Emerging Vectors of Narratology 9783110555158, 9783110553789

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Emerging Vectors of Narratology

Narratologia

Contributions to Narrative Theory Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Inke Gunia, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Markus Kuhn, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers

Volume 57

Emerging Vectors of Narratology Edited by Per Krogh Hansen, John Pier, Philippe Roussin and Wolf Schmid

ISBN 978-3-11-055378-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-055515-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-055488-5 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface Is narratology consolidating or is it diversifying? Such was the question debated at the third conference of the European Narratology Network held in Paris on March 29 and 30, 2013: Emerging Vectors of Narratology.1 The essays collected in the present volume, all of them full-length research articles developed subsequent to the lectures presented at that conference, provide no clear-cut answer to this question or to the numerous matters surrounding it. Rather, these in-depth studies are emblematic of the diverse and sometimes complementary, sometimes conflictual, but always thought-provoking ways in which the contributors frame the issues in today’s research environment, suggesting that current narratological inquiry is consolidating in some ways while at the same time diversifying in others. All of the authors draw on established advances in the field, and all seek to refine existing frameworks or to venture into areas which, whether already well-known or only nascent, call for further exploration. This, basically, is the rationale behind grouping the contributions into “Contexts” and “Openings.” As readers of the following pages will see, the “contexts” of the first section refer partly to the various theoretical and disciplinary environments and/or narrative objects focused on by the authors, and partly to context in the sense of the cultural and historical or communicative circumstances within which narrative discourses occur. Dan Shen discusses a number of attempts to “contextualize” narrative poetics, such as feminist narratology, but finds that while this approach enriches and refines formal narrative poetics, it is not possible to “genderize” structural distinctions, as such distinctions are by nature decontextualized. As for rhetorical narratology, it stakes out a position which, although not fully appreciated for a number of years, has considerable potential for the sociohistorical contextualization of narrative theory itself, without any need to challenge the principles of formal narrative poetics. In the following essay, Jannike Hegdal Nilssen, in an analysis of Linn Ullmann’s Before Your Sleep, examines “ambiguous” discourse, a combination of free indirect discourse with character-(in)dependent discourse which forms a hidden layer of narrative unreliability and irony in this Bildungsroman. Whereas

1 Complete information on the conference can be found on the ENN website at: http://narratology.net/node/189 DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-202

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unreliable narration is frequently in the first person, unreliability in this case results from the intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator and extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator functioning together. Refinement of another type is brought to unreliable narration by Per Krogh Hansen. Typically associated with fictional texts, unreliable narration undergoes a novel transformation when it is employed in autofiction, a genre characterized by the presence of both referentiality and fictionality and by the blurring of borders between author, narrator and character. As attested by Hansen’s corpus, this state of affairs leads to the unexpected conclusion that the implied author is not necessarily inseparable from unreliable narration. David Stromberg brings yet another set of considerations to unreliability. This raises a host of questions about value judgments which, in narrative contexts, bear on narrative faith: “a conviction that, regardless of its source in the imagination, literary narrative retains its relevance to both the phenomenal world and to human life.” Narrative faith often exists in a relation of tension with narrative doubt: “hesitation between the believability of the illusion and the consciousness of the story as invention.” Valery Timofeev offers a close analysis of a page from Nabokov’s story “Ultima Thule” (in both Russian and English) that incorporates unreliable narration into generative narratology, a model he has developed which is predicated in part on two aspects of authorial self-consciousness drawn from blending theory: self-reflexiveness and internal state awareness. In another group of articles included in the same section, Natalya Bekhta argues for the existence of a distinct, first-person plural narrating agent which defines we-narrative, an emergent form of narrative situation. Nora Berning, working within the framework of critical ethical narratology, analyzes a corpus of autobiographical end-of-life stories, a form of factual narrative in the life-writing mode that makes heavy use of fictional strategies. In Berning’s study, the immediacy of this form of writing is made more salient by the fact that her tutor text, Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur, is a blog. Manja Kürschner studies how history is fictionalized in a corpus she describes as post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction—a form, she explains, that “refutes radical constructivist theories that postulate an all-encompassing unreliability of historical writing and storytelling.” The fragile dividing line between factuality and fictionality is also taken up by Silke Lahn and Stephanie Neu, although with a transmedial focus. On the basis of Richard Walsh’s proposal to redefine fictionality as a “rhetorical mode” and the ensuing intensive Danish research in this field, the authors analyze two recent and iconic examples in European television series and movies. The Italian film Romanzo Criminale and the Danish series Klovn (subsequently a film) mix supposedly irreconcilable elements of fictional and factual origin into the narrative by including “forensic” elements—real events, archive footage and real persons as characters—so as to achieve effects of fictionality. Narrative cannot be

