in question, and to systematize them by grouping them along the categories of medium and mode. As far as medium is concerned, it needs to be pointed out that, in the strict sense, a novel cannot and normally does not integrate other media into the medium of the paperbound book. Rather, whenever other media are introduced into the novel, these are generally representations or printed reproductions of photographs, handwrit1

I am indebted to Alexander MacLeod and Birgit Neumann, who referred me to a number of prototypical multimodal novels which I had not come across when I first drafted this paper.

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ten notes, maps and the like. Once more, however, the phenomena in question are so multifarious that sometimes it is debatable whether a novel incorporates a different medium or merely the representation of such a medium, so that borderline cases may occur. Marisha Pessl’s novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics may be an appropriate example here: Throughout the novel the homodiegetic narrator provides her own hand-drawn illustrations in order to replace original photographs which she claims no longer to possess (Pessl 2006: 19). Thus, these visual elements are not actually illustrations in the traditional sense, but part of the narrative world, produced by the narrator and directly woven into the narrative discourse by the device of drawing upon them continuously in ekphrastic passages. For instance, “Visual aid 1.0” depicts the narrator's mother “when she was twenty-one and dressed for a Victorian costume party” (Pessl 2006: 19), and simultaneously characterizes her father by providing an impression of “Dad’s favourite photograph of Natasha […] in black and white, taken before she ever met him […]” (Pessl 2006: 19). Since these visual elements are ‘aids’ provided by the narrator for the fictive reader, and are fully integrated into the narrative discourse, they possess the same status as the verbal narrative text, and vice versa. They are representations of a medium (hand-drawing on paper) in the same sense as the printed page is a representation of the original text, handwritten or typed by the narrator. Generally speaking, on the one hand the medium of the printed book seems to set limits to the modes and media that can be integrated in novelistic narration. For instance, three-dimensional objects beyond a certain size cannot, for simple physical reasons, be included in a paperbound book. On the other hand one could imagine all sorts of tangible objects, scents and materials as inserts in the book and as supplements to the verbal narrative discourse. The following attempt to identify and group modes and media that occur most frequently and most saliently in the novels that have been examined is more or less tentative, since there are in principle no limits to authorial creativity: Kenneth Harvey’s novel Skin-Hound (There Are No Words) (2000) was supplemented by an envelope with a flake of the author’s skin. Verbal Narrative Discourse Although this might seem self-evident, it is worth noting that in order to be identified as ‘a novel’, major parts of the multimodal novel will consist of verbal narrative discourse. Leafing through any of the books in question, potential readers will immediately guess that they are addressed as readers and expected to read a book, as opposed to looking at pictures in a picture book or other decoding procedures, even if they might sometimes be irri-

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tated by the relative proportions of verbal text and, for example, photographs on a double page. Photographs Although by no means exclusive, the vast majority of non-verbal representations in multimodal novels are photographs of various sorts, or, to be more precise (as is required in this context), reproductions of photographic paper prints. These may range from individual or family portraits to photographic documentation of buildings, landscapes or situations, as well as interiors, objects and so forth. In order to demonstrate different ways in which these visual images may be incorporated into a narrative, I will briefly analyze a photograph in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz—the photograph which is also used on the book cover. It shows the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz as Jacquot, a boy in a snow-white costume dressed as cavalier for a masked ball to which he accompanied his mother, an actress, in Prague in the 1930s.

8.3. Jacques Austerlitz as Jacquot in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2002). From the book covers of the German and the English paperback editions.

The appearance of this photograph in the narrative discourse fulfils the requirements that are connected with novelistic multimodality, since it is fully integrated in the narrative on several diegetic levels: Austerlitz’s quest for his identity and his family’s history eventually takes him to Prague, where he finds his roots and the house in which he grew up and lived in an apartment with his mother, Agáta. When he returns there, an old friend of his mother's, Vera, presents the photograph to him. As an intradiegetic narrator, she tells the story of Jacquot’s childhood, of Agáta’s life in Prague as an actress, of her deportation by the Nazis, and of the Kindertransport that separated Auster-

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litz from his parents and deprived him of his identity and memory. Vera hands the photograph over to Austerlitz whose memory it triggers. It represents the rather glamorous life of a Jewish family in Prague, and strongly contrasts with the narrative present in which Austerlitz delivers his story in a second degree homodiegetic narration. He recollects his visit to Prague and his encounter with Vera in long conversations with the homodiegetic anonymous narrator of his life story who now possesses the photograph, since Austerlitz has passed all his photographs, a large collection, over to the narrator. Through Austerlitz’s comments, this photographic portrait of Jacquot as a page becomes a central symbol in the novel and thus iconicizes Austerlitz’s whole existence, as well as the quest novel as a whole: As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all, and I never had this impression more strongly than on that evening in the Šporkova when the eyes of the Rose Queen's page looked through me. (Sebald 2002: 261)

Thus, the narrative function of this photograph can be considered prototypical of the appearance of other medial and modal representations in the multimodal novel. Such artefacts form an integral part of the narrative discourse and are directly connected with the perceptions, experiences, practices and lives of the literary characters or narrator(s) that inhabit the story. These photographs are existents in the storyworld and, as can be seen, they even have a history of their own within the narrative world. Graphics It is an interesting observation that in multimodal novels a lot of description in which the storyworld normally unfolds, and on which the reader has to be able to rely in order to model the textual world mentally, is at times replaced by graphic representations provided by the narrator. The phrase that runs through Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) and that indicates this shift from verbal to nonverbal, visual representation is: “It looked like this”. For instance, instead of describing a cow in detail, the narrator resorts to a drawing he includes in the novel: “I could do a drawing of them at home and say that a particular cow had patterns on it like this:” (Haddon 2003: 176). In this, as in all other cases, graphic elements are not merely introduced in the place of verbal description; they represent the protagonist’s and narrator’s individual, specific way of looking at and conceiving of the world. Plans, maps and sketches of patterns or rooms represent the narrator’s mental pattern (or an abstract conception) of some real object or entity. They are neither supposed to represent the object itself, i. e. ‘reality’, nor do they simply substitute for verbal descriptions. Rather, such artefacts focus on certain

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features of real objects, underlying patterns (the cow), arrangements like a classroom in Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996: 33) or deep structures of systems that are not directly accessible to human perceptions but constitute visual or graphic representations of the narrator’s mental models or cognitive conceptualizations. Simultaneously, schematic drawings like ground plans, maps or the paper plane plan in Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) are also representations of cultural design practices and genres that make it possible to anticipate, to conceive and to understand how things are made, produced and built. In that sense, they are visualizations of the human mind’s capacity to construct the world according to human needs and wishes. Documents The characters and narrators in a narrative are concerned with exploring and structuring the world around them, in an attempt to understand it, to find orientation, to remember or to make themselves at home in this world. Therefore, quite often and almost as a standard, literary characters in multimodal novels are occupied (if not obsessed) with documentation, mostly through photographs or film (e. g. in Danielewski’s House of Leaves); and they are also collectors of all sorts of documents like newspaper articles and clippings, advertisements, death notices, letters written by themselves or others, handwritten poems and notices, entrance tickets, agenda, diary entries and so forth. As in the case of an advertisement or of the death notice in Streeruwitz’s novel Lisas Liebe that suggests a suicidal background, it is not always clear, or explained in the narration, how the document and the story are related. Other documents or facsimiles may be explicitly and extensively referred to in the narrative text. A complete history of the document may be provided, and a novel may fully unfold and represent the story of the relation between the document and the narrator or one of its characters. Sometimes—particularly in Sebald’s case, but also in the novels by Foer, Danielewski and Haddon—these are epistemological, encyclopaedic and quite systematic approaches, resembling the work of engineers, historians, astronomers or architects. In other cases, as in Streeruwitz’s and partly in Haddon’s novel, collections of documents are conceptualizations that structure everyday perceptions and knowledge, like the photographs of one street sign after another through which Lisa in Streeruwitz’s ‘collection of love novels’ explores and makes her way through New York, contrasting this experience with her rural background in the German Alps. In any case, all such documents are indicative of practices of collecting and archiving, with actants and narrators as collectors and historians. The multimodal novel thus represents the process of building up a personal and cultural archive of some sort that is then made accessible in the course of the narration and is part of

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the construct of memory within the story or novel concerned. In that sense, the multimodal novel also represents and makes accessible the multimodality of cultural archives, knowledge and memory. Works of Art and Physical Objects Sometimes, a literary character’s or a narrator’s activities of collecting, observing and analyzing also comprise works of art, like a Turner water-colour in Austerlitz that comes to Austerlitz’s mind when he observes a funeral, a drawing in a children’s bible, collages in House of Leaves or a multifunctional “teas-maid” in Sebald’s The Emigrants which, “with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence”, keeps the narrator “holding on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation in which I might well have become completely submerged.” (Sebald 1996: 154f.) Once more, the verbal narrative text reveals that physical objects and visual art objects, which can of course only be incorporated in a narrative via photographs or reproduction, are existents that contribute to the construction of the storyworld and are related to the story’s actants in a particular way, in terms of being representative of their way of life or belonging to their identity, history, or memory.

8.4. The ‘Monty Hall-problem’ in Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident

of the Dog in the Night-time (2003: 80f.)

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Formal Languages It is an interesting detail that in several of these novels formal languages and scientific references or quotes are used. Thus, a completely different mode of describing and conceiving the world becomes a conspicuous part of an otherwise narrative text (Fig. 4). The argumentative mode, which can easily be recognized as “the scientific way of thinking” (Ryan 2004b: 3) and which for Bruner (1986) and others is opposed to (and forms a dichotomy with) the narrative mode, is fully integrated into a narrative. Sebald’s references to philosophers, engineers or scientists, although not represented in a formal scientific language but paraphrased in encyclopaedic or everyday language, can also be regarded as a scientific mode, a scientific way of thinking and world-making. This integration of a mode that used to be regarded as opposed to narration raises questions of how scientific ways of conceptualizing and representing the world are narrativized in a particular novel and how they contribute to the whole of a narrative. Typography Typography is one of the most striking features of multimodal novels. In all of them, typography serves to identify independent textual units outside the main narrative text, which are often delivered by other narrators or authors. These may be electronic mails as in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), or handwritten letters, or even whole pieces of fiction like the typescript of (almost) a whole novel in Stephen King’s Misery (1988). In this novel, a writer is captured by his ‘No 1 fan’, kept hostage and forced to continue a novel series that he has already ended by eliminating the protagonist. The deteriorating material and personal conditions of novel-writing (a novel within the novel) are visualized not only by using a typical typewriter font, but also by expressing the increasing dysfunction of the typewriter in an ever increasing number of missing letters, so that there are complete novel chapters (novel within the novel) with no ‘e’s and ‘n’s in them. Typographically distinct texts like these are produced by identifiable (normally fictional) authors, who in most cases feature as literary characters in the story. Typographical styles range from handwritten poems (Lisa’s “Mountain Poem”) and the facsimile of deleted typed text to the mimetic representation of movement in the House of Leaves, or—in Extremely Close & Incredibly Loud—to a gradual change of font-types and font-sizes (or simply the use of different font-types), to mimic academic writing, or to the representation of complete hypertextual arrangements (Danielewski 2000; Haddon 2003). Typography visualizes textual ‘difference’ and identifiable textual elements, voices, ways, styles and modes of writing,

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but it also represents the material side and the technologies of writing, from the fountain pen, the typewriter and book print to the digits of electronic and multimedial hypertext. All these different symbolizations, semiotic modes, generic forms and medial representations cannot possibly be regarded as merely additional elements to an otherwise verbal narrative text. A stereotypical formula like “It looked like this” in Haddon’s novel indicates that graphic elements, nonverbal representations of the narrator’s perceptions, and non-narrative modes must be read as integral parts of the narrative discourse. The traditional verbal narrative then serves to contextualize these other modes and media and to assign them their meanings, places and functions within the narrative world. 3 Multimodal Narration and Transmodal Signification The concept of multimodality that has been introduced and used to describe the various semiotic modes in the novels in question derives from different disciplines and fields of study, mainly discourse theory, semiotics, visual culture studies and art design. It is an integrative approach that seeks to respond to the growing importance of visual images in cultural processes of signification, as well as to the rise of multimedial electronic environments that challenge the age-old dominance of verbal communication. In multimedial environments, as in all other signifying processes that integrate verbal and non-verbal symbolization, ‘meaning’ can no longer be explained as resulting solely from natural human language. The contribution of pictorial elements and of other codes and languages needs to be considered, too. Therefore, any theory of cultural semiosis must explain and describe how meaning is made across (and simultaneously through) a variety of different semiotic symbol systems, media and generic modes, and how a combination of modes and media can result in integrated meaning. Such an approach strongly contrasts with the monomodal concepts of the past, in which “language was (seen as) the central and only full means for representation and communication” (Kress/Van Leeuwen 2001: 45). Of course there were disciplines that occupied themselves with other modes of representation, like music, photography, or painting. But “in each instance representation was treated as monomodal: discrete, bound, autonomous, with its own practices, traditions, professions, habits” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 45). In contrast to such monomodal concepts of semiosis (e. g. the concept of the ‘novel’ as ‘a verbal narrative text in printed and paper-bound form’), a multimodal theory of signification defines modes as “semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realisation of discourses and types of

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(inter)action” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 21) while maintaining, at the same time, that these are always tied to a specific medium of realization. Such semiotic resources might be basic modes like colour or musical tone, but also more complex resources like textual or medial genres, or cultural artefacts like furniture, or even whole rooms; or they might be social practices that cultural agents can draw upon in social interaction and communication or, indeed, in all processes in which meaning-making is involved (see Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 24ff.). ‘Narrative’, too, is a mode because it allows discourses to be formulated in particular ways (ways which ‘personify’ and ‘dramatize’ discourses, among other things), because it constitutes a particular kind of interaction, and because it can be realised in a range of different media. (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 21f.).

In all of these cases, multimodality is a communicative practice that incorporates various modes and media in discursive acts of meaning-making or in the cultural negotiation of meaning, so that almost no act of communication (let alone discursive formation in the Foucauldian sense) is, or ever has been, monomodal. This applies all the more in the age of globalized televison networks, worldwide electronic communication, electronic multimedial communication and digital photography and videography: Any discourse may be realised in different ways. The ‘ethnic conflict’ discourse of war, for instance, may be realised as (part of) a dinner-table conversation, a television documentary, a newspaper feature, an airport thriller, and so on. In other words, discourse is relatively independent of genre, of mode, and (somewhat less) of design. Yet discourses can only be realised in semiotic modes which have developed the means for realising them. (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 5)

In that sense, multimodality in a novel represents the general insight that all cultural processes of signification and meaning-making comprise different modes and media (see Rose 2001: 136). Nowadays, it is the multimedial electronic hypertext that is able to best and most fully integrate different modes and media in a single act of semiosis. This is why the hypertext can be regarded as a prototype of multimodality and of transmodal meaning both in culture and literature. It does not come as a surprise, then, that some pages in multimodal novels resemble hypertexts rather than traditional verbal novels. In this way, the multimodal novel turns out to mirror and to contribute to a wider shift in cultural signifying practices. It does so not only by incorporating multimodal semiosis in narrative discourse, but also by constructing agents that employ these practices themselves. Narrative meaning can, therefore, no longer be regarded as a result of language-in-writing but of the combination and integration of different modes and media that contribute to and participate in the process of narration as a whole. The textual world that is created, and the narrative world that the reader constructs, are fed from a

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variety of semiotic resources which, on the reader’s side, are perceived through different senses. It seems highly plausible that such transmodal reader-cognition should lead to meaningful narrative constructions, since this is the way in which individuals make meaning in everyday-life discourses, too. The assumption that readers are able to incorporate different modes and media in the cognitive construction of a single narrative that is not delivered as linear verbal discourse may even be a strong argument in favour of Ryan’s cognitive definition, in which narrative is a mental image built by the interpreter as a response to the text. But it does not take a representation proposed as narrative to trigger the cognitive template constitutive of narrativity; we may form narrative scripts as a response to life itself (Ryan 2005: 6)

– or, as one might add here, to multimodal or hypertextual arrangements (see Schneider 2005). The multimodal novel makes it possible not only to connect various intratextual with extratextual semiotic discursive practices of writing, visualizing and conceiving the world. Multimodal novels are manifestations of the fact that “in the era of multimodality semiotic modes other than language are treated as fully capable of serving for representation and for communication.” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 46). 4 Functions of Multimodality in the Novel Apart from macro-cultural aspects of the mimetic representation of cultural practices, a narratological approach is most interested in the narrative functions of non-narrative and non-verbal elements in and through the multimodal novel. These must, of course, be regarded as individual and specific, differing from novel to novel, for statements about the function of textual elements in novels require very specific, detailed analysis. The following remarks about the narrative function and potential of different modes and medial representations are, therefore, preliminary and should not be taken to anticipate the substantial, detailed and individual analysis of any of the novels mentioned. 4.1 Plot Construction and Novelistic Narration through Visual Images As has been shown in the preceding parts of this article, pictures, photographs and all sorts of visual images are, in multimodal novels, an integral part of the story, indissolubly interwoven into the narrative discourse and storyworld. They may even, like the family portrait in Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (Auster 1982: 4), or in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (2000), provide the narrative core of the whole story, which refers to and

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relates the history of the photograph. Auster for instance reconstructs the history of the photograph, how it was torn apart to eradicate a person from the photo, how lies were told to the family for generations about the person that is absent from the photo, how the narrator got hold of the photograph and how, through his own investigations, he was eventually able to solve the mystery behind it (see Fig. 5).

8.5. The family portrait in Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982: 4-5)

In Sebald’s Austerlitz and in Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close the protagonist’s habit of photographic documentation is a central element of the story; and Danielewski’s House of Leaves can be read as the verbal reconstruction of a cinematic document, the story of decoding and deciphering Navidson’s film about the mysterious ‘house’ that changes its shape and interior whenever somebody approaches and enters it. Thus, in all of these examples, the plot of the novel revolves around visual images which, in contrast to monomodal narratives, are made directly accessible to the reader in the act of reading. Novelistic narration leads here to a synchronization of reading and looking. Moreover, meta-medial and meta-modal reflexive passages on the possibility of manipulation and visual deception, as well as the (un)reliability of visual images, are almost inevitable in these exemplars of the multimodal novel. Since it is generally agreed that stories can also be rendered in visual form (see Wolf 2002; Ryan 2004b; 2004c; 2005), it follows that visual images, as well as being central to a novelistic plot, can also play a pivotal role in plot construction itself. Whereas in all of Sebald’s narratives photographs, although only loosely connected with each other, may be regarded as a thread

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around which the verbal story is told, they form a plot of their own in Streeruwitz’s love story Lisas Liebe. Romansammelband (Lisa’s Love. A Serial Novel). Lisa hands over a love-letter to Dr. Adrian, a man whom she sees every morning on her way to school as a school-teacher, but whom she does not know. From that moment on, day after day she keeps waiting in vain for the postman to bring Dr. Adrian’s answer. This non-event of the postman and letter that never arrive is the narrative present of the novel; but the simple sub-plot of waiting for a letter for weeks and months is never verbalized in terms of narrative discourse; instead, it is represented in the photographs taken by the narrator, showing the mountainous landscape, the surrounding meadows and the neighbour’s house (see Fig. 6). There are headings and captions to the photographs by Lisa as a homodiegetic narrator, noting down pedantically the date of the photograph, and there are one-sentence statements about the postman, like “July 26. The postman riding past my house on his bike”, or “The postman rides across the meadow earlier than usual”. These photographs may even represent explicit non-events, stating that “there is no mail on Saturday” (p. 93) or simply “July 31. Sunday” (p. 94). At the plot-level, these photographs constitute a two-month-long daily chronicle of endless waiting (from July 4 to August 31): a sub-plot which is never addressed in the verbal text. Instead, the latter is a heterodiegetic narrration that tells the event-based stories of the two preceding months, with various more or less purposeful activities and encounters, mostly with married or older men. With regard to the initial love-letter, these activities can be seen as surrogate activities and relationships in which there is no future for Lisa.

8.6. A typical double-page from Streeruwitz’s Lisas Liebe (2005: 26-27)

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Two things are worth noting: First, even in Streeruwitz’s case visual images are always contextualized through verbal text which establishes their diegetic function, i. e. their relation to the narrator or literary characters and the narrration: the verbal part of the novel, in other words, defines their place in the textual world and embeds them in the narrative chronology. Secondly, there is no photograph without a photographer: it is obvious that photographing the postman is one of the narrator’s daily routines. This impressive series of some sixty repetitive, partly almost identical photographs, along with some newspaper clippings, therefore represents long stretches of (in-)activity and of a solitary life in isolation. It contrasts strongly with the heterodiegetic narration of Lisa’s active professional, cultural and sexual life rendered in the verbal narrative, that eventually results in the standstill of a lonely female life in the mountains represented in the postman-photographs. Photographic, filmic or (as in Haddon’s novel) graphic documentation in all of these narratives is thus indicative of the protagonist’s occupation, activities and way of life, which thus become themselves part of the plot. The act of taking, making or collecting visual images, then, can itself be plot-driving and, regardless of the content of these pictures, contribute to the story of its producer’s life. 4.2 Construction of Literary Characters As has been shown, it is one of the major concerns of the narrative discourse to trace and tell the story and history of pictures and their making. Thus, all of the visual artefacts cited above are directly connected with the life of literary characters and/or narrators. They testify to these characters as culturally productive agents who look at the world in certain ways and communicate their views and feelings via visual images. Doing so, they contribute to their identity, represent or symbolize important events or experiences in their lives, and trigger or represent their memories. It is one of the peculiar effects of the multimodal novel that the reader can study and look at artefacts produced or collected by an agent in the fictional world: photographs, drawings, letters, envelopes, newspaper-clippings. In this way characters from the fictional world move closer to the reader’s real world, since a photograph is indexical of the reality of the person or object depicted, as well as of the photographer who took the picture. 4.3 Representation of Cognition Visual artefacts, facsimiles and graphic representations and reproductions of textual products (photographs, drawings, graphs, flowcharts, letters, captions in the photo-album, stories written by a literary character etc.) can, for various reasons, allow the reader insight into the homodiegetic narrator’s or any

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literary character’s ways of ‘world-making’, into their ways of looking at the world and conceiving or structuring it. Austerlitz in Sebald’s novel, for instance, is obsessed with architecture. To him, architecture is a central cultural activity, since buildings and their design represent the world that humans create in order to organize their civic and social lives. Studying buildings and their underlying design enables him to read entire social histories and social systems—to the extent, however, that he is permanently unable to write the cultural history of architecture he intended. In Sebald’s narratives, photographic documentation of the man-made world, including gardens, cemeteries, a concentration camp, interior rooms and whole panoramas of cities, not only contextualizes the story, it represents a literary character’s attempts to understand and structure his world. Visual elements can also represent cognitive micro-processes and modes of thinking. Thus, in Haddon’s novel, Christopher, the homodiegetic narrator, considers his future options by creating possible (textual) worlds, drawing a flow-chart so that the reader can study the protagonist’s and narrator’s process of decision-making as a mental algorithm. Throughout Haddon’s novel, many of the protagonist’s cognitive activities—perceptions, decision processes and memories—are visualized, the narrator evidently possessing a visual mind and memory that he considers superior to its digital-conceptual counterpart. 4.4 Contextualization Photographs, documents and physical objects are regarded as indices of a real, empirical world. As such, they contribute considerably to the construction of the textual world, setting the story in a certain geographically and topographically identifiable space (New York, the Alps, London etc.) at a given historical time. In this way the reader is enabled to activate the appropriate cognitive schemata: to ‘see’ (or rather glimpse) the narrative world and connect it to her or his own world temporally and spatially. Again it must be noted that it is the number and range of artefacts in the multimodal novel that creates a new type of contextualization. They represent a whole culture, along with many of its practices, that can be studied in appropriate material form, including their history; in the examples cited this ranges from gardening to architecture and burying the dead. Multimodal novels thus convey a textual world’s signifying cultural practices, its ways of making sense of the world. They enact the material dimension of the depicted world beyond verbal manifestations, tapping generic riches unavailable to the novelistic narration that determines the textual world. In this process what used to be the extratextual context has now to a great extent become integral to the narrative text itself. Culture is represented directly and extensively; above all, it is

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no longer re-mediated linguistically. As to the performative dimension of literature, multimodal novels create the cultural archives that they claim to represent. 4.5 Indexical Functions Visual and graphic representations express the medial and material dimension of the narrative world: multimodal elements in a novel introduce the materiality and technology of ‘sign’, ‘language’ and ‘text’, i. e. paper, colour, ink, print, handwriting, font-types and so forth. Thus a multimodal novel will often contain a number of texts and passages which are not in ‘regular’ print. A particular graphic style or font-type will represent the writing technology and conditions of composition: a handwritten draft, an unedited typescript or an obviously defective version. This emphasis on the materiality and mediality of signification brings to the reader’s mind an awareness of the processual character of discursive practices with their conditions, obstacles, and dangers, and the impact of the material side of cultural signification on meaning. Almost all of the novels cited deal with the retrieval, discovery, restoration or reconstruction of lost or damaged artefacts and documents. In many cases, the materiality and condition of these artefacts is thematized and the process of restoration is narrated or forms a narrative of its own. A person, for instance, is identified through her handwriting (Haddon), a film is reconstructed through the analysis of a study of the film (Danielewski), where letters and notes have burned to ashes. In search of his mother, Austerlitz in Sebald’s novel produces an enlarged slow-motion copy of a short film from the Terezin concentration camp, hoping to identify his mother in the film, only to find that the larger the image is the more blurred it becomes. In Foer’s novel young Oskar experiences the same phenomenon when searching the Internet for 9/11 videos that might show his father. Thus, in the age of digitalization and immaterial electronic signs, the multimodal novel reinstalls the physicality and materiality of semiotic practices. It is an interesting side-effect that through this multimodality the use of verbal language as the main medium of novelistic narration is no longer ‘natural’; on the contrary, in the light of other modes and media the printed verbal mode is de-naturalized and relativized. On the one hand, it appears to be limited in its signifying potential, but on the other hand its specific value, its capacity to conceptualize, to contextualize as well as to de-contextualize and to integrate a number of other modes is highlighted.

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4.6 Framing and Perspective Although this is by no means a new phenomenon (Victorian novel, epistolary novel), the postmodern novel in particular often consists of different textual elements and identifiable parts, often related by different narrators or voices and represented in the form of a narrative collage. These independent narratives within the novel are frequently reproduced in a different font. This not only indicates the specific position of a narrative within a distinct frame narrative, but it also serves to identify different narrative voices. Various narrative voices may be identified through their respective graphic style or font-type, or a homodiegetic narrator may present a literary or textual product of his or her own that belongs to the different (distant) time-level of the frame narrative and can thus be regarded as a (fictional) document or trace from the narrative world. These different modes and styles of writing and representation can be regarded as a form of materialized multiperspectivity, with each style or mode representing a different perspective and a different history of production and distribution (see Wirth 2002). 4.7 The Limits of Verbal Narration Eventually, as can be expected, in almost all of the novels the visual images also bear witness to the shortcomings of verbal language and narration. Again, Sebald’s Austerlitz is the most extreme example, for he never realizes his intention to write up his studies of architectural and cultural history: The very thing which may usually convey a sense of purposeful intelligence—the exposition of an idea by means of a certain stylistic facility—now seemed to me nothing but an entirely arbitrary or deluded enterprise. I could see no connections any more, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-grey trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame. (Sebald 2002: 175f.)

There are phenomena and aspects of the world, then, that can hardly be conceived of as, or translated into, verbal information. The incorporation of visual or graphic information in a narrative text is, in a sense, an admission of the limitations of verbal narration in a visualized world: it is a form of narrative surrender, which is sometimes made almost explicit. That is why in Haddon’s novel one comes across “This is what it looked like” as a standard formula whenever the homodiegetic narrator is lost for words or finds it inappropriate to verbalize a specifically visual perception. Pessl in Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2005) even uses empty spaces between words to represent the limits of verbal description when she attempts to characterize Hannah, one of the central characters in the novel, and her “Art of Listen-

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ing”: “To describe this singular quality of hers […] is impossible, because what she did had nothing to do with words.” (Pessl 2005: 121) 4.8 The Multimodal Construction of Textual and Possible Worlds It has become clear that in a multimodal novel a wide range of different modes and media participate in the construction of the storyworld. It is neither the written verbal mode nor any of the other modes on its own that constitutes the story or builds the storyworld. Nor is this simply a matter of ‘dialogue’ between a verbal text and visual images (see Horstkotte 2002; 2005). Rather, it is the complex interplay between different semiotic modes, generic forms, and ways of conceiving and making sense of the world that eventually constitutes novelistic narration. And although it may be true, as Ryan (2004b: 11) argues, that “verbal language is the native tongue of narrative, its proper semiotic support”, it is also possible to narrate and to make meaning of the world in non-linguistic forms. A case in point of how, within the context of a verbal narrative, the powerful story of a possible world is constructed and delivered in merely visual form is Foer’s novel (see Hoth 2006). Oskar, the homodiegetic narrator and protagonist, who has lost his father in the 9/11 attack on the WTC, develops a vision in a very literal sense. He dreams himself into that other reality in which people do not fall from towers but instead, in the mode of a reverse presentation of a film, fly upwards from the ground, all the way up to their offices, sit down at their desks and start working. In the book, this vision is represented in a flipbook-like series of stills from an Internet video at the very end of the novel. Thus, Foer’s 9/11 novel not only narrates a possible world in pictorial form, it also does so by reviving one of the oldest techniques of moving pictures, the flip-book. At the same time, this flip-book story is a manifestation of the deception of the senses that all motion pictures use. Thus, by introducing a visual technology into the verbal art of storytelling, the authenticity of the picture is questioned, whilst simultaneously the storytelling potential of pictures is proven in contrast to the (weaker) narrative power of the word. Above all, the young narrator’s attempt to make sense of what happened to his father and him on that September day in 2001 is bound to fail as long as he relies on the linguistic mode. His quest for meaning can be arrested only after he has found the appropriate visual image. Thus, an individual’s search for meaning and its construction are represented as multimodal, and the multimodal novel can be regarded as itself a cultural template of the multimodality of semiosis and meaning making.

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5 Transmodal Narratology What has been said about the multimodal novel can be summarized very briefly: The multimodal novel ƒ incorporates and represents a wide range of verbal and non-verbal signifying practices as well as narrative and non-narrative modes and ways of world-making; ƒ equips its characters and narrators with a wide range of signifying and cultural abilities so that they appear as fully capable human beings sharing the cultural practices of their textual world; ƒ thus uses, represents and communicates cultural practices of looking and seeing, writing, printing and design technologies; ƒ integrates and thematizes the materiality of different codes and symbol systems; ƒ makes it possible for the reader to look at and study artefacts from the fictional world and thus share the cultural code and experiences of the textual world and its agents; ƒ creates a multimodal cultural archive by claiming to present and represent documents and sources from that archive; ƒ relativizes the conceptual and discursive power of verbal language and emphasizes that meaning-making, and making sense of the world, is transmodal and the result of multimodal as well as multimedial processes. It should have become clear that the questions raised and discussed here are not, as in transmedial narratological approaches (see Schüwer 2002, Wolf 2002, Herman 2004, Ryan 2004a, Meister 2005), primarily concerned with a single narrative that travels across different media. Rather the particularity of multimodal narrative lies in the fact that the whole of the narrative is a result of the semiotic interplay of different modes and media: they are fully integrated in the narrative discourse, part of the storyworld and an integral part of the reader’s construction of the narrative. It seems obvious, then, that the features of the multimodal novel delineated and illustrated above may have considerable implications for some central paradigms of narrative theory. Yet it would be premature to draw definitive conclusions at this point. So I am not proposing a new terminology, since a terminological system needs to be carefully developed in accordance with disciplinary traditions, both within narratology and in ‘imported’ disciplines. Rather, I would like to point to some conceptual shifts that may be implied in the findings indicated above about the multimodal novel: From writing to designing: It is obvious in the examples shown above that novels of the multimodal type require more than just writing a verbal text. Instead, the text can be regarded as a complex arrangement that com-

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bines various semiotic resources, and even layouts, on a page or doublepage. The multimodal novel is the result of multimodal and multimedial design (see Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 5). From narrator to narrator-presenter: Since the same applies to the narrator who, apart from delivering a story, searches, retrieves and ‘collects’ documents and sources and eventually presents them to the reader, the process of narrating includes ‘showing’ and ‘presentation’. As in everyday cultural practices, where life stories or a family history may be narrated while looking at and showing photographs in an album or on slides, narration in the multimodal novel includes presentation. The act of presenting, the selection of texts and visual images, their accessibility and reliability may become part of the narrative discourse as well as of meta-narration. From monomodal (verbal) text to multimodal, multimedial texts: Sufficient evidence has been provided above that the narrative text can no longer be conceived of as solely verbal. Instead, it takes on the shape and functions of a multimedial text. In that respect, some pages in multimodal novels may resemble a hypertext. In its most advanced form, as in Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the multimodal novel can even be conceptualized as a non-electronic hypertext. From reading to transmodal construction of narrative meaning: As has been shown, in the case of the multimodal novel the reader is engaged in constructing a holistic mental model of the textual world in which she/he incorporates data from different semiotic sources and modes. Connecting these different sources and resources intertextually and intermedially is an indispensable part of the reading process. ‘Reading’ this type of novel now integrates various literacies and the ability to decipher not only verbal language but also other codes and languages, from visual grammars to scientific formulae. From reader to ‘user’: The aforementioned shifts imply that the reader has to engage in intertextual and intermedial ways of meaning-making with the eventual goal of creating transmodal narrative meaning. To a certain extent, the reader’s activities start to resemble those of the user of an electronic hypertext (although in most cases the multimodal novel is a linear narrative, whereas the electronic hypertext is a non-linear ensemble of texts and signs). The traditional reader, on the other hand, makes meaning solely from the words on a page. What has been stated about the multimodal novel cannot leave narratology unaffected. It seems inevitable that the phenomena and implications described in this article will affect various narratological conceptualizations, since narratology must inevitably concern itself with conceptualizing and theorizing the semiotic interplay of different medial representations and semiotic modes within a single narrative and defining their mode-specific con-

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tributions to the narrative whole. Narratology must be able to describe and conceptualize narrative meaning as the transmodal outcome of multimodal textual arrangements and of the reader’s transmodal construction of narrative. A fully transmodal narratology would, therefore, have to study and understand transmodal cognitive process and the construction of cognitive narrative schemata based on multimodal data input. In the light of the multimodal novel it becomes apparent that interdisciplinary collaboration is not an arbitrary act, for the specific contribution that particular modes and media make to the whole of the narrative can only be studied appropriately if concepts from various specialized disciplines are consulted and imported. ‘Conceptual import’ from semiotics, visual culture studies or other fields of cultural studies is the corresponding, reciprocal move to what Wolf (2005) calls the ‘export’ of narratological concepts to other disciplines. The multimodal novel as a literary and cultural phenomenon cannot be grasped through traditional narratological and literary studies alone. The multimodality of narratives confronts narratology with phenomena that have not so far been the objects of its research. Therefore narratology must resort to and integrate the expertise that has been developed in other disciplines in order to describe and decode non-novelistic, nonnarrative and non-verbal modes and media and their interplay with verbal narration. Accordingly, the analysis of interdiscursive exchange between literature and cultural discourses in the sense of Link (1988) will have to shift away from the investigation of merely verbal correspondences to multimodal and multimedial transfer-processes between the literary and the cultural ‘text’. As a result, ‘context’, ‘culture’ and ‘knowledge’ may no longer be conceived of as being represented in verbal form only. ‘Search words’ such as Baßler (2005) proposes for scanning the cultural archive are suitable for the contextualization of verbal documents and texts, but they are not able to identify contextualizing images or graphic modes or to use them as contextualizing texts. Finally, it may be necessary to revisit historical exemplars of novels that show features of the multimodal novel, like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1951 [1759-67]), for non-verbal or non-narrative elements in novels have often been simply overlooked and left unconsidered in literary criticism. A comparison may produce astounding phenomenological parallels that require a closer analysis of non-verbal and non-novelistic elements in older novels and demand revaluation in the light of the study of multimodal novels as a literary and cultural phenomenon of the later 20th and early 21st centuries.

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Works Cited Auster, Paul. 1982. The Invention of Solitude. London: Penguin. Baßler, Moritz. 2005. Die kulturpoetische Funktion und das Archiv. Tübingen: Francke. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actuals Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Danielewski, Mark Z. 2000. House of Leaves. A Novel. New York: Pantheon Books. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2005. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. London: Penguin. Haddon, Mark. 2003. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. London: Vintage. Hallet, Wolfgang. 2008a. “Multimodalität”. In: Ansgar Nünning (ed.). Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. 4th ed., rev. and enl. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. [forthcoming] Hallet, Wolfgang. 2008b. “The Multimodality of Cultural Knowledge and Its Literary Transformations”. In: Angela Locatelli (ed.). The Knowledge of Literature. Vol. VII. Bergamo: Edizioni Sestante-Bergamo University Press. [forthcoming] Herman, David. 2004. “Toward a Transmedial Narratology”. In: Ryan 2004a, p. 47-75. Horstkotte, Silke. 2002. “Pictorial and Verbal Discourse in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants”. In: Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 2, p. 33-50. Horstkotte, Silke. 2005. “The Double Exposure of Focalization in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn”. In: Meister et al. 2005, p. 25-44. Hoth, Stephanie. 2006. “From Individual Experience to Historical Event and Back Again. ‘9/11’ in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”. In: Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). Kulturelles Wissen und Intertextualität. Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien zu Kontextualisierung von Literatur. Trier: WVT, p. 283-300. King, Stephen. 1988 [1987]. Misery. London: Hodder & Sloughton. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse. The Models and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold. Link, Jürgen. 1988. “Literaturanalyse als Interdiskursanalyse. Am Beispiel des Ursprungs literarischer Symbolik in der Kollektivsymbolik”. In: Jürgen Fohrmann and Harro Müller (eds.). Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissenschaft. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, p. 284-307. Meister, Jan Christoph; Tom Kindt and Wilhelm Schernus (eds.). 2005. Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality – Disciplinarity. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Nünning, Vera; Ansgar Nünning (eds.). 2002. Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT. Ondaatje, Michael. 1993 [1982]. Running in the Family. London: Vintage. Pessl, Marisha. 2006. Special Topics in Calamity Physics. London: Penguin. Rose, Gillian. 2001. Visual Methodologies. London et al.: Sage. Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.). 2004a. Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004b. “Introduction”. In: Ryan 2004a, p. 1-40. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004c. “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?” In: Ryan 2004a, p. 337-359. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology”. In: Meister et al. 2005, p. 1-24.

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Schneider, Ralf. 2005. “Hypertext Narrative and the Reader. A View from Cognitive Theory”. In: Michael Toolan and Jean-Jacques Weber (eds.). The Cognitive Turn. Papers in Cognitive Literary Studies. European Journal of English Studies 9:2, p. 197-208. Schüwer, Martin. 2002. “Erzählen in Comics. Bausteine einer plurimedialen Erzähltheorie“. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002, p. 185-216. Sebald. W. G. 1996 [1993, in German]. The Emigrants. London: Vintage. Sebald, W. G. 2002 [2001, in German]. Austerlitz. London: Penguin. Smith, Zadie. 2006 [2005]. On Beauty. London: Penguin. Sterne, Laurence. 1951 [1759ff.]. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. London et al.: Oxford University Press. Streeruwitz, Marlene. 2005 [1997]. Lisas Liebe. Romansammelband. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Wirth, Uwe. 2002. “Performative Rahmung, parergonale Indexikalität. Verknüpfendes Schreiben zwischen Herausgeberschaft und Hypertextualität”. In: Uwe Wirth (ed.). Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 403-433. Wolf, Werner. 2002. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik. Ein Beitrag zur intermedialen Erzähltheorie”. In: Nünning/Nünning (eds.), p. 23104. Wolf, Werner. 2005. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon. A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratalogical Concepts”. In: Meister et al. 2005, p. 83-107.

PETER VERSTRATEN (Leiden)

Between Attraction and Story: Rethinking Narrativity in Cinema When the action-packed blockbuster Godzilla (Robert Emmerich, 1998) was released, the tag line was “Size does matter”. The tag line referred to the size of the title monster wreaking havoc in New York. Wittily, skeptics replied that ‘plot does matter, too’. Although it was still possible to make head or tail of the film, it lacked a solid bone structure. It has often been said that the big Hollywood productions sacrifice consistent plotlines in favor of more spectacle. A decent story is also said to be missing in films like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001) and in European Hollywood imitations like The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997). When asked why the digital effects overshadowed the shaky plot of Besson’s film, leading man Bruce Willis answered that nobody cares for stories anymore nowadays (cited in Lunenfeld 2004: 151). Willis’s remark that the interest in film stories in the big blockbusters has dwindled is right insofar as it refers to classic ways of narrating. These presume that causal relations are consistent, which is a criterion that has traditionally been considered to be the parameter of plot. We follow a hero in time and space from A to B to C. It is possible for a narration to jump from A to C, but only on condition that development B is addressed in (for instance) a flashback. If a film starts with development E, A-B-C-D will eventually also be shown. It must always be clear who the hero is, what his/her background is, what his aims are and why he does what he does. In a classic film, the hero has to overcome obstacles while trying to achieve his aim, for instance because other characters have interests that are opposed to his. The hero will normally succeed, but this is not an iron ‘rule’. According to new media theoretician Peter Lunenfeld, the much-debated crisis of (classic) film narrative has more to do with the sheer quantity of stories in the contemporary information age than with indifference: nowadays, simple references suffice (Lunenfeld 2004: 151). We can easily jump from A to C while omitting B because the visually literate viewer has already trodden that particular path many times. A tightly structured plot is unnecessary in a blockbuster like Godzilla. For the modern-day popcorn movie, the

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structure of a box of bricks is enough: the typical standard elements of a story no longer require elaborate psychological motivations. Characters can be reduced to stable functions: H fights G to save M. These films, consisting of ‘stacked bricks’, do not represent or require a full development. Their way of narration is based on references to overly familiar plot devices. They present a sequence of events that are not explicitly causally related, but the viewer who is familiar with story patterns from other films can usually fill in the gaps. Apart from these ‘stack of bricks’ films, the last fifteen years have seen the rise of films with a so-called contiguous approach. Films like Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993), Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1998), Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) and Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004) offer a mosaic of widely diverging characters. What connects the characters is often little more than that they (temporarily) reside in the same place, which enables them to cross paths for a short time. These ensemble films are based on a narrative structure that also differs from classical narration in that coincidences now take precedence over causal relations: something might happen ‘out of the blue’ and events do not require a thorough introduction. In Short Cuts and Magnolia, the narrative climax is formed by natural events like an earthquake or a shower of frogs. These jumbled narratives are surprising and unusual when compared to classic film tradition. Nevertheless, they do adhere to a logic we have come to connect with the cyberspace hypertext, jumping from one link to the next (Zizek 2001: 204-205). I would argue that the altered nature of narration in cinema is an urgent reason to rethink filmic narrativity. A second reason why a reconsideration of film narratology is relevant at this moment has to do with the developments in the field of new media studies, which have their impact on academic film culture—and vice versa. In their search for the language and grammar of new media, Janet H. Murray, Lev Manovich and Marsha Kinder (among others) have posed narratological questions. How do digital media, with their database logic and interactive ambitions, relate to (film) narrative? What are the differences and similarities between the rules of computer games and (film) narratives? What does the future hold for the (film) narrative in cyberspace and how does cyberspace in its turn influence cinema? In view of the fact that the new media have inherited so much from cinema, the return of the narratological discussion to film studies is like a boomerang. This makes a reexamination of the ‘theory of narrating and narrations’ essential. And the question that will be my starting point is whether cinema is essentially narrative.

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1. The Narrative Potential of Film: Time, Space, Causality Following Mieke Bal’s example in her Narratology (1997), I will use ‘the representation of a (perceptible) temporal development’ as the basic definition of a story. A transition from one situation to another takes place, and that change is brought about by a (non-)act effected by someone or something. If the rain dance of a certain character in a film is followed by a spontaneous downpour, for instance, one may suspect that the dance has caused the cloudburst. If the sun breaks through the clouds after the dance, however, this can also be taken as a change caused by the same act. The radiant weather can then be interpreted as a reaction to the failure of the dance. For those who do not believe in the possible magic effect of the rain dance, the changing weather conditions have nothing to do with the dancer’s act at all. If it happens to start raining, the ‘event’ needs to be attributed to something else—the rain may simply be the result of the advancing storm clouds. Generally, not conducting a certain act can also be classified as a development. When someone stands by as another person is drowning, his failure to act has consequences for the further development of the fabula. Even if the drowning person is saved after all, a breach of trust, at least, might have occurred. The scope of the term ‘temporal development’ can be a matter of debate. Bal claims that temporality can be ‘read’ in, for instance, paintings. In Rembrandt’s work, the viewing direction and/or facial expression of the characters often suggests a story. We see for example how Susanna is being watched by the elders while she seems to turn to the viewer for ‘protection’. The painting shows a ‘frozen’ moment in time while simultaneously revealing interaction both between the characters and between them and the viewer (Bal 1991: 166-167). Even non-figurative paintings can be narrative. The wild brush strokes of abstract-expressionist action painters like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock ‘narrate’ the creative process: their fierce painting techniques seem to imply movement (Bal 1999: 177). This movement points to a certain temporal order that can be reconstructed by ‘reading’ the painting. Essentially, film is the setting in motion of a series of photographic images that pass forward (or, occasionally, backward) along the temporal axis. Filmic frames are linked moments in time. Because of the emphatic presence of temporality it would not be too big a leap to claim, along with André Gaudreault and Christian Metz, that cinema has been equipped with narrative antennae (Gaudreault 1997: 71). Concurring with these two critics, Seymour Chatman claims that a novel can give an exhaustive description of the surroundings, or of the looks, of a certain character. Fabula time is then arrested for a pause in the story. Chatman, however, claims that film scenes

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cannot pause and consequently are unable to describe (1980: 129). In his opinion, film cannot withstand the constant narrative pressure: the projection of moving images on the temporal axis forcefully drags the story on. Does this narrative pressure mean that film, as Gaudreault claims, is a machine doomed to tell stories (1997: 171)? It is a question that allows no other answer than a complex ‘yes and no’. Whoever wants to approach the matter from a strictly historical perspective may be forced to claim, like Sean Cubitt, that the earliest forms of cinema were not narrative. Cubitt argues that temporality is not yet properly directed in the first one-shot films. Originally, cinema was a simple stream of photo frames.1 Like the waves at sea, this primary state of cinema is independent of beginnings or endings. In the case of the Lumière brothers, it was not the things that were shown that gave rise to fascination but rather the fact that something unprecedented could be shown in the first place. The most miraculous effect of cinema was based on pure movement (Cubitt 2004: 15): this was a cinema of immediate presence, of the here and now, without past or future. It was straightforwardly sensational and yielded an experience that was not bound to narrative expectations. Having studied the oldest experiences of the medium, Cubitt cautions that narrativity is not inherent to cinema. At the moment of its conception, cinema was neither created nor experienced as a narrative medium. According to Cubitt, it is only when the cinematic cut was introduced that temporality was given a direction. By means of cutting, the length of shots was shortened and the viewer started to focus on what exactly was moving in the image. The cut marked the transition from the experience to the perception of the filmed object. Cubitt claims that this transition is comparable to looking at paintings by Camille Pissarro from a distance. When one looks at his canvasses from (less than) an arm’s length, it would seem that the painter has only applied colorful smudges and dots. A recognizable image can only be discerned if the viewer increases the distance between himself and the painting (Cubitt 2004: 28). Cubitt argues that the viewer only becomes sensitive to the composition and framing of film shots in the moment when they become aware of what they are looking at. This sensitivity generates questions like: ‘What does the person at the front have to do with the person in the background? Why have they chosen this setting? The person at the front is looking to her left: what could she be looking at outside this frame? Where will the camera be in the next shot?’ These questions evince two important principles. Firstly, if the cut encourages the viewer to transform waves of photo frames into ‘objects 1

Instead of the filmic term ‘photo frames’ Cubitt prefers the term ‘pixels’ from the vocabulary of digitization. See Stewart for a critique of this “terminological backflip” of Cubitt’s history (2007: 12).