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divided up only into nonfictional and fictional, though, for as Brian Richardson observes, there is a considerable body of “unnatural” or “antimimetic” narratives that defy verisimilitude through the use of physically impossible time schemes, endings with multiple conclusions, etc. There is no unified narratology suited to accounting for all narratives, Richardson contends, and for this reason he calls for an unnatural narratology to supplement the standard mimetic models. The next three articles examine aspects of narrative that are less bound to context properly speaking than they are to phenomena that span narrative in a broad sense. Stating that causation as such is not adequate for the analysis of narrative, Göran Rossholm, after reviewing a number of causal theories of narrative, presents a causal expectation model. A candidate for a narrative universal, this model incorporates external factors (e. g., genre) as well as internal factors, effect expectations and causal explanation, but it also allows for narrative point and surprise, two elements essential for the narrativity of a discourse, in whatever medium. Wolf Schmid examines the partly related issue of eventfulness. Events, he claims, are bound to the necessary conditions of factuality or reality and resultativity; eventfulness, however, results from the degree of relevance, unpredictability, persistence, irreversibility and non-iterativity through which events are narratively portrayed. At the same time, Schmid notes that the novelty of eventfulness is threatened by repetitiveness, thus pitting (in Šklovskij’s terminology) recognition against defamiliarization. On this basis he goes on to discuss narrative eventfulness in cultural history with reference to Lotman’s “aesthetics of identity” as opposed to “aesthetics of opposition.” Raphaël Baroni reflects on the virtualities of possible worlds in narrative theory. In possible worlds semantics, he observes, opposing statements about the fabula need not always be ordered hierarchically but can, as in Jorge Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” accommodate multiple alternative worlds that cannot be reduced to mutually exclusive versions. Virtualities can be expressed in the discourse (as in Gerald Prince’s “disnarrated”), or they can be shaped by the character at the level of the fabula or formulated by the reader. Unlike the logical structure of fabula, the dynamics of plots open up (in David Herman’s words) “a dialectical interplay between narrative and consciousness.” With the following three contributions, the context is that of non-verbal narratives. In his article, Jan Alber argues that film is much better suited to depicting character interiority than is commonly assumed. Through facial expressions, the use of music and associations of characters with other entities, for example, internal states can be conveyed in ways that are structurally similar to psychonarration in prose narratives. Furthermore, dual-perspective shots, which combine the subjective vision of a character with an ‘objective’ one, are analogous to free indirect discourse. Finally, Alber also discusses more immediate cinematic ways

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of rendering inner lives (through subtitles, captions, enacted mindscreens and interior monologues at the auditory level) that function like stretches of direct thought in prose texts. The question of transmedial transposition is taken up by Małgorzata Pawłowska in her study of the extensive repertoire of musical works (especially though not only opera) inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The discussion of music and literature relations date back many years, of course, but Pawłowska, referring to a growing body of research devoted to musical narratology, shows how the properties of media “affordances” and the use of musical themes (known as “topics”) enable music—particularly in the case of Romeo and Juliet—to capture emotional content in ways that parallel the Freytag Pyramid while at the same time following the processuality of narrative as mapped out by Greimas in his model for the narrative scheme. The broader issue of narrativity across media is addressed by Matthias Brütsch. In a survey of theories of narrativity, synthetically grouped into five “positions,” Brütsch analyzes the implications of these positions for verbal, audiovisual and dramatic forms of narrative, and he goes on to confront them with narratological models based on the categories of story/discourse, mediacy and mimesis/diegesis. In the end, he opts for Wolf Schmid’s “constitutional model,” built up from happenings, story, the narrative and presentation of the narrative, as a framework for defining narrative. Finally, with a switch to cultural contexts far removed from those of the modern Western corpuses habitually taken into account by narratologists, the parameters of inquiry may change significantly. Such is the case with ancient Greek narrative which, according to Claude Calame, is less a literature per se than it is a “poetic form of action” or an instance of “ritualized enactive speech.” Required for such a corpus, he contends, is an “interpretive understanding of intercultural translation demanded by cultural and social anthropology” together with discourse analysis working along the lines of French enunciative linguistics and pragmatics. This leads to a critique of the concept of narrativity as developed in the classical/postclassical paradigm for narratology which, among other things, fails to account for the prefigurations, configurations and refigurations of time as formulated by Paul Ricœur. When it comes to literary traditions such as that of China, looking in from the outside calls for a comparative approach. It is in this spirit that Huaiyu Luo surveys a body of research on Chinese narrative theory, both Western and Chinese, that got underway during the 1970s. During the 1980s and 90s, a number of major programs for translating Western literary and narrative theory into Chinese got underway. It was under this influence that narratological studies by Chinese scholars has been gathering speed over the past twenty years. Involved is not only the assimilation of Western research but also a rereading of traditional Chinese poetics, dating back over more than two thousand years. More recently,

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important work has been done within a properly Chinese context, thus developing narrative theories which open up perspectives for non-Western forms of narratological reasoning. In a number of ways, the contributions included in the second section of this collection—“Openings”—expand the contexts set out, sometimes implicitly, in the first section. This observation is confirmed by the topic of the narrative turn, a line of inquiry that has been evolving for more than thirty years but that is now undergoing important changes in response to recent developments in the research environment. Philippe Roussin shows how the narrative turn, which ushered in an instrumental conception of narrative and sense making in a departure from the structuralist preoccupation with form and story structure, resulted in the reintroduction of narrative into the social sciences. In his commentary, where the work of Lyotard, Bourdieu, Bruner and MacIntyre, among others, is discussed, Roussin stresses the rise in postmodern culture of narrative as a form of knowledge that rivals science. This tendency is felt particularly in historiography (notably in the work of Hayden White), but also (more recently) in the rise of storytelling—“the grand narrative of the present”—in communication, management and politics. In another commentary on the same topic, Paul Dawson looks at the implications of the narrative turn for interdisciplinarity. With narratology’s expansion beyond the literary canon, on the one hand, and the growing web of the narrative turn in the social sciences, on the other, narratology has been confronted by both centrifugal and centripetal forces, leaving its boundaries ill-defined. Dawson concludes by noting that narrative does not provide “unified knowledge about narrative as a fundamental cognitive faculty by which humans make sense of experience,” but rather that the different ways in which the story/discourse distinction run through the various disciplines afford possibilities for fruitful methodological exchanges in interdisciplinary research. The following three chapters are devoted to some of the numerous cognitive issues that have been studied by narrative theorists. In the first of these contributions, it is noted that the silent reading of literary fictions has long been regarded “as an incorporeal process of mapping written words onto mental representations and meanings.” This practice tends to make the reading of narrative a cerebral and abstract exercise, ignoring the various ways in which embodiment affects narrative sense making. Taking a cue from Monika Fludernik’s notion of experientiality, Marco Caracciolo, Cécile Guédon, Karin Kukkonen and Sabine Müller, working within the scope of second-generation cognitive approaches, explore the possible avenues for an “embodied” narratology. Such a theory incorporates cognitive parameters, the representational dimension and interpretive strategies for projecting the storyworld into cultural and ideological meanings. The possibilities

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of a neuro-narratology are taken up by Ralf Schneider. Although such a field does not exist yet, and although it cannot be expected to explain how neural activity might contribute to an adequate understanding of the production and reception of narratives, neuro-narratology, nourished by neurobiological data, does have the potential to provide “a heightened awareness of the richness and complexity of mental processes below the level of consciousness.” Finally, Richard Walsh questions the true scope of the cognitive sciences in narrative theory. Taking as his example a close analysis of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, he argues that narrative cognition, dependent on the serial logic of temporal sequence, and spatial cognition are incommensurable and consequently that narrative cognition does not suffice to comprehend the spatiotemporal reality we inhabit; on this basis, Walsh calls into question any totalizing global conception of storyworlds as well as the pertinence of immersion for the definition of fictional worlds, which he conceives as mental models, not as extra-representational referents. Taken together, these three chapters address only a small portion of cognitive narrative studies, yet they are indicative of several important tendencies in this field of research. Among the questions studied in the final four articles are a number of broad conceptual frameworks within which at least some narratological reasoning currently seems to be developing. Eva Sabine Wagner scrutinizes the conditions for narratological self-consolidation. She challenges the view according to which narratology is built up simply by defining its object of research, arguing that there is a feedback loop between narratology and narrativity. In view of this circular dynamics, the goal of narratological consolidation cannot be achieved by attempting to provide narratology with a supposedly “solid” conceptual basis, but only by exploring narratology’s “complex” processes of self-organization. Wagner contributes to this project by analyzing, on the levels of both narrativity and narratology, a specific dynamics of “coherence in progress” through negotiations between syntagmatic and paradigmatic modes of self-organization. For John Pier, complexity does not serve as a paradigm for narratology so much as it offers a transdisciplinary perspective for viewing narratological principles in terms of their possible degrees of commensurability with the loose federation of complexity sciences. With reference to Ilya Prigogine’s nonequilibrium thermodynamics, Pier shows how narrative sequentiality, whose standard formulations reflect the laws of Newtonian classical mechanics, might profitably be viewed, in today’s research environment, in terms of irreversibility or the “arrow of time.” Doing so supplants equilibrium and disequilibrium as defining features of narrative sequence in favor of the principles of stochastic (or random) processes, dissipative structures and spontaneous self-organization together with the instabilities engendered by nonlinearity, positive feedback and bifurcations. When sequentiality is viewed in this way, the properties found at the micro scale of

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narrative are not reduplicated at the macro scale, thus severing the isomorphic relations between parts and emergent wholes. Another scientifically inspired approach to narrative is explored by José Ángel García Landa. Arguing that literary and cultural phenomena are best understood within a consilient disciplinary framework, García Landa associates this perspective with “big history,” the broad context of the evolution of societies and of life generally. In a discussion of the philosophical works of Herbert Spencer, he finds in nineteenth-century evolutionary theory a historiographical and narratological perspective which is close to present-day research on natural and ecological contextualization of human societies. The concept of “narrative anchoring” is introduced so as to provide temporal schemas with large-scale interpretive contexts (e. g., the Christian myth from the Creation to Apocalypse) and that of “narrative mapping” as a framework to account for the historical situatedness of narrative modes. Finally, Roy Sommer looks into what might be a way forward in sorting out the multiple theories, models and paradigms that have come to dominate the narratological landscape. Observing that much has been accomplished to establish the links between narrative and knowledge, Sommer raises the question as to how theories of narrative, through their epistemological and methodological stances, produce knowledge about narrative. Such an exercise in metanarratology, he contends, stems from intuitive knowledge gained through aesthetic experience and abstract knowledge. From this standpoint, he discerns three types of compatibility in narratological theory building: “backward” compatibility (e. g., cognitive approaches integrate various principles of earlier structural approaches); “forward” compatibility (e. g., research that opens the way to the transgeneric and transmedial dimensions of narrative); and “sideways” compatibility of classical and postclassical narratology, for example, thanks either to paradigm expansion through the revision of existing theories or to paradigm evolution, as in the confrontation of structural and rhetorical narrative theories or of mimetic and antimimetic theories. Readers of these contributions who are in search of a unified narratological theory are likely to be struck by the diverse though fruitful avenues of inquiry followed by the authors. Yet within this diversity, and on another, more subtle level, many points of convergence will be found thanks to the prolific dialogue taking place in today’s research in narrative theory. 