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in the world’, the length of the shot is given intrinsic limits and the moving image becomes spatially located. This transition is marked by a change of attitude: instead of ‘wow, we are actually seeing a projection of a walking man’, the viewer might now think ‘in the image, a man with a cowboy hat is walking through a wide landscape. Is he going somewhere? How long do we keep following him?’ Secondly, the filmic space creates causal relations, and these are inherently temporal: first this happened, then that happened. A causal link, however, can often be drawn only in retrospect. If we see a shot of a man in a room followed by a shot of a gun in a drawer, questions such as these may arise: ‘Does this revolver belong to that man? Why does he have a revolver? Does he feel threatened? If so, by whom?’ If the man actually uses the revolver later on, the earlier shot of the drawer gains relevance: the weapon was not put there for no reason. The showing of the gun turns out to be functional. I stated that Cubitt gives a strictly historical analysis: cinema was not narrative from the moment of its conception, because true narrativity arises only in the process of editing. Against this vision, however, we could bring in the argument of retrospectivity. With the knowledge of cinema we now have, we could also classify the earliest films as narrative. (And since both visions are valid, this explains the complex ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether cinema is essentially narrative.) According to Gaudreault, the short film La Sortie des Usines Lumière (Louis and Auguste Lumière, 1895) can also be called narrative. In this film, shot with a static camera, the workers do little more than leave a factory. The earliest film of the two brothers shows at least part of a true temporal development—the gates open and the workers walk through. Therefore, the film can be called a “micro-narrative”. Gaudreault applies the term “monstration” to these early one-shot films (1997: 73). They are not yet ‘narrating’ in the proper sense of the word, but by showing they both create a sequence of photographic images and capture movement. This form of showing suffices for Gaudreault as a basic criterion for a (micro-)narrative. He considers monstration to be the first level of narrativity. Whereas Cubitt holds that narrativity only comes into the picture with the advent of editing, Gaudreault believes editing to be a second level of narrativity. The narration is no longer exclusively determined by what is being projected, but mainly by the transitions from one shot to the next. According to Gaudreault, these transitions between images shape narration in cinema (1997: 73). Three important functions of editing can, therefore, be addressed. Firstly, it allows time to be manipulated, for instance by omitting a certain time span. Secondly, space can be framed (time and again). Thirdly, causal relations can take shape because of the way in which images are juxtaposed.

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Time, space and causality are the main principles of narrative cinema. In this type of cinema, multiple storylines can be adroitly combined according to a pattern of cause and consequence; the direct look into the camera has become taboo. If we transpose this to the ‘classic’ variant of cinema, we get a formula like: ‘we know, or will soon know, why the characters are where they are when they are.’ The triad of time, space and causality is therefore a basic ingredient of narrative cinema. Nevertheless, filmmakers have thankfully used the many opportunities at their disposal to violate these classic conventions. The psychological motivation for someone’s action may remain unexplored, leaving the possibly enigmatic reasons for a certain deed unresolved. In several (European) art films, moreover, it is virtually impossible to fit the pieces of time and space together. The clear reconstruction of when what took place is barred. Despite the fact that these films are a challenge to narrative rules and make it impossible to ascertain a coherent fabula, they are nonetheless narrative. L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) reveals some characteristic narrative inclinations of ‘alternative’ films. The title explicitly refers to the classic parameters of time and space: we know when (last year) and where (the health resort Marienbad) the film is set. In the film, a nameless man in an immense baroque hotel is telling a woman about his encounters with her. They are said to have met many times near the balustrade of a garden full of statues in Fredriksbad, or perhaps in Marienbad or Karlsbad. The woman does not have a single memory of their meetings, which generates the impression that the ‘events’ have sprung from the lover’s imagination. Moreover, the status of the characters is unclear. We see how the woman is shot by a man who presumably is her husband; did this event take place last year, or is it imaginary once again? The fact that the characters in the hotel move about like ‘statues’ and the many references to the condition of being dead suggest that the guests are possibly roaming the hotel as ghosts. In the end, the lover claims that the woman has withdrawn with him alone, but within the context of the film this claim is unconvincing. With its many uncertainties, it is impossible to categorize L'Année Dernière à Marienbad finally: is it an abstract thriller, a love story or a philosophical puzzle? Resnais’s film violates the traditional use of basic narrative ingredients, but that in itself is unremarkable. However, it makes one wonder whether these basic ingredients might even be absent altogether. Is entirely nonnarrative cinema possible? An unequivocal answer cannot be given. However, just as the claim that every film is narrative is not completely correct— if one adopts Cubitt’s historicizing perspective—so also the assertion that a genuinely non-narrative film can exist is hard to defend. Since the debate concerning narrative and non-narrative cinema has not yet fully crystallized in film theory, the issue demands further exploration.

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2. Freeze Frame and temps mort Narrativity is said to be innate to cinema for the simple reason that films unfold in, and embody, passing time. An obvious exception to this rule is the freeze frame, which temporarily stops the image and turns it into a ‘photograph’. A frozen frame, however, does not necessarily cease to be narrative. One of the most famous freeze frames in film history is the final shot of Les Quatre Cents Coups (François Truffaut, 1959). The young Antoine Doinel has escaped from a juvenile institution and is running toward the ocean. The film ends with a ‘photographic’ portrait of his face in close-up as he turns to the camera. Strictly speaking, the (filmic) movement is arrested. Nevertheless, the underlying suggestion is narrative. The freeze frame invites the viewer to complete the story. According to Chatman the frozen shot does not imply a standstill or a pause, but instead signifies a repetitive pattern (1980: 130): Antoine is trapped in the frame, just as he will remain trapped in an existence made up of failures. And the freeze frame is, in fact, the starting point of several sequels about Antoine’s life that confirm the pattern of struggle already visible in Les Quatre Cents Coups.2 Chatman compares the narrative function of a ‘dead moment’ like the freeze frame to a taxi meter: even if we are in a traffic jam, the meter still runs (1980: 130). The story continues even when the image stops, if need be with an appeal to the viewers to interpret the freeze frame for themselves. Cinema has another technique that implies a standstill in its terminology: the so-called temps mort. This term indicates a scene in which no discernible event takes place. In the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, such ‘dead time’ manifests itself when the camera lingers at a place the characters have already left. Oddly enough, the absence of the characters within the shot is made all the more palpable by the passing of time: how long will it take for the camera to pick them up again? The non-appearance of a character where you would normally expect one to appear is also a form of development, much as a non-act is a form of action. The last five minutes of Antonioni’s Éclisse (1962) only contain shots of the surroundings in which the main characters had earlier agreed to meet. They both fail to show up. The final scene becomes an exercise in patience: will they show up or not? When the film ends, this question is still not answered. Will they perhaps meet after the film has ended, and if so, what will they say to each other? Even though nothing relevant to the plot happens in the final scene, the narrative issues remain; they are simply relegated to a point beyond the scope of the film. The narrative agent puts the story on the viewer’s plate beyond the usual ‘fine’. 2

In Baisers Volés (François Truffaut, 1968), we see how Antoine is fired from the military, how he ruins his job as night porter in a hotel and, finally, how he attempts to get by working as a detective.

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3. Tension, Attraction and Story With the freeze frame and temps mort, I have discussed the dividing line between narrative and non-narrative on the level of shot and scene respectively. In both cases, the balance shifts to narrative. The next step is concerned with the way in which (spectacular) scenes relate to the (main) plot. This step refers back to a debate between historians of early film about the term ‘attractions’. This term signifies a type of cinema that was dominant up to 1906, before the development of the cinema of narrative integration. According to Tom Gunning’s famous statement, the “cinema of attractions” involves an “exhibitionistic confrontation” with the viewer: ‘look at me performing my tricks’ (see Gunning 1994: 41). Browsing through old collections, Gunning came to the conclusion that early films were predominantly a display case for a series of ‘circus acts’. In the vein of vaudeville theatre, early cinema revolved around unrelated acts that lacked dramatic unity. Don Crafton has polemically reduced the difference between attraction and story to a difference between ‘pie’ and ‘chase’. A chase has a cause, shows a linear development, and is rarely confined to a single space. The throwing of pies in slapstick comedies, on the other hand, appears to be a spectacle staged only for the camera. According to Crafton, such comical act(ion)s or gags meet the qualification of a typical ‘attraction’: it needs to be a unique, self-sustaining event. If the pie-throwing has any cause at all, this disappears in the sheer fun of pies incessantly flying through the air. The relation to the main plot is usually irrelevant, which also applies to gags like the funny faces of comedians or the squinting looks of comic actor Ben Turpin. Crafton believes there is a fundamentally unbridgeable gap between the gag and the (main) story (1995: 111). According to Tom Gunning, however, the gag is always taken up again by the overarching story of the film. Apart from the fact that the gag already offers a microscopic story in itself, its only purpose in the first place is to serve as an ornament for the main plot. Pie scenes may seem an end in themselves and appear to drift away from the film’s actual storyline; nevertheless, Gunning claims they always have a discernible narrative motivation (1995: 121). A similar tension between story and intermezzo can be found in genres as diverse as the musical, the pornographic film and the Hollywood attraction-cinema. The narrative patterns have been sacrificed for the true ‘attraction’ of these genres: song and dance, sex scenes or flashy action sequences. The plot mainly functions as an excuse for, or an introduction to, these scenes. Eventually, however, these intermezzos are integrated into the plot, no matter how rudimentary it may be.

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4. ‘Zero Degree’ of Narrativity? The point so far is that specific techniques, (dead) scenes and intermezzos become embedded within a ‘larger’ story. This seems to corroborate Gaudreault’s and Chatman’s view that narrativity is inherent to film. This conclusion remains disputed, however. It is predominantly in the category of experimental film—which in turn comprises abstract as well as associative cinema—that narrative integration is (virtually) absent. Thus the ‘abstract’ film Ballet Mécanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, 1924) presents not a story but an argument expressed in the rhythmic dancing of objects (hats, bottles), and the mechanical movements of people. Reflecting Henri Bergson’s theory that we laugh each time a person gives the impression of being an automaton, the film opens and closes with an abstract animation of the comedian Charlie Chaplin, whose apparently agile body remains straight as a board while moving, and who is consequently notorious for his almost mechanical stiffness. In addition, Ballet Mécanique predominantly shows rhythmical similarities between objects, shapes and title cards. There is an incredible amount of movement in the eleven minute film, ranging from objects to human figures, but all this movement seems to lack direction. We repeatedly see a shot of a cleaning lady climbing a stairway, for instance, but this shot cannot be related to a fabula or to a temporal sequence of cause and effect. The connection with the other shots is graphic and rhythmic: the way in which human bodies move is reminiscent of object or machine parts. The abstract form of Murphy’s and Léger’s ‘visual symphony’ is appropriate to an ‘argument’ almost entirely constructed of (metaphorical) similarities. In order to reduce human beings to machinery, their psyches need to be as ‘empty’ as possible. Because of the complete removal of psychological aspects, temporality, causality and space become irrelevant and narrativity (as a ‘characteristic’ of the film) is shut out. Similarities grow to be so dominant that the ‘story’ is suppressed. A film becomes non-narrative by filtering out or suppressing temporality, causality and space, but what it then turns out to be is nothing more than a formal exercise. One reservation concerning the idea that Ballet Mécanique is a nonnarrative film needs to be made, however. Psychoanalysis has taught us that the repressed can resurface in a different guise. Even if a film consists only of accumulated similarities, and temporal development appears entirely lacking, the viewer may not be able to resist the inclination to read narrativity into the text, reordering the endless flow of movement into a (minimal) narrative. The possibility is not unlike Bal’s idea that the seemingly non-narra-

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tive work of action painters can be interpreted narratively if one reads the canvas as expressing movement.3 5. Content—Form For David Bordwell, narratological analysis revolves around the interaction between narrative tactics and stylistic features. This interaction is analogous to the more familiar distinction between content and form. Content refers to the bare representation of the plot, which is reduced to the question ‘what is it about?’ Narrative tactics concern the shaping of the content; the order in which events are told, for instance, falls under that heading. Form denotes the furnishing of the content and involves the question ‘how and by what means is the content conveyed?’ This entails a choice from the entire arsenal of filmic techniques: what camera positions does the director choose, what colors, what type of shot transitions, does the sound correspond to the images, and so on. Style is a further specification of formal possibilities. According to Bordwell, style refers to the systematic use of film techniques. He uses the word ‘style’ when a director or filmic genre can be recognized by the techniques that are employed. The interaction between content and form, or, in Bordwell’s terms, between style and narrative construction, determines how time, space and narrative logic will be manipulated. The distinction between form and content is not as strict as it may appear, because form is not a neutral conductor. Form is not like a wire that conducts electricity with a burning light bulb as its final ‘content’. Formal features inevitably affect content as well. One could envisage an experiment in which a man is filmed visiting a museum and looking around. If cheerful music accompanied the images, the pleasure of the visit would be emphasized. If we heard ominous music, however, we might get the idea that the man was being pursued. Thus a simple formal adjustment can greatly influence the content of a film. Because of the impossibility of completely neutral form, content is always distorted. I understand this distortion as ‘excess’, a concept I derive from an essay by Kristin Thompson. If a film exhibits “style for its own sake”, ‘filmic excess’ ensues (1986: 132). If the style draws too much attention to itself, the story is in danger of dissolving. Excess begins where motivation is lacking, or, in other words, where a stylistic feature does not propel the story or serve a narrative function. In Thompson’s view, excess is both

3

A comparable argument can be made where other experimental films from the twenties— Anémic Cinéma (Marcel Duchamp, 1926), for instance—and short-lived movements like cinéma pur are concerned.

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“counternarrative” and “counterunity” (1986: 132); it prevents the story from creating closure. In this view, Ballet Mécanique is an excessive film. Because of the emphatic rhythmic parallels and contradictions, temporal developments become secondary. Bordwell claims that the concept of excess cannot be reconciled with narratology. Excess falls outside the scope of narrative analysis (1985: 53). He blames it on an exuberant style that is not functional to the story. In his view, Ballet Mécanique is so abstract that the viewer is not invited to read a narrative into it at all. Every film creates a certain measure of excess, but the exact level of excess is determined by the balance between form and content. In the classic film or the ‘average’ genre film, excess manifests itself where specific stylistic means (temporarily) short-circuit the story: ostentatious low angle or high angle shots, overly fast shot alterations, extreme close-ups, sudden subjective shots and the use of bright or dim lighting may all be excessive. Techniques like these can draw attention to themselves in such a way as to distract you from the story and make you almost forget you were watching a film noir or a Western. In the black-and-white Western Forty Guns (Sam Fuller, 1957) the camera films the hero virtually from beneath his feet, looking up. The shot becomes an abstract composition. Above the hero’s hat, we see a vertical black line. In the next shot, the narrative efficiency of the ‘abstract’ shot is demonstrated: the line is a rifle which belongs to a man who is holding the hero at gunpoint from the upper storey window. It does not seem too big a leap to hypothesize that a (classic) film with sound narrative logic can relatively easily absorb excessive elements. Conversely, stylistic excess can be less easily incorporated into a film that lacks a tight narrative structure. This hypothesis seems to result in an apparently logical rule of thumb: the less plot or content a film has, the more its style and form will move to the foreground. The stronger form and content diverge, the more excessive the film becomes. This claim can easily be tested against European art cinema. In L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), a group of friends travels to a deserted island. Suddenly, Anna disappears and Sandro and Claudia start a search. Gradually, the actual cause of the search is ‘forgotten’: Anna’s disappearance is never solved. In the words of Pascal Bonitzer: ‘what happens is that Anna’s disappearance itself disappears’ (1989: 215). For a film called ‘the adventure’, there are remarkably few exciting events. As the film progresses and the plotline of the missing woman fades away, Antonioni’s meticulous style, with its stringently composed black-and-white shots and dead moments, focuses attention on itself to such an extent that L'Avventura now only seems to state its own unorthodox style. The considerations mentioned above lead to the following conclusion. As a rule, no film is unproblematically narrative for the full one hundred

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percent of its length. Storylines are always distorted by formal techniques. The tighter the narrative structure, however, the better this distortion can be absorbed and concealed. That is why the chance of a disturbed balance between form and content seems greater in avant-garde films and European art cinema than in classic Hollywood films. Nevertheless, this seeming logic requires further specification. Even in films that are unexceptionably narrative, the form can nonetheless be so ostentatious that ‘excess’ cannot in the end be contained. 6. Functional Compensation for Excess The difficulty of ‘excess’ is that it is not a well-defined characteristic and continues to be a matter of interpretation. A first logical step in the tracing of excess is of course to gain awareness of unorthodox stylistic elements— sharp-edged transitions or an extremely low number of cuts, shaky or very steady camera operations, illogical transitions in time or space, a bizarre choice of actors or actresses, quaint music or sounds, etcetera. A second step is checking whether the story legitimates unorthodox stylistic means. In other words: is the style functional and does it propel the plot? The notion of excess is predicated upon the interaction between form and content. Horror films sometimes take liberties with causal relations. If the monster does not operate according to (human) logic, the common sequence of cause and effect need not be adhered to. Since they find themselves threatened by an irrational monster, the characters hardly realize what they are dealing with, and causal relations can be dispensed with. In addition, horror films also make relatively little use of the shot/reverse shot structure. These stylistic characteristics are motivated by the fact that horror is based on the fear of unknown threats: the reverse shot is withheld in order to ensure that the monster will long remain mysterious. If a character has a distorted notion of time, like the protagonist in Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), or is spatially disoriented, like the alien creature in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicholas Roeg, 1976), illogical transitions in time or space are, in a sense, logical. They represent the experience of the main character. A distinct category is also formed by genres that offer ‘attractions’ rather than a story. A good example is the musical, in which songs occasion intermezzos with lavish mise-en-scène consisting of, for instance, grandiose decors, bright colors and theatrical gestures made by the actors. These excessive stylistic elements are consistent with the representation of extravagant spectacle that is presented as separate from the actual plot. A spectacle may point to the dreamy mood of characters that ‘lose themselves’ in song and dance or can take place on a specially prepared stage. In these

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cases, the music and dance scenes mark a separate world. Their deviating and patently artificial nature is heightened by the superfluous styling. Because the excessive style in musicals serves to represent the utopian ‘world’, there is a motivation for the stylistic overkill with respect to the content, and excess can be contained. The list of examples mentioned above, which can be expanded at will, illustrates the fact that excess can in principle be found in all types of film. In these examples, however, excess is only incipient, because stylistic elements are at the same time neutralized by the content or plot. Excess as defined by Kristin Thompson only fully manifests itself when the style remains selfdirected and is emphatically not compensated for by the content. Such is the case when metaphoric connections obscure insight into temporal developments, which happens in the abstract Ballet Mécanique. This also occurs when the plot all but disappears, as I claimed was the case with L'Avventura. The narrative rhythm of this film is extremely sluggish and crucial events are overlooked. What remains is a film with exceptionally steady shots in which characters are reduced to elements in desolate surroundings. We see them as ‘extras’ against the backdrop of modern architecture. The meticulous compositions implicitly tell the ‘story’ of the alienation of modern man. Because of their neglect of plot, these films function at the margins of the narrative tradition. Since there is so little content, there is an excess of style that cannot be compensated: the first condition of excess. The ‘vanished’ search and the slow rhythm lend L'Avventura almost the same level of stillness as a painting. The question remains, however, whether excess can also manifest itself in films that are not just stylistic exercises, but have a clearly narrative character. 7. Ostentatious Film Styles: The Case of Melodrama The European immigrant Douglas Sirk is known as the master of fifties Hollywood melodrama. Sirk’s plots are relatively tight, psychologically comprehensible and have a bitter, sentimental subtext. In All that Heaven Allows (1955), a widow from a well-to-do background has an affair with her young gardener, this to the horror of her two children and gossipy neighbors. In Imitation of Life (1959), a daughter is frustrated with the frequent absences of her career-minded mother, while a friend of hers is aiming for a career in showbiz and has to disavow her own black mother in order to achieve it. It does not take much effort to analyze the classic, potentially tearjerking story lines of these melodramas, because there is much logically structured ‘content’ to be analyzed. Melodramas are usually situated in a relatively restrictive social milieu. The story takes place in a wealthy middle-class

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setting in which it is inappropriate to settle conflicts by means of direct, forceful action (Elsaesser 1995: 364-366). The outlet that is often chosen in melodramas—and this was Sirk’s strong point—is to embellish the plot with syrupy stylistic features. The colors are bright and exuberant to draw attention to the role of outward display within provincial milieus with rock-solid social codes. The music is sentimental and underlines the emotions that are sometimes held back by these codes, but at other times are expressed in the most theatrical of ways. The characters operate within kitschy decors and are carefully framed behind windows, the latticework of stairways, bedposts or among mirrors in order to emphasize the lack of human contact. In a Sirk melodrama, the emphatically present stylistic procedures result in an ultra-kitsch approach. The storylines themselves already strike a maudlin tone, but the stylistic features create an even more hyper-sentimental effect. The filmic style manifests itself so ostentatiously that it draws attention to itself and outshines the story—which is the defining characteristic of excess. Form outweighs classical plot construction. The story, in other words, is told first and foremost by means of the excessive filmic form. Generally speaking, there are two ways to approach Sirk’s melodramas. On the one hand, the viewer can choose to see them as ‘simply’ sentimental because of their classical narrative structure. On the other hand, he or she can adopt an ironic stance and label them overly sentimental because their form is so imbued with pathos, their stylistic features so strain after effect that their dramatic context can no longer be taken seriously. Instead of identification with the events and characters, irony creates a buffer between the viewer and the emotions displayed on screen. The viewer will watch Sirk’s cinema with some (critical) distance and will not be carried away by the tearjerking content. I argued initially that excess results from a dysfunctional imbalance between style and form on the one hand and content and plot on the other. This claim concurs with the spirit of Bordwell’s Narration in Fiction Film and Thompson’s essay on filmic excess. Nevertheless, Sirk’s melodramas prompt a certain revaluation. In Sirk’s case, it could be said that the stylistic features of his films are in fact overly functional. The colors, shot compositions, framing and music magnify the story’s sentimentality so strongly that a paradoxical inversion takes place. Excess is created here by emphatically underlining the formal features. 8. Description and Excess Earlier I mentioned Chatman’s (1980: 126) claim that the pressure from the narrative component in cinema is great. There is usually no time to dwell on

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plenteous visual details. When a character travels across a landscape, an establishing shot may give an immediate impression of the space. In a split second we see whether there are trees, cars, lamp-posts, traffic signs and so on. In the case of an establishing shot, we do not register all the details, since the number of details is indeterminate. If we suppose that this is a shot from a classical movie, we are not expected to be interested in the landscape itself, but we will wonder about the action that is probably coming up. Taking this narrative pressure in cinema into account, I have examined to what extent films can contain non-narrative elements. To that end, I have introduced the concept of ‘filmic excess’: formal features can be so dominant that narrative content may become irrelevant. This particular lesson, I would suggest, might be fruitfully extended to other media. Let us imagine the scene in a literary text where a character travels across a landscape. It is possible to assume that the description of the landscape is embedded in the flow of the fabula. The character takes time to observe the surroundings. Hence, the description occurs through his or her focalization. However, we might equally assume that the description becomes so elaborate and precise that the whole fragment seems dissociated from the character’s perception and turns into an extensive exposition of the landscape. We might even get the idea that the character moves across that space so that the narrator can dwell on the beauty of the landscape. The timeline of the story is then only the occasion to indulge descriptive purposes—or in other words, narrative content is made subservient to formal ends. In this regard, the concept of ‘excess’ that I have examined in relation to cinema, may be usefully applied to the medium of literature as well. The notion of ‘excess’, I conclude, warrants further investigation, for ‘excess’ is not only crucial in film narratology, but may also shed light on the thin line between narration and description in literature. Works Cited Bal, Mieke. 1991. Reading ‘Rembrandt’. Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bal, Mieke. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bonitzer, Pascal. 1989. “The Disappearance (On Antonioni)”. In: Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink (eds.). L’Avventura. Michelangelo Antonioni, Director. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, p. 215-218. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen.

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Chatman, Seymour. 1980. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)”. In: Critical Inquiry 7, p. 121-140 Crafton, Don. 1995. “Pie and Chase. Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy”. In: Karnick/Jenkins 1995, p. 106-119. Cubitt, Sean. 2004. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: MIT Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 1995 [1973]. “Tales of Sound and Fury. Observations on the Family Melodrama”. In: Barry Keith Grant (ed.). Film Genre. Reader II. Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 350-380. Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.). 1997 [1990]. Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative. London: BFI. Gaudreault, André. 1997 [1984]. “Film, Narrative, Narration. The Cinema of the Lumière Brothers”. In: Elsaesser 1997, p. 68-75. Gunning, Tom 1994 [1991]. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film. The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gunning, Tom 1995. “Response to ‘Pie and Chase’”. In: Karnick/Jenkins 1995, p. 120-122. Harries, Dan (ed.). 2004 [2002]. The New Media Book. London: BFI. Karnick, Kristine Brunovska and Henry Jenkins (eds.). 1995. Classical Hollywood Comedy. New York: Routledge. Kinder, Marsha. 2004. “Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games”. In: Harries 2004, p. 119-132. Lunenfeld, Peter. 2004. “The Myths of Interactive Cinema”. In: Harries 2004, p. 145-154. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stewart, Garrett. 2007. Framed Time. Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, Kristin. 1986 [1977]. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess”. In: Philip Rosen (ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 130-142. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001 [1992]. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.

SILKE HORSTKOTTE (Leipzig)

Seeing or Speaking: Visual Narratology and Focalization, Literature to Film

1. Film, Narrative, Focalization Ever since Seymour Chatman proposed to analyze film with the help of narratological concepts (Chatman 1978),1 narratology has become a widespread method of film analysis (see, e. g., Andringa et al. 2001; Bordwell 1985; Branigan 1984; Chatman 1990; Lothe 2000; Nadel 2005). Chatman’s main contribution to the field of film narratology remains his concept of the “cinematic narrator,” which he defined as a non-human agent, “the composite of a large and complex variety of communicating devices” (Chatman 1990: 134). These include auditory (sound, voice, music) as well as visual channels, for instance lighting, mise-en-scène, camera distance, angle and movement, and editing (rhythm, cut etc). Chatman thereby contradicted David Bordwell’s earlier contention that film has narration but no narrator, and that notions of film narration are the construction of a spectator, not a narrator (Bordwell 1985). Referring to the opposition between fabula (story) and syuzhet (discourse) in Russian Formalism, Bordwell had defined film narration as “the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula” (Bordwell 1985: 53). Bordwell allowed for the possibility of an intradiegetic, voice-over (VO) narrator, whether homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, but excluded the possibility of an extradiegetic film narrator.2 However, it has been repeatedly pointed out that Bordwell’s conception of film narration as a message with a perceiver but without any sender (Bordwell 1985: 62) is a logical impossibility: as Chatman

1 2

Following earlier suggestions from film theory to describe film as a ‘cinematic narrative’; see e. g. Metz (1974). A comparable argument is raised by Celestino Deleyto, who also seeks to restrict cinematic narration to explicit on-screen narration through voice-over or intertitles (Deleyto 1991: 164).

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argues, surely “something gets ‘sent’”, and this sending presupposes a sender of some kind (Chatman 1990: 127).3 It seems sensible to assume that film possesses narrative qualities, and that these narrative qualities must have an originating agency on the side of film, hence, a film narrator. Leaving aside Chatman’s claim (contentious, in my view) that cinematic as well as literary narrators are put in place by implied authors (Chatman 1990: 132-133), I would tend to agree that film narrative presupposes the existence of a narrator and that this cinematic narrator is the transmitting agent of narrative, not its creator (Chatman 1990: 132). I would, however, furthermore posit that the presence of this cinematic narrator has to be inferred by the spectator to a much greater degree than is the case in literary narrative, and that film narration thus emerges out of an interaction between a film and its viewers. While a significant amount of research has been done on cinematic narrators, less attention has been paid to the possibility of a cinematic focalizer.4 This is surprising because focalization, through its basis in the notion of perspective, is closely associated with matters of vision. It would therefore seem a much more promising starting point for film narratology than narration, a concept originating with linguistic codes. In fact, focalization has been proposed as a concept bridging textuality and visuality (Bal 1997; 1999), and has been tentatively used as a tool for analyzing visual artifacts (Bal 1999; Yacobi 2002) as well as ones that combine the visual and the verbal (Horstkotte 2005). However, since Gérard Genette first proposed the concept (Genette 1980), focalization has remained one of the most problematic, and hotly discussed, areas of narrative theory. Although Genette initially favored the term for its abstractness and for avoiding the optical connotations inherent in the French “vision” and “champ” (see Genette 1972: 206), roughly corresponding to English “point of view,” he later highlighted the intrinsically visual dimension of focalization by distinguishing between “who speaks” (narration) and “who sees” (focalization) (Genette 1980: 186). In his still later Narrative Discourse Revisited, however, Genette again downplayed the term’s optical associations by suggesting that the question “who sees?” should be reformulated as “who perceives?” to include other sense perceptions (Genette 1988: 64). While some narratologists, particularly Mieke Bal, continue to stress the visual aspects of focalization, which make the concept “the obvious place to begin easing in some elements of a ‘visual narratology’” (Bal 1997: 161), others have argued that focalization’s connection to seeing is merely metonymical or metaphorical (Jahn 1996: 243).

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A similar point had already been made by Albert Laffey (1964): the succession of images in a film must, considered logically, have an originating agent beyond the screen (see esp. pp. 81f). See, however, Deleyto (1991).

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The term ‘focalization,’ then, may have shifted problems of narrative analysis rather than solved them, and similar problems beset Franz K. Stanzel’s concept of figural narrative (Stanzel 1984), which theorizes the consistent use of a reflector character as a distinctive narrative situation separate from first-person and “authorial” narrative. Stanzel’s holistic conception of narrative situations mixes notions of seeing, experiencing and passing judgment with the narrative act itself, from which Genette’s term of focalization was meant to be clearly distinguished. Apart from the duly noted inconsistencies of Stanzel’s system (Cohn 1981), this may point to unresolved problems concerning the distinction between narrator and focalizer, problems which also determine the ongoing discussion as to whether focalization is always linked to an anthropomorphized focalizing character (Bal 1997) or not (Genette 1980, 1988).5 To sum up, the different terms focalization, perspective, figural narrative and so forth, which continue to circulate in narrative theory, clearly indicate that there are widely divergent ideas of what constitutes what I broadly term focalization in this article. Despite their provenance from the optical domain, the concepts of focalization and point of view cover aspects of cognition and emotion as well as of perception; and they are insufficiently differentiated from narration. Not surprisingly, a survey of recent contributions to the field (Bal 1997; Herman 2002; Jahn 1996; Miller 2005; Nünning 2001; Phelan 2001; Rimmon-Kenan 2002; van Peer/Chatman 2001) reveals disagreements, blurred boundaries, and even fundamental uncertainties about what the term does—and does not—encompass. Similar inconsistencies were also noted by Monika Fludernik, who concluded that “[the] extensive debate on focalization has really demonstrated that the category is an interpretative one and not exclusively a textual category.” (Fludernik 1996: 345) This article will consider the potential, as well as the shortcomings, inherent in a ‘traveling concept’ of focalization through a study of two cases of intermedial translation, namely by comparing the literary and film versions of Robert Walser’s Institute Benjamenta (Jakob von Gunten, 1909; film: Brothers Quay, 1995) and Franz Kafka’s The Castle (Das Schloß, 1926; film: Michael Haneke, 1997), two novels which make intense and systematic use of fixed internal focalization. I believe that a parallel reading (or viewing) of the films can be productive for two reasons. Firstly, the original literary narratives differ in one important point: Institute Benjamenta is a first-person narrative in diary style; The Castle is told by a heterodiegetic narrator and consistently uses the protagonist, K., as a focal character or fixed internal focalizer. This enables me to contrast a heterodiegetic narration, which is comparatively easy to distinguish from internal focalization, with a homodiegetic narration, in 5

The debate is summed up by Jahn (1996: 245).

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which the distinction between narrator and focalizer is much less clear-cut. It will then, secondly, be interesting to see how the two film adaptations translate this distinction (or lack of distinction) into a filmic narrative and film focalization. 2. Kafka’s The Castle: Ironic Distance between Narration and Focalization Franz Kafka’s third and last novel The Castle, written in 1922 and published posthumously by Kafka’s close friend Max Brod in 1926, exemplifies that combination of heterodiegetic narration with fixed internal focalization which Franz Stanzel termed the “figural narrative situation” (Stanzel 1984). As early as 1952, the Kafka scholar Friedrich Beißner referred to this form of focalization as an “einsinniges Erzählen,” or narration from a single fixed perspective (reprinted in Beißner 1983). Apart from the fact that Beißner’s term unnecessarily confuses the positions of the impersonal narrator and the character-focalizer K., it bears noting that K.’s focalization is not as consistent as Beißner assumed but contains a number of breaks and oddities, especially at the beginning of the novel (see Müller 2008: 523; Sheppard 1977: 406). It is significant for the later development of the narrative that Kafka wrote two unfinished drafts of the novel’s beginning, employing different narratorial positions, before finally coming up with a narrative situation which enabled him to continue beyond the novel’s initial scenes (see Jahr-aus 2006: 397-402). The first of these fragmentary beginnings, the so-called “Fürstenzimmer” fragment, uses a heterodiegetic narrator who tells of the arrival of an unnamed “guest” at a country inn. This fragment already contains the thematic kernel of the later novel plot, because the guest talks about a “fight” in which he needs to engage (Jahraus 2006: 398). In the novel, K. frequently imagines his relation to the castle in terms of a fight. The “Fürstenzimmer” fragment, however, breaks off before this theme can be further explored. Kafka’s second false start already contains the first two sentences of The Castle, but employs a homodiegetic narrator, inasmuch as the protagonist K. here serves as a first-person narrator. This narrative situation continues until the narrator-protagonist engages in amorous relations with Frieda in the third chapter. At that point, the narrative abruptly reverts from a first-person to a third-person perspective, as in the earlier fragment. Kafka then writes a third beginning for his novel, this time employing a covert, heterodiegetic narrator. That third start finally develops into the fragmentary novel published in 1926 by Max Brod.

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I would suggest that a crucial factor in Kafka’s decision to use an impersonal, covert or heterodiegetic narrator was the possibility of linking this type of narration with a specific form of fixed internal focalization that is endemic in modernist writing and is characterized by the frequent use of free indirect discourse (FID), reported speech, and reported thought.6 Franz Stanzel’s concept of “figural narrative” suggests, in fact, that these two aspects— narration through a covert, impersonal, heterodiegetic narrator and fixed internal focalization tied to the consciousness of the central character—are mutually interdependent and together constitute a standard narrative situation. However, I will show that although the narration in The Castle presupposes a fixed internal focalization, this does not mean that the positions of narrator and focalizer are always congruent with each other. On the contrary, the protagonist-focalizer’s perception and interpretation of events is frequently at odds with the same events’ presentation in the narrative; indeed, the ironic distance between narrator and focalizer is a driving motor of the narrative. K.’s focalization is closely linked to visual activity, especially in the early chapters of The Castle, where the protagonist’s gaze remains directed at the silhouette of the castle, whereas the later chapters focus on his attempts to gain insight into the inner workings of the castle bureaucracy. The very first sentences of the novel draw attention to the protagonist-focalizer’s gaze: “There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it […]. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness.” (Kafka 1998: 1)7 Curiously, the sentence suggests that although K. looks, time of day and weather conditions prevent him from actually perceiving anything. The assertion that there is, in fact, a castle on the mountain therefore has to be the narrator’s, not K.’s, meaning that the initial statement is not internally focalized.8 In fact, K. is later surprised to hear that a castle perches above the village at all. We are, then, from the beginning of the novel confronted with conflicting statements about what is and what is not, what can and cannot be seen, setting up an ironic distance between narrator and focalizer. 6

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Dorrit Cohn similarly speculates that the implausible near-effacement of the narrating self in Kafka’s second attempt motivated the shift towards third-person narration (Cohn 1978: 169171). Gérard Genette, on the other hand, remains unconvinced that “a rewriting of […] The Castle into the first person would be such a catastrophe” (Genette 1988: 112). “Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehn, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn […]. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führt und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor.” (Kafka 1994: 9) Klaus-Detlef Müller (2007) offers a different interpretation: he argues that although the first sentence could be “authorial”, the consistent narration “from K.’s perspective” suggests that K. misses something (the castle) which he had expected (Müller 2007: 105). This is a circular, and therefore unconvincing, argument: if the very first sentence suggests zero focalization, then internal focalization cannot be consistent.

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The disparity between what the narrator asserts could be seen and what the focalizer actually perceives raises the question what, if anything, the narrator can be said to see. The perceptual capacities of narrators are a hotly contested narratological problem, with Seymour Chatman denying that the narrator can see anything and asserting that he “is a reporter, not an ‘observer’ of the story world in the sense of literally witnessing it” and that narrating, therefore, “is not an act of perception but of presentation or representation” (Chatman 1990: 142). At least as far as the beginning of The Castle is concerned, however, the distinction between reporting something that is at least potentially visible and actually seeing it does not appear highly useful. Whether we call the narrator’s activity perception or presentation, he (I will stick with the male pronoun for convention’s sake) suggests to the reader a visual impression of the castle that can then be compared with the visual impression (or lack thereof) that we receive through the focal character, K. Rather than drawing an absolute distinction between the focalizer’s visual perception and the narrator’s reporting of visual phenomena, I would like to refer to Manfred Jahn’s proposal to distinguish between different “windows of focalization” in the house of fiction (1996), which allows for distinctive forms of visual perception specific to both the narrator and the focalizer and therefore enables me to talk about the narrator’s visual perception. Jahn’s main point is that although narrators can, in principle, “see,” their perception has a different ontological status from (while being at least partly reliant on) that of the character-focalizer(s): What the narrators actually see is determined by a number of factors: the shape of the window […], the view afforded by it […], the ‘instrument’ used […], but above all, the viewer’s ‘consciousness’ and its construction of reality. It is for this reason that narrators see things differently even when they are ostensibly watching the ‘same show’ […]. Before this backdrop enters a special story-internal character […] who sees the story events not, like the narrator, from a window ‘perched aloft’, but from within the human scene itself. Wholly unaware of both his/her own intradiegetic status and the part s/he plays in the extradiegetic universe comprising narrator and narratee, the reflector’s consciousness nonetheless mirrors the world for these higher-level agents and thus metaphorically functions as a window him- or herself. (Jahn 1996: 252)

In the opening passage of The Castle, however, we find the narrator reporting on a potential visual perception that is not—indeed, that cannot be— mirrored for him by the reflector. The first sentences of The Castle are therefore at odds with the ensuing fixed internal focalization. While the narrator’s assurance of the castle’s actual existence—which K. cannot see in the darkness—as well as the objective geographical detail of the bridge “that leads […] to the village” (Kafka 1998: 1) seem to suggest a zero focalization (the narrator knows more than the characters), the following paragraphs make increasing use of internal focalization, culminating in the use of FID two

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pages later when we witness K. observing the village inn: “So there was even a telephone in this village inn? They were certainly well equipped.” (3)9 As the novel progresses, K.’s thoughts and perceptions—sometimes rendered in the form of indirect thought re-presentation, sometimes through the use of FID—circle increasingly around the unknown castle and its employees, which K. supposes to be engaging in a fight with himself. After an initial telephone conversation confirms K.’s claim that he has been appointed as a surveyor to the castle, he considers his position in the following terms: K. listened intently. So the Castle had appointed him land surveyor. On the one hand, this was unfavorable, for it showed that the Castle had all necessary information about him, had assessed the opposing forces, and was taking up the struggle with a smile. On the other hand, it was favorable […]. (5)10

As K.’s position is confirmed by the castle, the initial zero focalization is replaced with an almost consistently fixed internal focalization, which is only interrupted by the direct speech of other characters and by Olga’s longer intradiegetic narration about her sister Amalia. It is as if in order to be able to function as a focalizer, K. has to receive proof of his status and personhood from the castle. Apart from the first paragraph, no uncontroversial narratorial reference to the castle exists in the novel; the castle is always seen from K.’s perspective, or else is subject to interpretation by K. or through the direct speech of other characters. That the second description of the castle is already based on K.’s perception—that it is internally focalized—is made obvious by the verb “seemed” (“schien”), as well as by the use of deictics (“here”/“hier”) relative to K.’s viewing position, thus establishing K. as the “deictic center” of focalization (see Jahn 1996: 256). Now he saw the Castle above, sharply outlined in the clear air and made even sharper by the snow, which traced each shape and lay everywhere in a thin layer. Besides, there seemed to be a great deal less snow up on the hill than here in the village […]. Here the snow rose to the cottage windows only to weigh down on the low roofs, whereas on the hill everything soared up, free and light, or at least seemed to from here. (Kafka 1998: 7)11 9 10

11

“Wie, auch ein Telephon war in diesem Dorfwirtshaus? Man war vorzüglich eingerichtet.” (Kafka 1994: 11) “K. horchte auf. Das Schloß hatte ihn also zum Landvermesser ernannt. Das war einerseits ungünstig für ihn, denn es zeigte, daß man im Schloß alles Nötige über ihn wußte, die Kräfteverhältnisse abgewogen hatte und den Kampf lächelnd aufnahm. Es war aber andererseits auch günstig […].” (Kafka 1994: 13) “Nun sah er oben das Schloß deutlich umrissen in der klaren Luft und noch verdeutlicht durch den alle Formen nachbildenden, in dünner Schicht überall liegenden Schnee. Übrigens schien oben auf dem Berg viel weniger Schnee zu sein als hier im Dorf […]. Hier reichte der Schnee bis zu den Fenstern der Hütten und lastete gleich wieder auf dem niedrigen Dach, aber oben auf dem Berg ragte alles frei und leicht empor, wenigstens schien es so von hier aus.” (Kafka 1994: 16)

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Given the consistency of focalization, however, it is not surprising that it develops in scope as the novel progresses; for while the initial chapters revolve around the visual perception of the castle, K. later becomes increasingly preoccupied not with what is actually seen, but with speculation about the unknown inner workings of the castle and its presumed perception of himself. However, K.’s interpretations do not always adequately represent the fictional world, a fact that can be gleaned from the readings he gives to a number of letters he receives from the castle.12 Since the narrator quotes these missives in their entirety, the reader can easily compare the letters themselves with K.’s interpretation of them. For example, the first letter which K. receives from the hands of the messenger Barnabas confirms that he has been accepted into castle service, although it does not specify what that service is. It then assigns K. to the “village chairman” (23; “Dorfvorsteher”, 33) as his immediate superior, and asks him to convey messages to the castle exclusively through Barnabas. K. interprets this rather vague message as offering him a choice between two options: being a subordinate “village worker” (24; “Dorfarbeiter”, 34) who is connected to the castle in appearance only, or else being a village worker in appearance only, but in reality entirely determined by the messages delivered by Barnabas. K. then decides in favor of the second possibility, even though the letter had named no such alternative (see Alt 2005: 598). In view of this and of other highly fanciful interpretations of the castle’s messages and actions, the reader is led to strongly doubt K.’s impression that while he is watching the castle, the castle is actively watching back, thereby confirming his standing on equal terms. K.’s character focalization in the latter parts of the novel, then, does not constitute a perception of what is, but a model-building of what might be or can be inferred from what is, corresponding to Manfred Jahn’s concept of “imaginary perception” (Jahn 1996: 263). This has two possible consequences. On the one hand, K. emerges as a highly unreliable focalizer and quite a shady character to boot—we cannot even be sure that he is, indeed, a surveyor at all. Since the decision to reproduce the castle letters verbatim is the narrator’s, the contrast between the quoted letters and K.’s interpretation suggests that the narrator aims to show us how unreliable K.’s focalization is. On the other hand, as Peter-André Alt has pointed out, K.’s focalization also has the opposite effect: the castle is constituted less as a real place with clearly delineated contours than as a distanced focusing point for K.’s gaze, whose main effect is to unsettle the statements that the narrator makes about reality (Alt 2005: 592). Although the narrative situation is based on a combination of the narratorial and focalizing positions, an ironic distance is thus created between the two. Bearing in mind the different ontological status of 12

Michael Müller (2008: 524) raises a similar argument.

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the heterodiegetic narrator, however, it would appear that the ultimate irony is the narrator’s, at the expense of the focalizer’s credibility. 3. Cinematic and VO Narration in Michael Haneke’s Das Schloss How can the combination of narration and focalization in Kafka’s novel be translated into the medium of film? Before addressing that question, we first need to identify what forms, if any, focalization can generally take in a feature film. Summarizing Edward Branigan’s theory of subjectivity in film (1984), Andringa et al. (2001) suggest four techniques through which focalization may operate in film: (1) through so-called point of view (POV) shots, which show the focal character perceiving or thinking something; (2) through lighting and music; (3) through image sequences interrupting the film action to represent a character’s thoughts; (4) or by means of a voice over (VO). Voice over, however, has also been identified as an aspect of film narration—indeed, Andringa et al. identify the VO in the film they analyze as an overt level 2 narrator, as opposed to the covert cinematic level 1 narrator (see Andringa et al. 2001: 136, table 8.1).13 Seymour Chatman similarly distinguishes between a “showing” narrator—the cinematic narrator—and a second-order “telling” (VO) narrator who “may be one component of the total showing, one of the cinematic narrator’s devices” (Chatman 1990: 134). At the same time, however, Chatman also names VO as a possible element of focalization (“filter,” in Chatman’s terminology), which may be effected on screen “through eyeline match, shot-countershot, the 180-degree rule, voiceoff or voice-over [or] plot logic” (157). If the same techniques can be constructed as either narration or focalization, it seems that the two are even more difficult to tell apart in film than in literature and that any differentiation between them is almost entirely a result of the viewer’s interpretation.14 Nevertheless, I will try to offer some insight into the differences between film narration and focalization through a reading of well-known Austrian film director Michael Haneke’s adaptation of The Castle. The film script faithfully reproduces Kafka’s chapter division, although the scenes themselves are often shortened so as to concentrate on the (perceived) essence of a chapter. Scenes are frequently separated by cut to black, giving the film a fragmentary and jerky appearance and subverting the sort of identificatory and illusionistic viewing attitude promoted by mainstream Hollywood cinema. A further disillusionment is effected by the film’s setting. While Kafka’s novel was set in a claustrophobic universe bearing little or no 13 14

On VO narration, see also Kozloff (1988). Deleyto draws the more radical conclusion that “focalisation and narration … exist at the same level, and simultaneously in film” (1991: 165).