January 2017 Paris, Kolding, Hamburg

Table of Contents Preface 

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Contexts Dan Shen (Beijing) “Contextualized Poetics” and Contextualized Rhetoric: Consolidation or Subversion?   3 Jannike Hegdal Nilssen (Oslo) Rethinking the Unreliable Narrator: Is the Demarcation Heterodiegetic/ Homodiegetic Necessary?   25 Per Krogh Hansen (Kolding) Autofiction and Authorial Unreliable Narration 

 47

David Stromberg (Jerusalem) Beyond Unreliability: Resisting Naturalization of Normative Horizons  Valery Timofeev (Saint Petersburg) Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule”: An Exercise in Generative Narratology 

 61

 77

Natalya Bekhta (Giessen) Emerging Narrative Situations: A Definition of We-Narratives Proper 

 101

Nora Berning (Gießen) Critical Ethical Narratology as an Emerging Vector of Narrative Theory and Autobiographical End-of-Life Stories   127 Manja Kürschner (Kiel) The Fictionalization of History in Metahistoriographic Fiction after the Constructivist Challenge   153

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Silke Lahn (Hamburg) and Stephanie Neu (Mannheim) Towards a Crossing of the Divide between Fiction and Non-Fiction in European Television Series and Movies: The Examples of the Italian Romanzo Criminale and the Danish Klovn   171 Brian Richardson (College Park, Maryland) Unnatural Narrative Theory: A Paradoxical Paradigm 

 193

Göran Rossholm (Stockholm) Causal Expectation   207 Wolf Schmid (Hamburg) Eventfulness and Repetitiveness: Two Aesthetics of Storytelling 

 229

Raphaël Baroni (Lausanne) The Garden of Forking Paths: Virtualities and Challenges for Contemporary Narratology   247 Jan Alber (Aachen) The Representation of Character Interiority in Film: Cinematic Versions of Psychonarration, Free Indirect Discourse and Direct Thought   265 Małgorzata Pawłowska (Cracow) Intermedial Transposition: From Verbal Story to Music. Narrative in Musical Works Based on Romeo and Juliet   285 Matthias Brütsch (Zurich) How to Measure Narrativity? Notes on Some Problems with Comparing Degrees of Narrativity Across Different Media   315 Claude Calame (Paris) From Structural Narratology to Enunciative Pragmatics: Greek Poetic Forms between Mythical Narrative and Ritual Act   335 Huaiyu Luo (Beijing) Comparison of Chinese-Western Narrative Poetics: State of the Art 

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Openings Philippe Roussin (Paris) What is Your Narrative? Lessons from the Narrative Turn 

 383

Paul Dawson (Sydney) How Many ‘Turns’ Does it Take to Change a Discipline? Narratology and the Interdisciplinary Rhetoric of the Narrative Turn   405 Marco Caracciolo (Ghent), Cécile Guédon (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Karin Kukkonen (Oslo) and Sabine Müller (Berlin) The Promise of an Embodied Narratology: Integrating Cognition, Representation and Interpretation   435 Richard Walsh (York) Beyond Fictional Worlds: Narrative and Spatial Cognition 

 461

Ralf Schneider (Bielefeld) Is There a Future for Neuro-Narratology? Thoughts on the Meeting of Cognitive Narratology and Neuroaesthetics   479 Eva Sabine Wagner (Osnabrück) In Search of Coherence: Tacit Negotiations between the Paradigmatic and the Syntagmatic in Narratology and Narrativity   497 John Pier (Tours and Paris) Complexity: A Paradigm for Narrative? 

 533

José Ángel García Landa (Zaragoza) The Story behind any Story: Evolution, Historicity and Narrative Mapping   567 Roy Sommer (Wuppertal) The Future of Narratology’s Past: A Contribution to Metanarratology  Notes on Contributors  Index 

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Contexts

Dan Shen (Beijing)

“Contextualized Poetics” and Contextualized Rhetoric: Consolidation or Subversion? The relation between form and history has been a hot topic for debate in the field of narratology since the 1980s. Classical narrative poetics, because of its decontextualization, has been criticized by contextualist approaches. Rhetorical narrative theory, although figuring as a postclassical approach since the 1990s, has likewise been criticized for neglecting sociohistorical context. But if we examine contextualist narratological challenges to formal narrative poetics, we may find that the efforts to contextualize poetics actually come up with decontextualized structural distinctions, since the investigation of generic structures requires, by nature, leaving aside varied specific contexts.1 In the case of rhetorical narrative theory, contextualist challenges also function to bring into play the historicizing potential in the theory itself. That is to say, the contextualist challenges function to consolidate rather than to subvert the fundamental principles of formal narrative poetics and rhetorical narrative theory. I will start by considering the relation between poetics and contextualization.