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relation to any specific time and place, the film set suggests a setting close to the present, and in an Alpine region. Props, interior furnishings and characters’ clothes seem to derive from the 1970s, but their used and dated look suggests a later time, probably the 1990s when the film was made. On the side of sound, we find repeated allusions to Alpine folk music, both canned (from a radio at the inn) and live (peasants playing dance music in the inn). And while most of the actors speak little to no dialect, a number of minor characters such as Pepi (played by Birgit Linauer), Momus (Paulus Manker) and the village chairman (Nikolaus Paryla) exhibit traces of Austrian intonation, and Hans Brunswick (Conradin Blum) of Swiss dialect. However, these hints remain vague and are of a generically Alpine rather than a specifically regional nature. In the film, as in the novel, no precise location can be assigned to the village and castle, and this also serves to reflects K’s uncertain social status and underdetermined identity (Alt 2005: 594). Rather than suggesting a precise time and location, the film’s setting creates allusions to a specific theater aesthetic that is associated with the wellknown Swiss director Christoph Marthaler and with stage designer Anna Viebrock, with whom Marthaler frequently cooperates (for example in Die Stunde Null oder die Kunst des Servierens, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, 1995; Kasimir und Karoline, also Deutsches Schauspielhaus, 1996). Characteristic for this aesthetic is the use of dated interiors, of Alpine folk music, and of grotesque acting. These elements unite to create an effect of spectatorial distance and disillusionment in the tradition of Brechtian epic drama. Haneke, too, introduces many grotesque and slapstick effects especially through the comical and childish nature of the two “assistants” (“Gehilfen”). The actors’ clothing, with the men’s long johns and Frieda’s wrinkled stockings, is used to great comical effect in the film’s frequent dressing and undressing scenes, which also serve to show off the actors’ pale and distinctly unfit-looking physiques. Another source of humor can be found in the frequent close-ups focusing on the actors’ highly expressive mimicry. This concerns especially the assistants (played by Frank Giering and Felix Eitner), Frieda (Susanne Lothar) or Barnabas (André Eisermann), whereas lead actor Ulrich Mühe, who had already worked with Haneke in two earlier films (Benny’s Video and Funny Games), plays K. with a markedly deadpan facial expression that adds to the character’s enigmatic nature. Finally, the frequent repetition of scenes showing K. walking, stumbling or running through the snow-covered village emphasizes the cyclical nature of Kafka’s tale while also adding to the slapstick effect of the film. Together, all of these aspects—mise en scène, setting, lighting, sound— constitute the cinematic narration. However, the film also employs a secondlevel, overt VO narrator. The VO, spoken by Udo Samel, begins with the novel’s first sentence and recurs throughout the film, faithfully quoting the

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narrative usually one or two sentences at a time. Indirect speech and representation of thought in the novel are sometimes translated into dialogue in the film, but on the whole, the film is very faithful to the novel’s original text, with Kafka’s language creating an estranging effect when combined with the semi-contemporary visual setting. VO narration usually bridges passages with little or no dialogue. Sometimes, however, VO also overlays spoken dialogue and in one central scene entirely disrupts the cinematic narration. This concerns K.’s first love scene with Frieda on the floor of the “Bridge Inn” (“Brückenhof”), which is rendered exclusively in VO narration with almost no visual support—what is shown is not the couple making love, but only a still image of Klamm’s illuminated window (one of the castle bureaucrats residing at the inn). Like the fragmentary novel, the film ends abruptly. In fact, Michael Haneke was probably drawn to this fragmentary novel because of his own “fragmentary aesthetics” (Metelmann 2003: 35). However, the visual composition closes with a repetition of K. walking through the snow that is at odds with the VO narration describing a scene in one of the villagers’ houses. Indeed, film scholar Jörg Metelmann points out that the “obvious and clearly audible separation of sound and image” is frequently used in Haneke’s “aesthetics of deviation” as a “means of criticizing the characters and their actions” (2003: 154-156, my translation). In this and other aspects Haneke is closely influenced by Brecht (Metelmann 2003: 156), a heritage which also accounts for his visual similarities to Marthaler and Viebrock. Haneke’s explicit refusal to psychologically motivate his characters’ actions, which derives from Brecht’s concept of epic theater (Metelmann 2003: 159), could also account for his lack of attention to the focalizing FID passages in Kafka’s novel. The film’s VO narration mostly concerns those passages of the novel that are not focalized (zero focalization, the narrator knows more than the characters). Sometimes, the VO refers to K.’s auditory impressions, but rarely to his visual perception. The novel’s many instances of FID, especially the passages interpreting letters that are so central to the relation between narration and focalization, are left out entirely. The film’s use of VO, then, is not concerned with focalization, but with narration, and the other possible techniques for rendering focalization described by Branigan and Andringa et al.—POV shot, sound and lighting, and the insertion of image sequences rendering thought—are also left unexploited. Ulrich Mühe’s deadpan acting does not allow for the mimicking of point of view; the film’s sound and lighting function as part of a Brechtian aesthetic which creates the furthest possible distance between the audience and characters; no image sequences occur. An alternative possible source of focalization is the focus on K. created by the systematic use of shot/countershot between K. and his visual

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field. This may suggest some limited degree of internal focalization; surprisingly, however, the castle is never shown in the film and its description is not quoted in the VO narration. Focalization as a means of psychological insight is thus switched off, and the psychologically or psychoanalytically motivated conflict between K. and the castle is diminished. The limited use of internal focalization is restricted to rendering literal point of view, and a small portion of K.’s view at that, with the looming castle cut out completely. 4. Robert Walser’s Institute Benjamenta: Feigned Narration and the Reality of Dreams Where Kafka’s Castle combined an impersonal, covert, heterodiegetic narrator with a fixed internal focalization, Robert Walser’s Institute Benjamenta, written thirteen years earlier, is relayed by an overt homodiegetic narrator, the novel’s eponymous protagonist who is supposed to have written this novel in diary style. No independent focalization can be detected in the novel. This raises the thorny problem of whether narrators can (theoretically, narratologically) be focalizers. Answers to this question that have so far been suggested range from Patrick O’Neill’s claim that “the narrator is always a focalizer, having no choice whether to focalize or not […] only how to do so” (O’Neill 1994: 90), through James Phelan’s more moderate assertion that “narrators can be focalizers” (Phelan 2001), to Seymour Chatman’s and Gerald Prince’s vehement denial: “the narrator—even an intradiegetic and homodiegetic one […]—is never a focalizer” because “s/he is never part of the diegesis she presents […] s/he is an element of discourse and not story […] whereas focalization is an element of the latter” (Prince 2001: 46; see Chatman 1990: 144-145). However, while the distinction between narration and focalization is sound in theory, my analysis will show that it is not always easy to uphold in an analysis. Narrator and focalizer are messily intertwined especially in intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrative (as indeed Prince’s own assertion above suggests). For instance, Prince’s absolute distinction between story and discourse fails to take into account the specifics of retrospective narrative, in which the same character can function as a character in the story (in the past), and as the narrator, i. e. producer of discourse, in the present. This means that a narrator (in the present) may rely on his own focalization (in the past) (see Phelan 2001: 53). In fact, Seymour Chatman points out that “[the] homodiegetic or first-person narrator did see the events and objects at an earlier moment in the story, but his recountal is after the fact and thus a matter of memory, not of perception” (1990: 144-145). In retrospective homodiegetic narrative, therefore, narrator and focalizer, while functionally

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distinct, coincide in the same person. The same may, however, also be true of non-retrospective homodiegetic narrative, for example in introspective diary writing, where the writer may rely on his or her own focalization at a time close to, or sometimes coinciding with, the time of writing. Phelan concludes that a human narrator “cannot report a coherent sequence of events without also revealing his or her perception of those events” (2001: 57); I shall take this assertion as a starting point for my discussion of focalization and narration in Institute Benjamenta. A second point to bear in mind when we turn to Walser’s novel in diary format is James Phelan’s reminder that treating narrators as potential focalizers enables us to think about an important aspect of narration, namely “the self-consciousness of the narrator” (ibid.: 52). Clearly, the presentation of self-consciousness is central to diary writing, and I will therefore attempt to clarify the different aspects of narration and of focalization involved in it. The extremely rudimentary plot of Institute Benjamenta can be summarized in few words. The novel is set in Benjamenta’s Boys’ School, a school for aspiring domestics in which nothing is taught, where the teachers sleep as if petrified all day and the students waste whole days smoking in bed. Almost the only activity at the school is the pupils’ constant spying on each other and on their teachers; occasionally the protagonist takes strolls through the unnamed modern metropolis where the novel is set (presumably Berlin), a city that overwhelms the spectator with its manifold impressions. A position as a servant, for which the school is supposed to prepare Jakob and which Mr Benjamenta repeatedly promises him, never materializes. When Miss Benjamenta, the school principal’s sister, dies, all the pupils are suddenly given positions; only Jakob remains behind as a traveling companion for Mr Benjamenta. Like K. in The Castle, Jakob is a non-entity, possessed by a need to completely efface himself. As Rochelle Tobias explains, Walser’s protagonists are generally “incapable of forming attachments or returning the affection directed at them since they have no defining traits save that they mirror the characters they meet” (Tobias 2006: 293). The enigmatic setting in Benjamenta’s school thus mirrors the impenetrable character of the protagonistnarrator. As a result, Jakob’s diary focuses less on Jakob’s own personal development than on his relationships with other characters: on his interactions with the Institute’s reclusive director, which has distinctly homoerotic undertones (e. g. Walser 1995: 87f./Walser 1985: 105), his budding love affair with the director’s sister, Lisa (ibid.: 99f./120), and his relations with Kraus, the institute’s model student who serves not only as Jakob’s antithesis or antagonist in his love affair with Lisa Benjamenta, but also as a kind of doppelganger (see Grenz 1974: 141-142; Greven 1978: 173; Tobias 2006: 299).

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The almost complete lack of plot is compensated by Jakob’s rich inner life, which produces dreams and fantasies that are increasingly disconnected from reality. Jakob often likens his surroundings to fairytales or biblical stories. Some of these comparisons are simple fantasies of wish fulfillment, such as his extended and repeated reflections on what he would do if he were rich: “I would like to be rich, to ride in coaches and squander money.” (Walser 1995: 5)15 Besides their obvious motivation as wish fulfillment, however, Jakob’s fantasies about being rich (see also Walser 1995: 61-63 / Walser 1985: 75-77), or about being a war lord in the year 1400 (Walser 1995: 108-110), also serve the function of creating an alternative reality to the boredom and frustration that characterize student life at the Institute. In contrast to the wealth fantasies, which are usually narrated in the subjunctive, the warlord story—although initially designated “imaginings” (90)—is rendered in the indicative, and it is interesting to dwell a little on the function of focalization in this extended fantasy. Jakob’s impressions of the dealings he has with his generals are rich in detail and frequently refer to sense perceptions, which makes the reader temporarily forget the different ontological status of these descriptions from those relating to his fellow students. While the beginning and end of the passage foreground Jakob in his narratorial role—with comments on the unreal status of his imaginations—the central part of the sequence, therefore, highlights his role as a focalizer, and one with a highly imaginative and speculative perception of his surroundings. To be sure, Jakob is still the agent relating these fantasies and impressions. But if we treat focalization as an interpretative rather than a textual category, there are good reasons why we should experience Jakob more as a focalizer and less as a narrator, and these have to do with his complete lack of agency in his own fate. Not only does he consistently confuse dream and reality, he also lacks insight and understanding of his own inner life, thereby becoming “a mystery to myself” (5). The most extended of Jakob’s dream sequences, and the one where dream and reality most intermix, is the night scene in the darkened classroom (81-85/97-103), in which he experiences being led by Miss Benjamenta through “the vaults of poverty and deprivation” (83; “Gänge des NotLeidens und der furchtbaren Entbehrung”, 100) into the inner chambers of the Institute, where the Benjamenta siblings reside and which only Kraus has previously been allowed to penetrate. In contrast to Jakob’s impressions of the metropolis and to his fantasies about being rich, this sequence is also rendered in the indicative. However, Jakob stresses at the beginning that the experience was “incomprehensible” and a “myster[y]” (81) and later sees it dissolving into a “gluey and most unpleasant river of doubt” (85). After the 15

“Ich möchte gern reich sein, in Droschken fahren und Gelder verschwenden.” (Walser 1985: 7)

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girl has disappeared, Jakob concludes that she was “the enchantress who had conjured up all these visions and states” (ibid.). Afterwards, he expresses regret over having given in to “wanton pleasures of easefulness” (ibid.; “lüsterne Bequemlichkeit”, 103), belatedly suggesting that the dreamlike sequence may have been motivated by sexual desire for Miss Benjamenta. As Rochelle Tobias correctly remarks, “[each] room is the translation of an allegorical figure; each represents a particular phrase or mood as a physical environment” (Tobias 2006: 302), and this suggests that the rooms materialize Jakob’s feelings and emotions. Alternatively, however, the inner chambers could equally be manifesting the Fräulein’s words, as Tobias also suggests when she says: “Throughout the episode, the phrases that Fräulein Benjamenta utters appear as diverse settings.” (Tobias 2006: 303) Because of its dream logic, the passage lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretations focusing either on Jakob’s attachment to the Benjamentas or on the use of birth metaphors (see Tobias 2006: 304). In this and other passages, Jakob functions as a narrator insofar as he is the transmitting agent of the narrative, but since what he transmits is almost exclusively concerned with dreams and fantasies, it would appear difficult if not impossible to separate the two acts of narrating and focalizing. Indeed, different aspects of narration and focalization constantly blend into one another, with Jakob expressing doubts about what sort of perception he is describing: Is he reporting on the state of affairs in the Institute Benjamenta, for instance, or are these rather memories from the prep school he attended in his home town? It is, moreover, not at all clear whether Jakob is here reporting an earlier perception, or whether the styling of sense impressions as dreams and fairytales does not occur in the act of composing his diary, in which case it would belong to the order of narration. We might, then, turn once again to Manfred Jahn’s suggestion that there are different “windows of focalization” in the house of fiction and describe Jakob’s role as that of a narratorial (rather than reflector-mode) focalizer (Jahn 1996: 256-7). Or we could employ James Phelan’s (2001) terminology and describe Institute Benjamenta as a combination of two types of narration: narrator’s focalization and voice, and character’s focalization and narrator’s voice (with ‘character’ referring to Jakob-as-experiencer, and ‘narrator’ to Jakob the diary-writer). Phelan’s proposal has the advantage of enabling us to differentiate between Jakob as a character and Jakob as a diary writer. As Manfred Jahn has pointed out, Genette’s question “who speaks?” inadequately captures the narratorial function because it buries the narratologically relevant distinction between speaker and writer (and thinker, in interior monologue) (Jahn 1996: 246). Jakob, of course, poses as a diary writer; the novel’s subtitle designates it as a diary, and Jakob’s narration relies heavily on irony and word play, thereby calling attention to the diary’s composition (Tobias 2006: 299).

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However, a number of discrepancies raise suspicions that the book cannot really be a diary, and have led to the novel’s interpretation as a feigned diary (Gößling 1992: 170-179; Tobias 2006: 301-302). Among these are the intricate structure with its repetition of leitmotifs and intertextual allusions to Grimm’s fairytales and to biblical stories, and the fact that the diarist explicitly addresses such compositional aspects, for example when he writes “Once again I must go back to the very beginning, to the first day.” (24; “Ich muß noch einmal ganz zum Anfang zurückkehren”, 29). Furthermore, the diarist seems to possess an overview over the unfolding of the story, including events occurring later in the book, as when he writes “I shall have much to say about Kraus.” (20; “Von Kraus werde ich sehr viel reden müssen”, 25). Finally, these two statements suggest that Jakob is directing his diary writing at an addressee other than himself—that he imagines, in other words, a reader for his journal. Indeed, he frequently addresses a reader and speculates how that reader will respond to his writing: “I must now report a matter which will perhaps raise a few doubts.” (43; “Ich muß jetzt etwas berichten, was vielleicht einigen Zweifel erregt”, 53), or he even uses direct forms of address: “I’m gabbling somewhat again, aren’t I?” (87; “Ich schwatze wieder ein wenig, nicht wahr?”, 105). In light of these metaleptic deviations from the fiction of diary writing, Rochelle Tobias has proposed reading the novel as a double fiction “in which the diary of a student is enclosed within the diary of another person bearing the same name as him” (Tobias 2006: 301). Tobias posits that this makes Jakob simultaneously a homo- and a heterodiegetic narrator—a logical impossibility, because the two are ontologically incompatible positions. If the diary is feigned, however, then why should we assume that it contains a reliable narration? It makes much more sense to assume an unreliable homodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator who fantasizes about attending a school for domestics and produces a fake diary about these fantasies. In this interpretation, there would be no character called Jakob, only a narrator who produces a hypothetical narrative including a narratorial focalization of these hypothetical events and their hypothetical perception.16—But how can such a mind-bogglingly complex interweaving of narration and focalization ever be translated into a feature film, and how have the film-makers interpreted the novel’s juggling of dream and reality?

16

I use “hypothetical narration” in analogy to David Herman’s proposal of a “hypothetical focalization” (Herman 2002: 303).

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5. Focalization and Visual Distortion in Institute Benjamenta or This Dream People Call Human Life A novel without a plot, narrated by a protagonist with no defining personality, would in any case seem an odd choice for a film adaptation, but especially for a first feature film. However, the twin directors of Institute Benjamenta or This Dream People Call Human Life, the brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay, are known for their avant-garde films which consistently and systematically subvert normal viewing conventions. Indeed, the Quays seem to have been drawn to the novel’s anti-narrative aspects, for the film focuses on the dreaminess and ephemerality of Jakob’s sense impressions and on his relationships with other characters inside Benjamenta’s school, while the many scenes where Jakob leaves the Institute and describes his impressions of busy life in the modern metropolis are left out altogether. Without the realistic elements of urban life to balance it off, the school interior merges seamlessly into a surreal or fantastic space. This fantastic interpretation of the novel is supported through an anachronistic film aesthetic referring back to the expressionist films of the 1920s, with the choice of black and white, the exaggerated and pathos-laden gestures of the actors and the hints at interand subtitles evoking the silent film of the 1910s and 20s. The film also integrates elements from puppet and shadow theater and from animation film. Through its recurrent use of self-reflective techniques and its highly unusual aesthetic, which is far removed from audience expectations gleaned from realistic Hollywood movies, Institute Benjamenta self-consciously foregrounds the presence of a cinematic narrator. How, then, is Jakob’s dreamlike focalization conveyed in the film, and how does it relate to the cinematic narrator? The first thing the spectator notices is that the fairytale world, which Jakob experienced mainly in the metropolitan street life in the novel and which was often characterized as unreal through the use of “as if” and subjunctive clauses, now enters the school and is visualized as the intrusion of a Grimm’s fairytale forest into the house. The reality status of this intrusion is much less certain than in the novel, where it is clearly marked as fantasy or metaphor. Is the novel’s use of focalization—Jakob’s subjective perception—translated, then, into narration (of a fictive reality)? I think not: the fairytale forest retains a recognizable fantastic dimension. So it remains open to interpretation whether the fairytale actually enters the house or whether this is a result of Jakob’s distorted perception. For Jakob is either alone in these scenes, so that his vision cannot be challenged by other characters, or else he is together with Lisa Benjamenta, the object of his desire. But his impressions are never intersubjectively confirmed by other students. It is

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therefore impossible to ascertain whether the setting is supposed to be realistic or whether it constitutes a visualization of Jakob’s thoughts and fantasies—what Seymour Chatman has referred to as a “mindscreen” effect (1990: 159). Thus, the mise-en-scène of those scenes where Jakob is alone in front of the camera could constitute an effect of focalization. The disorientation created by the film’s enigmatic visual setting and use of chiaroscuro effects is heightened through visual distortions created by filming through a goldfish glass or through uneven window panes. The film’s foregrounding of setting, décor and props, with great attention to the marginal, combines with an improvisational style that owes more to a sense of musical rhythm than to the chronological unfolding of narrative. The brothers Quay explain: We demand that the decors act as poetic vessels […] . As for what is called the scenario: at most we have only a limited musical sense of its trajectory, and we tend to be permanently open to vast uncertainties, mistakes, disorientations as though lying in wait to trap the slightest fugitive “encounter.” (quoted in Buchan 1998: 7)

This lack of narrative embedding leaves the interpretation of the film’s visual style open to the viewer. As Suzanne Buchan writes in an article about the Quay brothers’ work: “Unencumbered by narrative, the viewer can descend to various levels of bewilderment or enchantment.” (Buchan 1998: 4) Buchan has named several techniques which the brothers use in order to disturb the viewer’s experience of continuous space, especially the use of macro lenses “which provide virtually no depth of field” or their landmark “fast pan shift” or rapid camera movement within a continuous diegetic space, which results in a flicker effect suggestive of spatial fluidity (ibid.: 9). Moreover, their use of “retroactive cutting,” i. e. cutting from a close-up view to a more distant camera angle, reverses “expository conventions of narrative continuity editing” and therefore also serves to strengthen the films’ nonnarrative aspects and to disorient viewers’ expectations (ibid.). Where Walser’s novel played with the tension between the reality of metropolitan life and Jakob’s dreamlike perception of it, and opposed the familiar milieu of the modern metropolis with the strange setting inside Benjamenta’s school, the film systematically cuts any ties to the viewer’s reality and rigidly limits information about the strange, fantastic setting. This makes it very difficult for viewers to formulate expectations about what is going to happen and to make interpretative decisions about the status of what they are seeing. However, the viewer’s understanding is helped by the film’s fixed internal focalization through Jakob, whose perception of events remains a constant point of reference. Frequently, Jakob’s role as focalizer is indicated through POV shots which show him seeing something, often through the use of optical devices, through windows, keyholes and the like. This might

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lead us to conclude that other distorted views are also an effect of Jakob’s focalization rather than of (cinematic) narration. That Jakob functions as the film’s internal focalizer is also suggested by the film’s use of VO. As in Haneke’s adaptation of The Castle, the VO passages in Institute Benjamenta are verbatim quotations from the novel. Unlike the impersonal VO narration in Haneke’s film, however, the VO in Institute Benjamenta is clearly attributable to the central character, Jakob: although the words are spoken from the off, the camera circles around Jakob—an unusual form of POV shot which suggests that he is to be identified as the source of these words. However, the viewer does not at the same time see Jakob’s mouth speaking these words. This creates the impression that the VO expresses Jakob’s thoughts and is therefore an effect of focalization, whereas the VO’s source—the written diary in Walser’s novel—belongs, of course, to the order of narration. Institute Benjamenta, then, expresses focalization in a number of ways, including POV shot, VO, and the use of mindscreen sequences. However, what does and does not constitute focalization in this film is in effect an interpretative decision, as evidenced by the fact that the fairytale forest scenes which I have read as mindscreen sequences (and therefore as focalizations) have been interpreted as the depiction of a strange parallel world in the fantasy genre (and thus as narration) by most of the film’s reviewers. 6. Conclusion Various assumptions circulate around the possible relations between narration and focalization. By comparing two internally focalized literary narratives, I have shown that there is a fairly straightforward distinction between narration and focalization in heterodiegetic narrative, but that such a distinction is considerably more difficult to draw in homodiegetic narrative. Much of this difficulty rests on the fact that the distinction between the two agents is not a property of the text but constitutes an interpretation of the reader’s, with different texts leaving more or less scope for such interpretation. In Kafka’s Castle, I have identified strong and prominently placed clues that the narrator’s window of focalization (which includes a description of the castle) is distinct from that of the focal character, K. (who cannot see the castle and is later surprised to hear of its existence). From the beginning of the novel, then, readers are made aware of K.’s limited perspective; in later parts of the novel, the narrator’s verbatim quotation of the letters K. receives is not reconcilable with K.’s interpretation of these letters, suggesting that K. is to be regarded as an unreliable focalizer ironically presented by the narrator.

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Walser’s Institute Benjamenta leaves a considerably wider scope for interpreting the relation between narration and focalization, as evidenced by the divergent readings given by Walser scholars, which themselves depend considerably on the concept of focalization employed. My own interpretation of Jakob is that of an unreliable homodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator who fantasizes about attending a school for domestics and produces a fake diary about these fantasies. According to this reading, there is no character called Jakob, only a narrator who produces a hypothetical narrative including a narratorial focalization of a series of hypothetical events and their hypothetical perception. In both novels, character focalization (in Institute Benjamenta, hypothetical character focalization) is embedded in a higher-order, narratorial (window of) focalization, suggesting that focalizers cannot be narrative agents on a par with narrators, since focalization is always to some extent intermingled with, and dependent on, narration. In an article entitled “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation,” Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003: 215) have argued that narratology may serve as a heuristic for the interpretation of narrative texts if it is neutral with regard to the interpretative framework, i. e. if it is usable in conjunction with various approaches to interpretation.17 However, if narratological concepts such as focalization and narration do not objectively describe narrative texts, but are themselves always already interpretations, they cannot then provide a neutral basis for interpretation. This means that we have to account for the construction of narrative agents by real readers (rather than ideal or implied readers) much more closely than most narratological frameworks have done to date. One notable exception is the theory of psychonarratology proffered by Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon (2003: 2), who argue “that the forms of narrative discourse are only meaningful when understood in the context of their reception” and that the narrator, as well as other narrative agents, must be viewed as a reader construction (ibid.: 72). The interpretative nature of narratological concepts becomes even more obvious when employed in the context of film narrative, since narration as well as focalization has to be inferred by film spectators to a greater degree than by readers of literary narratives. Moreover, both concepts invariably undergo great changes when applied to film. Whereas the narrator serves as a source of spoken or written utterance—often, if not always, of an anthropomorphized nature—in literary narrative, no single, unified or self-identical source of utterance can be identified in film narrative. The concept of a “cinematic narrator” remains a highly abstract construction that can never coincide with any one character in the manner of homodiegetic literary nar17

See also Tom Kindt’s article in this volume.

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rative. The identification of a film focalizer is, if anything, even more speculative. The camera does not usually represent the visual perspective of a focal character but that of the cinematic narrator; nor does film easily lend itself to the representation of cognitive processes. So-called POV shots, which show a focal character thinking or perceiving something, may be understood as either narration or focalization. The use of VO, which has been suggested as another source of focalization, remains at best an auxiliary construction and one that can, again, be constructed either as narration or as focalization. Not only is the identification of narrative agents in film narratives an interpretative act, it also has far-ranging consequences for how the fictional world is interpreted. Thus, depending on whether we understand the POV shots in Institute Benjamenta as narration or focalization, the fairytale forest can be assigned two ontologically distinct interpretations, either as a real forest in a fantasy setting, or as Jakob’s subjective imagination within a more realistic setting. The application of narratological concepts to film thus remains somewhat speculative. Furthermore, it bears repeating that terms like ‘narration’ and ‘focalization’ describe distinctly different phenomena in film and in textual narrative. The great differences between literary and film narration and focalization suggest that narratological concepts are not neutral categories, but media-dependent; as Fotis Jannidis (2003: 50) has written, “narrative should always be treated as something anchored in a medium,” making ‘narratology’ “a collective term for a series of specialized narratologies and not a self-sufficient metascience of its own”. Works Cited Alt, Peter-André. 2005. Franz Kafka, der ewige Sohn. Eine Biographie. München: Beck. Andringa, Els; Petra van Horssen, Astrid Jacobs and Ed Tan. 2001. “Point of View and Viewer Empathy in Film”. In: Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 133-157. Bal, Mieke. 1997 [1985]. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bal, Mieke. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beißner, Friedrich. 1983. Der Erzähler Franz Kafka und andere Vorträge. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bortolussi, Marisa and Peter Dixon. 2003. Psychonarratology. Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Branigan, Edward. 1984. Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film. New York/Berlin: Mouton. (= Approaches to Semiotics 66) Buchan, Suzanne H. 1998. “The Quay Brothers. Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime”. In: Film Quarterly 51:3, p. 2-15.

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Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1981. “The Encirclement of Narrative. On Franz Stanzel’s Theorie des Erzählens”. In: Poetics Today 2:2, p. 157-182. Deleyto, Celestino. 1991. “Focalisation in Film Narrative”. In: Atlantis XIII (1-2), p. 159-177. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London/New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1972. Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Transl. by J. E. Lewin. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gößling, Andreas. 1992. Abendstern und Zauberstab. Studien und Interpretationen zu Robert Walsers ‘Der Gehülfe’ und ‘Jakob von Gunten’. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Grenz, Dagmar. 1974. Die Romane Robert Walsers. Weltbezug und Wirklichkeitsdarstellung. Munich: Fink. Greven, Jochen. 1978. “Figuren des Widerspruchs. Zeit und Kulturkritik im Werk Robert Walsers”. In: Katharina Kerr (ed.). Über Robert Walser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, p. 164193. Haneke, Michael (dir.). 1997. Das Schloss. Kino International Corp. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Horstkotte, Silke. 2005. “The Double Dynamics of Focalization in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn”. In: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.). Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality, Disciplinarity. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, p. 25-44. Jahn, Manfred. 1996. “Windows of Focalization. Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept”. In: Style 30:2, p. 241-267. Jahraus, Oliver. 2006. Kafka. Leben, Schreiben, Machtapparate. Stuttgart: Reclam. Jannidis, Fotis. 2003. “Narrative and Narratology”. In: Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.): What is Narratology? Berlin: de Gruyter, p. 35-54. Kafka, Franz. 1994 [1926]. Das Schloß. Roman, in der Fassung der Handschrift. In: Hans-Gerd Koch (ed.). Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden. Nach der Kritischen Ausgabe. Vol. 4. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch. Kafka, Franz. 1998. The Castle. Transl. by Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. Kindt Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003. “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation”. In: T. K. and H.-H. M. (eds.): What is Narratology? Berlin: de Gruyter, p. 205-219. Kozloff, Sarah. 1988. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-over Narration in American Fiction Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laffey, Albert. 1964 [1947]. “Le récit, le monde et le cinema”. In: A. L. Logique du cinema. Paris: Masson, p. 51-90. Lothe, Jakob. 2000. Narrative in Fiction and Film. An Introduction. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Metelmann, Jörg. 2003. Zur Kritik der Kino-Gewalt. Die Filme von Michael Haneke. Munich: Fink.

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Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. Hillis. 2005. “Henry James and ‘Focalization’ or Why James Loves Gyp”. In: James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 124-135. Müller, Klaus-Detlef. 2007. Franz Kafka: Romane (Klassiker-Lektüren, 9). Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Müller, Michael. 2008. “Das Schloß”. In: Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus (eds.). KafkaHandbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 518529. Nadel, Alan. 2005. “Second Nature, Cinematic Narrative, the Historical Subject, and ‘Russian Ark’”. In: James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 427-440. Nünning, Ansgar. 2001. “On the Perspective Structure of Narrative Texts. Steps toward a Constructivist Narratology”. In: Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 207-223. O’Neill, Patrick. 1994. Fictions of Discourse. Reading Narrative Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Phelan, James. 2001. “Why Narrators Can Be Focalizers—and Why it Matters”. In: Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 51-64. Prince, Gerald. 2001. “A Point of View on Point of View or Refocusing Focalization”. In: Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 43-50. Quay, Stephen and Timothy Quay (dirs.). 1995. Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life. Zeitgeist Films. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002 [1983]. Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. London/New York: Routledge. Sheppard, Richard. 1977. “The Trial/The Castle: Towards an Analytical Comparison”. In: Angel Flores (ed.). The Kafka Debate. New York: Gordian Press, p. 396-417. Stanzel, Franz K. 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Tobias, Rochelle. 2006. “The Double Fiction in Rober Walser’s Jakob von Gunten”. In: The German Quarterly 79:3, p. 293-307. van Peer, Willie and Seymour Chatman (eds.). 2001. New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press. Walser, Robert. 1985 [1909]. Jakob von Gunten. Ein Tagebuch. In: Jochen Greven (ed.). Robert Walser. Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben. Vol. 11. Zürich/Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Walser, Robert. 1995. Institute Benjamenta. Transl. by Christopher Middleton. London: Serpent’s Tail. Yacobi, Tamar. 2002. “Ekphrasis and Perspectival Structure”. In: Erik Hedling and Ulla Britta Lagerroth (eds.). Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, p. 189-202.

SANDRA HEINEN (Wuppertal)

The Role of Narratology in Narrative Research across the Disciplines

1. The Narrative Turn in the Humanities and the Social Sciences It has been repeatedly remarked that narrative research is no longer confined to literary studies but has gained great currency in many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, ranging from cultural and media studies to linguistics, to historical theory and historiography, to anthropology, philosophy, theology, psychology, pedagogy, political science, medicine, law and economics.1 The rising tide of narrative research is a direct consequence of an altered conception of narrative, which is no longer considered to be merely a literary genre, but instead raised to the status of “a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (Herman et al. 2005: ix), “a mode [which] is alive and active as a cultural force [and which] constitutes a major reservoir of the cultural baggage that enables us to make meaning out of a chaotic world and the incomprehensible events taking place in it” (Bal 2002: 10). If there “is nothing in narrative’s intrinsic form, nothing in its inherent structural or textual properties [...], that can be used to separate fictive from non-fictive stories”, but “it is, rather, the different functions they perform, manifested in their different claims about their connection to the world and the web of responses to these claims, that create the distinction” (Kreiswirth 2000: 314), then it seems only natural that the heightened attention paid to narrative in the different disciplines should result in a fruitful interdisciplinary exchange, in which narratology, which is concerned with ‘the way narrative works’—i. e. its defining constituents, the processes of its production and reception or its specific function—might play a pivotal role. And indeed, “narratology is increasingly appealed to as a master discipline” (Fludernik 2005: 47) and it is ascribed potential to allow for truly interdisciplinary research. Yet, this claim is only minimally reflected in the 1

See for example Kreiswirth (1995; 2000; 2005), Mishler (1995), Herman (1999b), Nünning/ Nünning (2002b: 8ff.), and Fludernik (2005a: 46ff.).

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practice of narrative research and the growing interest in narrative and storytelling across the disciplines has certainly not led to a convergence of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches. Since, as Mieke Bal (2002: 11) puts it, “[s]imply borrowing a loose term here and there [will] not do the trick of interdisciplinarity”, the assumptions about narrative research’s interdisciplinarity are challenged by disciplinary boundaries determining the research actually undertaken. Surveys of the various academic approaches to narrative beyond literature have already been proposed by Barry (1990), Mishler (1995), Kreiswirth (2005) and Hyvärinen (2006a). Unlike their classifications, which try to encompass the whole range of narrative research in the wake of the narrative turn,2 I will focus in my discussions primarily on those approaches which explicitly make use of theoretical concepts developed within narratology. The application of this criterion reduces the number of relevant approaches considerably, since, as Kreiswirth (2005: 381) remarks pointedly, “just as traditional narratology neglected the alethic potential of narrative, history, law or medicine’s attempt to scrutinise story qua story has, until very recently, neglected practically everything else.” The term ‘narratology’, it has to be added, is outside its academic field of origin applied to a variety of phenomena and is thus, not a reliable indicator of the actual nature of an approach. To give just a few examples of—from a literary narratologist’s perspective—obvious misnomers: Posner (1997a) defines “legal narratology” as the writing of didactic law fiction by professors of law. When Wood (2005) writes about “interventional narratology” he is simply making the case for physicians’ narrative reconstruction of their patients’ history of illness to account for their individual experiences. Schütt (2003) equates narratology and storytelling, which he defines as a managerial method which analyses existing ‘stories’ in an organization and then develops and circulates new, alternative stories containing a message the manager wants to convey. A definition of ‘narratology’, which would be accepted by everyone, does—particularly in the wake of narratology’s many expansions (see Herman 1999a; Nünning/Nünning 2002a; Meister 2005)—not even exist in literary studies. Most recently this has been demonstrated by the controversial contributions to a volume with the programmatic title What is Narratology? (Kindt/Müller 2003a): Whereas Kindt/Müller (2003b) and Meister (2003) favour a very restrictive use of the term narratology, Nünning (2003) suggests a differentiating, yet much broader conceptualization of different

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The title of Barry’s article—“Narratology’s Centrifugal Force”—is therefore misleading: he uses the term ‘narratology’ in a very broad sense denoting any form of literary narrative studies.

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forms of narratologies usually subsumed under the heading of postclassical narratology.3 In this broader understanding, postclassical narratology has itself developed into “an inherently interdisciplinary project” (Herman 1999b: 20) by turning to other disciplines in order to develop hypotheses about narrative which depart programmatically from narratology’s earlier focus on textual features. Particularly the findings from research on natural and non-literary story-telling are increasingly incorporated into narratology in order to refine or redefine its categories and assumptions. Prime examples are, of course, the approaches put forward among others by Manfred Jahn, David Herman and Monika Fludernik, often subsumed under the term ‘cognitive narratology’.4 As Fludernik (2005: 47) holds, the “cognitivist paradigm shift could thus [even] pave the way for a closer companionship of narratology with the empirical sciences”.5 A case in point is the study of Bortolussi and Dixon (2003: 35), which follows an empirical approach to the reception of narrative in order to “understand the psychological processing of narrative form” and amend for narratology’s “failure to make a clear distinction between the text and its formal description on one hand, and the reader and the reading process on the other.” (Ibid.: 31) Although the borders of the field of ‘narratology’ are, thus, highly contested and notoriously fuzzy, I will for pragmatic reasons in the following survey of narratology’s application to non-fictional texts across the disciplines apply the term ‘narratology’ to any kind of narrative theory which has noticeable roots in classical narratology6. This does not per se amount to an exclusion of the so-called postclassical narratologies, which, in one way or other, also refer back to classical narratology. The actual reception of literary narratology in non-literary disciplines, though, pays hardly any attention to the more recent developments of postclassical narratologies.

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See also Nünning’s chapter in this volume, which is a revised version of his earlier argument in Kindt and Müller’s volume. See, for example, Fludernik (1996), Jahn (1997), Herman (2002) and Herman (2003). See also Fludernik’s and Herman’s contributions to this volume. Fludernik’s contribution to this volume demonstrates what such a companionship might look like, when she combines methods of corpus linguistics with the broader framework of narratology. A similar approach is followed by Herman (2005). Classical Narratology is usually associated with the theories of Roland Barthes, Seymour Chatman, Jonathan Culler, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, Gerald Prince, Tzvetan Todorov or Claude Bremond—to name but the most prominent theorists.

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2. Interdisciplinary Applications of Narratology The attempts to apply narratological theory to non-literary narratives are—in the huge heap of narrative research—few and far between. My main interest is to outline what happens to narratology if it is imported into disciplines concerned with non-literary and non-fictional narratives. In my categorization I distinguish three different types, which differ first of all with regard to their chief research aim, i. e. with regard to their motivation to engage in a narratological analysis of their object of study. Not surprisingly, these three types of applied narratology mirror the existing types of narrative research in the broader sense.7 Not included into the proposed typology are explicitly intermedial approaches, because firstly these adaptations of narratology are discussed elsewhere in this volume8. Secondly, I think the difficulties which the development of e. g. a specific film narratology is facing are of a very different, much more specialised kind than those which the applications of narratology in the social sciences or law and medicine are trying to come to terms with. The inclusion of intermedial approaches would therefore have demanded a much more complex description than can possible be given here. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that a more comprehensive and detailed survey of the use of narratology across the disciplines would have to include intermedial narratologies as well. 2.1 Understanding the “Homo Narrans” The assumption that storytelling is an essential human activity necessary to make sense of the world and one’s life has proliferated research projects in many disciplines of the social sciences attempting to further the understanding of the narrative process.9 The objects of this branch of narrative research are mostly ‘natural’, i. e. spontaneous narratives elicited in interviews or con7

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It is obvious that the approaches’ conceptual interest is neither the only difference between them nor the only possible criterion for a typological arrangement. The decision to privilege one (pivotal) criterion was made for the sake of argumentational lucidity. Other characteristics of the different approaches will be pointed out in the course of the description. See the contributions by Lippert, Meelberg, Verstraten and Hallet in this volume. On intermedial narratology see also Ryan (2004; 2005), Wolf (2003; 2005), and Jannidis (2003: 50) who argues that “a media-independent concept of narrative is nothing more than a marginally useful hypostatized abstraction” and contests the idea of “narratology as a medium-independent metascience” (ibid.: 38). See for example Jerome Bruner’s influential research on the narrative mode of thought and his claim that “we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative” (Bruner 1991: 4).

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versations. The form and focus of the analysis depends as much on the specific research questions as on the researchers’ disciplinary background. Interpretations may be supported by quantifiable data or by exemplary analysis, but as a general tendency it can be held that methodological guidelines in the social sciences aspire to be more rigorously ‘scientific’ than those in the humanities. Sociolinguistic discourse analysis shall here serve as an example of the type of narrative research in the social sciences which contributes to a more detailed understanding of the way narrative works. In its analyses, the sociolinguistic approach naturally pays particular attention to the linguistic features to be found in storytelling, while literary narratology usually plays no significant role: [...] social scientists [and among them sociolinguists] look at the theoretical and terminological apparatus put forward by narratologists in disbelief and ask themselves: so what? How does that help us find out how narratives work in everyday life, what they mean to people, how people employ narrative and to what ends? (Mildorf 2008: 43)

Narratological tools are, thus, considered by most social scientists to be simply irrelevant for answering the questions they are concerned with. It is therefore not surprising that most attempts to apply narratological categories to a (socio-)linguistic analysis of natural narratives were made by scholars who have a background in both literary studies and (socio-)linguistics: David Herman, Monika Fludernik or Jarmila Mildorf. It seems that only through their first-hand knowledge of more than one discipline are they able to overcome the mutually existing prejudices. In some cases, an application of narratological concepts to natural narratives proceeds surprisingly smoothly, as in Mildorf (2006). In this study Mildorf analyses oral narratives of general practitioners who are talking about their professional experience with domestic violence. With her application of narratological concepts to the GP’s accounts Mildorf intends to achieve “a more systematic investigation into oral narratives of personal experience” (ibid.: 44) than would be possible by a more conventional sociolinguistic approach to the empirical material. And indeed, her exemplary analysis of focalization and the use of double deictic ‘you’ in the GP’s narratives is very convincing: Mildorf can demonstrate how focalization is used for dramatic purposes and confers authority on the narrator. A narrator’s frequent use of the second person singular is shown to have a double function which becomes evident once the narratological concept of the double deictic ‘you’ is drawn on. Through the use of the personal pronoun ‘you’—instead of ‘I’—, the story-teller can simultaneously distance himself from his own personal self on the level of the storyworld and “align the interviewer with his viewpoint through involvement and discursive inclusion on the level of the inter-

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view during which the narrative was told” (ibid.: 57). While the narratological concept imparts a special susceptibility to this double function of distancing and bonding, according to Mildorf (ibid.), “in a general content analysis ‘you’ would at best be recognised as generic ‘you’”. While these exemplary results suggest that the literary categories are unrestrictedly suitable for an analysis of non-literary narratives and that no compatibility problems ensue, Mildorf explores not only the possibilities but also “the limits of a cross-disciplinary narratology” in a more recent publication (Mildorf 2008: 280, my emphasis). While the possibilities of the crossdisciplinary application of narratological concepts lie above all in the opening up of a new perspective (in this case: the representation of the consciousness of another person) and in the provision of a methodological framework (the mixing of the narrator’s voice and a character’s perspective as well as the distinction between source, self and pivot in free indirect discourse), the ‘limits’ become apparent in the actual analysis. In oral narratives thought representation relies on other techniques than in literature, but the narrators do not forego the construction of other people’s interiority. Whereas the literary device of free indirect discourse is rarely to be found in natural narratives, constructed dialogues can serve a similar function: “Story-tellers use direct speech and/or thought in order to make the people they present in their narratives act out their ‘inner worlds’ to the recipient of their stories [...]” (ibid.: 297). Since narrators of natural narratives can thus represent other people’s consciousness without having to rationalise their insight, Mildorf suggests the “re-conceptualization of defining criteria such as fictionality and truth-commitment”, which are generally used to distinguish factual from fictional narratives, “in the direction of greater flexibility” (ibid.: 280). It is not entirely clear whether the term ‘cross-disciplinary narratology’ in Mildorf’s usage refers to a theory of narrative whose applicability is not restricted by disciplinary boundaries—or whether it refers in a somewhat narrower sense to the application of narratological concepts to non-literary story-telling. Her general argument suggests the latter since both her contributions fall into this category. In contrast, David Herman’s many studies in the field of narrative theory have come to stand for the former understanding of narratology. The fundamental interdisciplinarity of his approach can be illustrated with regard to an article, in which he argues like Mildorf in favour of the combination of narratology with sociolinguistics. But whereas Mildorf advances a transfer of literary concepts into the non-literary discipline, Herman (1999c) envisions a combination of the two scientific branches by outlining an innovative integrated approach, which he terms ‘socionarratology’. Socionarratology, then, is not a form of one-way interdisciplinarity, but a reciprocal exchange enriching both disciplines: not only is the sociolinguistic approach provided with additional criteria for a descrip-

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tion of oral narratives; narratological assumptions about narrative are also revised in the process. Herman’s analysis highlights the interactional aspects and context of narrating and, thus, describes narrative as a mode of social interaction. Where classical narratology restricts itself to the description of textual features, socionarratology takes up some of these ideas to investigate “the communicative function of stories in conversational and other discourse contexts” (ibid.: 222). Despite allowing for a reciprocal communication between the disciplines, socionarratology’s main target is to enhance the understanding of narrative and the narrating process independently of disciplinary interests. 2.2 Reaching Behind the Narrative This is entirely different for the second type of narrative research, in which a narrative approach is regarded as an “analytic or methodological instrument” (Kreiswirth 2000: 300) to investigate a phenomenon of disciplinary interest. Among the wide range of phenomena which have been investigated by this kind of narrative research are psychological and physical illnesses, aspects of social interaction, or, more generally speaking, motivations, intentions or experience. The advancement of this type of narrative research in social sciences such as psychology, sociology or political science is linked to “the demise of the positivist paradigm” (Lieblich et al. 1998: 1) in disciplines which tend to dissociate themselves from the humanities through their insistence on a scientific methodology. Within these disciplinary contexts, narrative research is programmatically conceptualised as an alternative to traditional quantitative methods, such as experiments, surveys or observations, which proponents of a narrative approach consider too rigid to capture the complexity of human experience. In contrast to quantitative methods narrative research usually focuses on the individual, considers the cultural context and “advocates pluralism, relativism, and subjectivity” (ibid.: 2). Yet, ‘narrative’ is rarely a theoretical concept, but “enters the discussion as an everyday term” (Hyvärinen 2006b: 26) and functions most often as a metaphor highlighting the constructive and subjective aspects of experience. The majority of narrative researchers therefore holds a constructivist position, claiming that real-life narratives don’t in any way mirror an existing internal or external reality; instead it is assumed that the storytellers “construct their narratives and retrospectively try to give sense to or make sense of actions and critical events” (Søderberg 2003: 30).10 10

The irony of the fact that the growing interest in subjectivity in the social sciences resulted in the adaptation of a literary concept which was “initially developed and theorized in terms of the scientific rhetoric of structuralist narratology” (Hyvärinen 2006a: 1) and defined with the inten-

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According to Hyvärinen (2006b: 32), the prevalence of the “essentially metaphoric approach to narrative has [...] radically narrowed the import of theoretical and methodological ideas from literary theory of narrative”.11 In consequence, narrative analysis in the social sciences is unlike literary narratology not concerned with the form of narratives, but with their content. If the form of natural narratives is considered, this happens mostly from a linguistic—not from a narratological—vantage point. Yet, there are some isolated attempts to apply narratological concepts as a methodology in the social sciences, one of which is to be found in Anne-Marie Søderberg’s (2003) research on international merging.12 It is a contribution to the scientific field of organizational studies which investigate the way people act within organizations. While quantitative methods have dominated organizational research for the most part of the 20th century, qualitative methods have become acceptable in the course of the cross-disciplinary narrative turn. Today, different forms of narrative analysis are regularly applied in businesses, while the analysis of stories circulating within an organization prevails. These narratives are usually collected through ethnographical observations—conducted for example by students ‘pretending’ to do an internment—or through narrative interviews, during which the members of the organization are explicitly asked to tell their story of the organization as a whole or of a specific event concerning the organization.13 Such an event is the takeover of a company by a foreign investor, as happened to the Danish telecommunications company investigated by Søderberg. Søderberg is mainly interested in the relationship between different perspectives on the process of organizational change. For her, a narrative approach is especially “well suited to give voice to a wide range of organiza-

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tion “to objectify or formalise research” (Andrews et al. 2000: 2), has been noted repeatedly. The simultaneous but opposing movements of literary studies towards objectivity on the one hand and of the social sciences towards subjectivity on the other has met interpretations ranging from the observation of an “integration of the sciences and the humanities” (ibid.) to the evaluation as an “interdisciplinary phantas[m]” not advancing approximation but rather “symptomiz[ing] each discipline’s secret interior wound” (Peters 2005: 448). A curious counter example is Czarniawska (1997), who uses the term ‘narrative’ mostly in a metaphorical sense, but nevertheless intends to structure her material by applying “interpretative devices borrowed from literary studies” (ibid.: 29) in order to focus “the form in which knowledge is cast” (ibid.: 6). In practice, her narrative interpretations are an eclectic application of literary terms lacking in precision, as when she describes organizational life as a drama, in which actors take over roles or when she elaborates on the theatricality of leadership requiring a successful performance and following a specified script. See also Gertsen/Søderberg (2000), which is an early version of this study. On psychology’s relationship to narratology see Bamberg (2005), Kraus (2005) and Weilnböck (2005). A discussion of the methods applied is an integral part of any empirical study. Usually a great stress is put on the avoidance of methods which might be seen as manipulating the interviewee. Weilnböck’s contribution to this volume might serve as an example of this standardized methodological discourse.