1 “Contextualized” Poetics2 Although the situation varies in different countries or with different perspectives, many accounts of the development of narratology tell stories of evolution either from structuralist narratology to poststructuralist narratology (Currie 1998; Onega and García Landa 1996), from classical narratology to postclassical narratology (Herman 1999), from structuralist narratology to cultural and historical narratology (Nünning 2000), from “a strictly formalist poetics” to a “contextualist narratology” (Darby 2001, 829) or from formal investigation to pragmatic, gender-oriented and ideological investigations that go “beyond form” (Fludernik

1 I use “generic” in the sense of pertaining to the narrative genre or to a specific genre of narrative. 2 This section draws on Shen “Why Contextual and Formal Narratologies Need Each Other” (2005). I am grateful for permission from the editors to reprint here relevant materials in that paper. DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-001

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2005). These stories vary, some even differ in nature, but one idea is shared in common: the decontextualized formal investigation of generic structures has been and should be abandoned, and narratologists should always take contexts into account. However, if we examine respectively narratological theorizing and narratological criticism—often occurring since the late 1980s in the same narratological study—a different picture emerges. In terms of narratological criticism, the picture is indeed one of evolution from a text-based investigation subject to formalist limitations to a more valid and fuller investigation that takes into account contexts and readers. In terms of narratological theorizing, however, the picture is essentially different. Postclassical or contextual narratologies have greatly enriched narratological theorizing in various ways (for a good survey, see Fludernik 2005), but when the investigation is concerned with generic textual structures and their generic functions, there is usually no room or no need for the consideration of varied specific contexts. In a sense, a narrative is analogous to a sentence. It is true that, in interpreting the meaning of sentences in specific utterances, we need to consider the contexts in which the relevant sentences are uttered. But in classifying structural elements such as syntactic subject, predicate and object in a grammar, we do not need to consider the specific contexts in which the relevant language elements are expressed. Instead, we need to lift the relevant language elements (as structural illustrations) “out of their contexts in order to distill from them the essential structures” concerned (Warhol 1989, 4). Indeed, in classifying sentential/clausal structures in a grammar, usually only decontextualized hypothetical language elements are used as illustrations. This is the case even in M. A. K. Halliday’s (2004 [1994]) functional grammar. Because structural distinctions are necessarily decontextualized, the trend towards contextualization over the past several decades have not affected classical structural distinctions such as that among heterodiegetic, homodiegetic and hypodiegetic narration, or that among direct discourse, indirect discourse, free indirect discourse and free direct discourse, or that among various modes of focalization. Such decontextualized structural distinctions have been employed continuously in postclassical narratologies as useful tools in contextualized narratological criticism. Moreover, formal narrative poetics (in the shape of newly-established decontextualized structural concepts and models) has appeared continuously in contextualist narratologies. Let’s take feminist narratology for an example. Feminist narratology has played a pioneering and a most significant role in consolidating and enriching formal narrative poetics. It came into being in North America in the 1980s when structuralist narratology was very much excluded from the scene by the joint forces of deconstructive and sociohistorical approaches. Under such cir-

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cumstances, feminist narratologists helped to save formal narrative poetics by combining narratology with feminist criticism. While defending structuralist narratology, feminist narratology, as a contextualist approach, is unequivocally critical of formal narrative poetics. The criticism centers on two related issues: one, being gender-blind, and the other, decontextualization (see, for instance, Lanser 1981, 39). But a close look at the theoretical distinctions feminist narratologists propose will reveal that the investigation of generic structures, in striking contrast with narratological criticism, defies, by nature, the consideration of specific sociohistorical contexts. Let’s first consider the distinction made by Lanser between public and private narration. In her influential essay “Toward a Feminist-Narratology,” Lanser says, By public narration I mean simply narration (implicitly or explicitly) addressed to a narratee who is external (that is, heterodiegetic) to the textual world and who can be equated with a public readership; private narration, in contrast, is addressed to an explicitly designated narratee who exists only within the textual world. (1986, 352)

Not surprisingly, Lanser’s distinction is very much decontextualized and gender-indifferent. Indeed, as far as such structural classifications themselves are concerned, diversified specific contexts only form irrelevant digressions. As Lanser points out, “a major benefit of narratology is that it offers a relatively independent (pre-textual) framework for studying groups of texts” (1986, 346). While the investigation of groups of texts or specific texts as communicative acts needs to take account of the varied contexts, the establishment of the relatively independent or pre-textual framework necessarily requires lifting texts (as structural illustrations) “out of their contexts in order to distill from them the essential structures” concerned. Interestingly, Lanser’s study of women’s texts has led her to formalize and decontextualize “sex” as a narratological category. In “Sexing the Narrative,” Lanser writes, Written on the body leads me to recognize that sex is a common if not constant element of narrative so long as we include its absence as a narratological variable. Such an inclusion allows us to make some very simple formal observations about any narrative: that the sex of its narrator is or is not marked and, if marked, is marked male or female, or shifts between the two. […] One might well classify heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narratives according to their marking or non-marking of sex and according to the ways in which sex gets marked: overtly, through explicit designation, or covertly, through conventional aspects of gender that suggest but do not prove sex. (1995, 87; original emphasis, boldface added)