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tional actors” (ibid.: 5), including those usually marginalised by the dominant discourse. To capture the complex field of existing voices, Søderberg collected narratives of the acquisition process in interviews with different members of the company: the managing director, the shop steward, the human resource manager and the project manager of the research department. To account for the dynamics in identity construction processes she conducted interviews annually over a period of six years. Søderberg’s analysis of the narratives collected is highly regulated: Assuming that there is “no structural difference between literary fiction and organizational narratives” (ibid.: 12), she applies Greimas’ structuralist actantial model to each of the stories she collected. The actantial model claims that all stories follow the same pattern and Greimas distinguishes six basic functions, which are the basis of all narratives: These six functions, or actants, as Greimas calls them, occur in the form of three binary oppositions: There is the subject of a story and an object (the subject desires the object), there is a power (which can be a powerful person or an abstract like fate) and a receiver of the act of power. Finally there is a helper (someone or something supporting the subject’s quest) and an opponent (someone or something obstructing the subject’s quest). Søderberg analyses the stories elicited in the telecommunications company by identifying these six actants in each story. Or in other words: She looks at who or what is cast in each story as the subject, the power and the receiver, and especially what in each story is described as the goal to be achieved, what as an obstacle to this goal and what as a supporting factor. The systematic analysis shows that the situation in the organization is perceived quite differently from the different perspectives: Each interviewee constructs, depending on his or her position in the company, a different plot of the acquisition process. In the comparison between earlier and later narratives, the application of Greimas’ model proves to be equally productive: Changes occurring over time are systematically analyzed and thus the “dynamics of the […] individual employee’s sensemaking” convincingly captured (ibid.: 31). Søderberg uses the narratological approach as a tool to identify interpretations of a given situation, to give voice to individuals and to highlight the complexity and dynamics of perspectives held in the organization. What she investigates is not the process of meaning-making, but the resultant meanings, which can be accessed through the stories in which they are embedded. As Søderberg suggests, her research results can, then, be put to practical use: they could, for example, show the way to a dialogue between different stakeholders and provide instructive information for an organizations’ top management.

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Whereas Søderberg’s study is concerned with verbal texts, the concept of narrative has occasionally been extended from the telling of actions and events to actions and events themselves. In these cases human behaviour is considered to be meaningful only if it is conceptualized as part of a narrative structure.14 This assumption has entered interdisciplinary narrative research in various forms, one of which is the organization theorist Barbara Czarniawska’s proposal of an “organization research that conceptualizes organizational life as story making and organization theory as story reading” (Czarniawska 1997: 26). Daniel Robichaud’s analysis of a municipal administration process can serve an example of such an approach, which like Søderberg’s study makes use of Greimas’ actantial model. But unlike Søderberg, Robichaud employs it to analyse actions, in effect therefore he treats “actions of organizational actors as if they were texts” (Robichaud 2003: 39). His treatment of organizational actions as text is theoretically founded on the idea that in any given society there are so-called ‘institutions of meaning’, which provide a narrative context for our actions: “[T]he enactment of organizational actions [derives] its meaning from a larger institutional narrative framework, simultaneously inherited from the past and re-created in situ by the actors involved, who thus reproduce it.” (Ibid.: 44) Narratives can in this context be defined as the “central form of the institutionalized practices and scenes we construct and reproduce in the course of interacting, coordinating, and organizing” (ibid.: 38). The information which is necessary for a narrative analysis of organizational action is gathered by Robichaud through the observation of an organizational operation, in this case a municipal council’s consultation of the citizens. Greimas’ actantial model provides “the analytical language” (ibid.: 52) that allows Robichaud to stress the recursive element in organizational actions: Although the city officials are doing something never done before, they draw on a repertoire of “already institutionalized narratives of practices” (ibid.: 53) which are providing a frame for their actions and thus render them meaningful. What is narrative in Robichaud’s analysis, thus, are in contrast to his own claim not so much the actions of the organizational members as the underlying mental patterns guiding the actions. Given this result it is quite surprising that Robichaud does not mention cognitive sciences or cognitive narratology, since his idea of an ‘institutional narrative framework’ guiding the actions of people, seems to be very closely related to the concept of cog14

This understanding of narrative is famously verbalised in the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s much-quoted definition of man as “essentially a story-telling animal” (1981: 216). MacIntyre maintains that “enacted dramatic narrative is the basic and essential characterization of human actions” (ibid., my emphasis). With his theory MacIntyre objects to those narrativists who consider storytelling a second order activity which makes sense of the contingencies of life only in retrospect.

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nitive scripts, i. e. mental representations of standard action sequences, which facilitate a person’s orientation and acting even in unfamiliar situations. Although both Søderberg and Robichaud are acutely aware that they are exploring new research methodologies and although one of their goals is to demonstrate the potential of narratological analysis for organization studies, their investigations do not intend to shed light on the way narratives work, nor are they interested in contributing to narratological theory production as such. It is characteristic of this form of narratological application that concepts of classical narratology are chosen, whereas more current trends of the postclassical narratologies are rarely adopted. 2.3 Demythologizing ‘Factual’ Knowledge This can with equal validity be said about the third type of narratological research outside of literary departments. The research in this group also stresses the constructive aspect of narrative, but evaluates it quite differently. This has to do with the fact that the domains or disciplines turned to are considered to deny or suppress their narrative elements in order to strengthen their discursive authority. By bringing to light the discourses’ narrativity, the research of this third group questions their truth-claims and with it the discourses’ authority. Arguably, the most widely discussed critique of a discipline’s claim to represent reality occurred in the field of history writing: Hayden White’s metahistorical approach (1972; 1987) drew attention to the fact that historical writing can not maintain to provide a neutral account of the past in a transparent text.15 Instead the selection and arrangement of events is always steered by the interest of the scholar, who—according to White—falls back upon a set of existing narrative patterns to present his story of the past. White’s distinction between four tropes guiding the historian’s selection and four corresponding modes of emplotment determining the narrative structure of the historiographic text has “inspired a new and challenging research program focusing on the historical text as text” (Ankersmit 2005: 221).16 Because the emphasis on historiography’s narrativity often went hand in hand with the implication that historical narratives are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have 15

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Even if White is often considered the “most influential contemporary historical narrativist” (Ankersmit 2005: 220), he is of course not an isolated figure. As other important narrativists the philosophers Arthur C. Danto and Louis O. Mink have to be mentioned at least in passing. See also Canary and Kozicki (1978), and Ankersmit (1983). Among these are also several specifically narratological perspectives: See Barthes (1981 [1967]), Cohn (1990), Genette (1990), Jaeger (2002), Fulda (2005), Rüth (2005), and Julia Lippert’s contribution to this volume.

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more in common with their counterparts in literature than with those in the sciences” (White 1978: 82, emphasis original), many of these investigations have been concerned with uncovering historiography’s strategies of sensemaking. Historical narrativism in the wake of White thus puts a strong stress on the constructive (rather than reconstructive) aspects of historical narratives and its diction is often characterised by a gesture of revelation, which can already be found in Barthes (1981[1967]), who asks:17 Does the narration of past events, which, in our culture from the time of the Greeks onwards, has generally been subject to the sanction of historical ‘science’, bound to the unbending standard of the ‘real’, and justified by the principles of ‘rational’ exposition—does this form of narration really differ, in some specific trait, in some indubitably distinctive feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the epic, the novel, and the drama?

Barthes’ answer is, of course, that it doesn’t; that the discourse of history is “in its essence [...] an imaginary elaboration” (ibid.: 16), with ‘imaginary elaboration’ standing in contradiction to historiography’s proclaimed objectivity, its scientificity. Such rhetoric of disclosing narrative elements in a presumably objective discourse is characteristic of a number of studies on narrative in non-literary disciplines. Under scrutiny is mostly the disciplinary discourse, whose objectivity is questioned by the narrative analysis. Obviously such a form of narrative research is particularly precarious for discourses which depend on a general acceptance of their truth-claims to be able to fulfil their daily task—as is e. g. the case with law or medicine. Both legal and medical reasoning tend to present themselves as purely scientific, as neutral applications of established rules resulting in an objective judgement. In legal trials, though, the presence of narratives has been widely acknowledged: not only do lawyers, victims, defendants and witnesses tell stories trying to explain a crime—the verdicts of judges also depend on the plausible narrative (re)construction of a sequence of events:18 “After all here is a domain which adjudicates narratives of reality, and sends people to prison, even to execution, because of the well-formedness and force of a winning story.” (Brooks 2002: 2) Richard A. Posner, a former judge, who was mentioned earlier for his definition of the term ‘legal narratology’, is well aware of this. As he shows in his article on “Narrative and Narratology in Classroom and Courtroom”, he 17

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As a later example of this rhetoric see Munslow (1997: 2), who argues that “the genuine nature of history can be understood only when it is viewed not solely and simply as an objectivised empiricist enterprise, but as the creation and eventual imposition by historians of a particular narrative form on the past”. See the volume edited by Brooks and Gerwitz (1996), in which a broad range of narratives in the law are discussed. Most research on the role of narrative in the law refers to the AngloAmerican common law tradition, in which narratives play a particularly potent role, and does not consider the continental civil law tradition.

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also knows how to use basic narratological concepts to identify and describe narrative techniques with regard to the narrative situation, narrative speed, plot structure etc. Nevertheless he is not interested in analysing narratives in or of the law. On the contrary, he intends to ban narratives as far as possible from the courtroom, since they can manipulate the outcome of a process exactly because they are stories: because they suggest causality without proving it and because they appeal to their addressees on an emotional level, which makes them powerful and antirational at the same time. Narratives in the courtroom are considered therefore an imminent danger to “standards of historical accuracy” (Posner 1997b: 300). The presence of potentially manipulating narratives is particularly threatening in the case of jurisdiction, because it questions the very idea that it is possible to arrive at a just verdict: a just verdict requires an objective and absolute knowledge of the crime,—or to speak in literary terms: it requires and presupposes an authorial narrator, familiar with all outer and inner motivations and causalities. An authorial narrative situation can of course in reality—or the courtroom—not even be attained by adding up all existing first person narratives. Peter Brooks opposes Posner’s warning against narratives in the courtroom in maintaining that although narratives might be necessarily subjective or even manipulative and construct meaning, they are nevertheless “inevitable and irreplaceable” (Brooks 2005b: 6)—especially in the courtroom. Brooks claims, that if “narrative form were to be entirely banished from the jury’s consideration, there could be no more verdicts” (Brooks 2005a: 36). Because of the crucial position narratives have in trials, they should be thoroughly ‘denaturalised’ (Brooks 2005b: 53), so that the legal actors become conscious of what they are doing: Brooks considers narratology an ideal tool to analyze narrative perspectives, the construction of causality and narrative authority or modes of speech representation. Although Brooks himself mainly mentions concepts of classical narratology, he also stresses the potential importance of cognitive narratology: A legal narratology might be especially interested in questions of narrative transmission and transactions: that is, stories in the situation of their telling and listening, asking not only how these stories are constructed and told, but also how they are listened to, received, reacted to, how they ask to be acted upon and how they in fact become operative. What matters most, in the law, is how the ‘narratees’ or listeners—juries, judges—hear and construct the story. (Brooks 2005a: 424)

So far though, such an analysis of storytelling in the courtroom within a cognitive framework still remains to be undertaken, while a few isolated recourses to classical narratology—like Jackson’s (1998) application of Greimas’ actantial model to the legal process—exist.19 19

Jackson (1998) argues that legal reasoning is not scientific in the strict sense but makes use of narrative forms. Interestingly, he sees historiography and adjudication as parallel processes.

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Roughly the same observations can be made with regard to medical practice. Medicine’s self-representation as a science has been questioned repeatedly with reference to the narrative construction of meaning within the discipline. This has most vehemently been pointed out by Kathryn Montgomery Hunter (1993), who stresses that “medicine is not a science as science is commonly understood: an invariant and predictive account of the physical world” (ibid.: xviii). Instead “the knowledge possessed by clinicians is narratively constructed and transmitted” (ibid.: xvii). Hunter herself does not have recourse to narratological concepts in her book-length analysis of Doctors’ Stories in medical practice and medical education, but a few applications of narratological categories to medicine can be found for example in a volume edited by Charon and Montello (2002). In her contribution to this volume, Suzanne Poirier (2002) looks at voice and narrative levels in medical narratives and describes how the convention of reporting patient’s case histories erases all indications of the subjectivity and heteroglossia which in fact shape every medical narrative. This becomes particularly problematic from the ethical point of view taken up by all contributions to the volume: “As a narrative voice that strives for professional uniformity and objectivity by obscuring narrative levels and the diverse human input of those levels, the case presentation runs the risk of being a medically useful but ethically limited form.” (Ibid.: 52)20 Interestingly, most narratological analyses on narratives in law, medicine, history and other non-literary sciences with truth-claims are conducted by scholars with a background in literary studies: Hayden White, Peter Brooks, Suzanne Poirier, Rita Charon, Martha Montello, Tod Chambers and Kathryn Montgomery Hunter all have a formal education in the literary field. This raises not only questions about the prerequisites of interdisciplinary research projects (Is a dual education necessary?) but also suggests that the narrative research of this group might be placed in the broader context of disciplinary legitimation: This form of narrative research could be viewed as an attempt to undermine the authority of the empirical sciences and thus shift the balance of power between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ sciences in favour of the latter. 3. Narrative as a Key to More Interdisciplinarity? Summing up one can say that the application of narratological concepts in non-literary disciplines exists so far mainly in the form of isolated experiments. The research questions behind the projects are as diverse as within 20

In the same volume, Chambers and Montgomery (2002) underline the constructive aspect of narrative emplotment in medical narratives.

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the field of interdisciplinary narrative research as a whole: While the scholars of the first group are mainly interested in the mechanisms and functioning of narrative as such, the approaches of the second group consider narratology an analytic means to investigate the semantic constructions it produces. A special case in this group is Robichaud’s study of an organizational process because it extends the concept of narrative to interactions of real people. The third group regards narratives as potentially ‘dangerous’ if they are part of non-fictional discourses with truth-telling claims, because in these contexts narratives are considered to conceal their constructivist nature like myths sensu Barthes,—and like Barthes’ myths they have to be demythologized in the eyes of scholars like White, Brooks or Poirier. The majority of these experiments in interdisciplinary applications of narratology fall back on concepts developed in ‘classical’ narratology, while the potentiality of the postclassical approaches is at best hinted at. Here a partial exception has to be made for the research projects of the first group: because they understand themselves as contributions to the fields of sociolinguistics and narratology, they link up with current discussions in both fields, while all other projects turn to well established narratological concepts and apply them in isolation from any narratological debate. The interdisciplinary exchange remains therefore mostly an eclectic one-way importation. Nevertheless, the research projects do much more than just ‘borrow a loose term here and there’ and their endeavours as well as their results are promising. Unlike the many purely metaphorical applications of the term ‘narrative’ they indicate the potential a more reciprocal trading of concepts might have. Such a new interdisciplinarity would above all have to involve an agreement on how to deal with discipline-specific or even project-specific interpretations of theoretical concepts. From the narratological perspective, which has from the start been motivated by a desire to develop a universal language to describe narrative, it is sometimes hard to accept the “elastic” (Rimmon-Kenan 2006: 11) use of narratological concepts. But as Bender (1995: 32) points out, insisting on the “strict axiality, the semantic rigour, of terminology [...] to which narratology aspires” is likely to become an impediment in any form of cultural analysis. Yet, to avoid that terms like ‘narrative’ become “emptied of all semantic content”, Rimmon-Kenan (2006: 17) suggests a consensus at least on the basics. As sensible as this is in theory, as obvious become the difficulties of any de facto agreement in practice: the minimal definition of narrative suggested by Rimmon-Kenan (narrative agency and double temporality) would deny Robichaud’s project the status of being narrative research, because his narratives meet neither of the two criteria. A more liberal position is occupied by Mieke Bal (2002: 11) when she holds:

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Even those concepts that are tenuously established, suspended between questioning and certainty, hovering between ordinary word and theoretical tool, constitute the backbone of the interdisciplinary study of culture—primarily because of their potential intersubjectivity. Not because they mean the same thing for everyone, but because they don’t.

Differences in conceptualization are not necessarily obstacles to (interdisciplinary) communication, but can be motors for such a dialogue in the first place. In the long run, narratology will have to live up to the challenge posed, either by re-evaluating its self-image as a universal meta-science or by revising its theoretical frameworks to achieve a greater flexibility which allows the inclusion, rather than exclusion, of other forms of narrative research. Works Cited Andrews, Molly, Shelley Day Sclater, Corinne Squire and Amal Treacher (eds.). 2000. The Uses of Narrative. New Brunswick/London: Transaction. Ankersmit, Frank R. 1983. Narrative Logic. A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. The Hague: Mouton. Ankersmit, Frank R. 2005. “Historiography”. In: Herman et al. 2005, p. 217-221. Atkinson, Paul. 1997. “Narrative Turn or Blind Alley?” In: Qualitative Health Research, 7:3, p. 325-344. Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press. Bamberg, Michael. 2005. “Narrative Discourse and Identities”. In: Meister 2005, p. 213-237. Barry, Jackson G. 1990. “Narratology’s Centrifugal Force. A Literary Perspective on the Extensions of Narrative Theory”. In: Poetics Today 11:2, p. 295-307. Barthes, Roland. 1981 [1967]. “The Discourse of History”. In: Comparative Criticism 3, p. 7-20. Bender, John B. 1995. “Making the World Safe for Narratology. A Reply to Dorrit Cohn”. In: New Literary History 26:1, p. 29-33. Bortolussi, Marisa and Peter Dixon. 2003. Psychonarratology. Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Peter. 2002. “Narrativity of the Law”. In: Law and Literature 14:1, p. 1-10. Brooks, Peter. 2003. “‘Inevitable Discovery’—Law, Narrative, Retrospectivity”. In: Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 15, p. 71-102. Brooks, Peter. 2005a. “Narrative in and of the Law”. In: Phelan/Rabinowitz 2005, p. 415426. Brooks, Peter. 2005b. “Narrative Transactions—Does the Law Need a Narratology?” (http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/workshops/0405/pbrooks.pdf) Brooks, Peter and Paul Gewirtz (eds.). 1996. Law’s Stories. Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Bruner, J. S. 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality”. In: Critical Inquiry 18:1, p. 1-21. Canary, Robert H. and Henry Kozicki (eds.). 1978. The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Chambers, Tod and Kathryn Montgomery. 2002. “Plot. Framing Contingency and Choice in Bioethics”. In: Charon/Montello 2002, p. 77-84. Charon, Rita and Martha Montello (eds.). 2002. Stories Matter. The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. New York/London: Routledge. Cohn, Dorrit. 1990. “Signposts of Fictionality”. In: Poetics Today 11, p. 775-804. Czarniawska-Joerges, Barbara. 1997. Narrating the Organization. Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Czarniawska, Barbara and Pasquale Gagliardi (eds.). 2003. Narratives We Organize By. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 2005. “Histories of Narrative Theory (II). From Poststructuralism to the Present”. In: Phelan/Rabinowitz 2005, p. 36-59. Fulda, Daniel. 2005. “‘Selective’ History. Why and How ‘History’ Depends on Readerly Narrativization, with the Wehrmacht Exhibition as an Example”. In: Meister 2005, p. 173-194. Genette, Gérard. 1990. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative”. In: Poetics Today 11, p. 755774. Gertsen, Martine C. and Anne-Marie Søderberg. 2000. “Tales of Trial and Triumph. A Narratological Perspective on International Acquisition”. In: Cary Cooper and Alan Gregory (eds.). Advances in Mergers and Acquisitions, Vol. 1. London: Elsevier, p. 239-272. Herman, David (ed.). 1999a. Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Herman, David. 1999b. “Introduction. Narratologies”. In: Herman 1999a, p. 1-30. Herman, David. 1999c. “Towards a Socionarratology. New Ways of Analyzing NaturalLanguage Narratives”. In: Herman 1999a, p. 218-246. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David (ed.). 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Herman, David. 2005. “Quantitative Methods in Narratology. A Corpus-Based Study of Motion Events in Stories”. In: Meister 2005, p. 125-149. Herman, David; Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London/New York: Routledge. Hunter, Kathryn M. 1993. Doctor’s Stories. The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hyvärinen, Matti. 2006a. “An Introduction to Narrative Travels”. In: Hyvärinen et al. 2006, p. 3-9. Hyvärinen, Matti. 2006b. “Towards a Conceptual History of Narrative”. In: Hyvärinen et al. 2006, p. 20-41. Hyvärinen, Matti; Anu Korhonen and Juri Mykkänen (eds.). 2006. The Travelling Concept of Narrative. (= COLLeGIUM. Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1) Hyvärinen, Matti; Kai Mikkonen and Jarmila Mildorf (eds.). 2008. Narrative. Knowing, Living, Telling. Special Issue of Partial Answers 6:2. Jackson, Bernhard. 1998. Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence. Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications.

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Jaeger, Stephan. 2002. “Erzähltheorie und Geschichtswissenschaft”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 237-263. Jahn, Manfred. 1997. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives. Towards a Cognitive Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 18:4, p. 10-19. Jannidis, Fotis. 2003. “Narratology and the Narrative”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 35-54. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.). 2003a. What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2003b. “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 205-219. Kraus, Wolfgang. 2005. “The Eye of the Beholder. Narratology as Seen by Social Psychology”. In: Meister 2005, p. 265-288. Kreiswirth, Martin. 1995. “Tell Me a Story. The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences”. In: M. K. and Thomas Carmichael (eds.). The Human Sciences in the Age of Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 61-87. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2000. “Merely Telling Stories. Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences”. In: Poetics Today 21, p. 293-318. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2005. “Narrative Turn in the Humanities”. In: Herman et al. 2005, p. 377382. Lieblich, Amia; Rivka Tuval-Mashiach, Tamar Zilber. 1998. Narrative Research. Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation. Thousand Oaks: Sage. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press. Meister, Jan Christoph. 2003. “Narratology as Discipline. A Case for Conceptual Fundamentalism”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 55-71. Meister, Jan Christoph (ed.). 2005. Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality—Disciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter. Mildorf, Jarmila. 2006. “Sociolinguistic Implications of Narratology. Focalization and ‘Double Deixis’ in Conversational Storytelling”. In: Hyvärinen et al. 2006, p. 42-59. Mildorf, Jarmila. 2008. “Thought Presentation and Constructed Dialogue in Oral Stories. Limits and Possibilities of a Cross-Disciplinary Narratology”. In: Hyvärinen et al. 2008, p. 279-300. Mishler, Elliot G. 1995. “Models of Narrative Analysis. A Typology”. In: Journal of Narrative and Life History 5:2, p. 87-123. Munslow, Alun. 1997. Deconstructing History. London/New York: Routledge. Nünning, Ansgar. 2003. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term”. In: Kindt/Müller 2003a, p. 239-276. Nünning, Vera and Ansgar Nünning. 2002a. Erzähltheorie. Transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT. Nünning, Vera and Ansgar Nünning. 2002b. “Produktive Grenzüberschreitung. Transgenerische, intermediale und interdisziplinäre Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 1-22. Peters, Julie Stone. 2005. “Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real. On the Future of an Interdisciplinary Illusion”. In: PMLA 120:2, p. 442-453. Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz. 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Poirier, Suzanne. 2002. “Voice in the Medical Narrative”. In: Charon/Montello 2002, p. 4858. Posner, Richard A. 1997a. “Legal Narratology. Rez. Law’s Stories. Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law”. In: The University of Chicago Law Review 64:2, p. 737-747. Posner, Richard A. 1997b. “Narrative and Narratology in Classroom and Courtroom”. In: Philosophy and Literature 21:2, p. 292-305. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2006. “Concepts of Narrative”. In: Hyvärinen et al. 2006, p. 1019. Robichaud, Daniel. 2003. “Narrative Institutions We Organize By: The Case of Municipal Administration”. In: Czarniawska/Gagliardi 2003, p. 37-54. Rüth, Axel. 2005. Erzählte Geschichte. Narrative Strukturen in der französischen Annales-Geschichtsschreibung. Berlin: de Gruyter. Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.). 2004. Narrative Across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln. Ryan, Marie Laure. 2005. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology”. In: Meister 2005, p. 1-23. Schütt, Peter. 2003. “Story Telling. Von der schwierigen Kunst der Narratologie”. In: Wissensmanagement 2/2003, p. 14-17. Søderberg, Anne-Marie. 2003. “Sensegiving and Sensemaking in an Integration Process. A Narrative Approach to the Study of an International Acquisition”. In: Czarniawska/Gagliardi 2003, p. 3-35. Weilnböck, Harald. 2005. “Psychotrauma. Narration in the Media, and the Literary Public— and the Difficulties of Becoming Interdisciplinary”. In: Meister 2005, p. 239-264. White, Hayden. 1972. “The Structure of Historical Narrative”. In: Clio 1, p. 5-19. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wolf, Werner. 2003. “Narrative and Narrativity. A Narratological Reconceptualization and its Applicability to the Visual Arts”. In: Word & Image 19, p. 180-197. Wolf, Werner. 2005. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon. A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts”. In: Meister 2005, p. 83-107. Wood, James Hunter. 2005. “Interventional Narratology. Form and Function of the Narrative Medical Write-up”. In: Literature and Medicine 24:2, p. 283-296.

ASTRID ERLL (Wuppertal)

Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies

1. Introduction Arguably, the most fundamental scene of all narrative is oral storytelling.1 One major mode of such oral narration is storytelling as part of everyday conversation: children tell their parents what happened at school, grandparents tell their grandchildren what happened in the war. In many ways different from such everyday-life forms of conversational storytelling is a second important mode of oral narrative, that of the epic. From Homer’s Iliad, which, as Milman Parry (1971) has pointed out, is based on an ‘oral poetics’, to those manifold epic stories which were told in preliterate societies and have never found their way into the written medium—such stories are usually about a shared, mythical past, and often about battles and heroic deeds. With these examples two important links between narrative and memory are already uncovered. The first has to be located at the intersections of individual and sociocultural memory: It is about remembering a day at school or experience in a war and turning it into part of a personal autobiography by way of telling others about it.2 The second belongs to a cultural-collective, often national, level. Communities ritually renarrate events of a distant past, in order to represent shared values and shape cultural identities.3 This article is about such intersections of narrative and what has in a recent development in the humanities and social sciences come to be subsumed under the umbrella term ‘cultural memory’.4 It asks how narratology 1

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This has been argued in detail and convincingly by Monika Fludernik (1996: 12) who maintains that “oral narratives […] cognitively correlate with perceptual parameters of human experience and that these parameters remain in force even in more sophisticated written narratives”. In social psychology such forms are called ‘conversational remembering’ (see Tulving/Craik 2000). This is what cultural historians such as Pierre Nora (1996-98) or Jan Assmann (1992) are interested in. For the distinction made here see also section 3 of this article. In broad terms, cultural memory can be defined as the interplay of present and past in sociocultural contexts. For a more detailed analysis of the term ‘cultural memory’, see section 3 of this article.

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and cultural memory studies have profited from each other and may continue to do so in the future. In the following, I will consider the relation of memory and narrative, and the research being done on both phenomena, in three different perspectives. These will be called “Viewing Narratology through Memory” (section 2), “Viewing Cultural Memory through Narratology” (section 3) and “Re-viewing Narratology through Cultural Memory Studies” (section 4). Thus, proceeding from the role that concepts of memory already play in traditional structuralist and postclassical narratology, I will consider the relevance that narratology bears for the relatively new field of cultural memory studies before turning, finally, to the question of what the combination of these two theoretical approaches may yield for narratology, and what fields of further research might open up when using this double perspective on narrative phenomena in culture. 2. Viewing Narratology through Memory: Genette, Stanzel, and Beyond It would be the matter of a monograph in its own right to review the notions of memory that implicitly or explicitly pervade the classic texts of structuralist narratology. I will confine myself to two of the probably best-known contributions, Gérard Genette’s and Franz Stanzel’s works, in order to show how, even at the beginnings of classical narratology, concepts of narrative and memory were very closely linked, although the acknowledgement and systematic exploitation of this fact certainly seems to belong to what David Herman (1999) has termed the ‘postclassical narratologies’. In his Narrative Discourse (1980), Genette, interestingly and also quite tellingly, bases his new (and ‘neologistic’) taxonomy on what is arguably the greatest ‘novel of memory’ written in the twentieth century: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). Why should he have done so? Because acts of memory and narrative are in many ways closely linked, and it is in fictional representations of remembering that the manifold possibilities of narrative discourse best come to the fore. Storytelling is per definitionem an act of ‘memory’, in the broad sense proposed by Augustine, namely an act of connecting the temporal levels of past, present and future. Conversely, cognitive psychologists hold that acts of memory which belong to the episodic-autobiographical memory system (i. e. the memory of lived experience) can only be realized by way of storytelling.5 At the heart of both autobiographic memory and narrative, then, lies a 5

Cognitive psychologists differentiate between different systems of human memory. There are ‘explicit systems’, such as semantic and episodic memory, and ‘implicit systems’, such as procedural memory and priming (see Schacter 1996). Not all human memory is primarily organized

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process which Paul Ricœur describes as a ‘grasping together’ and ‘integrating’ “into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events” (Ricœur 1984: x).6 Going through Genette’s Narrative Discourse, it is striking how little in fact the author explicitly reflects upon the relation of memory and narrative. After two decades of sheer obsession with ‘all things memorial’ in the humanities, Genette’s work, read from today’s perspective, reveals a neglect of this aspect, at least on the surface, that seems quite improbable. And yet, tellingly enough, about half of this theoretical text is devoted to the issue of the representation of time. Viewed from a memory-studies perspective Genette’s very detailed introduction of the categories ‘order’, ‘duration’ and ‘frequency’ seems not accidental but dependent precisely on the choice of his major example. A la recherche du temps perdu is a ‘novel of and about memory’, a novel which is based on the narrator’s act of remembering and which minutely observes and problematizes the processes of memory, that is, the act of connecting different time levels. Not surprisingly then, Genette’s categories of narratological time analysis are also apt descriptions for major memory processes. Thus remembering is always an ‘anachronic process’. While reconstructing the past we never proceed chronologically but jump from here to there, creating ‘prolepses’ and ‘analepses’. Important events, and especially those which have a traumatic quality, tend to be remembered in a ‘repeating’ way. A different matter are the ‘general events’ of our autobiographic memory.7 An example would be the famous first sentence of Proust’s novel: “For a long time, I went to bed early”. Such general events are usually recalled in the form of a ‘summary’ or in an ‘iterative’ way. Readers consider novels like

6

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in a narrative way; there are different forms of cognitive organization, which may be based on the visual or the corporeal. Inherently narrative is only the episodic-autobiographic memory system. Episodic memory allows us to recall the personal incidents that uniquely define our lives (‘my first day at school’). Episodic memories are experienced as a ‘mental time travel’, a way of ‘reliving the past’ (Tulving 1983). Thus, the subjective experience connected with the episodic memory system is one of ‘remembering’, whereas we experience recall from the semantic memory system (which contains conceptual and factual knowledge, such as ‘the Earth is round’) as ‘knowing’. Narrativization turns episodic memories into autobiographic memory. Ricœur’s phenomenological approach to the relation of time and narrative is, of course, closely linked to notions of memory. But again, this connection functions more as an implicit horizon of reference than as something made explicit and productive by the author. In Ricœur’s works, ‘memory’ is (as so often) thought of mostly in opposition to ‘history’ (see the very title of Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, 2000). Psychologists differentiate between three levels of episodic-autobiographic remembering: lifetime periods, general events and event-specific knowledge. In literature, the representation of each of these levels is conventionally connected with specific narrative patterns (see Erll 2003: 165f.; 2004). General events “refer to periods of time measured in days, weeks, and possibly months, and represent knowledge of goal attainment and personal themes relating to specific sets of events or to extended events such as ‘Holiday in Italy,’ ‘Friday evenings with X, Y, and Z,’ ‘Working on project W,’ and so on” (Conway 1996: 297).

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Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu to be realistic because such literary narratives represent the past in a way that appears to conform to our own, ‘real life’ ways of remembering. My second example is Franz Stanzel’s Theory of Narrative (1984). Here we do find explicit mention of the issue of memory, in a short chapter called “Point of view and memory in the first-person narrative”. For Stanzel, a main difference between first-person narrative and authorial narrative lies in the “creative power of memory”: the narrator “evokes his story in an act of recollection” (Stanzel 1984: 216). In fact, not only Stanzel’s but all narratological taxonomies of first-person narration (or ‘homodiegetic’ or ‘diegetic’, if you will) operate, at least implicitly, with assumptions about acts of recollection. The classic example is the autodiegetic narrative, where the distinction between the ‘narrating I’ and the ‘narrated’ or ‘experiencing I’ (in German, ‘erzählendes Ich’ and ‘erlebendes Ich’) is actually a distinction between a ‘remembering I’ and a ‘remembered I’, between the act of memory and the content of memory. Literary first-person narrative is, therefore, a fiction of episodic remembering. It is the enactment of “mental time travel”, which is how the psychologist Endel Tulving (1983) defined episodic memory. The restrictions of the first-person narrator are the restrictions of the rememberer: you cannot remember what you yourself have not experienced, and what therefore is not part of your episodic memory system. Neither can you recall what you have not heard, read, or seen, and what therefore is not part of your semantic memory. Whenever a first-person narrator relates extensively what he or she has not experienced or known, narratologists tend to resort to other explanations: a transition to the authorial mode, an unreliable narrator etc. But leaving such gross transgressions of our real-world idea of the powers and restrictions of memory aside, we will, of course, very often find in literary first-person narrative more detailed descriptions and more exact dialogue than one would think a person would actually be able to remember. Franz Stanzel’s explanation for this phenomenon is that firstperson narrative is characterized by a mingling of “reproductive memory and productive imagination” (Stanzel 1984: 215). And Stanzel knows that this applies not only to literary narrative, but to all acts of narrative memory: “Remembering itself is a quasi-verbal process of silent narrating by which the story receives an aesthetic form, primarily as a result of the selection and structuring inherent in recollection” (ibid). It is precisely on such intersections of memory and narrative—firstly the mixture of ‘actual’ traces of the past with imagined elements, secondly the basic processes of selection and structuring, and thirdly the shaping and amplification of memory through the repertoire of narrative forms—that a ‘narratology of cultural memory’ focuses (see section 2 below).

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The move from classical to postclassical narratology can be described as a move from studies which are pervaded by implicit notions of memory to studies which explicitly draw on certain branches of memory theory in order to explain the production and reception of literary narrative. One notion of psychological memory studies has been particularly influential in this context: that of (narrative) schemata. This concept was popularized by the British psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett, in his seminal study Remembering (1932), in which he had his test subjects remember and repeat a strange story. Bartlett observed how culture-specific schemata shaped and altered the memory of this story. It was not until the 1990s, however, that a ‘cognitive narratology’ emerged in literary studies, which worked precisely with notions such as narrative schemata, scripts and frames (which had been further developed by cognitive sciences since the 1970s), thus heralding the ‘age of interdisciplinary narrative research’ (see Fludernik 1996; Jahn 1997; Herman 2003). Cognitive narratology currently belongs to the best known and defined branches of postclassical narratology; it promises not only to build on the work of classical narratology but at the same time to enrich structuralist categories with concepts that were unavailable at the time of Stanzel and Genette (see Herman 2007). The questions addressed by cognitive narratology are different: indeed most of them have to do with human memory in its biological dimension. Because a great deal of research is already being done in this particular field, I will confine myself in the following to a slightly different (albeit in fundamental ways connected) perspective on the relation of memory and narrative, that is, the cultural dimension. The next section will therefore address the question of what cultural or collective memory actually is, and how cultural memory studies can profit from narratological research. 3. Viewing Cultural Memory through Narratology: Narrative Modes of Remembering Cultural memory studies came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on mémoire collective (collective memory).8 In the course of the last two decades this area of research has witnessed a veritable boom in various countries and disciplines. As a consequence, the study of the relation of ‘culture’ and ‘memory’ has diversified 8

See Halbwachs (1925; 1950). Halbwachs introduced the term ‘collective memory’. Jeffrey Olick (1999) prefers to describe similar phenomena with the term ‘social memory’. I use the term ‘cultural memory’ in order to emphasize the fact that it is cultural formations which shape individual memories and which build ‘cultures of memory’, with their rituals and media constructing and representing a shared past. In the anglophone discussion as I see it right now the terms ‘collective’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ memory are more or less interchangeable, hinting above all at the disciplinary background of the respective researcher.

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into a broad range of approaches. Today, the complex issue of cultural memory is part of interdisciplinary and international research. There are concepts of cultural memory in cognitive and social psychology, in psychoanalysis and neurobiology, in history, literary and art studies, philosophy, theology, and in the social and political sciences. Moreover, cultural memory studies is a decidedly international field. Important concepts have been generated in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, the USA and the Netherlands.9 ‘Cultural’ or ‘collective’ memory is a multifarious notion. Practices, structures and media as diverse as myth, monuments, historiography, ritual, conversational remembering, configurations of cultural knowledge and neuronal networks are nowadays subsumed under this wide umbrella term. Because of its intricacy, collective memory has been a highly controversial issue ever since its very conception in Maurice Halbwachs’ studies. Just as his contemporary Marc Bloch (1925) accused Halbwachs of simply transferring concepts from individual psychology to the level of the collective, today’s scholars keep challenging the notion of collective memory. Given that ‘myth’, ‘tradition’ and ‘individual memory’ are well-established concepts, there is no need, they argue, for ‘collective memory’ as a further, and often misleading, addition to the existing repertoire of terms (see Gedi/Elam 1996). What they overlook, however, is that it is exactly this umbrella quality of the term ‘collective memory’ which helps us see the (sometimes functional, sometimes analogical, sometimes metaphorical) relations between such phenomena as, for example, ancient myths and the personal recollection of recent experience, and which, furthermore, enables disciplines as diverse as psychology, history, sociology, theology and literary studies to engage in a stimulating dialogue. It is important to note, however, that the notion of ‘cultural’ or ‘collective’ memory proceeds from an operative metaphor: The concept of ‘remembering’ (a cognitive process taking place in individual brains) is metaphorically transferred to the level of culture. In this metaphorical sense, scholars speak of a ‘nation’s memory’, a ‘culture’s memory’, or even of ‘literature’s memory’ (which, according to Renate Lachmann, 1997, is its intertextuality). Jeffrey Olick draws attention to this crucial distinction between two levels in cultural memory studies when he claims that there are in fact two aspects to collective memory: that of ‘collected memory’ and that of ‘collective memory’ in a narrower sense: [T]wo radically different concepts of culture are involved here, one that sees culture as a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds versus one that

9

For an overview of the state of the art in the field, see Erll (2005) and Erll/Nünning (2008). See also the new journal dedicated to the field, Memory Studies (since 2008).

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sees culture as patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society. (Olick 1999: 336)

The term ‘collected memory’ refers to biological memory. It draws attention to the fact that no memory is ever purely individual, but is always inherently (and not merely metaphorically—see section 3 below) shaped by collective contexts. From the people we live with and from the media we use, we gather (or ‘collect’) schemata which help us recall the past and encode new experience. Our memories are often triggered as well as shaped by external factors, ranging from conversation among friends to books and to places. In short, we remember in sociocultural contexts. It is especially within oral history and social psychology that collective memory is understood according to this first aspect of the term. The term ‘collective memory’ (in the narrower sense), on the other hand, refers to the symbolic order, the media, social institutions and practices by which social groups construct a shared past. ‘Memory’, here, is used metaphorically. Societies do not remember literally; but much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory, such as the selectivity and perspectivity inherent in the creation of versions of the past according to present knowledge and needs. In the fields of sociology and history much research has been done with regard to this second aspect of collective memory, the most influential concepts being Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s notion of kulturelles Gedächtnis. The two forms of collective memory can be distinguished from each other on an analytical level; however, they exert their power in cultures of memory only by interacting, through the interplay of the levels of the individual and the collective. There is no such thing as precultural individual memory; but neither is there a Collective Memory (with capital letters) which is detached from individuals, embodied only in media and institutions. Just as sociocultural contexts shape individual memories, a ‘memory’ which is represented by media and institutions must be actualized by individuals, by members of a community of remembrance, who may be conceived of as points de vue (Maurice Halbwachs) on shared notions of the past. Without such actualizations, monuments, rituals and books are nothing but dead material, failing to have any impact in cultures of memory. As is always the case with metaphors, some features can be transferred with a gain of insight, others cannot. Thus the notion of cultural memory has quite successfully directed our attention to the close connection that exists between, say, a nation’s version of its past and its version of national identity. That memory and identity are closely linked on the individual level is a commonplace that goes back at least to John Locke, who maintained that

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there is no such thing as an essential identity, but that identities have to be constructed and reconstructed by acts of memory, by remembering who one was, and by setting this past Self in relation to the present Self. Needless to say, this identity-creating process is usually realized in the form of narrative, and the dyadic idea of ‘memory and narrative’, with which this article started out, actually has to be extended into the triadic model of ‘memory, narrative and identity’. Families, friends, nations, social classes, ethnic and religious communities tell their stories in order to create identities. The German protagonists of cultural memory studies, Jan and Aleida Assmann, have called such stories ‘founding stories’ or ‘myths’. In his influential book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis Jan Assmann defines ‘myth’ in the following way: “A myth is a story that is told in order to provide an orientation about oneself and the world; it is a ‘truth’ of a higher order that is not simply correct but which moreover makes normative claims and has formative power.” (J. Assmann 1992: 76; my translation) Assmann’s distinction between ‘normative’ and ‘formative’ functions has become an important notion in a cultural-memory perspective on the uses of narrative. Stories connected with cultural memory tend to give an answer to the question ‘where do we come from?’ This is their formative or identityrelated aspect. And they answer a second question, namely ‘what shall we do?’ This is their normative, or ethics-related, aspect. The normative and formative dimensions of narrative can be found in the Bible as well as in Homer’s epics, in Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as in the great national historiographies of the nineteenth century, in twentieth-century war novels as well as in cinematic versions of 9/11. But if the main research objects of cultural memory studies are myths, and therefore narratives, then narratological approaches might provide insights into how exactly versions of the past are created, how concepts of identity are conveyed, and how values and norms are inscribed into these ‘cultural texts’. To give just one example of the possible uses of narratological categories in the field of cultural memory studies, I will refer to my own work on Gedächtnisromane (‘memory-making novels’; Erll 2003), which conceives of literary narratives as media of cultural memory.10 It takes a look at the existence of what is called a ‘rhetoric of collective memory’ in German and British war novels of the 1920s. Several modes of such a rhetoric can be distinguished: experiential, monumental, historicizing, antagonistic and reflexive modes, for example. The past is not given; it must be reconstructed and represented. Thus, our memories (individual and collective) of past events can vary to a great 10

A similar notion can be found in Rigney (2004), who calls literary narratives ‘portable monuments’.

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degree. This holds true not only for what is remembered (facts, data), but also for how it is remembered, that is, for the quality and meaning the past assumes. Thus, there are different modes of remembering identical past events. A war, for example, can be remembered as a mythic event (‘the war as apocalypse’), as part of political history (the First World War as ‘the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century’), as a traumatic experience (‘the horror of the trenches, the shells, the barrage of gunfire’ etc.), as part of a family history (‘the war my great-uncle served in’), as a focus of bitter contestation (‘the war which was waged by the older generation, by the fascists, by men’). Different modes of remembering are closely linked to different modes of narrative representation. Changes in the form of representation may effect changes in the kind of memory we retain of the past. In the following I will give some examples of how such memorial modes are constituted in the medium of literary narrative. It is, however, never one formal characteristic alone which is responsible for the emergence of a certain memorial mode; instead we have to look at whole clusters of narrative features whose interplay may contribute to a certain memory effect. How stories are interpreted by actual readers, of course, cannot be predicted; but certain kinds of narrative representations seem to bear an affinity to different modes of collective remembering, and thus one may risk some hypotheses on the potential memorial power, or effects, of literary form.11 Experiential modes are constituted by literary forms which represent the past as lived-through experience. They are thus closely connected with what Aleida and Jan Assmann call ‘communicative memory’12 and with its main source: the episodic-autobiographical memories of witnesses. Typical forms of the ‘experiential mode’ of literary remembering are the ‘personal voice’13 generated by first-person narration; forms of addressing the reader in the intimate way typical of face-to-face communication; the use of the present tense or of lengthy passages focalized by the ‘experiencing I’ in order to convey embodied, seemingly immediate experience; and a very detailed presentation of everyday life in the past (the effet de réel turns into an effet de mémoire). In English war novels of the 1920s, for example, the experientiality of a recent past is evoked by autodiegetic and I-as-witness narration (as in Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 1930), by extensive internal focalization 11 12

13

For different modes of remembering in the literature of the Great War, see Erll (2003; 2004); for modes of remembering the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857/58, see Erll (2006). See J. Assmann (1995: 126): “For us the concept of ‘communicative memory’ includes those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communications.” It is oral history that is primarily concerned with communicative memory, e. g. with the passing on of war memories between generations. Lived experience is the object of communicative memory; its time frame therefore never extends beyond some 100 years. In the sense of Lanser’s (1992) feminist narratology.