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This theoretical distinction of “sex” is as formal and decontextualized as classical structural distinctions. In the case that the narrator’s sex is unmarked or marked only covert, the readers’ inferring of the narrator’s sex may vary from individual to individual or from context to context, but the theoretical distinction between “marked” and “unmarked” or between “covertness” and “overtness” has to be made in an abstract and decontextualized way. This case lends strong support to the point I have been driving at, namely, that the classification of generic structures defies, by nature, contextualization, or that it requires, by nature, leaving aside the consideration of sociohistorical contexts. In a similar fashion, we could formalize the narrator’s race, class, religion, ethnicity, education, marital status or sexual preference, all of which can be either “marked” or “unmarked,” and, if marked, can be marked either “overtly” or “covertly” in the text. Once an attempt is made to theorize those non-structural elements (sex, race, class, religion, ethnicity, etc.) as “narratological” categories, it also becomes necessary to lift the texts out of their contexts and to distill from them the distinguishing properties concerned. Such non-structural elements, that is to say, cannot enter the realm of poetics unless they are transformed into decontextualized formal distinctions. Chatman observes that contextualist narratologists “argue for the need to inquire into the intentions, motivations, interests and social circumstances of real authors and audiences. Failure to make this kind of inquiry, they believe, dooms narratology to a treatment of narrative as a ‘detached and decontextualized entity’” (1990, 314). But as far as the investigation of generic structures is concerned, there is, in effect, nothing wrong with decontextualization, since this is the only possible way to do it—even in the case of “sex.” Significantly, feminist narratology functions to enrich narrative poetics from a specific angle. A most valuable enrichment is found in Lanser’s discussion of “communal voice,” which is “a category of underdeveloped possibilities that has not even been named in contemporary narratology” (1992, 21). Lanser distinguishes three forms of “communal voice”: “a singular form in which one narrator speaks for a collective, a simultaneous form in which a plural ‘we’ narrates, and a sequential form in which individual members of a group narrate in turn” (1992, 21). The “communal voice” was previously neglected probably because, “[u]nlike authorial and personal voices, the communal mode seems to be primarily a phenomenon of marginal or suppressed communities” (1992, 19). Lanser discovered this mode through her investigation of women’s texts. While the use of this mode by women writers undoubtedly calls for contextualized analysis, the theoretical classification of this mode and its different forms (singular, simultaneous and sequential) requires lifting texts out of their various specific contexts “in order to distill from them the essential” structural properties concerned. The gender-indifferent and decontextualized structural distinction also leaves room for the

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investigation of “communal voice” in men’s texts. It should be stressed that, as in the case of “authorial” or “personal” voice (Lanser 1992, 16–21), we recognize “communal” voice or its “singular,” “simultaneous” and “sequential” forms, not because of the author’s gender or because of any given sociohistorical context, but due to the “essential” structural properties involved. In her Gendered Interventions (1989, 29), Robyn Warhol puts forward the distinction between “distancing” and “engaging” narrators. The distancing narrator “provides so much information about the narratee” that the addresee becomes very clearly defined just like “any character,” which “necessarily places a distance between the actual reader and the inscribed ‘you’ in the text.” In contrast, the engaging narrator “strives to close the gaps between the narratee, the addressee, and the receiver.” This distinction is decontextualized and agendered in itself, and it likewise forms a valuable contribution to formal narrative poetics. Perhaps because of the fact that it is practically impossible to contextualize and “genderize” structural distinctions, many recent feminist criticisms, in contrast to earlier attempts to forge a feminist poetics, have turned to classical narrative poetics for analytical tools. In her more recent “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine of Persuasion: A Feminist-Narratological View of Jane Austen” (1996), Robyn Warhol makes use of the classical distinction between story and discourse and the classical concept of focalization in her contextualized feminist criticism. In “Gender and History in Narrative Theory,” Alison Case says, Narratology gives us, among other things, the tools to identify and describe narrative techniques more precisely, and thereby to consider their implications and significance in more nuanced ways. In recent years, feminist critics have begun to make good use of these tools to examine the impact of gender ideology on the form as well as the content of literary narratives: asking, for example, how gender is encoded in the formal structures of novels, and in the dynamic of reading those structures produce. […] But feminist narratology can also help us to attend to gendered distinctions within texts, whether they are authored by men or women—as, for example, by looking at the ways narrative voices are gendered in homodiegetic narration. (2005, 312; original emphasis)

Case uses the decontextualized and non-gendered structural concepts “paradoxical paralipsis”3 and “ambiguous distancing”4 to investigate how narrative voices are gendered in specific narratives in historical contexts. Let’s shift attention to another contextualist approach, cognitive narratology. As distinct from feminist narratology, which sets store by real authors in soci-