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(as in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, 1924-28), and by the representation of soldiers’ slang by means of skaz (as in Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, 1929). Literary forms which help to promote one version of the past and reject another constitute an antagonistic mode. Negative stereotyping (such as calling the Germans ‘the Hun’ or ‘beasts’ in early English novels of the Great War) is the most obvious technique for establishing an antagonistic mode. More elaborate is the resort to biased perspective structures in which only the memories of a certain group are presented as right, while those versions articulated by members of conflicting cultures of memory are deconstructed as false (see Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, 1929). The resort to wenarration may underscore this claim (see Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929, or Helen Zenna Smith’s Not so quiet…, 1930). Literature always allows its readers both a first and a second-order observation. It gives us the illusion of glimpsing the past and is (often at the same time) a major medium of critical reflection upon such processes of representation. Literature is a medium which simultaneously builds and observes memory. Prominent ‘reflexive modes’ are constituted by narrative forms which draw attention to processes and problems of remembering, for instance by explicit narratorial comments on the workings of memory, the juxtaposition of different versions of the past (narrated or focalized), or— jumping to the literature remembering the Second World War—by highly experimental narrative forms, like the inversion of chronology in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969) as a means of representing the bombardment of Dresden. Most present-day historiographic metafiction, for example novels by Julian Barnes, Graham Swift and Peter Ackroyd, uses the narrative forms of a reflexive mode. And this also shows that the different modes of narrative remembering can be encountered in various literary genres and periods. What I termed a ‘narratology of cultural memory’ (Erll 2003) is actually not so much a theory as a method. The main focus is on using existent narratological categories as a toolbox for looking at texts and their relation to cultural memory. Not that I think research into narrative and memory need necessarily be restricted to such forms of ‘applied narratology’. Insights into the forms and functions of memory can also trigger a reconsideration of the basic categories of structuralist narratology, and thus promote a more intense theoretical discussion of the issues involved. This assumption leads directly to my last point: the ‘re-viewing of narratology through cultural memory studies’.

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4. Re-viewing Narratology through Cultural Memory Studies: From ‘Forms Made by Memory’ to Remediation After looking at the concepts of memory which implicitly or explicitly pervade classical and postclassical narratology, and giving some attention to the possible uses of narratology for studies in cultural memory, I would like to conclude by asking how present-day narratological research can profit from a dialogue with cultural memory studies. My suggestions refer to two possible strands of such future collaboration: firstly the incorporation of (historical) concepts of memory into the study of narrative forms (‘forms made by memory’); secondly the extension and combination of both narratology and memory studies with respect to media theory. My first bundle of suggestions concerns the historicizing of narrative forms with a view to the ever-shifting concepts of memory that cultures develop. Narrative forms change over time: they are connected to contemporary systems of knowledge and belief, as well as to practices of representation. In what respect, then, are certain forms such as first-person narration, but also free indirect discourse and interior monologue, related to historical concepts of memory? How do these forms change as concepts of memory develop over the centuries? It is certainly no coincidence that the heyday of stream-of-consciousness techniques is also the heyday of the memory theories of Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson. And our current, highly memoryreflexive age has brought forward new narrative forms for conveying memory, forms that are highly intermedial (see Erll/Rigney 2009).14 Concepts of memory and of ways of narrating the past are subject to historical change. There is a dialogic relationship between narrative forms and cultural concepts of memory which has to be taken into consideration not only in cultural studies but also in theoretical narratology. Connected with this insight, one might want to consider what can be called the ‘ideology of first-person narrative’. Narrative forms cannot be analyzed without the cultural context in which they appear and are used, and in the western world (especially in the Protestant tradition), autodiegetic narratives have long been used as forms of self-exploration and also selflegitimization. This cultural function has naturally exerted some influence on the form itself. One example is the teleological plot structure of many firstperson narratives. The story of the ‘experiencing I’ tends to end up, if not precisely where the ‘narrating I’ started, then at least at a point in its development where the way leading up to the identity of the ‘narrating I’ is in clear view. The whole idea of a temporal, epistemological and moral distance between ‘narrating I’ and ‘experiencing I’ rests on such a teleological concept 14

See Wolfgang Hallet’s article in this volume. Many of his examples are, in one way or another, ‘novels of memory’.

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of memory in the service of identity.15 This is clearly another instance of literature’s dialogic relationship with cultural concepts of memory and identity, a dialogue which extends to the level of narrative forms and is therefore a challenge for narrative theory. Another way to incorporate concepts of memory into the study of narrative forms is to rethink some narratological categories in the light of our increasing knowledge about the workings of memory. In an article on the ‘Erinnerungshaftigkeit’ (the ‘memory-ness’) of literary texts, Michael Basseler and Dorothee Birke (2005) have intriguingly argued that there might be a third category hidden between the ‘narrating (or remembering) I’ and an ‘experiencing I’ proper. They call this third category the ‘remembered I’, which is, just like the ‘experiencing I’, a character on the level of the story; yet at the same time, the ‘remembered I’ is clearly an identity-based construct of a past Self made by the present narrator. The narratological criterion is free indirect discourse and thus a form of double focalization: The past Self perceives the world, but at the same time, this perception is clearly shaped (and probably even retrospectively altered) by the discourse of the present Self. Another way of rethinking narratological categories might be to take a fresh look at the various kinds of unreliable narration, which is more often than not a ‘mimesis of troubled memory’. It is the literary representation of problems of memory (such as forgetting and distortion) or a fragmented traumatic memory that may in many cases lie at the heart of unreliability. My second bundle of suggestions concerns the currently most exciting area of research in cultural memory studies and in narratology: the extension of both to media studies. To show the relevance of this idea, let us go back to the notion of ‘cultural memory’. As already pointed out, this notion hinges on an operative metaphor. Yet as soon as we consider the role of narrative, we start to realize that the literal level as well—i. e. the very level of biological memory—is in a sense ‘cultural’. It is inherently shaped by sociocultural contexts. This idea of a cultural (or collective) memory in the literal sense goes back to Maurice Halbwachs (1925) and his notion of cadre sociaux de la mémoire, the social frameworks of memory, which can be understood as an early formulation of the concept of cultural schemata. The idea of an inherent culturality of our brain has convincingly been backed up in recent collaborations between neuroscientists and sociologists such as Markowitsch and Welzer (2005). One of the major cultural shaping forces that work on our individual brains and minds is narrative patterns, as Jerome Bruner (1991) and other narrative psychologists have pointed out.16 Certain plot 15 16

How a rhetoric of autobiographic memory works in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield has convincingly been shown by Löschnigg (1999). For an excellent overview of the current state of narrative psychology, see Echterhoff/Straub (2003/2004).

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structures, micro-narratives or metaphors give our life-stories form and coherence, or, in Ricœur’s words again, they help us ‘grasp together and integrate into one complete story our multiple and scattered experience’. Narrative patterns, provided by the sociocultural context, turn our incoherent lived experience into autobiographical stories (Eakin 1999; Brockmeyer/Carbaugh 2001). But how exactly are cultural contexts and individual minds linked? Why do all of us apparently have some kind of access to a shared reservoir of narrative forms? The answer is that in the ‘real world out there’, these forms do not exist as abstractions (as neat narratological categories), but as transmedial phenomena. They are realized again and again ‘across media’ (Ryan 2004), for example in oral stories, in novels and plays, in movies and TV serials, in comic strips and popular songs. Objectivized in these media, narrative forms are circulated in societies, and via media reception they have the power to influence individual remembering. The social psychologist Harald Welzer (2002), for example, discovered in interviews with Second World War veterans that certain stories they told him about their war experience closely resembled episodes of famous war movies, such as All Quiet on the Western Front. Apparently, certain plot elements (such as sharing a cigarette with the enemy in no-man's-land or a ‘last-minute rescue’) can serve as templates for the telling of autobiographical stories. They give a shape to incoherent and often traumatic experience. Certainly, this process is not straightforward or monocausal in the sense that the ‘movie directly influences the memory’. Rather, a simultaneous circulation of certain narrative patterns in different media must be assumed. And what’s more, these patterns may preform experience as well as reshape memory. In a more diachronic perspective, and with regard to imperial and postcolonial memory cultures, I have shown in a recent publication (Erll 2007) that certain plot structures, time structures, character constellations and points of view which were typical of the representation of India in the nineteenth century (e. g. in newspaper articles, novels and historiography) were carried across media over a period of more than one hundred and fifty years. They were ‘remediated’ in melodrama, poetry, painting and photography, and they can still be found in movies of the twenty-first century. Cultural memory carries not only contents, but also narrative forms. The interesting point here is to ask why there is a preference in memory cultures at certain times for certain media to convey their narratives (in the nineteenth century the historical novel, after wars and other catastrophes often the diary, right now apparently the history film) and to look at the media-specificity of such remediated narratives (see Erll/Rigney 2009). To conclude this article I would like to raise some questions which are of significant interest for the kind of interdisciplinary ‘memory and narrative’

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research envisaged here: How exactly are certain narrative forms realized in different media? How are they circulated, how do they travel across media? How are such forms conventionalized to serve as vehicles of collective remembering? How are they even canonized to become objects of national cultural memory? What are transnational memory narratives composed of (such as the ubiquitous Holocaust and 9/11 narratives)? And finally, how can such narrative forms (and this concerns reception theory and cognitive narratology) turn into the resource, or the very stuff, that our most personal memories are made of? Works Cited Assmann, Jan. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”. In: New German Critique 65, p. 125-133. Basseler, Michael and Dorothee Birke. 2005. “Mimesis des Erinnerns”. In: Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, p. 123-148 (= Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung 2). Bloch, Marc. 1925. “Mémoire collective, tradition et coutume”. In: Revue de Synthèse Historique 40, p. 73-83. Brockmeier, Jens and Donal Carbaugh (eds.). 2001. Narrative and Identity. Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality”. In: Critical Inquiry 18, p. 1-21. Conway, Martin A. 1996. “Failures of Autobiographical Remembering”. In: Douglas J. Herrmann et al. (eds.): Basic and Applied Memory Research. Vol. 1. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, p. 295-316. Eakin, Paul John. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Echterhoff, Gerald and Jürgen Straub. 2003/2004. “Narrative Psychologie. Facetten eines Forschungsprogramms”. In: Handlung, Kultur, Interpretation. 12:2, p. 317-342; 13:1, p. 151-186. Erll, Astrid. 2003. Gedächtnisromane: Literatur über den Ersten Weltkrieg als Medium englischer und deutscher Erinnerungskulturen in den 1920er Jahren. Trier: WVT. Erll, Astrid. 2004. “Reading Literature as Collective Texts: German and English War Novels of the 1920s as Media of Cultural and Communicative Memory”. In: Christoph Bode, Sebastian Domsch and Hans Sauer (eds.): Anglistentag München 2003: Proceedings. Trier: WVT, p. 335-354. Erll, Astrid. 2005. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Metzler. Erll, Astrid. 2006. “Re-writing as Re-visioning: Modes of Representing the ‘Indian Mutiny’ in British Literature, 1857 to 2000”. In: Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (eds.). Literature

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and the Production of Cultural Memory. EJES (European Journal of English Studies) 10 (2006) 2: p- 163-185. Erll, Astrid. 2007. Prämediation—Remediation. Repräsentationen des indischen Aufstands in imperialen und post-kolonialen Medienkulturen (von 1857 bis zur Gegenwart). Trier: WVT. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). 2008. Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter (= Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung 8). Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney (eds). 2009. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter (= Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung 10) (forthcoming). Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge. Gedi, Noa and Yigal Elam. 1996. “Collective Memory––What Is It?” In: History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past 8:1, p. 30-50. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Transl. by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1925. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Herman, David (ed.). 1999. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Herman, David (ed.). 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Herman, David. 2007. “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind: Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction”. In: Narrative 15:3, p. 306-334. Jahn, Manfred. 1997. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 18, p. 441-468. Lachmann, Renate. 1997. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism. Transl. by Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lanser, Susan Sniader. 1992. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Löschnigg, Martin. 1999. “‘The Prismatic Hues of Memory...’: Autobiographische Modellierung und die Rhetorik der Erinnerung in Dickens’ David Copperfield”. In: Poetica 31:1-2, p. 175-200. Markowitsch, Hans J. and Harald Welzer. 2005. Das autobiographische Gedächtnis: Hirnorganische Grundlagen und biosoziale Entwicklung. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Memory Studies. Ed. Andrew Hoskins. Sage Publications, since 2008. Nora, Pierre (ed.). 1996-98. Realms of Memory. The Construction of the French Past. 3 Vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. “Collective Memory. The Two Cultures”. In: Sociological Theory 17:3, p. 333-348. Olick, Jeffrey K. 2007. The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. London/New York: Routledge. Parry, Milman. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse. The Collected Papers of M. Parry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1 Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

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Ricœur, Paul. 2000. Memory, History, Forgetting. Transl. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rigney, Ann. 2004. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans”. In: Poetics Today 25:2, p. 361-396. Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.). 2004. Narrative Across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books. Stanzel, Franz K. 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Transl. by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tulving, Endel. 1983. Elements of Episodic Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tulving, Endel and Fergus I. M. Craik (eds.). 2000. The Oxford Handbook of Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Welzer, Harald. 2002. Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung. München: Beck.

JULIA LIPPERT (Halle)

A “Natural” Reading of Historiographical Texts: George III at Kew

1. Introduction Since the early 1990s, George III has been reinvented. With the theatre play The Madness of George III and its highly popular filmic version The Madness of King George Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner set off a wave of medial presentations which has resulted in the rehabilitation of this eighteenth-century monarch. In the radio play The Grapes of Roi (Radio 4, 1995), for example, he featured as a confused but warm-hearted individual; TV programmes such as Timewatch (BBC2, 2004) and Royal Deaths and Diseases (Channel 4, 2003) cleared him of the stigma of madness; he was characterized as an enlightened monarch by a major exhibition at the Queen’s gallery (2004); and the historian Jeremy Black in his biography George III: America’s Last King (2006) acquitted him of the blame for the loss of the American colonies. The last two decades have witnessed a popularization and commodification of history, and the historical figure of this Hanoverian monarch is a case in point. One important result of this development has been the blurring of the distinction between argumentative academic historiography on the one hand and experiential popular history on the other. Attention has been drawn to the narrative nature of historiography in general by the rise of “narrative non-fiction”, a term Peter Mandler (2002) has coined to denote works such as Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats that combine scholarly research with popular/fictional methods of presentation. This and other developments within the field of history-writing make it vital to find an analytical narratological approach that can both accommodate such hybrid textual forms and be applied across media and genres. Cognitive theory offers an exciting prospect for a narratology uniquely suited to historiographical texts covering the range from academic discourse to popular biographies to museum exhibitions. In her paper “Signposts of Fictionality” (1990), Dorrit Cohn proposed some “rudiments” for what she called a “historiographic narratology” (Cohn

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1990: 777) and at the same time questioned whether established categories of narrative theory are or are not fiction-specific. She concluded that some of the dominant and long-standing criteria of fictional narratology such as the story/discourse model, Genette’s concept of focalisation and the traditional category of voice would have to be modified and extended in order to make them applicable to historical narratives (see Cohn 1990: 778-89). As Ansgar and Vera Nünning pointed out in their survey of the current state of narrative theory (Nünning/Nünning 2002: 18), a narratology of historiographical texts had yet to be developed, and this remains the case to this day. Taking up Cohn’s proposal, I shall trace out the first steps towards a narratology that considers the particular make-up of historical narrative. After a short introduction to narrative approaches to historiography outlining current trends that emphasise a cognitive methodology, Monika Fludernik’s “natural” reading model will be introduced as a useful tool kit for the analysis of historiographical texts across genres and media. The final task will be to demonstrate the usefulness of the model by isolating one specific element, modes of presentation, and applying it to a narrative analysis of the Kew Palace exhibition dedicated to George III. My overall aim is to illustrate the model’s potential for analysing such multi-media historiographical presentations. More specifically, I will show how this approach successfully addresses one of the long-standing problems of transmedial narratology, namely the systematic analysis of narrative agency in non-language-based texts. 2. Historiography and Narrative Theory In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the historian Hayden White rejected the common notion of causality as the determining factor in history writing; he pronounced historiographical texts to be “verbal structures in the form of a narrative prose discourse” (White 1973: ix) or “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (White 1978: 42).1 For White, literature and history could be treated on equal terms, since he regarded both as linguistic constructions determined by the tropology of language; furthermore, in their constructedness both could be treated as fiction. White’s theory of the poetical and linguistic deep structural make-up of historical discourse triggered a wave of literary criticism within historiographical studies. Because White postulated a structuralist approach that focused on the narrative nature of historical writ1

As Fulda (2005: 175f.) points out, Hayden White’s work was anticipated by Hans Michael Baumgartner’s inquiry into the process by which narrative schemata are part of the configuration process of history writing.

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ing, scholars concentrated on the narrative construction of such texts: Gossman (1990) and Gearhart (1984), for example, analysed the narrative structure of eighteenth-century works, while White (1973), Bann (1984), Suessmann (2000) and Rigney (1990; 2001) concentrated on the nineteenth century, and Carrard (1992) and Berkhofer (1995) on texts written in the twentieth century.2 Most of these narratological approaches, however, remained sketchy and restricted to a very narrow range of narrative criteria. For example, Carrard focused his survey of the poetics of French New History and Annales on narrative mediation and illustrated that the new historians’ claim to a profoundly objective presentation of historical facts clearly clashed with the modes of presentation they applied, namely the conscious use of a first person narrator. Next to the narrative criterion of voice, Carrard also looked at aspects of perspective and emplotment, as did most of the above-mentioned narratological analyses of historiographical texts. Voice (narrative agency), perspective and plot thus became the pivotal criteria for the analysis and differentiation of literary as well as historiographical narratives. However, all of these case studies dealt exclusively with written texts, utilising existing narratological categories that were originally arrived at by looking at fictional texts. More recent attempts at developing a systematic narratological approach to historiographical texts have been undertaken by Stephan Jaeger (2002) and Daniel Fulda (2005). Fulda has suggested a cognitive approach, pointing out that history is narrativized in two ways: in the composition process of the historian (erschreiben) and in the reading or ‘selecting’ process (erlesen) of the recipient (Fulda 2005: 178). Cognitive theory defines narrativity as something attributed to a text. This process of attributing narrativity affects history in two stages: first, when it is composed by historians from chronicles and other non-narrative sources, and then when the historians’ texts in their turn are ‘read’. Fulda is especially interested in the second stage of narrativizing history. Accordingly, he defines narrative as “[. . .] a scheme which a recipient brings with him or her to organize historical experience” (ibid.: 187). In his case study of the so-called ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’, Fulda discusses two aspects of the narrative scheme for understanding history: “contextualization” and “wholeness”3. His main achievement has been to show that cognitive methodology could be a useful means of developing a narratology 2 3

See Jaeger 2002: 245. “Contextualization” refers to the embedding of individual facts or events into their respective context. With the concept of “wholeness” Fulda describes the tendency of history to look at events from different angles and to consider many possible perspectives on the “story” (see Fulda 2005: 183-4, 187). The ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’ immediately invokes both aspects. Covering the involvement of the German armed forces in civilian atrocities during World War II, it caused quite a stir in Germany in recent years.

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of history since it allows for the inclusion of narrative frames that are specific to the writing of history. Importantly, cognitive theory’s notion of narrativity as something attributed to the text by the perceiving subject liberated the approach from its restriction to historiographical writing. As Fulda—in accordance with Sobchack (1996)—points out, “history today is hardly ‘composed’ or ‘selected’ in verbal texts alone” (ibid.: 180).4 Fulda considers history-writing as a cultural phenomenon; not restricted to the academic world: history occurs in various medial forms such as film, TV programmes and exhibitions. It is upon precisely this concept of history as the sum of the synchronic discourse about the past in a specific society that my proposal for a cognitive, trans-medial narratology is premised.5 With its cognitive reading model, Monika Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratology offers a possible key to developing a historiographical narratology that can be used for narratives in all kinds of medial and generic forms. In the following I will attempt to demonstrate some aspects and criteria of Fludernik’s model that render it an especially useful point of departure for such an endeavour. 3. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology of Historiographical Texts The theoretical framework of ‘natural narratology’ relies on a cognitive reader-response approach which is based on the assumption that any given text becomes a narrative when the reader ‘perceives’ it as such. The fact that it is ‘read’ in a narrative manner may be determined largely by formal and, particularly, contextual factors. As a consequence, the model can be applied to any variety of media and genre. Thus far, the problem of working across genres and media has been solved. The main issue still to be addressed is the extent to which historical texts can be treated as ‘narratives’ in accordance with the definition provided by ‘natural’ narratology.

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Jaeger, in his discussion of the links between narratology and history (2002), attempts to make exactly this point and to go one step further by arguing that historiography occurs in so many different generic forms (fictional and non-fictional) that any narrative approach needs to take this on board as well (2002: 260-1). According to Siegfried J. Schmidt and Niklas Luhmann’s theory of constructive realism, a society’s reality is formed in an active process of reception. This also implies that all the images of the past produced within a given social group determine the way they perceive and remember it (Schmidt 1992: 425-449; Luhmann 1996: 138-157). Luhmann (1996: 144) further argues that within today’s mass-media society, it is mainly media contents which determine our concept of reality. Along similar lines, Aleida Assmann (1980: 7-8) describes reality as a collective construct, created by the historically specific world-discourse (Weltdiskurs) of a society.

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Monika Fludernik herself defines historiographical texts as non-narrative in nature and describes them as tending towards the argumentative text type. She argues thus: In terms of the theoretical set-up of Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, historical narrative displays a degré zéro of narrativity since the purpose of historical narrative is not to portray the experience of individual characters that will allow readers to make sense of life by vicarious projection into the situation of a fictional protagonist, but the function of history is to provide an argument [. . .] (2001: 93).

In other words, for Fludernik historical texts are only narrative on a discursive level. On the level of the macro-genre, she places them with the argumentative, since they do not set out to constitute narrativity. Narrativity, according to ‘natural’ narratology, is “constituted by a narrative’s creation of experientiality, and experientiality to a large extent relates to a protagonist’s consciousness” (ibid.: 93). Experientiality, then, is defined as the “quasi mimetic evocation of ‘real-life’ experience” (1996: 12), requiring an experiencer and a mediating consciousness (see ibid.: 311). According to Fludernik, historiography is not concerned with the portrayal of human experience but “attempts to weigh documentary evidence, to deliberate between causality patterns and explanatory proposals, [and] to sift the wealth of detail for configurational possibilities” (ibid.: 39). It ought to be noted that Fludernik considers history a “scholarly project” (2001: 93); her focus is on academic writing. In the light of the recent popularization of history, however, history can be taken to comprehend all historical presentations as they occur in today’s society, including so-called ‘pop history’.6 As Fulda convincingly states, ‘History’ is created by the histories of a given society (2005: 176).7 The histories of contemporary British society oscillate between the popular and the scientific and thus between historical argument and experiential narrative. Based on this assumption, I propose a narratological solution that will encompass historical writing in all its forms, from the academic to the popular. A case-study of the wide range of current popular history texts on George III reveals that for the most part they can not only be described as narrative on the discourse level, but also in the sense of Fludernik’s definition of the macro-genre. That is to say, these texts concentrate on the experience of individuals and their evaluation of or reaction to it. In many 6

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Peter Mandler, in his survey of current history writing in Britain, accurately depicts the current state of affairs: “By the end of the [20th] century, then, the divide that had opened up since the beginning of the century between the worlds of popular and academic history had begun to close. Separate spheres remain, but between them now lies a thick stretch of overlap and intermingling. Historians are battling it out with novelists and scientists for the public’s attention [. . .]” (2002: 139-40). Fulda differentiates between History as “the narrative organization of all events which we know as ‘history’” and histories as individual stories of the past (2005: 176).

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cases the concentration is deliberate: Susan Groom, for example, the main organizer of the Kew Palace exhibition on George III and his family, stated in an interview: “[. . .] it’s about the man himself rather than his role as king” (audio transcript of an interview between Susan Groom and myself in June 2006). The tendency to concentrate on the experience of an individual could arguably be attributed to the biographical nature of the work under scrutiny, which might justifiably be regarded as constituting a special case in historiography. However, in the current historiographical landscape as a whole, biography is no longer exceptional. There is a clearly discernible trend towards presenting history as created by individuals and away from the social and cultural histories of the 1970s and 1980s.8 As a consequence, historio(bio)graphy has come to be one of the most popular genres of writing.9 But let me turn back to those aspects of Fludernik’s textual typology that furnish tools for analysis. Fludernik’s differentiation between the narrative as discourse type and narrative as macro-genre allows an interesting preliminary sifting of historiographical material into experiential and non-experiential narrative. This sifting enables the identification of the purpose of each work, whether it be a description of events, argumentation, or conveyance of the experience of historical personages. All texts identified as belonging to at least the narrative discourse type (which applies to most of them) could be analysed according to White’s criteria of storification and emplotment. The main point of interest here is which contents or historical events have been selected for presentation and how they are linked into specific stories, plot patterns and genre types.10 8

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Mandler (2002) and Cannadine (2004) describe how especially in the 1990s history writing, primarily although not exclusively in the popular realm, concentrated to a large extent on the history of individuals as well as individual histories. According to them, this trend was primarily due to a new search for identity. As Cannadine points out: “[...] the decline of the idea of British unity in the face of resurgent Welsh and Scottish nationalism on the one hand, and growing integration into Europe on the other, have left the English wondering who on earth they are. [...] History and the national heritage are where English people are looking instead” (Cannadine 2004: 12). Book sales data from the Book Sales Yearbook: an Analysis of Retail Book Sales in the UK (19992003) indicates that there has been an enormous increase in the publication of history books in general (from somewhat more than 2000 in 1990 to almost 6000 titles in 2000) from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, and that biographies of historical personages figured regularly among top-selling titles. It must be taken into account that Fludernik does not actually exclude non-experiential or report-like narratives from her model. She defines them as having a degré zéro of narrativity and then largely excludes them from her discussion, since they are not narratives in her definition of the macro-genre. Nonetheless, on the level of mediation of her model she includes the so-called mode of ACTING which refers to the “processuality of event and action series” (Fludernik 1996: 44) and can therefore be applied to report-like narratives. In short, although ‘Natural’ Narratology excludes such texts from its definition of narrative proper, the make-up of the reading model allows the inclusion of non-experiential texts. As a consequence, it is possible to use

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Next—and this is the crux of the matter—all texts that can be identified as belonging to the macro-genre of experiential narrative can be analysed according to Fludernik’s reading model. I shall briefly sketch the basic structure of the model, since it serves as the theoretical foundation of my argument. Fludernik’s model describes the process of narrativization by the reader on the basis of four levels of ‘natural’ categories. Level I comprises parameters of real-life experience (identical with Ricoeur’s Mimesis I) shared by readers and producers of texts alike, i. e. “subconscious cognitive parameters by which authors and readers cognise the world in terms of fundamental processes of human being in the world” (Fludernik 2003: 258). It is concerned with schemata such as agency and the natural comprehension of event processes, including their supposed cause-and-effect explanations. On level II Fludernik differentiates four basic viewpoints from which the ‘action’ can be perceived, mediated or understood. They correspond to the cognitive scripts of perceiving and mediating the ‘world’. The model distinguishes between: (1) TELLING/REFLECTING, (2) EXPERIENCING, (3) VIEWING, (4) ACTING. The mediating consciousness can be situated either in the ‘text’—narrator (1), protagonist (2)—or in the recipient (3/4). Level III comprises culturally perceived cognitive parameters, i. e. storytelling patterns and genres, the so-called “large-scale cognitive frames” (Fludernik 1996: 44). These genre patterns developed over time, and through habits of reception they have become part of the human cognitive apparatus. They contain concepts of, for example, conventional relations between narrator and recipient, official vs. private narratives, performance and narratological concepts (chronological order, flashbacks, authorial omniscience, possibility of a bodiless narrator as well as his ability to enter all the protagonists’ minds), as well as the recipients’ understanding and expectations of a particular genre. Finally on level IV the reader narrativizes the text, utilizing “conceptual categories from levels I to III in order to grasp, and usually transform, textual irregularities” (ibid: 45). All four levels describe the process of reading. However, they are not to be understood as hierarchical, but rather as a dynamic, simultaneous interaction of different cognitive scripts. In four respects this reading model seems particularly suited to the task at hand. First, Fludernik’s model allows an analysis of the full range of media presentations used in historiographical discourse, because its definition of narrative depends on experientiality at a deep structural level rather than on any specific form of discourse. Secondly, at this stage the model is more like a rough blueprint that allows and invites adaptation, with specific criteria and frames for particular purposes. Thirdly, the ‘natural’ reading model succeeds the model in order to locate differences and similarities between non-experiential and experiential historiographical discourse.

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in including the three core aspects of cognitive theory: parameters of text(production), context and reception. Production parameters are involved on levels I to III; contextual aspects feed in on level III (comprising media conventions, cultural context etc.), and, since it is a reading model, the act of narrativization—the reader’s reading of the text as narrative—occurs on all four levels. Finally, if it proves fruitful, the model’s diachronic nature would allow a survey of texts produced at different points in time, i. e. the reception of a particular historical phenomenon across the centuries, enabling further insights into the workings of history and collective memory. Thus far the groundwork for a cross-medial and cross-generic cognitive analysis has been laid. I will now proceed to apply one aspect of the model, namely modes of mediation (on level II). The concept of narrative mediation via some kind of storyteller (Stanzel) or narrative agency/instance (Chatman, Bordwell) has for a long time made any transmedial analysis of texts impossible, or at least somewhat awkward. It has been especially difficult to account for a narrative agency in film or drama. This has led to rather obscure categories such as David Black’s intrinsic narrator for film that describes an agency which is “congruent with the discursive activity of the medium itself” (Black 1986: 22), with discursive activity comprising all filmic and cinematographic codes that constitute the filmic narrative. Fludernik’s model, however, is able to shift narrative mediation from a primarily production-based concept of someone telling somebody something towards a reception- and consciousness-based concept of perceiving through the consciousness of either a narrator, a protagonist or the recipient, described respectively as modes of TELLING/REFLECTING, EXPERIENCING and VIEWING. Thus the mode of telling is no longer a must for narrative texts but only one possible mode of mediation among others. So far the criteria on level II as proposed by Fludernik are applicable to any kind of text, irrespective of the idiosyncrasies of historiography. One aspect particular to historiographical discourse is its extratextual logic. Ricoeur explains in Temps et récit (1983: 311-322) how historical writing, apart from relying on the causal connections of facts established by the fabula, is based on a pre-compositional logic of, for example, which event caused which result. The producer of historical texts deliberates about possible causal relations and eventually comes up with his version of the past as only one possible interpretation. This pre- or extra-fabula logic is usually expressed in historical narratives via what Roland Barthes describes as shifters of discourse and Dorrit Cohn as perigraphic apparatus,11 referring to the 11

Cohn adapts this term from Carrard’s “périgraphie” first used in 1986 in a case study of French historical writing on World War I, in which he looks at the discursive norms of narrative history.

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“stratum of testimonial evidence” or the “textual zone intermediating between the narrative text itself and its extratextual documentary base” (Cohn 1990: 282). Barthes differentiates between shifters of listening and organization on the one hand and signs of the writer/sender on the other (1989: 128131). Both scholars consider such testimony as obligatory to historiographical discourse, and as such it must find expression within a historiographical reading model. I am suggesting here that cues of testimonial evidence could be integral parts of the REFLECTING mode on level II of the ‘natural’ reading model. REFLECTING in Fludernik’s concept does not denote the reflector mode in Stanzel’s terminology but refers to a “consciousness in the process of rumination” (Fludernik 1996: 44). REFLECTING as such is a variant of TELLING and “invokes parameters of rumination, arguing, memory, selfcriticism, and so forth” (ibid.: 372). Cohn’s perigraphic apparatus and Barthes’ shifters are not parts of the narrative strand but consist in more or less direct comments on the process of writing, researching and composing this particular version of history. A few examples of how this finds expression on the discourse level are: a) inferential or conjectural syntax, such as he must have felt angry or he possibly felt angry, b) comments by the sender as to how he arrived at his conclusions, and c) references to sources. Such extranarrative comments are what Fludernik means by “ruminations”, which in fictional accounts would find expression, for example, in reflections by the narrator on the writing process. In what follows, a short inquiry into the narrative modes of the Kew Palace exhibition organized by Historic Royal Palaces will apply Fludernik’s reading model to a mode of history-writing that comprises a whole range of forms of mediation, and will examine its use of the REFLECTING mode deemed obligatory for historiographical productions. 4. Modes of Mediation: A Case Study of the Kew Palace Exhibition (2006) The permanent exhibition at Kew Palace, launched in April 2006, courts its audience with the promise of a glimpse into the private life of King George’s family. The flyer announcement invites them to “Unlock the secrets of Kew Palace and discover a royal family home and a compelling story”. The family home is the small, flaming red palace in the lovely setting of Kew Gardens. But what is the compelling story? People are led to wonder and are thus enticed to come and find out for themselves. My project goes somewhat further by asking who tells the story, or more appropriately, how it is mediated.

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13.1. King George III, studio of Allan Ramsay, oil on canvas, (1761-1762) © National Portrait Gallery, London

The exhibition begins in a welcome centre situated in a building separate from the actual palace. Using pictures and written commentary it exhibits a general timeline of political events from 1759 to 1898 and parallel developments at Kew. George III appears five times in the timeline. The first time the visitor encounters him is in the image of a young man in his coronation robes in the well-known portrait by Allan Ramsay (fig. 13.1.). This is followed by three written comments: he is described as suffering his first attack

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of porphyria, during which he was confined to the White House at Kew, as signing the Act of Union, and finally as leaving the scene in 1811 when porphyria struck again and his eldest son George took over the affairs of state as Prince Regent until the king’s death in 1820. The last uncommented glimpse we get at the welcome centre is a large portrait, showing him as a desolate old man in a dark cloak (fig. 13.2.).

13.2. King George III, by Samuel William Reynolds, mezzotint, (1820) © National Portrait Gallery, London

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The flyers, posters, internet ads and welcome centre can be regarded as the framing borders, to use Werner Wolf’s terminology,12 of the exhibition’s narrative, influencing the audience’s perception and ‘reading’ on level III of the model. On the one hand, the timeline, the chronological order of political events and the explanatory comments give the whole project the factual tone of an exhibition documenting historically accurate information. On the other hand, the rather passionate comments concerning George III—such as “suffers his first terrifying attack of porphyria”, “porphyria strikes again” and “compelling story”—combined with the juxtaposition of the two portraits of the monarch, first as a sparkling youth and then as an almost unrecognisably aged man, set the scene for a personal story of suffering which ends tragically. I would argue that these framing borders prepare the ground of the reception process in three respects: firstly, they evoke the macro-genre of narrative in the form of the experiences of George’s sufferings, and thus support a process of narrativization of the exhibition by the visitor. Secondly, they evoke the genre of tragedy. Finally they frame the ‘story’ as real. Upon entering the palace through the ante-room, one is immediately confronted by a bust of George III modelled from life by Madame Tussaud herself around 1809. It is accompanied by a written comment (from Tussaud’s 1823 catalogue): Whether we view him as a king, as a husband or as a father, his character shone. When future historians record the events of our times, they will place the name of George III among the best, the most beloved and honoured of sovereigns.

Entering the room, one comes not only face to face with the king but is even spoken to by him. The speech, audible in the whole room through loudspeakers, is a eulogy of his life and achievements and a guide to how he would like to be remembered in the British collective memory: If I am to be remembered for one thing let it not be any fleeting malady or inconsequential foreign loss ... but for the creation of Britain. What what? This is what I am to the marrow—a Briton. And let future generations know that I glory in the name of ... Briton. (unpublished audio script)

The ante-room demonstrates well the different channels of communication the exhibition employs. First of all there is the arrangement of objects in the different rooms; each room focuses on a specific theme or aspect of the king’s life such as his interests, his sickness, his children, family and public perception. Secondly, the voice of an authorial narrator surfaces at times in the form of written comments on tags or slides. Thirdly, there are speeches and dialogues by family members played in a number of the rooms—some addressing an audience, some staged as glimpses into private conversations, 12

Werner Wolf defines “framing borders” as textual framings or cognitive meta-concepts that guide the reception process. Situated at spatial and temporal “edges”, they strongly influence the development of that process (2006: 22).

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including the sound of rattling newspapers and china tea cups. Finally, different contemporary voices are added to the chorus in the form of quotes on plates or within the dialogues. Using Fludernik’s level II of the reading model, two modes of mediation can be identified: TELLING and VIEWING. TELLING occurs in two different forms. There are authorial comments, as for example in Princess Elizabeth’s Dressing Room. Here they accompany a picture show in which the pictures are consistently followed by written commentary. A picture of the celebration at the Golden Jubilee of George III, for example, is followed by the comment: “There was often affection for the King behind the caricatures”; or Gillray’s cartoon Reconciliation carries the remark: “The royal family could swallow their differences at times”. These direct narrative comments guide the visitor’s perception. In the example given they point at the irony in the pictures. Furthermore, there are the family members, who more or less implicitly tell the story of their lives and sorrows to other family members or imaginary listeners. It is primarily the visitor’s task to narrativize, to connect the different elements and cues—the arrangements of objects, dialogues and voices—in order to arrive at the “compelling story” they were promised. It is the visitor’s consciousness that takes over the task of mediating, of constructing a narrative, thus allowing for different interpretations. It is the mode of VIEWING that dominates the perception process. Indeed, the analysis of the Kew exhibition based on Level II of the ‘natural’ reading model reveals how wisely the organizers chose their words when they announced that the visitor would have to ‘unlock’ a story. In fact, there is no omnipresent authoritative narrator. There are different bits and pieces of information, different cues and clues as to how George and his family experienced life, but in the end it is the ‘perceiver’ who has to come up with the reading. Yet, with all this room for the recipient to read and interpret, it can still be argued that the exhibition fosters its own reading as a narrative. It clearly aims to evoke experientiality and, more precisely, the experiences of George III along with his own evaluation of them. Next to the framings already mentioned, it is above all the emotional overtones connected with objects such as a little egg boiler given to George by his children for his birthday, the waistcoat he wore during his final years discoloured with what look like blood stains, and the desperation in the voices of the children and the queen when they talk about the king’s illness that trigger a reading of the life of George and his family as a tragic narrative. Finally, of course, the speeches by the king that frame the exhibition raise expectations in the visitor of the unfolding of a personal story. The king not only welcomes the visitor, he is also given the last word, accompanying the final image, that of the old man in the cloak:

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What, what. I am old and weak. Kings, too, become old and weak. I decline, but my country thrives. My country has no need of me anymore. So it should be. Let them think of me for a moment and then pass on as history passes on. Leaving halfunderstood events for future generations to muse over.

Thus far Fludernik’s level II of the reading model has been tested only for its general applicability to multi-media texts. Testimonial evidence still remains to be identified in the form of the REFLECTING mode. In the exhibition at Kew the REFLECTING mode is as good as non-existent. The organisers seem to absent themselves from the discourse, employing neither inferential nor conjectural syntax nor shifters of organisation. There is only the occasional label to hint at the origin of the different objects on display. Spoken and written dialogue and commentaries give no evidence of their source. Barthes refers to such a systematic absence of “any sign referring to the sender of the historical message: [in which] history seems to tell itself” as “referential illusion” (1989: 132). He further argues that such an illusion is intentional on the part of the historian, who claims that the “referent speak for itself”, and denounces it as quite improper to historical discourse (ibid.). Barthes’ indignation in this respect shows the importance he attaches to the perigraphic apparatus and specifically to the signs of the sender as integral parts of historical writing. Indeed, the total absence of referential allusions at Kew gives the impression of a self-contained historical discourse. Reasoning with Barthes, this absence of referential allusion implicitly raises the specious claim that this particular story of the king’s life is not merely one possible version among many but the one “true story”. 5. Conclusion The Kew exhibition is a prime example of the different mediating channels employed in the (re)construction of past events. It stresses the necessity, emphasised earlier by Fulda, Jaeger and Vera and Ansgar Nünning, of developing a narratology of history that works across genres and media. As the case study of George III has illustrated, ‘natural’ narratology could serve as an appropriate basis for such a project. Fludernik’s cognitive reading model is not only applicable to different forms of mediation, it also allows the incorporation of aspects specifically connected to historiographical discourse, as the integration of perigraphic discourse on level II of the model exemplifies. Furthermore, ‘natural’ narratology’s definition of narrative as the mediation of experientiality does not prove an inhibiting factor in the analysis of historiographical texts. On the contrary, it allows comparison of their evocation of experientiality and the reader’s narrativization. As the curators of the Kew exhibition were well aware, reading history as the past experience of

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individuals has become one of the dominant modes in contemporary popular historical discourse. For this reason, the ‘natural’ reading model seems ideally suited for a narratology of history. In the course of time, as conventions of perceiving the world and the past evolve, the method may require adaptation. But at this moment in time it seems a promising beginning. Primary Works Cited Bennett, Alan. 1992. The Madness of George III. London/Boston: Faber. Black, Jeremy. 2006. George III America’s Last King. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Caffrey, David (dir.) 1999. Aristocrats. Videocassette. BBC Worldwide Ltd. and Irish Screen Production. Hytner, Nicholas (dir.). 1994. The Madness of King George. The Samuel Goldwyn Company and Channel Four Films. Pownell, David (dir.). 1995. The Grapes of Roi. Writ. Martin Jenkins. Radio 4. 29 March. Quinn, James (dir.). 2003. Royal Deaths and Diseases Part 2: Madness. Narr. James Frain. Channel 4 and Lion TV. 10 Jan. Tillyard, Stella. 1994. Aristocrats. Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox. 1740-1832. London: Chatto & Windus. Waterhouse, Michael (dir.). 2003. Kings and Queens. The Real Dramas of Britain’s Greatest Monarchs. DVD. Channel 5, 3BM Television Production for Five and BBC Worldwide Ltd., 2003. Whalley, Claire (dir.). 2004. Timewatch. How Mad Was King George. Narr. Michael Praed. BBC2. 6 Feb.

Secondary Works Cited Assmann, Aleida. 1980. Die Legitimität der Fiktion. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der literarischen Kommunikation. München: Fink. Bann, Stephen. 1984. The Clothing of Clio. A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenthcentury Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1989. The Rustle of Language. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Black, David Alan. 1986. “Genette and Film. Narrative Level in Fiction Cinema”. In: Wide Angle 8: 3-4, p. 19-26. Baumgartner, Hans Michael. 1976. “Thesen zur Grundlegung einer transzendentalen Historik”. In: Hans Michael Baumgartner and Jörn Rüsen (eds.). Seminar. Geschichte und Theorie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Berkhofer, Robert F. 1995. Beyond the Great Story. History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Book Sales Yearbook: An Analysis of Retail Book Sales in the UK. 1999-2003. London: Bookseller.

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Cannadine, David. 2004. “Introduction”. In: D. C. (ed.). History and the Media. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 1-6. Carrard, Philippe. 1986. “Récit historique et function testimoniale”. In: Poétique 65, p. 47-61. Carrard, Philippe. 1992. Poetics of the New History. French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1990. “Signposts of Fictionality. A Narratological Perspective”. In: Poetics Today 11: 4, p.775-804. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London/New York: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 2001. “Fiction vs. Non-Fiction. Narratological Differentiations”. In: Jörg Helbig (ed.). Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger. Heidelberg: Winter, p. 85-102. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”. In: David Herman (ed.). Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications, p. 243-270. Fulda, Daniel. 2005. “‘Selective’ History. Why and How ‘History’ Depends on Readerly Narrativization, with the Wehrmacht Exhibition as an Example”. In: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter, p. 173-194. Gearhart, Suzanne. 1984. The Open Boundary of History and Fiction. A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gossman, Lionel. 1990. Between History and Literature. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press. Jaeger, Stephan. 2002. “Erzähltheorie und Geschichtswissenschaft”. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 237-263. Luhmann, Niklas. 1996. Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Mandler, Peter. 2002. History and National Life. London: Profile Books. Nünning, Vera and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). 2002a. Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT. Nünning, Vera and Ansgar Nünning. 2002b “Produktive Grenzüberschreitung. Transgenerische, intermediale und interdisziplinäre Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie”.. In: Nünning/Nünning 2002a, p. 1-22. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. Temps et récit. 1. L’intrigue et le récit historique. Paris: Seuil. Rigney, Ann. 1990. The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rigney, Ann. 2001. Imperfect Histories. The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1992. “Medien, Kultur: Medienkultur. Ein konstruktivistisches Gesprächsangebot”. In: S. J. S. (ed.). Kognition und Gesellschaft: Der Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, p. 425-450. Sobchack, Vivian (ed.). 1996. The Persistence of History. Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. New York/London: Routledge. Suessmann, Johannes. 2000. Geschichtsschreibung oder Roman? Zur Konstitutionslogik von Geschichtserzählungen zwischen Schiller und Ranke (1780-1824). Stuttgart: Steiner. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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White, Hayden. 1978. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”. In: Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (eds.). The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, p. 41-62. Wolf, Werner. 2006. “Introduction. Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media”. In: W. W. and Walter Bernhart (eds.). Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, p. 1-42.

VINCENT MEELBERG (Nijmegen)

Sounds Like a Story: Narrative Travelling from Literature to Music and Beyond

1. Introduction Within the several disciplines of the humanities tools, theories and approaches are developed and used to study their respective objects. And while some disciplines may use very similar approaches—think for instance of the study of the different languages—others apply methods that are more or less unique for their respective fields of study. Musicology is one such discipline. One of the main tools of the musicologist, music theory, is bound to the medium it is developed for. It is very hard, if not impossible, to apply music theory to cinema (except of course when it concerns the music that is used in a movie), literature, or visual art in any way that transcends a very superficial, metaphorical comparison. Thus, musicology does not really provide tools that could be used in interdisciplinary research, i. e. research in which methods and/or approaches developed within a certain discipline are used to study an object belonging to another discipline. Yet it is quite possible to study music with the aid of methods established in other disciplines. Many disciplines have invented tools that are not limited to the objects for which they were originally developed. These tools are medium independent. They allow for the study and comparison of different media, precisely because they do not presuppose a particular medium. In this article I want to examine whether narratology, which is usually associated with verbal texts, can function as a medium-independent tool. More specifically, I will investigate the possibilities of applying Mieke Bal’s narratology to music. First, I will elaborate in what way narrativity might be useful for the comprehension of music. Next, I will try to counter the main argument against musical narrativity, namely that music cannot have a narrative content, before outlining the narrative aspects that can be identified in music. Finally, I will conclude that the narrative study of music can teach us about the way the listener makes sense of music, and that Bal’s narratology is

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well suited for studying the narrative aspect of music, and of media in general, in a productive manner. 2. Narrative Understanding Music listening consists, first of all, in the recognition of sounds as musical sounds. The listener qualifies sounds as musical, because s/he hears certain characteristics that lead him/her to believe that s/he is hearing music. These sounds more or less comply with the musical precedents s/he is familiar with, and therefore s/he calls these musical sounds. This results in the listener assuming a listening stance that differs from everyday listening. As soon as s/he has decided to regard a series of sounds as music, other conventions, criteria, and precedents are used while listening. Once this stance is assumed, a melodic minor second, say, will be regarded as a leading note, and not as a series of sound waves with a small difference in frequency. Thus the acoustic material gives up its original physical qualities in favour of musical qualities as soon as a listener who assumes a musical listening stance experiences it. However, to be able to decide that a certain series of sounds represents a leading tone is a step beyond just regarding sounds as musical. At that initial stage the listener’s musical experience consists of nothing more than a concatenation of sound perceptions that s/he identifies as musical. Yet, the example of the leading tone shows that the listener’s musical experience is not to be equated with the pure labelling of sounds as musical. The listener is capable of relating musical phrases to other phrases within the same piece, and this relating is regarded as one of the most important characteristics of music. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, for instance, states that “[m]usic presents order relationships in time” (quoted in Grant 2001: 135). Additionally, the listener may relate musical phrases to other musical works or practices, or to nonmusical ideas or phenomena. In short: the listener relates music while listening to it. This capacity, together with the ability to recognize musical sounds, makes up a musical listening experience. During such an experience, which can be regarded as a unifying activity, the listener tries to structure the music. The strategies used for this purpose, however, may differ from listener to listener. Fred Everett Maus (1999: 182183) suggests that a narrative strategy might be successful in helping to structure the music: [T]he association of music with a story is a way of attributing musical unity: the parts of a story belong together, somehow, and in associating music and story one is, somehow, transferring that unity to a musical context. Second, as I understand it, the notion of a musical story is not an alternative to the notions of musical experiences or musical world. They are related as follows: a listener may have a unified

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experience, and that experience may include the imagining of a fictional world, and the events within that fictional world may form a story.

In the course of a musical listening experience, a listener might regard the music s/he is listening to as a story, i. e. structure the music as if it were a musical narrative. In this way, the music is regarded as a structural whole, namely a narrative, and, consequently, musical comprehension might be gained. But what does it mean to grasp something in a narrative manner? David Herman (2003b: 2) observes that human beings often interpret events by creating stories around them in order to get some kind of grasp of these events: As accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances and with specific consequences, stories are found in every culture and subculture and can be viewed as a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change.

Moreover, Kitty Klein adds that “[n]arrative has often been viewed as the product of a universal human need to communicate with others and to make sense of the world” (2003: 65). Stories are important both in grasping the world and in communicating this grasp. Thus, broadly speaking, narrative has two interrelated functions: on the one hand, it can be regarded as a means of making sense of the world, structuring the human subject’s experiences and integrating these into a graspable whole. On the other hand, narrative functions as an account with which the human subject can communicate these experiences. As Herman puts it: “[N]arrative is at once a class of (cultural) artifacts and a cognitive-communicative process for creating, identifying, and interpreting candidate members of that artifactual class” (2003b: 170). Stories are both cultural objects and the manner in which human subjects talk about those objects. Roy Schafer remarks that narrative is not an alternative to truth or reality; rather, “[…] it is a mode in which, inevitably, truth and reality are presented. We have only versions of the true and the real […] Each retelling amounts to an account of the prior telling” (quoted in Frawley et al. 2003: 88-89). Narrative is the manner in which the individual subject has access to other people’s experiences; it is a way to distribute experience and knowledge. Through stories, Herman contends, human subjects have “[…] a way of structuring the individual-environment nexus, constituting a principled basis for sharing the work of thought” (2003c: 185). Moreover, Herman (2003b: 8) claims, via stories the subject can have access to events that are separated from him/her in time and/or space: [N]arrative can be seen to facilitate intelligent behavior. Stories support the (social) process by which the meaning of events is determined and evaluated, enable the distribution of knowledge of events via storytelling acts more or less widely separated

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from those events in time and space, and assist with the regulation of communicative behaviors, such that the actions of participants in knowledge-yielding and conveying talk can be coordinated.

In short: stories are an effective means by which knowledge, experience, beliefs, desires, and fantasies can be represented. They are one of the most important means by which human beings communicate. Narrative is an instrument for distributing and elaborating the perspectives that can be adopted on a given set of events. Moreover, stories aid in enriching the whole compound of past, present, and possible future events that constitutes the foundation of human knowledge. Narrative, Herman (2003c: 184-185) concludes, therefore serves a dual function: […] correcting for biases and limitations that can result from a particular cognizer’s efforts to know; and integrating such individual efforts into a larger human project that takes its character from the way it is ongoingly distributed in social and historical space. In short, the process of telling and interpreting stories inserts me into the environment I strive to know, teaching me that I do not know my world if I consider myself somehow outside of or beyond that world.

By producing and listening to narratives, the subject places him/herself within a social environment; through stories both his/her particular place can be articulated, and knowledge of this environment can be gained. Klein furthermore adds that “[o]ne of the marvelous features of narrative is that it can transform memories of unspeakably awful experiences into streamlined representations that lose their ability to derail cognition” (2003: 65). Thus, narrative not only locates the subject within a social environment, but also helps him/her cope with traumatic or stressful events. Creating a narrative around such an event, Klein remarks, involves the subject’s cognitive functions and enhances psychological wellbeing: “[M]any psychologists believe that in addition to helping people understand stressful events, narrative changes the memory representations of these events, making them less likely to erupt into consciousness” (77). By consciously integrating a traumatic event into a narrative frame, the subject may be able to control his/her trauma. When a subject tries to make sense of events through the creation of a narrative, s/he has an inclination to construct a story that is as clear and simple as possible, H. Porter Abbott contends: “[A]s a general rule, human beings have a cognitive bias toward the clarity of linear narrative in the construction of knowledge” (2003: 143). Because narrative is essentially nothing more than a “basic pattern-forming cognitive system bearing on sequences experienced through time” (Herman 2003c: 170), the subject tries to structure these sequences in the most straightforward way possible, which is linear. If possible, s/he interprets successive events causally, the earlier being the cause of the appearance of the later, as Klein explains: “Identification of causal relations is particularly important for narrative […], because to under-

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stand the text the reader must make numerous inferences to establish the relations between various parts of the narrative” (2003: 75). Thus, causal relation is one of the most important kinds of structuring within a narrative. Richard J. Gerrig and Giovanna Egidi (2003: 44) acknowledge this: [Research has] provided evidence that one product of readers’ narrative experiences are causal networks that represent the relationships between the causes and consequences of events in a story. Some story events form the main causal chain of the story whereas others, with respect to causality, are dead ends. When asked to recall stories, readers find it relatively more difficult to produce details that are not along that main causal chain.

Stories representing events that are hard to connect causally are not as easily remembered as stories whose events can be causally related. This implies that stories that show many causal relations can be grasped in a clearer way than those that lack these relations. Klein (2003: 75) elaborates how a subject detects causal relations: To detect causal relation, the reader must connect inferences from immediately preceding text still in working memory, information from earlier text, now located in long term memory […], and background knowledge that was not in the text but that is also in long term memory.

As I will show below, this process is similar to the process of detecting musical events within a composition that is received and assimilated aurally. In the next section I will also explain that the notion of musical causation is used as a metaphor. Musical events do not actually, physically cause other musical events; they can only be interpreted as being a cause. Yet, as Herman (2003c: 176) observes, this is the case not only in music, but in literary narrative, too. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, he remarks that […] narrative understanding depends fundamentally on a generalized heuristic according to which interpreters assume that if Y is mentioned after X in a story, then X not only precedes but also causes Y. Indeed, one can detect the operation of this same heuristic in a variety of discourse contexts, as when language users are able to ‘read in’ temporal and causal relations in the case of conjunctions that do not contain explicit time-indices or markers of causality.

A narrative can be understood because its succeeding events can be interpreted as being related in a causal manner, regardless of whether this relation is a reality or a projection of the apprehending subject. Hence, music that can be interpreted as containing events that are somehow—metaphorically—related in a causal manner might be more easily grasped as well. Can an object such as music, however, that is not a literal narrative be interpreted in a narrative manner, and might this result in a more profound comprehension of that object? Monika Fludernik believes this is possible. She contends that narrativity “[…] is not a quality adhering to a text, but rather an attribute imposed on the text by the reader who interprets the text as narrative, thus narrativizing the text” (2003: 244). In the case of literature,

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it is the reading process that is “[…] fundamental to the construction of narrativity—that which makes a narrative narrative” (244). Yet this does not mean that the object is irrelevant. For is it possible to narrativize, say, an ordinary coffee cup? Perhaps stories around this cup could be made up, but the cup itself, though interpreted as a cup, is not thereby interpreted as a story. The object itself has to have some qualities that invite the observer to regard it as narrative. It has to have narrative potentiality and context. Not just anything can be regarded as narrative simply because the observer wants to regard it so. A coffee cup and a story about a coffee cup are artefacts (or objects) on two different experiential levels. The narrativization of cultural objects amounts to the creation of a construction, a structure in which (causal and other) temporal relations between events are identified. Some objects can more easily be regarded as narrative than others. Narrative depends on both the narrative potentiality of the object and the act of narrativization of that object by an observer. By narrativizing an object, the observer might comprehend this object in a better, or different, way. Turning an object into a story means establishing some other, maybe wider kind of grasp of this object. And the study of narrativity is an inquiry into the manner in which an apprehending subject acquires this kind of comprehension. This implies that narrativity is not exclusive to those objects that we traditionally call narratives, such as novels. According to Mieke Bal, narratology can be used on other objects than narrative texts, just as narrative texts can sometimes be better approached with other methods than narratological (1990: 730). With the aid of narratology, the narrative aspect of objects can be studied, regardless of whether they are linguistic or other. I propose the following working definition of narrative, which is derived from Bal’s narratology, and which, to my surprise, has proved more controversial than I had anticipated: a narrative is the representation of a temporal development. It is the representation of a sequence of events in time. Thus, the construction of a house, say, can be regarded as a sequence of events, but it is not in itself a narrative. Rather, it is a process on a different experiential level from the process of narrative. But as soon as I record this process on video, for instance, the recording can be regarded as a narrative. After all, we now have a representation, in the shape of a video recording, of a temporal development, namely the construction of a house. Lyric poetry might be a representation as well, but not all lyric poems can be regarded as the representation of temporality or of a temporal development. This is not to say that lyric poetry, or fragments within a lyric poem, can never be regarded as representations of a temporal development. In these cases one might conclude that this particular poem has narrative moments or characteristics. Conversely, novels such as Samuel Beckett’s The

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Unnamable (1953, English translation 1958) and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) problematize the notion of temporal development in narrative. Yet this does not automatically imply that the working definition of narrative I gave above has to be revised. Rather, it shows that these novels are not novels in any conventional sense, because they do not neatly fit into the category of narrative. Chronologies, timetables, and weather reports, finally, are representations that refer to temporal phenomena, but to what extent can they be considered representations of temporal development? As I explained above, causality plays an important part in narrative. Because one can identify particular events as (metaphorically) causing other events, the perceiving subject is able to regard this succession of events as constituting a development, a transformation from one state to another. Thus, if it is possible to identify causal relations within a chronology or a timetable, one could conclude that this object is, to a certain degree, narrative. But I cannot say a priori whether or not these objects can be regarded as such. That depends on the particular representation that is being considered. The narrativization of an object amounts to the creation of a structure in which (causal and other) temporal relations between events are identified. Some objects can more easily be regarded as narrative than others. Narrative depends on both the narrative potentiality of the object and the act of narrativization of that object by an observer. By narrativizing an object, the observer might comprehend this object in a better, or different, way, and the study of narrativity is an inquiry into the manner in which an apprehending subject acquires this other kind of comprehension. In her 1997 study on narratology, Bal aims at giving “[...] a systematic account of a theory of narrative for use in the study of literature and other narrative texts” (ix). Bal’s narratological theory offers a very elaborate and systematic account of narrative elements, but it does not presuppose, and is not confined to, verbal narrative: indeed, it extends to many other narratologies. Even more importantly, it takes the apprehending, narrativizing subject as its starting point, and follows the order in which this subject accesses and experiences a narrative object. As a result, her approach may account for the way the perceiving subject recognizes a particular structure in a perceptible object, and how s/he distils from this a series of logically and chronologically related events caused (or passively experienced) by actors. Bal regards her theory as a readerly device, a heuristic tool that provides focus to the expectations with which subjects process narrative (xv). A narrative text, according to Bal, is a text in which an agent relates a story in a particular medium (5). This definition may seem to compete with the definition of narrative given above, namely narrative as the representation of a temporal development. However, the two definitions are complementary rather than competing. The definition of narrative as a representati-

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on of temporal development is more basic and general; it is devoid of narrative jargon; it determines whether or not a particular object can be narrative at all. All narratives are representations, for telling a story means representing a sequence of logically and chronologically related events. When an object complies with this working definition, thus when it can be regarded as a representation of a temporal development, narrative aspects such as narrative agent and story can be identified, and the definition of a narrative text as one in which an agent relates a story in a particular medium will become relevant. Bal distinguishes three layers in a narrative text: text, story and fabula. A text is a finite, structured whole composed of signs. A story is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner, and a fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. An event is defined as a transition from one state to another, whilst an actor is an agent that performs actions. To act, finally, means to cause or experience an event (5). It is because Bal’s narratology consists of a trichotomy, rather than a dichotomy, that it is an appropriate model for the study of the narrative aspect of an object, verbal or otherwise. Especially when it concerns narrativity and intermediality, this trichotomy is crucial. If one were to use a theory based on a dichotomy, it would be very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to discuss with any precision the consequences of relating the same story in a different medium. For in this case one could only distinguish between fabula and narration, and with each change of medium the entire narration would change as well, since text (as medium) and story (as content) are conflated on this level. Thus, the division of a narrative object into three, instead of two (or no) layers allows for a more accurate study of narrativity, especially when it concerns intermedial approaches. Bal’s narratology enables investigation into the narrative comprehension of any object that has narrative potentiality, as well as the comparison of narrativity in different media. So, what about the medium of music? Comprehending a musical piece means recognizing its constituent sounds as musical and being able to relate musical phrases to other phrases within the same piece, as well as to other musical works or practices and nonmusical ideas and/or phenomena. Comprehending a musical piece implies the structuring of sounds, the establishing of relations within and without the piece concerned. A possible way to structure music is to narrativize it, to regard it as a narrative. By narrativizing a musical piece, the listener may get a better (or different) grasp of it. Turning music into a story means establishing some kind of control over, or comprehension of the music, creating a sense of certainty in an uncertain situation, which listening to an ephemeral object such as music might sometimes be.

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2. Narrative Doubts As I explained earlier, narrativizing an object implies both a narrativizing subject and an object that has some narrative potentiality. Since music is a temporal cultural expression, it would make sense to assume that music has such a potentiality. After all, temporality is an important aspect of narrativity. Moreover, many musical works, especially tonal ones, consist of the exposition of one or more themes and their development. Through this treatment of themes, a temporal development can be represented and a musical narrative might be created. Yet it is not an easy task to explain what this narrative is exactly about, since, in contrast to language, music has no clear referential qualities. For this reason the notion of musical narrativity is highly disputed. Verbal narrative is able to represent many phenomena, ideas, and views that cannot be represented in music in the same straightforward manner. For instance, in verbal narrative it is possible to posit an unreliable narrator. A verbal narrative can represent a character’s thoughts, or retell historical events. Music, because it lacks the referential qualities of language, is not capable of doing this; it cannot, therefore, Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990: 257) concludes, be narrative: […] music is not a narrative and […] any description of its formal structures in terms of narrativity is nothing but superfluous metaphor. But if one is tempted to do it, it is because music shares with literary narrative that fact that, within it, objects succeed one another: this linearity is thus an incitement to a narrative thread which narrativizes music. Since it possesses a certain capacity for imitative evocation, it is possible for it to imitate the semblance of a narration without our ever knowing the content of the discourse, and this influence of narrative modes can contribute to the transformation of musical forms.

Nattiez evidently acknowledges that music has the potentiality to be narrativized—not, however, because he thinks music can be properly speaking narrative, but because it can have the appearance of narrative as a result of its linear character. Nonetheless, Nattiez holds that because music has no narrative content it cannot be narrative. This is a standard argument against musical narrativity. Werner Wolf (2002: 77-78), for instance, claims that every discourse that is said to be narrative has to be able to achieve precise heteroreference, i. e. a reference that goes beyond the work and its medium, in order to comply with the basic representational quality of storytelling. The visual arts are undoubtedly capable of this, at least as concerns spatial objects, and of course verbal speech, too; speech cannot escape heteroreference at all, as the possibility of establishing referentiality in even the most extreme literary experiments shows again and again. The ‘language’ of music, however, is only capable of such reference in very few exceptional cases, and is in general resistant to precise nonmusical referentializa-

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tion to such a degree that its linguistic character is often denied altogether. [my translation]1

Again, because music cannot explicitly refer to nonmusical phenomena, it does not comply with the most basic function of narrative. For both Nattiez and Wolf, verbal narrative is evidently the paradigm with which every narrative has to comply. Thus, in contrast with the definition of narrative that I use, in which narrative is the representation of a temporal development, their conception of narrative is medium dependent. But in my definition, too, the element of referentiality is accounted for, as narrative is explicitly stated to be a representation of temporal development and must, therefore, refer to such a development. Temporal developments can indeed be represented in music; the listener can perceive expectations and resolutions, yet these are not caused by the music itself. Music elicits expectations by giving the impression that musical events lead to or cause other events. This in turn results in the suggestion of forward motion. With regard to this suggestion, Bob Snyder (2000: 113-114) remarks: [M]usical events are seen as ‘leading to’, or ‘causing’ successive events that are close to and similar to them. This is, of course, all metaphorical because musical events do not actually cause each other in the way that other kinds of physical events do (although they can imply each other). It is interesting to note that causation is also an important factor in the construction of linear verbal narrative; sequences of narrative events are also often linked by chains of causation.

Snyder, too, acknowledges that music generates expectations by giving the impression that musical events lead to or cause other events. It is not real causation that takes place in music, but rather a (musical) representation of causation. A dominant seventh chord, say, does not necessarily have to resolve to the tonic. There is no physical necessity for this chord to resolve. Rather, the listener expects it to resolve accordingly, as a result of the musical conventions and precedents s/he is familiar with. In other words, the listener interprets a dominant seventh chord as wanting to resolve to the tonic. This chord is a musical representation of tension, rather than actually being unstable or tense; indeed, the physical makeup of the chord is as stable as any other sound. Thus tension and resolution, which can lead to temporal 1

“Jeder Diskurs, der im Dienst des Narrativen stehen soll, muß zur Erfüllung der basalen Darstellungsqualität des Erzählens zur präziser Heteroreferenz, d. h. zu einer Referenz jenseits des betreffenden Werkes und seines Mediums, befähigt sein. Die bildende Kunst ist hierzu zweifellos in der Lage, wenigstens was räumliche Gegenstände betrifft, und natürlich auch die verbale Sprache; ja diese kann der Heteroreferenz gewissermaßen gar nicht entkommen, wie die Möglichkeit der Referentialisierung selbst extremer literar-sprachlicher Experimente immer wieder zeigt. Die ‘Sprache’ der Musik kann dagegen nur in eng begrenzten Ausnahmefällen einer vergleichbaren Referenz dienen und ist allgemein so resistent gegen präzise außermusikalische Referentialisierungen, daß ihr Sprachcharakter sogar überhaupt in Abrede gestellt wurde.”

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development, are not physically present in the music, but are represented by it. This is not to say that the physical makeup of this chord has nothing to do with the fact that the listener considers it to be tense. As I stated above, narrativization is only possible if an object has a narrative potentiality. In the case of a dominant chord, the dissonant wavelengths induce the listener to interpret this chord as being tense. The physical makeup is one of the reasons the chord is interpreted in this way. However, this does not mean that the chord is compelled by physical necessity to resolve to the tonic. The necessity (embodied in the tension) is an act of (cultural) interpretation on the part of the listener. Furthermore, Snyder recognizes a relation between this phenomenon and verbal narrative, in which causation between events also plays a constitutive role. A verbal narrative consists of representations of events and it is the whole body of these representations that is related to the reader. Such narratives, then, relate representations of the causality between events, rather than presenting actual causation. For example, in a story that tells about a person falling out of a tree there is no physical necessity for this person to actually hit the ground. The words that make up this story do not necessarily, physically, cause this. The reader might expect the person to hit the ground, but this does not have to happen just because the story implies it. Real, physical causation does not exist in verbal narratives; nor does it exist in music. Even so, Wolf (2002: 78-79) maintains that the progression of a musical discourse and its coherence is in general far more dependent on form and medium, i. e. determined by an intramusical syntax. As a consequence, it is at odds with the progression and coherence of narrative created by causality and teleology that relates to the logic of a fictional world outside of the respective narrative medium. [my translation, emphasis in original]2

Against this it can, nevertheless, be argued that causality, linearity, and goaldirectedness are not inherent to the music itself, but are represented by the music. This means that the music does refer to phenomena that are outside of itself, namely the phenomena of causation and teleology. Musical causation, which can give rise to linearity and teleology, is ultimately the product of representation. A musical narrative’s capacity to refer to extramusical phenomena, in this case to a temporal development, might not be explicit enough for Wolf and Nattiez. They might want to know what this development means, and verify 2

“Die Progression eines musikalischen Diskurses und dessen Kohärenz ist insgesamt wesentlich form- und mediumsabhängiger, d. h. bedingt durch eine innermusikalische Syntax, und steht damit quer zur Progression und Kohärenz des Erzählens durch Kausalität und Teleologie […], die sich auf die Logik einer scheinbaren Welt jenseits des jeweiligen narrativen Mediums beziehen.”

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whether its meaning is intersubjectively shared, before acknowledging that music can be narrative. I have to admit that music is probably unable to meet such demands. Nonetheless, the temporal development that can be heard in music is the result of a representation. It is this temporal development that is the content of the musical narrative, however abstract that content might be. 3. Aspects of Musical Narrative The content of musical narrative is related by a narrator, the agent that relates a story in the medium of music at the textual level, which consists of perceptible sounds. The musical narrator is almost always imperceptible and external, and as such does not take part in the story it is telling. Yet, this agent is not the performer. The performance is the musical focalizer, the function that colours the story with subjectivity. This function belongs to the story level, the musical structure. The jazz composer and musician Carla Bley also uses colour as a metaphor when describing her compositions: “I write pieces that are like drawings in a crayon book and the musicians color them themselves” (quoted in Benson 2003: 135). The interpretation of a written score, which is the crayon book that is coloured in during performance, is translated into sounds by that performance. A score is a way to ensure the continuing existence of a musical work, and at the same time to guarantee a wide variety of different performances. As soon as the writing is done, the composer him/herself can no longer control the way the music will sound in performance, other than trying to be present during rehearsals and hoping the directions s/he gives will be acted upon.3 A musical text, then, which I earlier defined as a finite, structured whole composed of musical signs, does not receive its final aspect when the musical score is written by the composer, but only during performance, the moment in which, to use Bruce Ellis Benson’s expression, the musical work is “embodied” (2003: 82). The reason why a listener favours one performance of a musical work over another cannot be found in the notes themselves, either. The lines in the crayon book, the musical score, stay the same, but it is the colouring within and over these lines that shapes the listener’s preferences. The performance thus determines how the music is communicated to the listener: 3

Yet, even when the composer him/herself conducts his/her own music, total control over the music is impossible. Benson for instance refers to the many recordings in which Igor Stravinsky conducted his Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), each of which differed from all the others (2003: 79). Of course, it cannot be ruled out that these differences occurred because the views of the composer changed between two successive recording dates.

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performance acts as musical focalization, the point from which the musical events are perceived.4 A literary focalizer always gives a limited and specific account of events. Through focalization it is determined how limited or specific the image is that the reader receives. When performing a musical work, the ‘image’ of the musical events that is given to the listener is also always limited and specific: the performer or performers have to make choices about the interpretation of the piece, by deciding for instance whether or not the rendition will be historically ‘authentic’, how to interpret dynamic and tempo marks (which are by definition only approximate) etc. In other words: the focalization in a musical work always results in a limited account of the musical story. The musical score, however, is not the musical story. In fact, the score is itself a text consisting of visual signs relating a story, based on a fabula, by an imperceptible external narrator. This text, story, and fabula are related to the text, story, and fabula of the musical performance, but are, by definition, not identical with them. For their semantic medium is different: in my elaboration of musical text, story, and fabula I explicitly refer to sounds, rather than to visual signs. Thus the object of narrativization is music-as-sound: the performance is part of the narrative. And the musical narrative that I discuss here is performed music. The performance is an integral part of the narrative itself, not simply an interpretation of a narrative. What it interprets is the score, which itself might be considered a narrative, but a narrative of a different nature, in a different (visual) medium. Still, it is not at all clear what it means to give a ‘true’ account of musical events. This cannot be the transparent presentation of a musical score, if only because this would imply that improvised music would not be focalized. Yet, in the performance of improvised music, too, choices are made, options are rejected, and alternatives are selected. Consequently, in improvised music a limited and specific account of musical events is given as well. Moreover, the musical events in a score are not represented transparently, i. e. unfocalized. For the score of a musical narrative is itself a narrative text. Its story is related by an imperceptible external narrator in a visual medium that consists of musical notation. As a text, the score is itself focalized, which again results in a coloured representation of events. Nevertheless, the events in a score necessarily belong to a different ontological category; they have been turned from audible into visual signs. Unfocalized, and thus by

4

In the case of a recording, the musical focalizer is augmented with the technology and production used to create the recording.

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definition unperformed, musical events are necessarily abstract entities that can only be made concrete in a sounding text, which is always focalized.5 Focalization does not manifest itself in music in the same way as in literature. First of all, whereas in literature the focalization or focalizations are identical for every reading of the narrative, in music the focalization can, and almost always will, change in each performance. No two performances are the same, and therefore different interpretations, and thus different focalizations, of the same musical work may well exist. A reader interprets the focalization(s) in a novel in his/her own way and that interpretation can change with every reading, whereas the presentation of this focalization stays the same. In music, however, both the focalization and the listener’s interpretation can change with every performance. As a result, one cannot speak in musical narratology of different performances of the same musical narrative. Each performance of the same musical piece has to be regarded as a new musical narrative, a new work. Each of these performances has a different focalization, and thus every performance of the same piece results in a different musical narrative. Aleatoric music demonstrates this point in a very explicit manner. Two performances of the same aleatoric piece, say Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) for twelve radios, 24 performers and a conductor, composed by John Cage, cannot be identical. If this piece can be considered as narrative, then the resulting narratives are very different. It is also possible that one performance of this piece can be regarded as narrative, whereas another performance cannot. The performance is such a radically determining factor in the experience of the piece that it can even control the degree of narrativity of the work in question. In literature, more than one focalizer, the subject through whose perception the reader perceives the events, can be found, while in music there is only one focalizer. After all, only one performance of a piece can be heard at any given time. Although many musical pieces have to be performed by more than one musician, each musician contributes to the performance as a whole, and it is this performance through which focalization takes place. A performance is the end result of the creation of an interpretation of a musical work, a creation in which each performer shapes his/her interpretation of his/her individual part in order to achieve the desired end result. A rendition of a musical work by an ensemble of musicians is not the presentation of 5

It is impossible to have a sounding musical narrative that is not focalized, for performance, which is a necessary element in the production of sounding music, always implies focalization. Hence, one could regard a musical narrative as making explicit Bal’s assertion that a narrative is always focalized. In order to create a musical narrative—which in my definition is always a sounding musical narrative—the music has to be performed, and this necessarily implies focalization.

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several focalizers, each giving his/her own view of the musical events at the same time, but the joint presentation of a single focalizer, i. e. the performance. Or, more precisely: the performance acts as an external focalizer, an anonymous agent situated outside the fabula (Bal 1997: 148), whereas the individual musicians contribute to the performance, and thus to the focalization. This does not mean, though, that only one focalization is possible. A focalizer can ‘change its mind’, as it were, and give a different ‘view’ of the same situation. In a musical piece, for instance, the same musical phrase can be repeated in different ways by the same focalizer. When this occurs, the function of external focalizer stays assigned to the same agent, i. e. the performance, and only the focalization, the way that phrase is performed, has changed. Finally, there is one more important difference between a literary and a musical focalizer. With regard to literature one can distinguish between internal and external narrators. In the case of ‘internal focalization’ the “focalization lies with one character which participates in the fabula as an actor”, whereas the term ‘external focalization’ means “that an anonymous agent, situated outside the fabula, is functioning as focalizer” (Bal 1997: 148). Music, in contrast, can only be focalized externally, for the performance (the musical focalization) is never given by an agent that is part of the fabula, and thus can never be internal.6 The performance cannot be part of the musical fabula, which is the final narratological level of music, because a musical fabula consists only of a series of logically and chronologically related musical events caused or experienced by musical actors. Neither the performance nor the performer(s) are musical actors. Rather, a musical actor can be defined as the musical parameter or parameters that cause closure; it is closures, therefore, that create musical events. After all, an event is not complete until it has reached some kind of closure, and it is closure that makes the listener recognize the events and their organization in music. Thus, a musical actor can be a temporal interval that is larger than the immediately preceding ones, a significantly different sound, or the end of a continuous change. At the same time, a musical actor may be the musical parameter that changes during a musical event, since an actor can not only cause, but can also experience events.7 6

7

In Bal’s conception, the qualification of a focalizer as external or internal depends solely on whether or not the agent that focalizes is situated within the fabula. If so, the focalizer is internal. Otherwise, it is external. This account may differ from the classical distinction of internal and external focalization made in other narratologies. Thus a musical actor is the parameter that creates closure or that changes during an event, whereas a musical event consists of all the parameters that sound during a particular period, regardless of whether they create closure, change or remain unchanged during that period.

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By identifying these narrative elements in music, and investigating the manner in which they constitute narrativity, it is possible to understand the process of narrativization in music. Bal’s narratology thus enables the study of the narrative potential of music, as well as inquiry into the narrative interaction between music and listener.8 But most importantly, it facilitates the comparison between narrativity in music and other media. Conclusion Narrativization is a fundamental human tendency enabling the human subject to come to terms with temporal phenomena. It is a tendency that depends on both the narrative potentialities of a phenomenon and on an interpretative act on the part of the human subject. As a result, a narrative listening stance, a stance in which music is narrativized, explicitly calls for the active contribution of the listener in order to structure the music in time. By the listener’s assumption of a narrative stance music is transformed into another artefact, namely a narrative. Yet the interaction between listener and music that leads to this other artefact is based on a natural human tendency. The narrative analysis of music focuses on this interaction, and does not search for an essence or truth in or of the music itself. In the end, musical narrativity concerns the manner in which the human subject can cope with the temporal phenomenon of music. Bal’s narratology proves particularly productive in these analyses. I believe that because her theory does not presuppose a medium, and because it takes the apprehending, narrativizing subject as the focus of narrative analysis, it can be used as a starting point for developing a ‘lingua franca’ for interdisciplinary, or rather intermedial, discussions of narrative. Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. 2003. “Unnarratable Knowledge. The Difficulty of Understanding Evolution by Natural Selection”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 143-162. Bal, Mieke. 1990. “The Point of Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 11, p. 727- 753. Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Second edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue. A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8

In Meelberg (2004; 2006) I give a more elaborate musical translation of Bal’s narratological elements.

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Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 243-267. Frawley, William; John T. Murray and Raoul N. Smith. 2003. “Semantics and Narrative in Therapeutic Discourse”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 85-114. Gerrig, Richard J. and Giovanna Egidi. 2003. “Cognitive Psychological Foundations of Narrative Experiences”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 33-55. Grant, Morag J. 2001. Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman, David (ed.) 2003a. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Herman, David. 2003b. “Introduction”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 1-30. Herman, David. 2003c. “Stories as a Tool for Thinking”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 163-192. Klein, Kitty. 2003. “Narrative Construction, Cognitive Processing, and Health”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 56-84. Maus, Fred Everett. 1999. “Concepts of Musical Unity”. In: Nicolas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.). Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 171-192. Meelberg, Vincent. 2004. “A Telling View on Musical Sounds. A Musical Translation of the Theory of Narrative”. In: Mieke Bal (ed.). Narrative Theory. Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Volume IV. London: Routledge, p. 287-316. Meelberg, Vincent. 2006. New Sounds, New Stories. Narrativity in Contemporary Music. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. “Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?” In: Journal of the Royal Musical Association 115, p. 240-257. Snyder, Bob. 2000. Music and Memory. An Introduction. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wolf, Werner. 2002. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik. Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie”. In: Vera Nünning und Ansgar Nünning (eds.). Erzähltheorie. Transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT, p. 23-104.

ANDREAS MAUZ

Theology and Narration: Reflections on the “Narrative Theology”-Debate and Beyond* “… that God himself demands narration.” Eberhard Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (1977)

1. Introduction Narrative is a central element in the founding document of Christianity, the Bible. The Bible tells stories: of the creation of the world and of the human race, of the destiny of the chosen people of Israel, of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, of the early Christian communities and of the end of the world. For this reason if not for any other the theological reflection of Christian faith will of necessity be concerned with narration. Theology has the task of rendering these stories intelligible in and to its contemporary world— both as individual narratives and in their overall context as the one story of God’s dealings with creation. The narrative quality of the biblical writings is, however, only one of the reasons why storytelling is a pre-eminently theological theme. The Christian tradition that grew out of these narrative foundations has itself produced a wealth of stories, which together constitute the history of the church (or rather of Christianity)—a history that unquestionably, and not only from a perspective critical of religion, reads in part as a ‘crime story’ (K.-H. Deschner). Episodes of this story are told and retold in Christian religious education, in school classes or in preparation for confirmation. The sermon is another locus of narration, frequently in the form of an interpretive retelling of an episode from the life of Jesus—himself a storyteller, as the parables demonstrate. Finally, storytelling is of decisive importance for the individual Christian: why a Christian lives thus and not otherwise is the stuff of narrative: a tale interwoven with the story of Jesus and those other stories that derive from it. In this rudimentary overview ‘history’ and ‘storytelling’ are used in a broad, integral sense. This does, nevertheless, indicate that the concept of narration—which does not immediately suggest a relation to theology—is of *

I am indebted to Dr. Barbara Piatti (Zürich/Prag) for her comments on this essay and Joseph Swann (Wuppertal) for his translation.

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central importance to that discipline and to the church that it serves. Christianity, it is sometimes said, is in its essence a ‘storytelling community’—its deep structure is narrative: Storytelling is basic for faith because only in the act of telling can our story be bound in with that of God and Jesus; because this story must be told; and so that it can be told as an unfinished story into which the faithful write their own stories and, in so doing, carry the story forward. Thus at its elemental level Christian faith has a ‘narrative deep structure’. (Arens 1988: 24)

Narration, then, is a recurrent topos of theology. It is not, however, the only way in which theology speaks, nor is it the only mode of speech relevant to theology. Theo-logy, in the broad sense of ‘God-talk’, takes on many different forms, concretized in the multiple categories of myth, hymn, gospel, vision, psalm, legend, prayer, creed, confession of sins, song, sermon, dialogue, catechism, tract, commentary, concordance, law, review, essay, dogma etc. The series is manifestly one of increasing abstraction, with the language of prayer situated worlds away from academic discourse on ‘the problem of God’.1 The decisive difference is not simply a matter of form and style: the mode of utterance is different. Thus, where academic discourse speaks of God, prayer (also) speaks to him: the speech mode of prayer is one of witnessing or confessing, which involves the subjectivity of the speaker to an incomparably higher degree than does the act of academic writing. The awareness of the inherent multiplicity of ‘God-talk’ has generated theological schemes and orders of immense variety. Taking up the distinction just mentioned, Hermann Deuser (1999: 22ff.), for example, suggests a three-fold division of religious, theological and confessional language. Religious language (paradigmatically in prayer) is a vital enactment of faith, while theological language is an academic reflection on faith (and thus on religious language), and confessional language is situated somewhere between the two as the language of church teaching, bound up with the institution2 and combining the implicit theology of religious language with its explicitation in theological language. Again, there is an evident scale of abstraction here, with prayer as the “first and immediate expression” of faith, the confession of faith (or creed) as “its more general and repeated form”, and theology as the “critically reflected” expression of that form. (That this sequence can be readily inverted is also apparent: a concrete act of faith in the form of prayer may well be based on a creed that itself incorporates much theological reflec-

1 2

I. e. from theological reflection on the being of God, more precisely his reality, essence, and action. See the Confession of Faith of the German Lutheran Church, the Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/89), or the Account of Faith (1977) of the Union of Protestant Free Churches in Germany.

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tion.)3 Another way of expressing this scale would be to speak of object language and metalanguage. In these terms theology is a metalanguage, meta-‘Godtalk’, a type of utterance that refers back to and assumes into the methodologically controlled discourse of science the immediacy and multiplicity of the religious and confessional modes. As the critical reflection of these other modes theology ideally impacts upon them in its turn. Applied to narration, Deuser’s modal scale raises the key question of the level at which storytelling takes place. That it occurs de facto in religious language is clear—prominently (though not exclusively so) in the biblical narratives. But does it also play a role in confessional and theological language? Put like that, the issue is one of description. It becomes theologically interesting—if not hazardous—when the descriptive perspective is joined by a normative one and the question arises: should narration play a role—given that it can and does so—at these more abstract levels? Reduced to its lineaments, that is the frame within which discussion of the relation between theology and narration generally occurs: prima facie, narration appears to be one mode of ‘God-talk’ among others. The aim of the following reflections is to demonstrate in what sense and on what grounds it has been termed the neglected central mode not only of religious but also of theological language. This task can only be undertaken on a modest scale in the present context. Accordingly, despite the many areas of theological concern in which, as has been indicated, storytelling plays a significant role, the present argument will confine itself to the impact of the concept on modern Protestant systematic theology in German.4 This immediately excludes two other widely ramifying areas of discussion: biblical criticism (both Old and New Testament research)5, and practical theology6. Here too, however, narration has a role to play, for it focuses the question of the openness of these sub-disciplines to new parameters—which, in turn, impinges on their very legitimacy.

3

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That the spectrum of religious articulations includes (not just marginally but essentially) nonverbal forms such as image, dance, glossolalia, silence etc. is an aspect that can only be touched upon in this context. Systematic theology (or dogmatics) is concerned with the doctrinal development of the contents of belief. It covers such areas as God, creation, Jesus Christ (christology), the trinity, sin (hamartiology), redemption (soteriology) and the last things (eschatology). Specifically what has been called ‘narrative exegesis’ (see Marguerat/Bourquin 1999). Practical theology is concerned with the day-to-day practices of the church, including church services and preaching, church leadership, counselling, social work and religious education. It is what Schleiermacher called “the theory of practice”. For a general introduction to the theological subdisciplines and their interrelations see Deuser (1999: 177-184).

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After an initial survey of the debate that has taken place among Germanspeaking theologians around the concept of ‘narrative theology’ (2)7, I aim to draw a provisional balance (3) more closely involving the perspective and terminology of literary criticism. The significant absences that become evident in this context indicate the holistic—and by the same token polemic— nature of the theological view of narration. These reflections lead (4) in the direction of a remarkable contribution made by the literary scholar Klaus Weimar, who sees narration and theology as engaged in an entirely different type of systematic relation: Weimar has demonstrated how central theologumena recur in a covert fashion in the distinctions and categories of narratological theory. His observations provide an appropriate springboard for my concluding reflections on the topic (5). So far as the manner of presentation is concerned, the overall aim of this article is to report on a field of discourse at the interface of theology with literary science rather than to provide an independent contribution to that discourse. To do this in 2008 is to revive a discussion whose heyday lies somewhat in the past. Nonetheless, the mode of report selected here may indicate its continuing topicality. 2. Research: An Overview 2.1 The “Narrative Theology” Project (Weinrich, Metz) … Considering the many theological contexts in which storytelling plays a significant role, it may come as a surprise to learn that—in the German tradition at least—the concept of narrative theology was a real discovery, not only at the descriptive but also at the prescriptive level. For narrative theology, when it came, was the name of a critical theological programme containing several quite heterogeneous strands.8 The beginning of the debate can be precisely dated to May 1973 and the appearance of an issue of the progressive Catholic periodical Concilium devoted to “The Crisis of Religious Language”. It contained two essays, printed side by side, which sketched out the contours of the later discussion. The first of these was, remarkably, not from a theologian at all, but from the well-known linguist Harald Weinrich. Indeed he seems to have been the first to use (in the title of his essay) the controversial compositum narrative theol-

7

8

The earlier discussion in the English-speaking world has a clearly different emphasis. See for a general overview Wenzel (1998). See also Comstock (1987), Hauerwas/Jones (1989) and Loughlin (1996). The survey that follows is defined by its focus on the explicit concept of ‘narrative theology’, albeit to the exclusion of many other contributions that bear on the issues involved.

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ogy.9 The second text, “Brief Apologia for Storytelling” came from the pen of the Catholic fundamental theologian Jean Baptiste Metz (1973).10 Both writers intended to launch a programmatic line of thought, but with different emphases. Where they agreed was in the underlying thesis that not only theological discourse but present-day society as a whole had entered a “postnarrative” phase (Weinrich 1973: 331; cf. also Metz 1973: 336)—hence Metz’s formulation of his thesis as an apologia.11 They both saw theology as particularly affected by this crisis; for, as Weinrich put it, “Christianity is a narrative community” (Weinrich 1973: 330), an axiom which Metz (1973: 336) qualified with the differentiation: “[Christianity is] not primarily a community of argument or interpretation but quite simply a narrative community.” For Metz the narrative problem stands in a broader context. Narrative theology is one aspect of the ‘political theology’ programme he conceived in the manner of the Frankfurt School as a critique of contemporary society.12 He saw narration as a mode of theology sensitive to experience, and especially to unatoned suffering. He speaks in this context of a “memorativenarrative theology” (ibid.: 339) and of the memoria passionis—which sets all suffering in relation to that of Christ—as a “dangerous memory” (ibid.: 337) disrupting the argumentative force of the ‘victor’s history’ wherever that occurs. Narrative takes on a virtually sacramental quality as “the medium of salvation and of history” (ibid.), a stance diametrically opposed to a theology that would, on simple theoretical grounds, “banish [narrative] to the sphere of precritical expression” and allocate “all linguistic expressions of faith to the category of objectivizations” (ibid.: 335). To do this, Metz argues, is to render the experience of faith indefinable, and the “exchange of experience” (ibid.) that is the proper material of narrative impossible. Metz does not, however, (as he is sometimes accused of doing) draw the reciprocal conclusion that argumentation has no place in theology. What he is interested in is a “relativization of argumentative theology” (ibid.: 340). A fundamental trait of his theological programme becomes apparent in his explicit referral of the bond between narrative and experience to Walter Ben9

10 11

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Weinrich (1973). The concept itself is a good deal older. In 17th century theology the concept of “theologia historica seu narrativa” was used to distinguish the history of dogma from “theologia dogmatica” in the proper sense. See O. Ritschl (1920). See also the collection co-edited by Metz in the same year: Metz/Jossua (1973). For an introduction to Metz’s theology see Delgado (2000). This agreement is so fundamental that it requires no further reason – which is all the more interesting in view of the irreducibly anthropological dimension of narrative on which (with Schapp and/or Ricœur) they here and elsewhere insist. The essay is extant in a revised form in Metz (1977). His project must be distinguished from that of Carl Schmitt’s Politische Theologie that has continued to attract interest ever since its initial publication in 1922. See Brokoff/Fohrmann (2003).

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jamin,13 and in his citation of Martin Buber’s collection of Tales of Hasidim, together with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Faith (which he calls “a great encyclopaedia of tales of hope”; Metz 1973: 335), as examples of the “practical, liberating character of narrative” (ibid.). Storytelling in Metz’s view is a specifically Jewish strength, a Jewish virtue reflected in the messianic slant of his thought: for Metz, theology “after Auschwitz” is in radical need of a “Jewish corrective”.14 Weinrich’s approach to narrative theology is more openly historical—and it is, for him, a history of decline. The narrative quality of early Christianity is evident from biblical documents; but “in the encounter with the Hellenistic world [Christianity] lost its narrative innocence” (Weinrich 1973: 331). Mythos succumbed to logos and, despite the narrative strand that runs through the history of philosophy (Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Nietzsche), the Christian theological tradition veered definitively towards the “armies of other philosophers […] who see their task as the construction of systems and theories, as reasoning and debate” (ibid.)15. What followed was a “generally secular tendency towards demythologization and the banning of story and its telling from the Christian tradition” (ibid.: 331)16. In a rhetorical twist (of the sort familiar to Asterix and Obelix fans) Weinrich then asks: “Every story …?” His point is that the ban could never be complete: it inevitably collapses in the face of Easter—a highly interesting theological thesis. The exception marked in the message ‘He has risen’ becomes “the story of stories, subsuming into itself all other narratable events” (ibid.: 331). Weinrich’s secondary thesis, prescinding altogether from de facto storytelling, is comparatively speculative. He argues that the resistance of this central event to demythologization may mean that it alone remains to be told as a story—“an important dispensation in a post-narrative time” (ibid.). The story of decline ends for Weinrich in the “holy or unholy alliance” (ibid.: 333) between theology and modern scholarship—above all in its relation to historiography. If (as Danto maintains17) historians are also storytell13 14 15

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Central here (see ibid., 334) is Benjamin’s “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows” (1937). On the general issue of Benjamin’s relevance for Metz see Ostovich (1994). See Delgado (2000) and Müller (1988). The Jewish tradition plays a similar role in Dorothee Sölles’ (1988) related project of ‘theopoetics’ – as opposed to (and critical of) theology. Weinrich himself seems barely to have noticed the problem of idealization latent in the suggestive phrase “from mythos to logos”, especially in relation to the concept of “narrative innocence”. Only later did this meet with opposition. For an overview see Wacker (1977: 97ff.). The concept of demythologization is particularly associated with the New Testament theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) whose powerful but controversial programme – influenced by Heidegger – involved laying bare the Bible’s existential “core” of mythical discourse, the kerygma with its divine appeal to existential decision, which he considered dissoluble from its linguistic and cultural “shell”. See his classic essay: Bultmann (1985 [1941]). Danto (1968: 111): “History tells stories”. Today Weinrich would probably call on the work of Hayden White (1987).

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ers, the pathos of their position lies in the assertion that their stories are true. Unable to resist the prestige of the true story produced in a methodologically controlled environment, theology in turn has begun to question the truthvalue of its narratives. Yet what U. Wilckens has called its “retreating skirmishes” (ibid.: 332) have concentrated on the periphery—palpably so in the modest results of classic historico-critical exegesis. Here it was easy to satisfy methodological standards—easier at least than it would have been to answer the Easter question “not merely by telling the story, but by telling it with the emphasis of a historian: ‘He has truly risen!’” (ibid.) The sweep of Weinrich’s thought, roughly outlined above18, functions in his discourse as a background against which his real concern is gradually revealed. His goal is to (at least partially) regain the lost “innocence of the story” in the form of narrative theology. This will immediately call in question “the bond with (academic) history” in whose wake theology “stares fixedly at the single point where a story is tested for truth” (ibid.: 333). What will take its place as a criterion of theological relevance, Weinrich suggests— and here again he is close to Bultmann—is the receptive category of concern (Betroffenheit): “Facticity is not the sine qua non condition of a story’s impacting and ‘concerning’ us. We receive fictional stories, too, with concern.” (ibid.) Even as a theoretical science theology need not “small-mindedly deny” (ibid.) its received fund of stories. In sum, Weinrich installs ‘narrative concern’ as a positive alternative to historical truth: this corresponds to the ‘nature’ of Christianity as it is revealed, even after the loss of narrative innocence, in the central event of the resurrection: the event that can only ever be articulated as a story. If one considers Metz’s und Weinrich’s positions together, it becomes apparent that, for all their differences, they share a strong model of narrative theology: narration is not just a mode of religious language: it has a significant role to play in theological discourse as well. Without entirely disregarding or devaluing conceptual, argumentative thought, both authors stress the point 18

Weinrich’s position does not fully accord with the exegetical and dogmatic discussions of his day. It was by no means the case that “theologians held the unanimous and virtually unquestioned view that biblical narratives [...] stand or fall on their truth value as determined by the recognized methods of historical scholarship” (Weinrich 1973: 332.). It was precisely the historically unanswerable question of the historicity of the resurrection that, beginning with the Enlightenment critique of religion, led to the understanding that historical truth was not necessarily the only criterion of theological relevance. Accordingly, Bultmann’s thesis – whose key utterance was the assertion “Jesus rose again in the kerygma” – was received with widespread approval. Bultmann not only bypassed the issue of a methodically convincing historical answer, but declared the underlying (historical) question itself to be theologically insignificant: “If it is the case [that he is present to those who hear him], all speculations about the being of the risen [Jesus], all stories of the empty grave, all Easter legends, whatever portion of historical fact they may contain, are quite indifferent. Belief in Easter means believing in the Jesus present in the kerygma” (Bultmann 1960: 27).