3 This concept has been put forward by Phelan (1996, 82–104). 4 This concept is suggested by Case herself in this essay.

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ohistorical contexts, the contextualization of cognitive narratology is oriented toward readers who can be classified into different types (cf. Shen 2005, 155–157). What is most relevant to the present discussion are two types of readers. One is what we may call “generic” readers, that is, readers who are equipped with “narrative competence” (Culler 1975, 113–130) and who share the same narrative conventions as typically embodied by stereotypic assumptions, expectations, frames, scripts, plans, schemata or mental models in narrative comprehension.5 The other type consists of flesh-and-blood readers with their particularity and social identity in specific sociohistorical contexts. When cognitive narratologists are concerned with narrative poetics or formal description in contrast with actual reading experiences, only the “generic” type of readers come into play and varied sociohistorical contexts are necessarily ruled out. I’ll take David Herman’s influential book Story Logic (2002) as an example. The book rethinks “narrative as a strategy for creating mental representations of the world” (5) and emphasizes the necessity of contextualizing formal description. In chapter  9, entitled “Contextual Anchoring,” attention is directed to “the process by which cues in narrative discourse trigger recipients to establish a more or less direct or oblique relationship between the stories they are interpreting and the contexts in which they are interpreting them” (8). But the recipients Herman has in mind are generic ones, and the contexts are likewise generic rather than sociohistorical. Herman focuses on the second-person pronoun “you” as a special case of person deixis. While the actual occurrences of narrative you in specific narratives are anchored in sociohistorical contexts, once an effort is made to classify the different types of you as a theoretical framework of narrative poetics, we have to lift the texts out of their specific contexts in order to distill from them the generic structural properties concerned. Herman offers a comprehensive classification of five types of you in second-person fictions: (a) generalized you, (b) fictional reference, (c) fictionalized (= horizontal) address, (d) apostropic (= vertical) address, (e) double deictic you (2002, 340–345). The different types are all determined solely by “essential” structural properties. The first two types—(a) generalized you, (b) fictional reference—are “marked by an uncoupling of the grammatical form of you from its deictic functions” (2002, (340). Type (a) is impersonal, generalized, “pseudo-deictic” or “non-deictic” (340). Type (b), in contrast, refers to the narrator-protagonist by what Margolin (1984) calls “deictic transfer.” In making the classification, the various examples Herman cites from

5 Narrative genres can be subdivided into more specific genres, such as “second-person fiction” (see below). The same applies to literary genres, such as prose fiction (realist novels, the fantastic, etc.).

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Edna O’Brien’s novel A Pagan Place (1984) only serve as generic structural illustrations, playing the same illustrative role as hypothetical examples. In Herman’s classification, each type of you has its “generic” function which is shared by different occurrences of the same type across specific contexts in this genre, and which is therefore to be distinguished from contextualized significance. Precisely because Herman’s classification of the different types of “you” is based on generic textual features without being affected by the diversity of readers and contexts in the same genre, the classification yields valuable “new tools for the poetics of second-person fiction” (Herman 2002, 337). With its capacity for taking account of the interaction among textual cues, generic conventions and generic interpretive strategies, cognitive narratology has been widely hailed as an approach superior to the text-based formal narrative poetics. In Psychonarratology, Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon offer a comprehensive summary of various reception-oriented approaches, concluding that “In all these disciplines, this emphasis on the recipient of narratives can be seen as the result of a paradigm shift that exposed and transcended the limitations of purely formalist models” (2003, 2). Moreover, Bortolussi and Dixon take issue with other reader-oriented scholars for failing to carry out an empirical approach: “In general, to expand on what might plausibly be attributed to the reader, narratologists and reader-response theorists have generated a hypothetical description of readers’ knowledge and inferences with little grounding in objective evidence. […] The result is a circular kind of logic: The characteristics of a text provide evidence for various narrative competencies, and the existence of a particular competence provides the evidence for a particular characteristic of the text” (2003, 168). What they advocate is to study “actual, real readers, and to ground one’s analysis of the reading process in empirical evidence on how readers process narrative forms” (168–169). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, while theoretically excluding the text-based approach and the “generic reader”-oriented approach,6 both are adopted in Bortolussi and Dixon’s own three-step investigation: “we first provide a framework for understanding the relevant textual features; then we discuss some hypotheses for related reader constructions; and finally, we report some empirical evidence that supports these hypotheses. Each of these aspects is taken up in turn” (184–185). While formal narrative poetics is only concerned with generic textual structures (and their generic functions) with no capacity for dealing with actual readers’ responses in varied contexts, an empirical approach to varied actual

6 For a discussion of the distinction between “generic reader” and actual readers, see Shen (2005, 155–157).

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readers’ responses, similarly, will be hard put to work out models of generic textual structures. The failure to see this division of labor clearly is a fundamental reason underlying many criticisms of formal narrative poetics. While Bortolussi and Dixon (2003, 177–178) criticize Gérard Genette for failing to take into account “the type of reader, the nature of the text, and pragmatics of the reading context” in his theoretical discussion of focalization, their own theoretical discussion of focalization, not surprisingly, is equally as reader-free and context-free. Their “psychonarratological approach” has synthesized, “from the relevant scholarship in narratology and linguistics,” three categories as the theoretical framework of focalization: 1) descriptive reference frames, 2) positional constraints and 3) perceptual attributions (186–189). The first category is further divided into “relative reference frames” (e. g., “Some times a dog would howl in the distance,” where we have “perceptual information relative to the location of a potential perceiver”) and “external reference frames” (e. g., “The lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles,” where the reference frame is “determined by axes found in the story world, independent of any potential perceiver”). The second category, “positional constraint,” is the textual “constraint on the location of an agent who might have perceived the information,” while the third category, “perceptual attribution,” consists of textual cues “suggesting a perceiver.” Whatever the modification of earlier models, Bortolussi and Dixon’s classification of textual features is every bit as decontextualized as classical narrative poetics. What is crucial is to preserve the borderline between “the objective features of the text” and “the potentially variable reader constructions” (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003, 198), a borderline that is kept quite clear in the authors” own three-step investigation: “Having discussed some categories of textual features related to perceptual information, the important question that should be considered is how such cues are processed by readers. […] We present here several ideas concerning one aspect of the representations readers may construct in processing perceptually salient descriptions. Subsequently, we report some evidence in support of these ideas” (191, emphasis added). The three-step investigation well demonstrates the co-validity of, and the mutually-benefiting relationship among, the different kinds of inquiry: 1) the decontextualized investigation of generic textual structures, 2) the investigation of the hypothetical generic reader’s understanding of narrative and 3) the empirical study of actual readers’ cognitive processes. The first decontextualized approach, which provides “a stable landing” or “a theoretical bedrock” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005, 1), paves the way for the latter two. The third, that is, the empirical, verifies or challenges the conclusions drawn by the second, concerned with hypothetical narrative understanding. Moreover, the hypothetical and the