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that theology can only fulfil its scientific task through (also) telling stories— whether in the spirit of “dangerous memory” of the victims, or in that of safeguarding the existential moment of concern in the face of rigorous historical methods and standards.—Both Metz’s and Weinrich’s theses met with wide acceptance, questions being directed, if anything, not to their programme itself but to its format. Critique, when it came, was (not exclusively but for the most part) in the shape of different and weaker models of narrative theology.19 2.2 … and Its Critique: Ritschl and Jüngel Two critiques of narrative theology made a lasting impression on Protestant theology: those of Dietrich Ritschl and Eberhard Jüngel. For the systematic theologian Ritschl (1976: 41), ‘narrative theology’ was a “misnomer beneath which lay a clearly definable programme”. The programme itself he largely shared, but the fundamental distinction he made between theological and pre-theological discourse led him to prefer the broader and less technical term ‘story’; and stories, the title of a 1976 essay put it, are the “raw material of theology”.20 The clear allocation of narrative to a subordinate position allowed Ritschl to distance himself from what he called the “modish programme” (ibid.: 36), in contrast to which he outlined in explicit terms his own understanding of the role (or roles) of theology proper. These were (1) “clarification (in the service of communication)”; (2) “safeguarding coherence (in the service of logic and ethics)”; (3) “reflection on the limited flexibility of contemporary language (respecting tradition)”; and (4) “stimulation of new thinking and the opening of new perspectives” (ibid.: 9). Quite evidently, stories have little to contribute at least to the first three of these tasks: they are situated, Ritschl argued, “‘prior’ to these operations” (ibid.). This was not to disparage the role of “raw material”; Ritschl, too, upheld the central significance of narrative structure in and for the biblical writings; he, too, saw human identity as determined in and by stories.21 In this sense theology was “in its essence concerned with stories”; but this did 19 20

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For the breadth of this debate see Wacker (1977). Along with Ritschl’s essay the monograph contains a far less widely received article by Jones entitled “Das Story-Konzept und die Theologie” (‘Theology and the Concept of Story’, 42-68), along with two sermons illustrating that concept (69-75) – typical evidence of Ritschl’s practical bent. The significance of his contribution can be judged by its inclusion (in excerpts) in Härle (2007b). For a self-portrait of Ritschl see Henning/Lehmkühler (1998), 3-23. See ibid., 15.36. Ritschl elsewhere (1984: 49) cites Old Testament scholarship (which he had also at one time taught) as well as psychoanalysis as defining factors in his concept of story. This had not primarily developed in the debate with narrative theology. By his own account he had discussed the theological usefulness of the concept with biblical scholars of his acquaintance from 1958 onwards (ibid., 47). For the precise role of story in Ritschl’s theology see ibid. I B, H; III B, and Ritschl (2005: 81).

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not mean that it “should articulate itself in stories” (ibid.: 7). In the light of the fourfold task outlined above, “theology itself”, as Ritschl (1984: 51) axiomatically put it, “is regulative, not narrative.” Ritschl’s view did not, however, end with this categorical statement; he took up its implications for the story, listing the various forms and functions of what he called that “idiom” (Ritschl 1976: 18), and elaborating on the transition from story (as one type of raw material) to the “regulative axioms” (ibid.: 39) of theology. Without going into detail, his reflections on that crucial transition should be mentioned, if only because the rigour and precision of his thought distinguishes it markedly from that of most other writing on the topic. Finally, lest the impression be conveyed that Ritschl had no interest in a theology concerned with life experience and social relevance (in the sense advocated by Metz), it must be stated that, despite his plea for academic rigour in theological thought, his interest in a theology alive and sensitive to the contemporary world was unmistakable.22 In 1977, a year after Ritschl’s ‘raw material’ thesis, Eberhard Jüngel’s major study, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (‘God as Mystery of the World’) appeared.23 Its subtitle, ‘towards a theology of the crucified in the dispute between theism and atheism’ established a context for narrative and narration entirely different from that postulated by Ritschl. And indeed Jüngel’s intention could scarcely have been more fundamental: to put theology on a Christological basis that would speak the language of modernity and take seriously three crucial contemporary problems: the “linguistic impossibility of placing God”, the corresponding and “still increasing unthinkability of God”, and “the inarticulacy of theology” (Jüngel 1992: 2). In the light of what has been said above, the occurrence of the keyword ‘narrative theology’ in this context will not be surprising; it is, however, important to focus the specific role Jüngel accorded to it. Unlike Ritschl, he accepts its basic legitimacy; but like him he cannot decide […] whether it is feasible in the form of a rigorous dogmatic theology, or whether a narrative theology does not, rather, belong to the sphere of the church’s practical self-realization with its Sitz im Leben in the proclamation [of the gospel] 24.

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See his references to Black Theology (ibid., 33), as well as his assertion that “constructive and decisively important theology today is above all oral” (ibid. 12, note 9) and is current in the countries of the south. For a concise presentation of the position of the renowned Tübingen systematic theologian see Rohls (1997: 805-810; “Jüngel’s Hermeneutic Barthianism”). See also Jüngel’s statement in Henning/Lehmkühler (1998: 188-210). Ibid., foreword to the first and second editions, XVII. Ritschl (1976: 39 note 28) had earlier criticized Jüngel’s use of the concept in his classic essay “Metaphorische Wahrheit. Zur Hermeneutik einer narrativen Theologie” (‘Metaphorical Truth: Towards a Hermeneutics of Narrative Theology’, Jüngel 1974).

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Irrespective of this (admittedly central) question, Jüngel gives great prominence to the story topos, and—in contrast to the other authors mentioned— he does so in the context of dogmatic thought in the strictest sense. Towards the end of his book the decisive proposition 19 opens the section concerned with the Christological foundations of theology, the ultimate goal of Jüngel’s entire argument. Here he returns to the triple question outlined above, in the form of the “thinkability”, “effability” and “humanity” of God. He announces his programme in the title of the section: “The humanity of God as a story to be told. Some prior hermeneutic reflections”; for it is the humanity of God in Jesus Christ that drives the entire reflection on narrative and narration. The event of the incarnation signifies a “change of time […] and history” (ibid.: 413); if this significance is to be articulated at all, it must be in a linguistic mode appropriate to the event. The language of God’s humanity must be structurally geared to expressing time and history. […] This is, however, the case in the mode of narrative, which genuinely unites articulacy and temporality in a single order and, along with interjection and evocation, can best claim to represent an autochthonous language. God’s humanity enters the world in the act of storytelling. Jesus tells of God in parables before he himself is proclaimed a parable of God. (ibid.)

Jüngel’s careful and thorough rooting of the need for theological narrative in the complex of the incarnation sets him over against Metz (ibid.: 425f.) and—at a critical level—Weinrich (ibid.: 419ff.). His subtle argumentation touches on the recurrent issue of the implications of narrative theology for theological narration. If “the thought that seeks to understand God […] is repeatedly thrown back on narrative” and must “itself embark on narrative” (ibid.: 414), the need inevitably arises to clarify whether that proposition is also necessarily narrative. For Jüngel, Metz and Weinrich this is not the case. That Metz (1973: 336) quotes a Hasidic story25 and Weinrich (1973: 329) opens his deliberations with an apocryphal New Testament text is merely a stylistic gambit: their apologias themselves are consistently argumentative. In fact, the problem of self-referentiality manifestly increases to the extent that narrative is recommended as an alternative to the shortcomings of reasoning and argument, and this is bound to impact the strong models of narrative theology more acutely than the weak model proposed by Ritschl. One might be tempted to call the tension in these strong models a “performative contradiction” (Habermas). At all events the issue of argument versus narration focuses the need to clarify the definitions and relations of the two opposing 25

The instance quoted for the all-changing impact of narrative is, interestingly enough, precisely not taken from ‘real life’. This strengthens the suspicion that narrative is here “ultimately devalued into a post factum illustration of the properly argumentative discourse of theology” (Sandler 2002: 530).

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modes. How otherwise could one begin to follow Jüngel’s (1992: 414) statement: “Thinking of God can only be thought of as a conceptually controlled storytelling of God?” (see ibid.: 428) Despite his critical stance vis à vis Metz and Weinrich, and his initially professed “uncertainty”, Jüngel - if we take this dictum seriously - evidently also proposes a strong model of narrative theology. Indeed this is demanded (at least as an ideal) by his whole approach. To bridge the gulf that consequently opens between ideal and practice he appeals to what might be called the exception-clause of genius, citing the case of his own teacher, Karl Barth. It was Barth’s “specific genius”, he writes, to create “a genuine bond between argumentative and narrative dogmatics” which “allowed the argumentative power of the story to speak for itself” (ibid.: 427, n. 52)26. This move of Jüngel’s at least partially draws the sting from the charge of performative contradiction: not everyone is gifted to combine so faultlessly the two modes of discourse; enough, then, that the mass of participants confine themselves to the conceptual argument that is their natural métier.27 2.3 From Mainstream to Backwater The positions taken by these authors, and their implications for the various disciplines of theology, attracted much attention, discussion and critique in subsequent years.28 But a mere decade after the appearance of Metz and Weinrich’s essays, Bernd Wacker could, in his “Towards a Balance” (1983), accept the verdict of the religious pedagogue Helmut Anselm (1981: 117) that “narrative theology was for a short time on everyone’s lips. Today it seems already a thing of the past.” The decline in interest after the mid 1980s in both Protestant and Catholic circles was undeniable, and when in 1997 the Catholic theologian and Germanist Knut Wenzel published his dissertation Zur Narrativität des Theologischen29 (‘On Theological Narrativity’) it aroused little interest, despite the fact that Wenzel sought a solution to a repeated stumbling-block: the theological indeterminacy of the central concepts of narration and narrativity. Unsurprisingly, he calls on Paul Ricœur, whose approach to narratology is in any case close to theology (see e. g. Ricœur 1995), arguing that the indeterminacy in question is theologically well founded: 26 27 28

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For Barth’s own position on narrative see Wacker (1977: 73-81). It should be mentioned here that Jüngel himself published several much acclaimed volumes of sermons. The many essays in practical theology, as well as Dietmar Mieth’s benchmark contribution to the development of a ‘narrative ethics’, deserve special mention. Major works of systematic theology were the exception at that time. For an overview see the bibliography in Wacker (1983: 26-29). See also: Wenzel (1996).

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the indeterminacy of the concept reveals itself […] as an indication of the radical historicity of a theology that—as narrative—not only has history as its theme, but sees itself as a voice within that narrative. Yet again: narrative theology is immersed in its own thematic element of time and history (Geschichte)—history understood in its double sense of ‘account’ (Historie) and ‘story’ (Erzählung). (Wenzel 1997: 15)30

What Wenzel proposed under the programmatic title of ‘Theological Narrativity’ is something which had, up to that point, been lacking: an explicitly reflective narrative theology. The scarcely audible response to his thesis was doubtless due in part to the general shift in thematic focus, but it can be ascribed with even greater conviction to the hermeneutically refined level of his argument. A third factor may have been simply denominational: up to now the discussion had been confined to Protestant theology. Whatever the case, his work receives no mention at all in the latest contribution to the discussion, the 2005 volume of essays Dogmatik erzählen? Die Bedeutung des Erzählens für eine biblische orientierte Dogmatik (‘Narrating Dogmatics? The role of storytelling in a biblically oriented dogmatic theology’; Schneider-Flume/ Hiller 2005). 2.4 Leipzig Reprise: “Narrating Dogma?” (Schneider-Flume) The general argument of the volume in question can be discerned in the contributions of one of its editors, the Leipzig systematic theologian Gunda Schneider-Flume.31 In her introduction Schneider-Flume (2005a: 3) expressly cites what she calls the “old programme” of narrative theology, an approach she judges to be of “limited legitimacy”, in whose “rejuvenation” the essays presented in the collection are, she makes clear, not interested. On the contrary, the relevance of narrative theology is to be understood here in the context of reflection on the traditional task of dogmatic theology, which remains, for her, “the explication of the scriptures” (ibid.). The unmistakably Lutheran slant to this manifesto carries over into the question that forms the title of Schneider-Flume’s own first essay (as it does of the volume as a whole): “Narrating Dogma?”—described in her subtitle as a “plea for a biblical theology”. Schneider-Flume sees narrative theology in the old sense as harbouring two major “dangers and limitations […]: the arbitrariness, or ideological […] abuse, of narration on the one hand, and the lack of credibility of metanarrative remarked by Jean-François Lyotard on the other” (ibid.: 4). However, neither of these deficiencies is further elaborated, nor does it become clear how they are to be avoided in the author’s own approach.32 30 31 32

The German word Geschichte is commonly used for both ‘history’ and ‘story’ [trans.]. But see the painstaking review by Linde (2007). The argument that the “unique history of God” is not a metahistory because it “enters [individual] life-histories as a concrete force” (ibid.) certainly constitutes no objection to Lyotard’s understanding of metahistory.

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Despite the coolness of this volume towards narrative theology, the diagnosis underlying its reprise of the topic has a familiar ring: Christians suffer from “inarticulacy” (ibid.: 3) vis à vis their faith; the “great dogmatic symbols” (ibid.: 6)—sin, justification, providence, God—no longer adequately express Christian experience. In these circumstances the story is called upon to “break up the[se] great dogmatic concepts” (ibid.: 3). Yet, true to the principle avowed by Ritschl and Jüngel,33 Schneider-Flume also insists that dogmatic theology, albeit reflecting narrative and, as such, beholden to it, should not itself be conceived in narrative terms. Where she differs from Ritschl is in the scope of what she thinks of in this context as narrative: not any corpus of stories but the stories of the Bible. These, for her, are the “material of dogmatic thought“ (ibid.: 11). How dogmatic theology is to be practised as the interpretation and exposition of biblical writings is demonstrated in Schneider-Flume’s (2005b) second contribution to the volume, where she directly confronts the problem, familiar to theologians, of speaking in a single breath of “the many stories of the biblical tradition and the one story of God.” The narrative problem, in other words, appears against the horizon of the ‘scriptural principle’ (sola scriptura)34, and even more precisely against that of the unity and centricity of the scriptures. To speak in these terms is to assume the accents of the Reformers, for whom Jesus Christ was the one binding factor within a multifarious biblical tradition. “Take Christ out of the scriptures and what more will you find in them?” Luther had asked35. The significance of the concept of scriptural centring was developed in the form of the doctrine of justification36; as such it underlies all critical theology, including that whose object is the matter of the scriptures themselves.37 The postulate of an underlying unity of scriptural intention has certain problematic consequences for theology. What does it entail, for example, for that portion of the sacred books of Christianity that comprise the Old Testament, the majority of whose writings belong at least primarily not to the 33 34

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In contrast to the analysis presented here, Jüngel in these terms represents a weak model. Viz. of the Reformers’ doctrine that the scriptures are the sole source and norm of faith and consequently also of theology; this contrasted with the Roman Catholic appeal to the authority of tradition as a second norm – see Ebeling (1966). For a fuller treatment of the scriptural issue see Härle (2007a: 111-139). “Tolle Christum e scripturis, quid amplius in illis invenies?” (Luther 1525: 606, 29). I. e. the Reformers’ doctrine that mankind, locked in original sin, can and will be unconditionally set in a rightful relation to God (viz. justified) by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide) in the redeeming power of Christ (solus Christus). “It is from the platform of the Bible itself that the Bible becomes both addressee and object of critical analysis. Because the authority of scripture is derived from the authority of scripture, Christ’s dealings [“was Christus treibt”, Luther] themselves become the critical standard against which the utterances of scripture as a whole and of its individual books must be measured; it is with Christ that they must match.” (Härle 2007a: 138f.)

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Christian tradition at all but to the Jewish?38 Above all, however, it was the results of critical historical research that led to what W. Pannenberg has called “a crisis of the scriptural principle”; for what this demonstrated was precisely not the unity but the multiplicity of at times contradictory theological conceptions. Why, therefore, theology should remain subservient to scripture is not easy to establish convincingly—which is why the scriptures tend to play an increasingly background role in recent systematic theological discussion. Aware of this development, and of the advent in their place of what she calls “the generalized religious constructs of subjectivity theory”, Schneider-Flume argues decisively for a new opening of systematic theology towards narrative and narration. Theology, she says, has forgotten what “experiential riches [are lost] by giving up the biblical tradition […] Faced with this loss, the work of dogmatic theology must concentrate on finding its way back to the biblical stories.” (ibid.) Nevertheless, rather than engaging immediately in this task, SchneiderFlume turns her attention to a counter-proposition concerned with a modern approach to scriptural centring: Ingolf U. Dalferth’s (1997: 189) thesis that the centre of the scriptures is “external […]: not within the semantic horizon of the biblical texts but within their pragmatic horizon in the work of the Christian church”39. The texts themselves, Dalferth maintains, do not raise the question of a ‘centre’ at all; this arises in the wake of the broader attempt to expound the presence and working of God in the world. For her part, Schneider-Flume utterly rejects the shift from a received principle of biblical interpretation to a fundamental principle of theological hermeneutics. Against Dalferth she hammers home her traditional Lutheran position, exegetically enriched with three biblical “traces of the (hi)story of God”, which she entitles “the realism of mercy”, “hearing the cry for salvation” and “righteousness and vicariousness” (see Schneider-Flume 2005b: 41-50). These three strands of biblical history, she argues, reveal the unity of the story of God within the multiplicity and diversity of the biblical accounts. Far from deciding the issue, however, her uncompromising riposte provokes more questions about Schneider-Flume’s position. If her ultimate objective is to break up the “great dogmatic concepts” because they are no longer understood, it is not immediately clear how this is to be achieved with the help of biblical narratives. That it is they (rather than narratives as such) that are invoked is understandable as a traditional reflex (sola scriptura); but at least it should be made clear why the frequently lamented alien quality of the Bible’s textual worlds suddenly no longer presents an obstacle. To put it mildly, is the “prolongation of the Bible story into the present-day world” 38 39

See Schneider-Flume (2005b: 34, esp. the works listed in note 7). For an exegetical presentation see Weder (NT) and Hermisson (OT) in the same volume. They also attract Schneider-Flume’s criticism.

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(Linde: 2007: 1116) really as straightforward as the author maintains? A second objection concerns a similar discrepancy between the proposed definition and solution of the problem. If the “inarticulacy” predicated of “Christians” in their lack of understanding of the “great concepts” (SchneiderFlume 2005a: 3) is as truly global a phenomenon as it is made out to be, it scarcely follows that a “biblically oriented dogmatic theology” will be an appropriate remedy. After all, dogmatic theology is the preserve of academic theologians, and of an academic language that need not and cannot be intelligible to all Christians. A far simpler (indeed banal) appeal would in the circumstances be more convincing: that the pastoral clergy should strive more effectively to communicate a theologically informed and experientially rich religious language to their communities—which does not, of course, reciprocally imply that academic theology can afford to be oblivious of religious language. 3. Interim Balance: Narration—a Holistic-Polemic Concept The foregoing discussion of some key approaches to narrative and narration bears ample witness to the alterity of theological discourse on the subject. The summary below (which is based on a wider range of publications than those already cited) will attempt an interim balance from a point of view closer to that of literary studies. Doing so, it hopes to shed a closer light on the specific purpose and role of narration for systematic theology. If in the process certain gaps are noted, this should be understood descriptively rather than critically; for in an interdisciplinary context precisely those dimensions (here of the phenomenon of narration) are most interesting that do not enter the discourse of the partner discipline, or might even disrupt it. What distinguishes the theological discussion of narrative and narration, then, can be expressed in the following propositions: ƒ In all the approaches so far discussed, the concepts of narration, storytelling etc. are, even in the weak models, consistently positive (rather than neutral). ƒ For theology the narrative problem is neither merely aesthetic nor stylistic, nor is it purely didactic (and as such a topic for practical theology). On the contrary, it falls (as above all Jüngel’s approach demonstrates) within the purview of systematic theology in the strictest sense. ƒ Nevertheless it is of little interest to any of these approaches how storytelling actually operates. The whole issue is derivative: what is crucial is its status for theology as a whole and/or for the subdisciplines. In other words, the concept of narrative is not differentiated internally but externally, in relation to other competing positions.

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What is undoubtedly lost in the course of the debate is the emancipatory thrust of its beginnings. What for Metz was a keystone of ‘political theology’ is for Schneider-Flume no more than a keyword of traditionally Lutheran ‘biblical theology’. The highlighting of narrative tends to overlook the fact that much but not all of the Bible falls within that category. The significance of other genres (poetic, legal, epistolary) for narrative theology remains an open question—and one to be addressed above all with regard to by Schneider-Flume’s biblical dogmatic theology. Within the narrative theology discourse, storytelling plays the more or less simple role of the good alternative to conceptual argumentation’s bad. Whilst many participants in the debate allow that these are not disjunctive opposites, the point is rarely developed. The programmatically chiastic bond between the two—narration as a mode of argument, argument as a mode of narration—is passed over in silence, despite the evidence for this within the biblical tradition, evidence quite as obvious as that of the oft-cited Tales of Hasidim.40 Nor is mention made in this context of Deuser’s ‘confessional’ language as a type of ‘God-talk’ mediating between argument and storytelling.41 The alternatives of argument and narration are treated almost exclusively in abstracto. Above all the proponents of a strong model of narrative theology ignore the practical consequences of their position. For requirement and performance do not meet: the requirement to narrate demanded of theological language by no means entails an ability to do so adequately (hence Jüngel’s waiver clause for genius). The plea for a narrative theology does not carry the same implications for all the theological sub-disciplines. In its strong form it impacts systematic theology most acutely, for here ‘God-talk’ takes on its most abstract and highly specialized terminological form. The more exclusively narration is propounded as the optimal mode of ‘God-talk’, the more pressing becomes the reciprocal question of the mode of discourse in which that proposition is framed. Most approaches ignore this self-referential dimension of the problem; those that do ac-

But see also Landfester’s (2005) historico-exegetical approach. Petzoldt (2005: 73) crucially asks if the opposition between concept and narrative has not been overly hasty. In the field of academic theology, too, it is not concepts but propositions (sentences) that characterize dogmatic utterances: “A dogmatic utterance is only completed when the dogmatic concept is joined with a predicate to form a sentence or judgment. [...] The utterance can only enter scholarly discourse once it is expressed as a judgment. In this respect the utterances of dogmatic theology must also fulfil the propositional postulate of scientific theory.” Petzoldt’s essay is of particular interest in being the only one to take a critical stance towards the volume’s overall programme.

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knowledge it are content, like Jüngel, with a simple indication of the existence of the problem: Before argumentative theology can become truly narrative it must develop an ability to reflect on the mode and matter of narrative: it must prove its dialectic and discursive capabilities. If “discourse is again [!] to become narrative […] it urgently requires a discursive theory of narrative” [Mieth]. (Jüngel 1992: 427) The unquestioning assumption that storytelling is a theological virtue derives largely from the notion that narrative and experience are one. Their relation is not further analyzed but itself assumed as a sort of a priori postulate, frequently backed by a classical reference (e. g. to Walter Benjamin, see note 24 above). The categorical premise that concepts are incapable of communicating experience is matched by the assumption that narrative can do this to a high degree. The reciprocal question whether narrative is not itself subject to limitations is not raised, nor is any reference made to the role of experience in non-narrative poetic modes (especially the Psalms). Theological assent for narrative and narration invariably regards itself as assent to a mode whose time is past (not just for theology). Thus, Schneider-Flume (2005a: 4) wholeheartedly agrees that ‘we’ live in a post-narrative era, and she, too, appeals to the diagnoses of Benjamin and Adorno without, it seems, adverting to the huge shifts in the media landscape that have taken place since they wrote. Ever since its introduction, the concept of ‘narrative theology’ has largely oscillated “between the twin poles of ‘storytelling theology’ on the one hand and ‘theological theory of narration’ on the other” (Wacker 1983: 20). The main reason for this oscillation would seem to be the very openness of the concepts of narrative, narration, storytelling etc. Who tells whom what story how and where frequently remains unclear.42 Standard literary-critical distinctions relating to the semantics (author versus narrator, discours versus histoire, fictional versus factual account etc.) and pragmatics of narration (author/work/reader, narration versus narrative, oral versus written narrative etc.) scarcely play a role in the theological discussion. Yet whether we are talking of one of Jesus’ parables or of Proust’s Recherche is—quite apart from the question of differing canonicity—a mat-

A standard observation since Metz (1973: 341) and despite Wenzel (see Wacker 1977: 85ff.). The lack of clear focus inevitably affects the paraphrases given here.

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ter of considerable consequence for the phenomenology of both narration and reading.43 The lack of such differentiation can be seen as the very condition under which narrative and narration can function as a clear holistic alternative to argument. Only as such can it fulfil the polemic function required of it by theological discourse.44 4. Analogies: “The God of Texts” (Weimar)

A final reference must be made to an approach that brings narration and theology into an entirely different relation to each other, and from a quite different motive and angle. Far from launching a programmatic thesis or critique (either disciplinary or interdisciplinary), Klaus Weimar’s 1998 essay “Der Gott der Texte” (‘The God of Texts’) confines itself to a precise description of a number of striking analogies that appear between the two areas. In this approach literary-critical (and especially narratological) concepts and distinctions finally play a central role. The title of the essay is initially somewhat confusing; beneath it lies the observation that literary criticism frequently impinges (or draws) upon theology even when it is unaware of doing so. Recognizing God “neither as immediate thematic focus, nor […] as historical agent or systematic source of explanation” (ibid.: 145), literary criticism nevertheless has persistent and unmistakable recourse to “procedures and concepts that—at least in earlier times—were part and parcel of theology” (ibid.). Three areas in particular attract Weimar’s attention: the doctrine of inspiration, the analogical mode of interpreting and, above all, the concept of author. In each case his argument proceeds identically, a sketch of the theological dimension of the concept being followed by examples illustrating its less obvious literary-critical analogue. Thus the theological doctrine of inspiration, he argues, (like its poetological counterpart) postulates a type of heteronomous utterance: one in which two voices, that of a divine and of a human author, speak, the latter (whether orally or in writing) articulating the will of the former. It is an ordering that recurs (albeit variously) in the predilection of literary studies to 43

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Ritschl’s story becomes an umbrella term “embracing the suffering in Chile or Angola” as much as the “story of Abraham” or “the story of my child”, irrespective of the profound differences these present as theological raw material (Ritschl 1976: 10, 37). See also Weinrich (1973: 330f.). The polemic instrumentalizing of the debate within academic theology may be at least partly responsible for the lack of interest it aroused outside that circle. Significantly, the comprehensive bibliography of narratological research published between 1976 and 1978 in successive issues of the Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik carries no reference whatsoever to narrative theology. See Wacker (1983: 30, n. 28).

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read texts as symptoms of e. g. ‘society’ or the ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘discourse’. Neither the source of inspiration nor its instrument is in such cases personal; in this type of global palimpsest the role of muse or Holy Spirit is taken by an impersonal but all-powerful force. Narratologically the interesting point is that theology, in contrast to poetics, links the blending of the two voices to two different linguistic modes, the divine language of ‘things’ or ‘realities’—the verbum efficax within whose outreach word and being, word and world are one (the classical texts being Gen 1 and Ps 33,9)—and human language, whose words symptomatically lack such efficacy. “When the divine language of things enters the human language of words per inspirationem, the human author speaks […] in human words and the divine author speaks through him […] to the things signified by those words.” (Weimar 1998: 146) The distinction, Weimar (ibid.: 147) argues, recurs in literary scholarship in the “concept of the dual linguistic level specific to literature, current in exemplary form in the narratological distinction between author and narrator. […] author and narrator are related to each other as divine inspirer and evangelist or prophet”. Heinrich Lee in Der grüne Heinrich is in this sense just as much a creation of Gottfried Keller’s as, in Christian belief, mankind is the creation of God. Whilst Heinrich speaks with the words of men, Keller speaks in and through his character’s ‘human’ words the divine word of ‘things’. The idea that certain texts involve some sort of inspired language underlies a wide range of hermeneutic practices. Heteronomous speech demands interpretive techniques that reveal the higher meaning, the sensus spiritualis, ‘behind’ the immediate meaning of the words. Weimar’s point is that the anagogical (including the allegorical) interpretation of texts—a traditional canonical technique of Christian hermeneutics—far from being confined to antiquity or the Middle Ages, is an accepted procedure of modern literary science (see ibid.: 148). The mention of a bicycle pump in a text by Joyce inspires interpretive constructs from phallic symbol to serpent in Paradise that would be unlikely to occur to the (same) reader of a travel journal. Nevertheless, the difficulty of the (still almost spontaneous) jump from sensus litteralis to sensus spiritualis in the case of the familiar pump is, in comparison with the anagogical reading of a biblical text, heightened by the absence of any regula fidei to serve as prop or guideline. Between phallus and serpent (or any further alternative) the reader may waver where he or she will not when confronted with a biblical triad whose reference to the Trinity is canonically guaranteed.45 Weimar’s deliberations culminate in his third section, devoted to the role of author—and specifically to the thesis that a traditional idea of God has 45

See Bühler (2000) on Luther’s critique of interpretive reasoning.

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“slipped into literary studies and taken refuge in the concept of author” (ibid.: 150).46 For whenever one posits a ‘language of things’ as the basis for the meaning of things within a textual world, one must at the same time posit a speaker of that language— namely the author. The author of a literary text stands to the textual world that he or she creates as, in received theological doctrine, God stands to the world that he created. (ibid.: 149)47

Citing a passage from Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart, Weimar demonstrates that at least eight of the classical attributes of God are predicable of a human author in relation to the text: omnipotence and omniscience, invisibility and incorporeality, omnipresence and immeasurability, eternity and infinity. Understood as the creator of a textual world—that is to say from the point of view of “textual theory” rather than (as is commonly the case in literary studies) “text-production theory”—the literary author enjoys all these attributes. And Weimar takes the significant further step of ascribing those attributes “also, and in fact primarily, to the reader” (ibid.: 153)—for it is a commonplace that the reader is the real creator of the concrete textual world, however much readers of Ahnung und Gegenwart may selflessly insist on ascribing the world of that novel to the historical Eichendorff.48 With or without this final twist into the aesthetics of reception it remains plausible to speak of the author as the ‘God of Texts’ for the simple reason that the classical doctrine of God has formulated, albeit unawares, a concept of authorship that perfectly dovetails with textual theory. 5. Conclusion “Contemporary theological dictionaries are treacherous—above all in what they leave out.” (Metz 1973: 334) The opening sentence of Metz’s ‘Brief Apologia’ no longer reflects today’s situation. Recent theological encyclopaedias all contain an article on ‘narrative’, and both the Catholic Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (3LThK) and the Protestant Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (4RGG) even carry an independent entry on ‘narrative theology’.49 Thanks at least partly to Metz, one can, then, no longer speak in this context of omission. It is nevertheless striking that, even in retrospect, the authors (especially of the systematic sections) of the relevant articles still experience 46 47

48 49

Weimar’s argument doubles as an explication of Barthes’ postulate of the death of the authorGod: see Barthes (1984: 67). Weimar’s concept of God is that of early-modern Lutheran orthodoxy: the texts on which he draws are Quenstedt’s Theologia didactico-polemica (1685) and Buddeus’ Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae (1724). For the background to this see Weimar’s theory as expounded in Weimar (1994). See Wenzel (1993) and Arens (2003).

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certain difficulties in establishing the scope and locus of narration. Arens (2003: 53), for example, notes once again the dilemma of the “outreach of narrative”: are we talking here about “a, or indeed the, genuinely theological method and approach, or are stories merely the ‘raw material’ (Ritschl) of a theology whose processes are themselves argumentative”? Current theological discourse, however, seems better able to live with these uncertainties than was the case thirty years ago. The theological relevance of narrative— especially for a church that confesses allegiance to the sola scriptura principle—is generally accepted; what has passed into history is the programmatic foregrounding of ‘narrative theology’, though this does not in turn imply that the problems that gave rise to that program have passed into oblivion. What is the appropriate language of (systematic) theology? What is its ‘raw material’? To what extent is it legitimate for the metalanguage of theology to distance itself from the world-centred language of religion? These questions remain at the forefront of contemporary discussion, and in them the biblically sanctioned mode of narration is present and active, albeit in a significantly altered perspective. Narration today more often features as one aspect of an aesthetic50, poetic51 or poietic52 (dogmatic) theology that sees itself as a medially open-ended response to the modern “crisis of the scriptural principle”.53 Be that as it may, it is not the after-life of narrative theology that is at issue here. More to the point is one final but fundamental issue that emerges from viewing the interim balance in the light of Weimar’s “God of Texts”. For the manner in which narration and theology are linked in ‘narrative theology’ raises the prospect of a new and independent type of theology. As we have seen, it is the function of narration—above all its polemic function—not its methods that have captivated the interest of theologians. How specific narrative worlds were constructed and with what critical tools they can be described was never of pressing interest. Against this background Weimar’s essay reads—however unintentionally—as a plea for recapturing a lost dimension. Its focus on careful deployment of accepted narratological techniques and methods absolves him in any case from the accusation of functionalism. And without wanting to play off one approach against the other— which (among other things) would fail to do justice to the established disciplinary role of narrative theology—one further benefit must be mentioned. For 50

51 52 53

See the three-volume Ästhetische Theologie (‘Aesthetic Theology’) of the writer and theologian Klaas Huizing (2000-2004). See also Mertin (2002) for a sensitive critical presentation of that work. See Stock’s (1995-2007) to-date seven-volume Poetische Dogmatik (‘Poetic Dogmatics’), as well as his essays in ‘pictorial theology’, Stock (1996 etc.). See Bayer (1999). See Huizing (2000-2004; 1996). For an overview of these and other approaches see BaukeRuegg (2004: 199-254).

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Weimar’s contribution highlights the price that is paid when the twin poles of narrative theology are joined in a venture whose primary motivation is programmatic and polemic. The advantage of his more modest horizon is that it generates results which are of interest to both disciplines involved— and why else should literary scholarship be interested in the projects of theology? An awareness of the latent theological dimension of a whole series of critical concepts and procedures opens up new prospects for literary scholars; though whether this breakthrough will be accompanied by joy at the discovery of new relations or fear and trembling in the face of concepts already shed by theology centuries ago is hard to say. For theologians, the prospect is similar. They can perceive their own concerns all the more clearly through the lens of another discipline, but to do so involves a parallel ambivalence. This may be illustrated in a single example: for theology today, the concept of narration is almost sacramental, its connotations wholly positive, its outreach virtually unlimited. It will be interesting to see if this evaluation is affected by an awareness of the limits imposed by the terminology, categories and concepts of literary narratology. It is at least thinkable that advertence to the limitations of individual narrative perspectives (described, for example, in such categories as voice and focalization) might introduce a measure of scepticism towards the unlimited power of narration and narrative as such.54 A number of literary scholars and theologians apart from Klaus Weimar have shown an interest in the relation between theology and narration from a more closely narratological point of view, where (in contrast to narrative exegesis) the textual corpus is not restricted to biblical writings. If it were not for the grandiose overtones of such a term, one might think of their contributions as paving the way for a new and welcome analytical ‘narratheology’. Works Cited Anselm, Helmut. 1981. “Gott als Dichter. Aspekte zum Selbstverständnis narrativer Religionspädagogik”. In: Theologia practica 16, p. 117-130. Arens, Edmund. 1988. “‘Wer kann die großen Taten des Herrn erzählen?’ (Ps 106,2). Die Erzählstruktur christlichen Glaubens in systematischer Perspektive”. In: Rolf Zerfass (ed.). Erzählter Glaube—erzählende Kirche. Freiburg i. B.: Herder 1988, p. 13-27. Arens, Edmund. 2003. “Art. Narrative Theologie”. In: Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 4th ed., vol. 6, col. 52-53. Barthes, Roland. 1984 [1968]. “La mort de l’auteur”. In: R. B. Le bruissement der la langue. Essais critiques IV. Paris: Seuil, p. 63-69.

54

For a substantial critique on this point (expressly directed at Weimar) see Stoellger (2009).

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Bauke-Ruegg, Jan. 2004. Theologische Poetik und literarische Theologie? Systematisch-theologische Streifzüge. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Bayer, Oswald. 1999. Gott als Autor. Zu einer poietologischen Theologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Brokoff, Jürgen and Jürgen Fohrmann (eds.). 2003. Politische Theologie. Formen und Funktionen im 20. Jahrhundert. Paderborn: Schöningh. (= Studien zum Judentum und Christentum) Bühler, Pierre. 2000. “Allegorese und Sensus literalis in Luthers Hermeneutik. Mit einem Blick auf den Abendmahlsstreit”. In: Paul Michel and Hans Weder (eds.). Sinnvermittlung. Studien zur Geschichte von Exegese und Hermeneutik I. Zürich: Pano, p. 497513. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1960. Das Verhältnis der urchristlichen Christusbotschaft zum historischen Jesus. Heidelberg: Winter. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1985 [1941]. “Neues Testament und Mythologie. Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung”. In: R.. B. Offenbarung und Heilsgeschehen. München: Lempp (= BEvTh 7), p. 27-69. Comstock, Gary L. 1987. “Two Types of Narrative Theology”. In: Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, p. 687-717. Dalferth, Ingolf U. 1997. “Die Mitte ist außen. Anmerkungen zum Wirklichkeitsbezug evangelischer Schriftauslegung”. In: Christoph Landmesser et al. (eds.). Jesus Christus als die Mitte der Schrift. Studien zur Hermeneutik des Evangeliums. Berlin: de Gruyter (= BZNW 86), p. 173-198. Danto, Arthur C. 1968 [1965]. Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delgado, Mariano. 2000. “‘Jüdisches Korrektiv’—Das Christentum von Johann Baptist Metz”. In: M. D. (ed.). Das Christentum der Theologen im 20. Jahrhundert. Vom ‘Wesen des Christentums’ zu den ‘Kurzformeln des Glaubens’. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, p. 246-258. Deuser, Hermann. 1999. Kleine Einführung in die Systematische Theologie. Stuttgart: UTB. Ebeling, Gerhard. 1966 [1964]. “‘Sola scriptura’ und das Problem der Tradition”. In: G. E. Wort Gottes und Tradition. Studien zu einer Hermeneutik der Konfessionen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 91-143. Härle, Wilfried. 2007a [1995]. Dogmatik. Berlin: de Gruyter. Härle, Wilfried (ed.). 2007b. Grundtexte der neueren evangelischen Theologie. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. Hauerwas, Stanley M. and L. Gregory Jones (eds.). 1989. Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology. Grand Rapids: Wipf & Stock. Henning, Christian and Karsten Lehmkühler (eds.). 1998. Systematische Theologie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Huizing, Klaas. 1996. Homo legens. Vom Ursprung der Theologie im Lesen. Berlin: de Gruyter. (= Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann 75) Huizing, Klaas. 2000-2004. Ästhetische Theologie. Stuttgart: Kreuz. (Vol. 1: Der erlesene Mensch. Eine literarische Anthropologie, Vol. 2: Der inszenierte Mensch. Eine Medienanthropologie, Vol. 3: Der dramatisierte Mensch. Eine Theateranthropologie. Ein Theaterstück) Jüngel, Eberhard. 1974. “Metaphorische Wahrheit. Zur Hermeneutik einer narrativen Theologie”. In: Evangelische Theologie. Special Issue Metapher. Zur Hermeneutik religiöser Sprache, p. 71-122. Jüngel, Eberhard. 1992 [1977]. Gott als Geheimnis der Welt. Zur Begründung der Theologie des Gekreuzigten im Streit zwischen Theismus und Atheismus. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

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Landfester, Manfred. 2005. “Argumentation als Modus des Erzählens”. In: SchneiderFlume/Hiller 2005, p. 19-30. Linde, Gesche. 2007. [Review of Schneider-Flume/Hiller 2005] In: ThLZ 132:10, col. 11141116. Loughlin, Gerard. 1996. Telling God’s Story. Bible, Church and Narrative Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luther, Martin. 1525. De servo arbitrio, WA 18,551-787. Marguerat, Daniel and Yvan Bourquin. 1999. How to Read Bible Stories. An Introduction to Narrative Criticism. London: SCM Press. Mertin, Andreas. 2002. “Ästhetische Theologie?! Eine Topologie medialer Heiligenlegenden”. In: Magazin für Theologie und Ästhetik 20 . Metz, Jean-Baptiste and Jean-Pierre Jossua (eds.). 1973. The Crisis of Religious Language. New York: Herder and Herder. Metz, Jean-Baptiste. 1973. “Kleine Apologie des Erzählens”. In: Concilium 9, p. 334-342. Metz, Jean-Baptiste. 1977. Glaube in Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Mainz: Mattias Grünewald Verlag. Müller, Karlheinz. 1988. “Bedingungen einer Erzählkultur. Judaistische Anmerkungen zum Programm einer ‘narrativen Theologie’”. In: Rolf Zerfass (ed.). Erzählter Glaube— erzählende Kirche. Freiburg i. B.: Herder, p. 28-51. Ostovich, Steven T. 1994. “Messianic History in Benjamin and Metz”. In: Philosophy and Theology 8:4, p. 271-289. Petzoldt, Matthias. 2005. “‘Sprachspiele’ christlicher Glaubenslehre?”. In: Schneider-Flume/ Hiller 2005, p. 62-80. Ricœur, Paul. 1995. Figuring the Sacred. Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress. Ritschl, Dietrich. 1976. “‘Story’ als Rohmaterial der Theologie”. In: D. R. and Hugh O. Jones. ‘Story’ als Rohmaterial der Theologie. München: Kaiser (= TEH 192), p. 7-41. Ritschl, Dietrich. 1984. Logik der Theologie. Kurze Darstellung der Zusammenhänge theologischer Grundgedanken. München: Kaiser. Ritschl, Dietrich. 2005. “Nachgedanken zum ‘Story’-Konzept. Die Koagulation wiedererzählter ‘Stories’ auf dem Weg zu differierenden theologischen Lehren”. In: Theologische Zeitschrift 61, p. 78-91. Ritschl, Otto K. A. 1920. “Das Wort dogmaticus in der Geschichte des Sprachgebrauchs bis zum Aufkommen des Ausdrucks theologia dogmatica”. In: Alfred Bertholet et al. (ed.). Festgabe für D. Dr. Julius Kaftan zu seinem 70. Geburtstage. Tübingen: Mohr, p. 260-272. Rohls, Jan. 1997. Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit. Vol. 2: Das 20. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Sandler, Willibald. 2002. “Christentum als große Erzählung. Anstöße für eine narrative Theologie”. In: Peter Tschuggnall (ed.). Religion—Literatur—Künste. Ein Dialog. Anif: Müller-Speiser 2002, p. 523-538. Schneider-Flume, Gunda and Doris Hiller (eds.). 2005. Dogmatik erzählen? Die Bedeutung des Erzählens für eine biblisch orientierte Dogmatik. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Schneider-Flume, Gunda. 2005a. “Dogmatik erzählen? Ein Plädoyer für biblische Theologie”. In: G. S.-F. & Hiller 2005, p. 3-18.

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Schneider-Flume, Gunda. 2005b. “Die vielen Geschichten der biblischen Tradition und die eine Geschichte Gottes. Zur Frage nach Einheit und Mitte der Schrift”. In: G. S.F. & Hiller 2005, p. 31-50. Sölle, Dorothee. 1988. “‘Das Eis der Seele spalten’. Theologie und Literatur auf der Suche nach einer neuen Sprache”. In: Jahrbuch für Religionspädagogik 4, p. 3-19. Stock, Alex. 1995-2007. Poetische Dogmatik. Paderborn: Schöningh. Stock, Alex. 1996. Keine Kunst. Aspekte der Bildtheologie. Paderborn: Schöningh. Stoellger, Philipp. 2009 (forthcoming). “Potenz und Impotenz der Narration. Zur Allmacht der Erzählung—und deren Kritik”. In: Albrecht Grözinger, Andreas Mauz et al. (eds.). Religion und Gegenwartsliteratur. Spielarten einer Liaison. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Wacker, Bernd. 1977. Narrative Theologie? München: Kösel. Wacker, Bernd. 1983. “Zehn Jahre ‘Narrative Theologie’—Versuch einer Bilanz”. In: Willy Sanders and Klaus Wegenast (eds.). Erzählen für Kinder—Erzählen von Gott. Stuttgart: Klett, p. 13-32. Weimar, Klaus. 1994. “Lesen. Zu sich selbst sprechen in fremdem Namen”. In: Thomas Bearth et al. (eds.). Dialog. Zürich Hochschulverlag (= Zürcher Hochschulforum 22), p. 111-123. Weimar, Klaus. 1998. “Der Gott der Texte”. In: Ingolf U. Dalferth et al. (eds.). Die Wissenschaften und Gott. Ringvorlesung aus Anlass des 60. Geburtstags des Rektors der Universität Zürich, Prof. Dr. Hans Heinrich Schmid. Zürich: Pano (= Theophil 9), p. 143-154. Weinrich, Harald. 1973. “Narrative Theologie”. In: Concilium 9, p. 329-334. Wenzel, Knut. 1996. “Zu einer theologischen Hermeneutik der Narration”. In: Theologie und Philosophie 71, p. 161-186. Wenzel, Knut. 1997. Zur Narrativität des Theologischen. Prolegomena zu einer narrativen Texttheorie in soteriologischer Hinsicht. Frankfurt a. M.: Lang. (= Regensburger Studien zur Theologie 52) Wenzel, Knut. 1998. “Art. Narrative Theologie”. In: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche. Vol. 7, col. 640-643. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

HARALD WEILNBÖCK (Zürich)

Toward a New Interdisciplinarity: Integrating Psychological and Humanities Approaches to Narrative

1. The Interdisciplinary Potential of Narratological Inquiry Recent developments in narratology have paved the way for a closer interdisciplinary cooperation between narrative research in literary studies on the one hand and psychology—especially psychotherapy research, psychotrauma studies, and developmental psychology—on the other. Although cross-faculty research projects such as the one outlined in this paper are still a rare exception,1 the advent of interdisciplinary (including psychological) narratology coincides with a hermeneutical turn in psychological and social research which used to be predominantly quantitative and statistical. Thus qualitative-empirical research methodology employs narratological sequence analysis to interpret and analyze the oral narratives given by individuals—an approach that is hermeneutical in essence, albeit in a more systematic and methodologically rigorous manner than is common in literary studies. Hence, a potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration comes into sight that may bridge the traditional gap between the text-theoretical humanities, the interaction-theoretical social sciences, and qualitative approaches in psychology. The particular approach of narratological Literary and Media Interaction Research (LIR), which I have developed over the last couple of years, might lend itself as an example of such cross-disciplinary undertakings. 2. LIR: Core Research Questions, Theoretical Assumptions, Societal Relevance In the following, I will lay out LIR’s basic scientific objectives and research questions, with particular reference to its interdisciplinary methodology. For an approach that is truly interdisciplinary—and inter-narratological with re1

The Berlin School of Mind and Brain, funded by the German Excellence Initiative, might be an example of truly cross-faculty cooperation between the neurosciences and the humanities.

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spect to the narrative theories of different disciplines—will enable us to pursue culture studies in a way that is more immediately applicable and relevant to the questions of contemporary society and its citizens than may have generally been the case with humanities scholarship. The essential goal of narratological Literary and Media Interaction Research is to better understand what people actually do when they interact with fictional narratives. What precisely happens over the course of a lifetime in mental, psycho-biographical and developmental respects when people read novels, engage in aesthetic experience, and/or consume or produce fictional media narratives? Hence, LIR’s core research questions are: How do individuals—given their personal and biographical dispositions—mentally interact with literary texts, aesthetic objects and media productions, in particular with those which they identify as having been (or still being) of high personal significance? How does the experience of reading and media interaction relate to a person’s life history and to the patterns of coping that have resulted from it? More specifically: How does media interaction correlate with the mental identity construction that people constantly and unwittingly perform in their everyday life, and through which they consciously and/or unconsciously meet the particular biographical challenges of their personality development? This also implies asking the quite difficult question: To what effect—be it therapeutic, educational or the opposite—do people employ aesthetic interaction in their identity forming processes? And to what extent are they successful in using it in their continuous efforts to achieve sustainable personal development? In the second main dimension of LIR the research question is: What role does media narrative itself have in this interaction, given its specific content and form? How does a fictional narrative that has been singled out by an individual as having been personally significant function in interactive terms? More precisely: What are this narrative’s textual interaction potentials (regardless of how the person who identified it—or any empirical person— actually interacted with it)? How can we—while studying people as readers or hearers/viewers—avoid losing sight of the media narrative as text, and vice versa? How can we avoid taking the text as a mere trigger of reader response, as previous empirical literary and media research tended to do? How can text analysis and media interaction research be systematically integrated? It is evident already from these basic research questions how much a program like LIR is occupied with issues of immediate societal importance. For asking how literature and media interaction really works in psycho-social respects—both on the level of the text and on that of empirical persons— and asking what effects it has, or may potentially have, for an individual in educational and/or therapeutic respects, also always means asking how me-

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dia and literature come into play on the level of societal integration—which means also of societal conflict and its resolution. In this respect sustainable personal development is intrinsically interwoven with sustainable societal development. Hence, one main perspective of any LIR project will always be: What specific kinds of pedagogic and didactic intervention may be profitable in teaching and/or other forms of cultural social work? More specifically in psychological terms, touching upon the issue of media interaction and societal interaction/integration means asking: How does aesthetic interaction contribute to tackling the quite challenging task of working through the long-term psycho-social consequences of violence, as well as other forms of psycho-social stress? How can the transgenerational effects of violence be neutralized? These have, after all, been found to be both pervasive and lasting, and tend to propel unwitting cycles of violent and (self-)destructive behavior. Put slightly differently this question means: How can literary and media interaction and teaching contribute to building up a person’s or a group’s mental resilience against stress and violence? And this genuinely educational and therapeutic vector may remind us of what was envisioned as the ‘aesthetic education of mankind’ in the 18th century—by which Friedrich Schiller and others meant the inherent potential of art and literature to effectively support civilization and culture by instilling humanistic “Bildung”. Thus, interdisciplinary narratological research touches upon one of the humanities’ most long-standing and enthusiastically advocated objectives. The second characteristic of LIR, which is again immediately evident from its basic research questions, is the complexity of the task. Asking to what effect and how successfully individuals employ media interaction in striving to cope with aspects of their life-history, both past and present, and attempting not only to reconstruct but also to qualitatively distinguish the phenomena concerned, is a challenging task. It implies estimating in a methodologically secure fashion how an individual’s mental media interaction and aesthetic practice may support and/or hamper their personal development in the sense of sustainable individual growth and development of personal skills. Successfully tackling such complex questions requires input from various disciplinary fields. LIR projects therefore combine resources from the humanities (especially text-linguistics and recent narratological literary and media studies), from qualitative-empirical interaction and social research (especially recent biography studies), and from developmental, clinical and psychodynamic psychology and psycho-trauma studies, as well as qualitativeempirical research in psychotherapy. This joint project in advancing a new interdisciplinarity requires, first of all, trans-disciplinary theory-building. For instance, it needs to be spelled out and

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discussed how LIR’s underlying theoretical notion of interaction can be understood to comprise both the social and the mental dimensions of the concept, for interaction is taken here to refer to both intra-psychic and extrapsychic processes. And the more one thinks about this distinction with respect to the main task of theory—which is to guide the operationalization of questions for empirical research—the more one wonders whether this is a reasonable distinction at all. For individuals interact socially with other people in real-life contexts; and at the same time they interact mentally with associations and memories of past occurrences and encounters that are psychically activated by the present interactive situation. Hence, interaction—being both a mental and social phenomenon—always has the dimension of time and biographical memory (Weilnböck 2009b), more precisely: of livedthrough experience in the course of one’s personal development. In a way, a person’s whole life-history and its major guiding principles is co-present in all of her/his interactions: interaction is biographically embedded. Another basic theoretical assumption about interaction is immediately relevant to narratology: A privileged mode of (biographically embedded) media interaction is co-narration. Co-narration brings a personally experienced event (and the accompanying personal associations and memories) into a narrative form, complete with chronological order and subjective logic, and into a psycho-affectively charged situational context designed to elicit particular responses from the co-narrative interlocutor. As opposed to factual report, description and argument (modes of self-expression which may, however, be part of an unfolding narrative), narrating an experienced event is privileged in that it best serves one of the most important functions of human media interaction: to help the individual understand and come to terms with their lived experience, to develop personal knowledge and capability, and to better anticipate future occurrences and condition future interactions. This seems to be what humans live for—and why they tell stories (Weilnböck 2006a). Since this pivotal function undoubtedly holds true for co-narrative interaction, both with real-life people and occurrences and with fictional media representations of such people and occurrences—notwithstanding modal differences between the two (see below)—one additional theoretical ambition of the LIR approach will be to re-evaluate the distinction between fictional and factual narrative in order to better take into account the parallels and interrelations between these two modes of narrative and the interactions they elicit. Remarkably, this synoptic perspective only comes into play at all if one systematically adverts to the fundamental psychological dimensions of narration. With literary studies and the humanities—which almost exclusively handle the area of narratology proper today—this theoretical assumption needs

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to be explicitly underlined. Interaction with both fictional media narrative and factual real-life narrative contributes to the developmental and narrative processes of biographical identity construction as well as societal discourse. The LIR approach is based on the—I think genuinely narratological— assumption that interaction with fictional media narratives may have profound and lasting impact on a person’s—and a society’s—patterns of actual real-life interaction and biographical decision-making. And this theoretical assumption is, of course, the basis of LIR’s claim to be able to approach issues of societal relevance. Most importantly, however, the joint effort of advancing a new interdisciplinarity on a narratological basis requires the creation of a solid methodological framework and the development of a multi-method research design which is adequate to the task. The question is: How can LIR’s highly challenging research questions be approached in a methodologically rigorous way which at the same time allows for intersubjective evaluation? And how can the new narratological interdisciplinarity play a pivotal role in this endeavor? 3. LIR: Methodological Approach 3.0 Methodological Considerations The question of what qualitative-empirical interaction research is all about, how it is narratological and, above all, how it can contribute to inaugurating a new narratological interdisciplinarity, will now be discussed in more detail. The object of qualitative social research is oral narration: the impromptu storied accounts and spontaneous narratives given by individuals in interviews. Qualitative research is thus essentially narratological. Its basic assumption is that in (oral) narration individuals express themselves in ways that are subjectively felt to represent the most authentic and thorough account of what they experienced in the past and think about in the present interview situation. Therefore, (oral) narration is considered the prime resource for anyone aiming to understand how individuals operate in their subjectively organized worlds—which, of course, are always intertwined in specific ways with fictional worlds from the literary and media narratives which these individuals consume. The aim of the qualitative interaction research derived from such interviews is to reconstruct a person’s guiding interactive principles, i. e. isolate the basic principles of individual biographical development and decision making, past, present and future. In a way, it is neither more nor less than asking: ‘What makes that person tick?’—a question that qualitative research asks, however, in a systematic manner and with methodological rigor. The

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reason why qualitative and/or biographical research strives to understand how individuals ‘tick’—and also how types of individuals and particular social groups function—is that it wants to find out how people and societies may best be assisted in arranging their individual and social lives in a sustainable manner. Literary research’s complement to this cannot easily be defined with any sufficient degree of conceptual precision. But much of what is done in thinking about and interpreting literary works might be paraphrased as asking: What makes the text tick? What are its guiding principles? However, while in literary studies these questions are generally asked only of the formal and structural principles of the text, the impetus of LIR is precisely to reconstruct its interactive principles as well, following the assumption that the concept of ‘ticking’ for a text also implies some sense of interaction between author and reader. The guiding interactive principle of a person’s life history and mode of arranging their present biographical situation is, however, not easily detectable; it is certainly not something they themselves, or any analytic specialist for that matter, might be able to spell out right away—or indeed at all. Such principles are sometimes heavily concealed; and their biographical effects may take various guises and emerge in many unexpected areas. Hence, the analysis of these principles implies much intricate and laborious work in systematically probing a multitude of hypotheses, weighing different assessments, and extracting the most operative and influential biographical vectors from the array of actions, occurrences, intentions, fantasies, impulses, and opinions that an individual may present in her or his narrative and that have evolved from the complex web of their history. Even when an interviewee’s oral narrative presents a clear and convincing idea of how they tick, qualitative biographical research will employ reconstructive means which are likely to substantially augment or even correct the person’s own assessment—if, indeed, any such underlying personal principle has been explicitly volunteered at all (which is certainly not what a narrative interview expects). Almost all social and psychological research asserts the possibility—in fact the imperative probability—of significant differences between the subjective and the analytic perspective, or to put it more precisely and in the terms used in biography studies: a difference between the experienced life history of a person and their narrated life story (Rosenthal 1995; 2004). All these approaches abundantly corroborate the assumption that intuitive human self-perception and awareness is generally too unreliable and incomplete—as well as too ambivalent and conflicting—to secure accuracy in evaluating anything as complex as the guiding interactive principles of any person, let alone of oneself.

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Hence an interviewee’s narrative will generally be less reliable and factual than one might assume. And yet any information relating to the more elusive life history and its principles will—in however unwitting and unconscious a way—also be given by the subject themselves. Such implicit information will be intrinsic to the narrative account, unless it has been subtly imposed by the researcher—overwritten as it were, by the researcher’s own narrative—in an unsuspecting and involuntary dynamic of co-narrative interference. Effective methodological precautions must be taken to prevent this from happening. Even without an intrusive research narrative, however, the interviewee proper—the person functioning as narrator of their own life story (or of any other personal, subjective experience)—cannot necessarily be viewed as the absolute agent of their narrative in any consistent sense. For on some important levels of the story the interviewee may—for whatever reasons of conflict, ambivalence etc.—convey key personal issues unwittingly, between the lines of the explicit narrative. As a result, in conceptualizing the interviewee as the object of qualitative research, it might be advisable to distinguish two agents: the narrator and the narrating persona—or, more precisely, the actual interview narrator and the narrative composition subject of the interview— and to see these as co-narratively intertwined but operating on two different levels of subjective awareness (Stein 2007, Jesch/Stein 2007). Qualitative social and biographical research has not yet explicitly adopted this distinction, but the twin concepts of life history and life story implicitly reflect it. Moreover, when Rosenthal repeatedly insists on the need for biography studies to pay "particular attention […] to structural differences between what is experienced and what is narrated” (Rosenthal 2004: 53), and when she insists on “latent structures of meaning” (Rosenthal 2004: 55), she touches upon phenomena which in psychodynamic approaches are conceived of as being unconscious—i. e. as being situated in sectors of mental activity outside the subject’s awareness—and which are, moreover, frequently associated with conflict. The same implication applies to the biography studies notion of a copresent issue, i. e. of a biographical issue which is co-narratively and semiconsciously associated with a given narrative sequence, while not being mentioned by the interviewee in any explicit manner. One still quite young area of qualitative research, psychodynamic psychotherapy (whose methodological importance to the field has not yet, perhaps, been fully recognized) is firmly based on a concept of selfhood that assumes different more or less unconscious sectors of the self—and, above all, differently situated vectors of the self’s interactive principles. What is relevant to the present argument is that this field studies the co-narrative processes in psychotherapy and how they correlate with lasting changes in the subject’s state of mind (From-

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mer/Rennie 2001; Boothe 1994; 2005; Jesch et al. 2006; Weilnböck 2006a; 2006b). Hence, qualitative research has, it seems, intuitively developed analytic methods which lend themselves to reconstructing how more or less unconscious conflict-ridden or ambivalent vectors of experience and interaction work in a person’s life, and the ways in which they show themselves in selfexpression. Crucial here are the points of divergence between what is narrated today and what was experienced then, and what impact these vectors have on the subject’s biography. To say that qualitative research has intuitively developed these insights is to suggest that it has done so without having read much—and maybe even without having wanted to read much— about psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, and clinical research (which, in fact, constitutes an unexpected parallel between this field and literary studies). All schools of literary studies would certainly agree that a text’s guiding principles are not easily detectable. There is also widespread awareness of the need to differentiate between various levels of agency in literary narratives. In fact, the distinction between narrator and persona, i. e. the text’s narrative voice and its author, is something literary scholars are acutely aware of (see Jannidis 2004). Possibly, this awareness is even a bit too acute, since it usually correlates with the assumption that while the narrator, narrative voice or implied author etc. (see Kindt/Müller 2006) may be a legitimate object of literary study, the author as empirical person is not really of much interest for the interpretation of literary texts. Conceptualizing a double narrative agency might, therefore, also be advisable here. This would imply not only making the distinction between the narrator and the composition subject of the text but also viewing both narrative instances integratively and taking them equally seriously in methodological respects. The need not only to distinguish the narrator from the author on the one hand and from the composition subject on the other, but also to take the author effectively into account, and thus make the theoretical distinctions fully operational in research design and interpretation methodology, raises important issues both in qualitative research and in literary studies. When qualitative research reconstructs the difference between the livedthrough, experienced life history and the narrated life story—and thus unwittingly anticipates a conceptual distinction between persona or composition subject and narrator—it not only touches upon phenomena that psychodynamic approaches conceived of as unconscious and beset with conflict, it also quite unexpectedly touches upon an element of the imaginary, almost of the fictitious, in what is generally referred to as factual interview narrative, since what someone in their subjective view holds to be their authentic life experience might not prove factual, and what they consider their main principles of interaction might not prove accurate or complete at the analytic level; and

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even some hard facts in a truthfully given and authentically felt account of the self may prove incorrect. These incorrect, incomplete, or in other ways partially erroneous or misleading parts of a factual narrative may, therefore, in some sense be viewed as fictitious—unintentionally fictitious, as it were. And surely, thinking about literary narration, one cannot be certain that fiction writing, in turn, is not always also in some sequences and/or aspects, as it were, unintentionally factual. This, however, is not to say that many literary critics are really interested in the interface of fictional and factual/biographical elements in a literary narrative, or even consider this interface to be researchable by any standards of philological scholarship (Weilnböck 2007). The only ones who would support such an approach are psychoanalytically oriented scholars. They, however, have never had much lasting impact on mainstream literary text analysis, nor have they been able to provide the necessary methodological rigor to claim the status of reconstructive empirical research (Weilnböck 2008a; Kansteiner/Weilnböck 2008)—which is what the LIR approach is aiming at. Conceptualizing a twofold agency for literary narration as well, and thus defining two different dimensions of a literary narrative—be they labeled fictionally versus factually oriented, or manifest versus latent, or in narratological terms: narrative perspective versus focalization (in the sense of Jesch/Stein 2007)—is a characteristic feature of LIR and one of its basic principles—one that might also be of help in enhancing literary narratology’s interface with interdisciplinary research. Consequently, one of the most—if not the most—important and challenging methodological tasks of narrative analysis today (be it in qualitative social/interaction research or in literary studies) seems to be to reconstruct the interplay of the fictional and the factual aspects of a narrative, whether oral/factual or literary/fictional. In more precise terms this once again means to reconstruct the interrelation and mental interaction between what an individual has actually experienced in the past in their real life on the one hand and what they give as storied account about these experiences in the present before a listening interviewer on the other (or else what the individual as author of a fictional text may create as a personally inspiring story before a literary audience). In other words the basic task is to reconstruct the interplay of the narrator and the persona (author/composition subject) of a given narrative—in a psychologically informed sense of these terms. It is the core objective of Literary and Media Interaction Research to take on this challenging task and realize its inherent potential for interdisciplinary research, which first of all means to effectively integrate the two hitherto largely separated academic areas of studying the world of (fictional) texts on the one hand and the world of so-called real-life and empirical persons on the other.

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LIR thus encompasses two methodological dimensions: qualitativeempirical interaction research with readers, formerly called ‘reader response research’ (section 3.1), and interactive theoretical, reconstructive analysis of fictional literary or media narratives (section 3.2). Eventually the reader/author research case studies and the textual analyses will have to be integrated to reconstruct empirical variants of author-text-reader interaction— or at least of reader-text interaction. The aims and benefits of this research, which forms the core of the LIR program, will be outlined in the conclusion of this paper (section 4). 3.1 Qualitative-Empirical Interaction Research How does qualitative-empirical social research go about reconstructing an individual’s guiding interactive principles, the factors that make that person tick both in their real-life interactions and in those with literary and fictional media? Using the methodology of biography studies as a springboard, LIR employs state-of-the-art qualitative interviewing for data acquisition, and narrative transcript analysis for data analysis. For specific procedural phases of case study work, however, LIR has developed a substantial supplementary methodology of its own, for the most part in two directions: first systematically integrating psychological knowledge—particularly from psychodynamic resources, which lend themselves to better understanding how biographically molded mental interaction, and in particular its psycho-affective dynamics, functions (biography research itself has not yet tapped these resources in any systematic way); and secondly, developing methods of qualitative interviewing suitable for reconstructing media experience and media interaction— these are also not yet fully established in biography studies, and the methodological questions related to them have not been satisfactorily solved by qualitative media research. 3.1.1 Biographical-Narrative Interviewing Biography research’s strict methodology for conducting narrative interviews reflects the fact that there are many things that can be done wrong—or, put positively, there are many technical rules which, if aptly observed, permit the acquisition of interview materials containing the kind of narrative selfexpression that facilitates successful reconstructive case study analysis. But biographical-narrative interviews substantially differ from natural conversations or journalistic interviews, so conducting them requires an expertise which needs to be trained (a fact that isn’t always adequately accounted for in qualitative research).

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In essence, qualitative interviewing procedures follow one basic principle: that of maximum openness, providing conditions which secure the utmost freedom for interviewees to design and arrange their story-telling. Methodological precautions are taken to ensure this openness and reduce as far as possible any unwitting influence by the interviewer. The interview starts with a general narrative question directed not to a specific topic or period of life but to the person’s life history as a whole (and increasingly also to their family history; Rosenthal 1995). Rosenthal (2004) herself tells how in the course of her methodological development she came to realize that with almost any research question it is necessary (or at least desirable) to ask the interviewee to give their whole life history and “avoid any thematic restriction”, no matter what the particular topic and scope of the research project is (ibid.: 51). The interviewee may then begin to tell their life story, i. e. give their main narration in an individual fashion. I have conducted interviews in which the main narration took just two minutes and others in which the interviewee took two hours and more. Whatever happens in this first phase of the interview, it is essential with respect to the principle of openness that the “narration is at no time interrupted by questions from the interviewers” (ibid.: 52). Instead, they should give nonverbal support by means of various paralinguistic expressions and body language which signal personal interest, attentiveness, and empathy—and give encouragement when the interviewee pauses (for instance by simply interjecting “and then what happened?”). Unaccustomed as this self-restraint might feel at first, it is a technique that enables the interviewee to arrange their narration in the richest possible way and to tap into distant and estranged sources of personal memory. In this space the narration will “start to flow” (Rosenthal 2004: 52), become increasingly detailed, and unfold in ways which are sometimes unexpected and surprising even for the interviewee—and which touch upon issues invested with personal emotion which are not easily attainable in an everyday conversational situation. Following the main narration, interviewers may begin to pose internal follow-up questions on the basis of notes taken during the interview. These questions aim at generating more detailed information about the interviewee’s experience. Technically speaking this means avoiding both the sort of factual questions frequently posed in conversation (“When was that?” “Where was that?”), and drawing parallels to the interviewer’s own experience (“I felt that, too …”). Above all it means not asking about reasons, adducing arguments, or discussing opinions (“Why did you do that?”), because such questions effectively thwart narration. During the main narration interviewers will in any case have taken note of any such arguments and opinions, just as they will of the interviewee’s detached reports and descriptions of

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issues and contexts. In this follow-up phase they use the interviewee’s arguments for further narrative questions aiming to tap into the personally experienced events that lie behind the interviewee’s account. So, if an interviewee expresses the opinion that they don’t like foreigners, for example, the follow-up question will not ask about reasons or discuss opinions, which might well produce an abstract evaluation or argument, but simply remark: “You mentioned that you don’t like foreigners. Tell me about a moment or event in your life in which you clearly felt that you didn’t like foreigners.” This will produce further narrative, to which the interviewer will respond with the same attitude of attentiveness and empathy as before, and which may be further expanded (“What happened before that?”, “What happened later?”, “How did that happen?”). Listening attentively in this way, interviewers will have noted many points that seem promising for generating further narrative. And while there are certain formalized rules for spotting such cues (for instance when arguments, opinions, contradictions, lacunas occur in the narrative, see Rosenthal 2004; Lucius-Hoene/Deppermann 2002), there sometimes seems an instinctive element in an interviewer’s choice, when it taps into a content-rich experience which the interviewee had not thought of mentioning. This and other techniques of interviewing have proven effective in stimulating an interviewee’s narrative to flow freely. People who have been interviewed frequently report that they had not expected to come up with so much personal history or to touch upon this or that issue, and often also not to experience this or that feeling. In fact, interviewees have often gotten into a quite elated mood, as if creatively inspired by the experience. And since a biographical interview is usually conducted by two closely interacting interviewers, and may take up to three hours, with a possible second appointment to follow, the end product will often be a rich, complex artistic creation containing both factually oriented and imaginative narrative vectors. For the interviewee the experience will seem at times to resemble the state of creative enthusiasm and aesthetic elevation which authors are sometimes reported to have experienced during the writing process. Conversely, training and initial experience in conducting narrative interviews frequently have an existential impact on researchers, changing their interactive style even in everyday life and resulting in a more open and perceptive attitude vis-à-vis their social environment. This too has sometimes been described as akin to the effect of reading belletristic literature: an aesthetic as well as interactive enhancement of sensibility. After the internal follow-up questions are finished it is only in the last phase of the interview that the principle of openness is suspended and external narrative follow-up questions may be posed. These confront the interviewee with instances of narrative incoherence or conspicuous deviations

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from a standard perception of reality; as well as involving external issues pertaining to the specific focus of the study. In the LIR approach this is also the place where a significant methodological innovation is introduced, with key questions from psycho-diagnostic interview techniques being included if the relevant issues have not already been sufficiently covered during the biographical interview (Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis: http:// www.opd-online.net). Finally the interviewee is asked to name a literary or media production of high personal significance, which will then be used in the second phase of LIR narrative interview (3.1.3). 3.1.2 Reconstructive Narrative Analysis This high degree of methodological rigor which—aside from its creative elements—characterizes the interview technique also holds true for data analysis. Here a novel method of reconstructive interdisciplinary transcript analysis (ITA) is employed, applying standard procedures of transcript analysis as practiced in qualitative biography studies, and systematically integrating the results with psychological resources. In the first phase, transcript analysis as known from biography studies follows a well laid-out path of methodical steps which, for reasons of brevity, cannot be described here in detail (see Rosenthal 2004: 50). Suffice it to say that the key analytic procedure is adductive (as opposed to deductive or inductive) sequential hypothesis building, which means that every hypothesis produced by the analytic team to explain a specific narrative sequence or biographical fact is taken into account. It is only in the chronological course of hypothesis building along the consecutive sequences of the interview transcript that certain hypotheses are excluded and others retained. Methodically formalized, the five steps of transcript analysis are: ƒ Extraction and interpretation of basic biographical data, including key events and decisions. These are isolated in the interview transcript as quasi-objective information (place and social milieu of birth, siblings, education, illnesses, change of residence, historical events) and looked at separately, abstracting as much as possible from the specific form and subjective viewpoint of the narrative. Here the guiding question of sequential hypothesis building is: What are the probable turns of this life history and the respective states of mind of the subject, given these biographical data? Or in other words, what consequences would be expected from each of these hypothetical turns if they were to occur? Asking which of the different hypotheses actually comes true in the next biographical phase then leads to the construction of new and more refined sets of hypotheses about what might possibly happen in the phases that follow.

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Text and thematic field analysis of the narrative by adductive verification-falsification procedures. Here the structure and dynamics of the subject’s self-presentation are analyzed chronologically in line with the sequences of the transcript (which were drawn up according to thematic shifts and changes in text type, such as description, argumentation, report, and narrative). The guiding question of sequence-by-sequence text analysis is: How does an interviewee view the world in terms of their own life history and their personal agency in it? How do they choose to portray themselves? ƒ Reconstruction of experienced life history—aims at illuminating the lived-through experience of the interviewee, independently of how it is presented as a story. ƒ Microanalysis of transcript segments—focuses on interview passages that seem particularly pertinent to the life history and promise to further “decipher [the transcripts’] latent structures of meaning” (Rosenthal 2004: 60). ƒ Concluding contrastive comparison of experienced life history and narrated life story—aims at finding explanations for the difference between the two levels and how they impact the subject’s way of coping with life. In its second phase LIR’s interdisciplinary transcript analysis (ITA) goes beyond these standard biography studies procedures and systematically taps into the resources of clinical and psychodynamic psychology, with a view to determining and formulating the subject’s principles of mental coping and psychic defense. ITA begins with Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis (OPD), a multi-axis diagnostic tool developed in Germany over the last fifteen years from various recent approaches in psychodynamics, psychoanalysis, psychosomatic medicine and psychiatry with a view to expanding and complementing the existing purely descriptive manuals of psychopathological symptoms. OPD has added various psychodynamic criteria of classification such as interpersonal relations, specific conflicts, and mental structure, and has today become a widely and internationally acknowledged common denominator in clinical diagnosis. It thus serves as a useful springboard for trans-disciplinary collaboration. Beyond the OPD manual, ITA may refer to further and more elaborate psychological resources such as qualitative psycho-trauma studies (Fischer/Riedesser 1998; Hirsch 2004), as well as the approaches of narratological, relational and attachment psychology (Bollas 1984; Angus/McLeod 2004) and psychiatry (Kernberg et al. 2000), whenever these appear promising for a better understanding of the case material in hand. In procedural terms this means that once the five steps of narrative sequence (or transcript) analysis have been completed, psychodynamic assessment proceeds in reverse order, starting with step 5 and confronting the

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conclusions with two questions: Are there any psychodynamic phenomena—as defined by the OPD and other sources—that parallel the biographical phenomena reconstructed so far? Do these parallels produce additional in-depth hypotheses? Phases one and two of ITA—biographical narrative analysis and psychodynamic/developmental assessment—are conducted consecutively and not simultaneously, because the first phase of reconstruction must not be methodologically compromised with premature psychological conclusions. As a result, what biography research usually describes in generic terms as the guiding principle(s) of a person’s life-history and development is now also specified psychologically as that individual’s psychodynamic profile—a specification of the particular challenges inherent in their personality development. This psychodynamic profile profits from the inclusion in the last phase of the biographical interview of key questions from the OPD diagnostic interview directly targeting relationship themes, interactive core conflicts, and/or core trauma compensatory patterns. 3.1.3 Media-Experience Interviewing and Final LIR Case Study Reconstruction Having reconstructed the interviewee’s biographical and psychodynamic profile, researchers now turn to the second step in LIR data analysis, the narrative media-experience interview (MEI). This was recently developed on my initiative (Weilnböck 2008b; 2009a; 2009b) because, in the first place, standard modes of qualitative and/or biographical interviewing do not lend themselves to understanding media experience, and secondly, what has sometimes been called the ‘media biography interview’ neither sufficiently grasps media experience itself nor really fathoms the biographical dimensions of an individual—let alone the aspect of their life-long psychological development (see Weilnböck 2003; 2009b). The MEI is conducted after the interviewee has re-read or re-viewed the text or film which they had identified at the end of the biographical interview as being personally significant for them. The LIR team will also have read or viewed the narrative and produced two sorts of memos in preparation for the MEI: a sequence protocol for the interviewers’ immediate orientation, in which plot-turns and characters are listed in the order in which they occur, and the MEI hypotheses memo (see below). As in the biographical interview, the interviewee is asked at the beginning of the MEI—by way of a maximally open initial question—to talk about their recent re-reading/re-viewing and the associations it had for them, as well as about the original media experience in the more distant past. The narrative response to this question then becomes the focus of MEI internal follow-up questioning aimed in two

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complementary directions. In this novel technique interviewees are first prompted to elaborate narratively on the spontaneous perceptions, thoughts and imaginations occasioned by the plot events and their causalities, as well as on the characters’ possible motivations and biographical prehistories. Secondly, they are prompted to articulate associations and memories of their own which resonate with their thoughts and imaginations about the plot and characters. Passages from the media narrative may directly be brought in (reread/re-screened) depending on which aspects of the narrative become important in the interview (Weilnböck 2008b; 2009b). This process moves, as it were, top-down into the media narrative world as it is subjectively perceived by the interviewee, and then again bottom-up into the personal biographical memories triggered by the media narrative. In the final phase of MEI, external narrative follow-up questions are posed on the basis of the MEI hypotheses memo. This consists of a collection of hypotheses about how, and to which particular sections of the text or plot-turns, the interviewee might respond, given the analysis of the biographical interview, which—given the LIR approach—itself includes hypotheses of a psychological and psycho-biographical nature. Furthermore, by this stage of the LIR process, the narratological text analysis of the media narrative has been drafted according to the NTA method (see 3.2 below) but not yet fully worked out—for research-economic reasons. This draft contains hypotheses about the narrative’s textual interaction potentials and may be used as an optional source of hypotheses to assist interviewers in producing effective external follow-up questions. The transcript analysis of the media experience interview proceeds analogously to the analysis of the biographical-narrative interview (BNI). However, it is more complex due to the fact that it deals with the biographical data both of the interviewee and of the media narrative characters. It eventually integrates the results from the BNI analysis and enters into the integrative case study reconstruction defining the person’s psychodynamic principle(s) of media interaction vis-à-vis the particular challenges of their personality development. Here the steps are: ƒ Extraction and interpretation of the fictional characters’ biographical data in the order and choice in which they were referred to by the interviewee, and their interpretation via sequential hypothesis building. This latter technique gives rise to the questions: What biographical issues might have arisen for a reader focusing on these narrative data? What other data might they then plausibly also focus on? How might they be expected to do so? ƒ Text and thematic field analysis of the interviewee’s account of their subjective reading of the media narrative, also implemented by sequential hypothesis building; and from there, reconstruction of the narrated media plot.

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Contrastive comparison with the media experience database. Reconstruction of the experienced media plot and its contrastive comparison with the narrated media plot. ƒ Search for correspondences with psychodynamic phenomena—as defined by the OPD and other psychological resources (as above with the NBI). ƒ Formulation of the subject’s psychodynamic principle(s) of media interaction. ƒ Search for thematic and structural correspondences with the results of the BNI analysis, above all with the subject’s experienced life history and general psychodynamic principle(s). ƒ Conclusions about the subject’s media interaction in light of their personality development challenges (also from the BNI analysis). Hence, in the first of its two basic methodological research dimensions— qualitative-empirical research—LIR applies narratological analysis both to an individual’s account of their life-story (BNI) and to their account of a key media experience (MEI), and reconstructs from this an instance of psychobiographically driven developmental media interaction. The case study in its entirety gives a picture of how the media narrative has been appropriated, and whether and how it has (even unwittingly) been used as a tool for working on and further developing psychodynamic mechanisms for coping with personal biographical challenges. This enables inferences to be drawn about the subject’s general pattern of biographical and developmental interaction with media. Working with several individuals from a particular social sector or age group will eventually enable a certain number of personality types— and types of real-world and media interaction—to be formulated in relation to that specific segment of the population. For qualitative research, it must be noted, does not build generalizations numerically or statistically, it works typologically, defining the types that characterize the biographically molded media interaction of a group, and how these types function in interactive terms. The group in question may consist of people undergoing psychotherapy, or young persons who are prone to violent behavior and political/religious extremism (see below), or any other relevant category. Hence, qualitative research while “reconstructing an individual case [is] always aiming at [generalizable] statements” (Rosenthal 2004: 62). Its objective is to illuminate developmental types and the complex rules of the typical genetic processes in specific sectors of society, rather than proposing one-off cause-and-effect statements for individual cases. This kind of research is about more thoroughly understanding the laws of social becoming, without which scholarship may not be able to produce effective strategies of social intervention and thus exercise its underlying responsibility to society.

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3.2 Narratological Text Analysis of the Literary/Media Narrative The second of LIR’s two basic methodological research dimensions is psychologically informed narratological text analysis (NTA) of the literary and/or media narratives selected by interviewees at the end of the biographical-narrative interview. NTA responds to LIR’s ambition to integrate empirical reader research and text analysis in a single theoretical approach. Thus NTA derives from the phenomenon established in research that when people talk about their experiences with fictional literary or media narratives and about their personal life-history in a single interview, the fictional and the factual on the one hand, and social/psychological research and literary scholarship on the other, which have thus far been kept largely separate, eventually enter into an inextricable mutual relation. This is not to say, however, that there are not significant modal differences between a fictional text conveyed in a technical medium and a factual narrative conveyed in a face-to-face interview. And with text analysis LIR’s research questions turn from readers to media, from person to text, and from factual oral to fictional textual narratives. Both types of narrative can be regarded as modes of personal self-expression, which is why they are not entirely incommensurable or autonomous, as literary theory would sometimes assume; and this is also why the LIR approach encompasses both in its concept of mental media interaction. And yet, in methodological respects it appears inadvisable, as well as operationally impracticable—at least at this point in time—to treat fictional texts in exactly the same way as narrative interview transcripts. The reasons for this methodological caution are that the interview seems in a more immediate way embedded in a co-narrative situation of interpersonal interaction; and it also refers more directly to a concept of shared reality experience. An aesthetic/fictional text, on the other hand, cast in a technical medium and directed at a larger impersonal audience, seems less amenable to the concept of interaction between author and reader. Nevertheless, the LIR approach—seeking to integrate empirical reader/author research and narratological text analysis—does require a method of analyzing literary and media narratives which is as interactively oriented as its empirical counterpart. LIR suggests the following solution to this theoretical predicament: Since analyzing a text cannot directly reconstruct interpersonal interaction proper, what narratological text analysis can do instead is to identify the interaction potentials inherent in the form and content of a particular narrative, as well as in the socio-cultural context of the audience to which it appeals (Weilnböck 2006a). In this way NTA will reconstruct the psychological impact potential a narrative may plausibly be expected to exert on its readers. In methodologi-

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cal respects NTA thus builds on an approach which in its first phase draws on the fields of linguistics, pragmatics and narratology, and in its second phase on psychodynamic clinical psychology. Consistently with this lineage NTA has recently been developed into a methodological interface between literary and clinical research (Stein 2007; Jesch et al. 2006). From text and discourse-linguistics and narratology NTA obtains methodological guidelines which allow it to assess both the informational choice and completeness of a narrative text and its incoherencies. The informational choice and completeness with which the author (or composition subject) of a fictional narrative arranges and depicts the characters and actions in their story-world is straightforwardly assessed along the sequential phases of human action with regard to: ƒ the subjectively perceived causal situation of the character (before action), ƒ the character’s build-up of personal motivation and specific intention to act in response to the causal situation, ƒ the implementation of this intention in the form of concrete action, ƒ the effects of the action, both intended and unintended (Stein 2007). It seems fair to assume that any reader striving to follow and understand an account of events and actions in a story will spontaneously and unwittingly look for the most complete information possible with regard to these four phases, and will immediately attempt to reconstruct them according to their personal and biographically molded perception of the information given in the narrative. Hence, any character’s action within a narrative can be systematically described in the first place in terms of the completeness and choice with which the elements of cause/intention/action/effects are represented. Secondly, the text can be methodically scrutinized with regard to phenomena of narrative incoherence, whereby incoherence is understood to represent a verifiable deviation from a predictable order of occurrences and actions within a narrative—predictable and verifiable with reference to the internal as well as external logic of the narrative. Instances of internal incoherence can be methodologically identified in three distinct dimensions: ƒ in the order of space and time in a narrative, along the linguistic relations of first … then and there … also there, ƒ in the order of correlations and conditions in the narrated world, along the linguistic relation of if … then, and ƒ in the order of cause and effect, of intention and result, as well as of finality, along the linguistic relations of because, in order to, with the result that. Instances of external incoherence are identifiable with reference to the cultural frames and patterns, and the general knowledge of the historical period and socio-cultural sphere, in which author and reader operate. Here inco-

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herencies and deviations are verifiable with reference to other widespread cultural narratives (or representations of knowledge) of the time, which serve as predictable frames of reference and which indicate a logic of occurrence and action which may deviate significantly from the logic of the narrative to hand. The second phase of NTA, which follows the text-linguistic assessment, serves to formulate hypotheses and draw conclusions about how the phenomena of textual incoherence and/or incompleteness might impact the reader—which to a certain extent implies the question how the reader might be motivated by the compositional subject of the text (i. e. the author) in the moment of text production. On this—more challenging—second level of inquiry one needs to muster scientific assistance from those fields which are most knowledgeable about issues of mental impact, as well as of mental causes and motivation: clinical and psychodynamic psychology. Here too, the OPD psychodynamic manual provides the main guidelines, followed by other more specific psychological resources (see 3.1.3 above). Analogously, the leading questions here are: Are there any psychodynamic phenomena—as defined by the OPD manual and other sources—that parallel the textual phenomena reconstructed thus far, and do such parallels produce further in-depth hypotheses about the interactive dynamics of the story world, and of the narrative itself, vis-à-vis the reader? As with transcript analysis, these interdisciplinary resources should, however, only be introduced by way of a strictly adductive (rather than deductive) mode of hypothesis-building. And they should only be brought in late and in a separate methodological step of the reconstruction procedure, after the text-linguistic analysis has been completed. Finally, they should be left uncompromised by any premature off-the-cuff psychological hypotheses. The end-product of NTA, then, is the reconstruction of the (literary/media) narrative’s textual interaction potentials—in other words, conclusions about what sort of impact the narrative may plausibly be expected to have on readers in general, notwithstanding the subjectivity of individual reading acts. NTA studies narratives as products of mental and communicative processes of interaction which—however consciously or unconsciously—aim to relate to and impact on their readers. LIR takes a different position here from that of the more radical proponents of reader-response theories in literary studies, who hold that a text’s impact is mostly a matter of the reader’s subjective and even idiosyncratic views, and that it cannot therefore be dealt with on the level of text. In keeping with cognitive and contextual narratologies, LIR deems it more appropriate and scientifically productive to assume, that, while empirical readers may read in highly subjective manners, they are always somehow in touch with the text, and their readings are not entirely

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idiosyncratic. Moreover, the text can also be legitimately reconstructed as a subjective intentional act, i. e. as the author’s act of writing. The two-step analytic procedure is buttressed by sources both from textlinguistics and from psychology—which defines its interdisciplinary position. In this respect it is remarkable that the NTA method of analyzing fictional (literary) narratives unwittingly responds to questions formulated in recent empirical research about the co-narrative processes of psychotherapy as one of that discipline’s “major challenges”: “to further develop methods for describing, exploring, and measuring narrative coherence and incoherence” (Angus/McLeod 2004: 373). 4. Conclusion: The Integration of Reader and Text Analysis within the LIR Project The key to the LIR project is to eventually bring together reader and text analysis.2 Such integration, however, must not compromise the specific modus operandi of the two elements (outlined in 3.1 and 3.2), as has sometimes occurred when hypotheses on reader-response and observations about the text were prematurely lumped together. For text analysis cannot fully anticipate the impact of the text on the individual reader any more than an individual case study can fully explain how a text works interactively. LIR’s final step toward integrating the two strands of its inquiry aims rather at reconstructing the actual variant of reader-text interaction in the particular case. It clarifies which of the narrative’s textual interaction potentials an individual reader has actually responded to—and how. In other words, it draws conclusions about the issues and processes of biographical and mental identity in which both reader and text have been implicated. In seeking to reconstruct empirical constellations and variants of aesthetic interaction, the LIR project contributes to the task of overcoming the compartmentalization of literary and media studies—which are currently split along the broad lines of text interpretation versus reader research. It can do so most effectively if matching sets of author-text-reader interaction are studied, in which a reader case study refers to a media narrative whose author consents to take part in analogous author research. LIR actively encourages inter-methodological synergies and feed-back options between reader- and text-research. For instance, narratological text analysis (NTA)—i. e. the reconstruction of a media narrative’s textual interaction potentials—is likely to prompt new kinds of hypothesis for sequential transcript analysis, as well as

2

The LIR approach’s methodology will soon be explicated at length (Weilnböck 2009b).

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new and promising analytic questions which might not yet have arisen in NTA. LIR’s integration of reader- and text-research also facilitates new modes of presenting cultural studies knowledge to the wider public. A novel form of publishing is envisioned, in which the text analysis of a certain literary and/or media narrative will be accompanied by and integrated with readerinteraction analysis of two or more readings, and possibly also by the respective author-interaction case study. Thus, different empirical variants of mental media interaction within the complex constellation of an author-textreader relationship will become available in a multi-focus perspective. Such a publication may contribute to significantly expanding the modes of current cultural discourse. It will, at any rate, help to avoid two problematic traditions in mainstream culture and literary studies: on the one hand the imposition of fixed, academically acclaimed interpretations of literary works, and on the other the introduction of abstract descriptive techniques of text analysis which remain largely detached from students’ own reading experience. Abbreviations LIR: OPD: ITA: MEI: NTA: BNI:

Literary and Media Interaction Research Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis Interdisciplinary Transcript Analysis Media Experience Interview Narratological Text Analysis Biographical-Narrative Interview

Works Cited Angus, Lynne E. and John McLeod (eds.). 2004. The Handbook of Narrative and Psychotherapy. Practice, Theory and Research. London: Sage. Bollas, Christopher. 1984. The Shadow of the Object. Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Unknown. London: Free Association Books. Boothe, Brigitte. 1994. Der Patient als Erzähler in der Psychotherapie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck. Boothe, Brigitte (ed.). 2005. Die Sprache des Traumas. Psychotherapie und Sozialwissenschaft 1. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag. Fischer, Gottfried and Peter Riedesser. 1998. Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie. München: Ernst Reinhardt. Frommer, Jörg and David L. Rennie. 2001. Qualitative Psychotherapy Research. Methods and Methodology. Lengerich: Pabst. Hirsch, Mathias. 2004. Psychoanalytische Traumatologie—Das Trauma in der Familie. Psychoanalytische Theorie und Therapie schwerer Persönlichkeitsstörungen. Stuttgart: Schattauer.

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Jannidis, Fotis. 2004. Figur und Person. Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter. Jesch, Tatjana; Rainer Richter and Malte Stein. 2006. “Patientenerzählungen wie Literatur verstehen. Vom Nutzen der Narratologie für die psychodiagnostische Hermeneutik”. In: Vera Luif, Gisela Thoma and Brigitte Boothe (eds.). Beschreiben—Erschliessen—Erläutern. Psychotherapieforschung als qualitative Wissenschaft. Lengerich: Pabst, p. 39-65. Jesch, Tatjana and Malte Stein. 2007. “Mise en perspective et focalisation: deux concepts - un aspect? Tentative d’une différenciation des concepts”. In: John Pier (ed.). Théorie du récit. L’apport de la recherche allemande. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, p. 245-264. Kansteiner, Wulf and Harald Weilnböck. 2008. “Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy”. In: Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: de Gruyter, p. 229-240. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2006. The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kernberg, Otto F.; Birger Dulz and Ulrich Sachsse (eds.). 2000. Handbuch der BorderlineStörungen. Stuttgart: Schattauer. Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele and Arnulf Deppermann. 2002. Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität. Ein Arbeitsbuch zur Analyse narrativer Interviews. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Rosenthal, Gabriele. 1995. Erzählte und erlebte Lebensgeschichte. Gestalt und Struktur biographischer Selbstbeschreibungen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus. Rosenthal, Gabriele. 2004. “Biographical Research”. In: Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F. Gumbrium and David Silverman (eds.). Qualitative Research Practice. London: Sage, p. 48-64. Stein, Malte. 2007. “Johann Wolfgang Goethe. ‘Harzreise im Winter’”. In: Jörg Schönert, Peter Hühn and Malte Stein: Lyrik und Narratologie. Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachigen Gedichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter, p. 77-97. Weilnböck, Harald. 2003. “‘Leila’. Dissoziative (Medien-)Interaktion und Lebensweg einer jungen Erwachsenen. Eine (medien-)biografische und psychotraumatologische Fallstudie”. In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung. . Weilnböck, Harald. 2006a. “Der Mensch—ein Homo Narrator. Von der Notwendigkeit und Schwierigkeit, die psychologische Narratologie als Grundlagenwissenschaft in eine handlungstheoretische Sozial- und Kulturforschung einzubeziehen. Besprechungsessay”. In: www.literaturkritik.de, Schwerpunkt: Erzählen. . Weilnböck, Harald. 2006b. “Erzähltheorie als Möglichkeit eines gemeinsamen Nenners von Humanwissenschaften”. In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 7:3. . Weilnböck, Harald. 2007. “Geisteswissenschaften und Psychologie, zwei mögliche akademische Partner? Plädoyer für eine methodische Erforschung des geisteswissenschaftlichen Selbstverständnisses”. In: Journal für Psychologie 15:3. .

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Weilnböck, Harald. 2008a. “‘The trauma has to remain inaccessible’—Trauma-ontology and other (ab-)uses of trauma concepts in post-structural and conventional philological discourses”. In: Eurozine. . Weilnböck, Harald. 2008b. “Mila—eine exemplarische Fallrekonstruktion der qualitativ-psychologischen Literatur- und Medien-Interaktionsforschung (LIR)”. In: Psychotherapie und Sozialwissenschaft 10:2, p. 113-145. Weilnböck, Harald. 2009a (forthcoming). “Kann qualitative Medien(biografie)-Forschung den interdisziplinären Sprung durch die surreale Spiegel-Trennwand zwischen Textund Lebenswelt vollbringen—und psychologisch werden?” In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung. . Weilnböck, Harald. 2009b (forthcoming). “Qualitativ-empirische, psychologische Literaturund Medien-Interaktionsforschung (LIR). Ein integraler Ansatz der rekonstruktiven Forschung mit Leser/innen und deren fiktionalen Texten/Mediennarrativen”. In: Phillip Stoellger (ed.). Textwelten—Lebenswelten. Zürich: Kompetenzzentrum für Hermeneutik der Universität Zürich.