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empirical can shed light on the limitations of the first, promoting its further development. By now, postclassical narratologies have enjoyed a history of two or three decades, and narrative criticism has long been contextualized. However, attempts to contextualize narrative poetics have invariably ended up in decontextualized structural distinctions. But of course, we can investigate the historical or cultural/national context in which a narrative technique came into being (cf. Shen 2005, 152), or trace the history of the specific uses of a narrative technique in, say, French women’s narrative or African-American narrative. But when it comes to a theoretical discussion of the structural features of a narrative technique, we simply have to leave aside the specific contexts and focus on the basic structural properties of the technique—structural properties that are shared by varied specific uses of the technique at least in a narrative genre such as second-person fiction or in the genre of a language such as Chinese narratives (see Shen 2010). By both using classical poetic concepts and models (which helps classical poetics to gain current relevance) and proposing new decontextualized structural distinctions, contextualist narratologies have made significant contributions to formal narrative poetics. As this discussion has sought to make clear, contextualist narratologists actually help to consolidate and develop formal narrative poetics, rather than subvert it. But of course, instead of being concerned only with universal narrative poetics, postclassical narratologists pay more attention to the narrative structures of specific narrative genres. It could thus be said that we have minor diversification coexisting with major consolidation.

2 Contextualized Rhetoric7 Although feminist narratology, cognitive narratology and rhetorical narratology are all influential postclassical approaches, the rhetorical approach has been criticized for failing to take historical contexts into account. This approach has been developed mainly by the second and third generations of the Chicago School of criticism. Both within and outside the Chicago School, there have been critical attempts that try to rectify the decontextualization of the rhetorical approach. The critics involved take their attempts either as rebellion against or as challenges to

7 This section draws on Shen “Implied Author, Authorial Audience, and Context: Form and History in neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory” (2013, 140–158). I am grateful for permission from the publisher to reprint here relevant materials in that paper.

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the rhetorical tradition, but I’ll argue and show that these attempts actually function to realize the contextualizing potential in rhetorical theory itself. Let me start with the key rhetorical concept of the “implied author,” which has been widely used and hotly debated in narratological studies. When putting forward the concept in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth states, To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes “only by writing the story that the novelist can discover—not his story—but its writer [the novelist himself in the writing process], the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative.” (Miss West continues: “Writing is a way of playing parts, of trying on masks, or assuming roles, not for fun but out of desperate need, not for the self’s sake but for the writing’s sake.”) Whether we call this implied author an “official scribe,” or adopt the term recently revived by Kathleen Tillotson—the author’s “second self” (In her inaugural lecture at the University of London, published as The Tale and the Teller. “Writing on George Eliot in 1877, Dowden said that the form that most persists in the mind after reading her novels is not any of the characters, but ‘one who, if not the real George Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them.’ The ‘second self’, he goes on, is ‘more substantial than any mere human personality’ and has ‘fewer reserves’; while ‘behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable historical self secure from impertinent observation and criticism’” [1959, 22])—it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner. […] Just as one’s personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works. (Booth 1961, 71; emphasis added)

If we examine Booth’s words carefully, including those between the two sets of brackets (taken from footnotes 7 and 8), we will find that the “implied author” is no other than the writer of the text—“the official scribe who writes in this manner,” or “the writer [who] sets himself out with a different air,” or the “second self who writes” the text through “playing parts,” “trying on masks, or assuming roles,” or again “that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them.” The difference between the implied author (the second self) and the real author (the first self) is that between the person assuming a certain air or adopting a particular stance when writing the text and the same person in daily life out of the writing process. If we turn our attention from the encoding process to the decoding process, the implied author is the textual image of this writer for the reader to infer: Encoding Process: the IA = the person writing in a certain manner, making all the textual choices

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Decoding Process: the reader infers from all the choices made by the IA (= the person writing in a certain manner) the image of the IA (= the person who has written the text in a certain manner)

While it is biographical materials that we need to read to know the real author (or the flesh-and-blood person),8 what we need in order to know the implied author of a text is to read the particular text itself, for the implied author’s image is implied by the textual choices he or she made when authoring the text. As I analyzed in detail in my paper “What is the Implied Author?” (2011), Booth’s frequent metaphorical expression of the real author’s “creating” the implied author, coupled with his putting much more emphasis on the decoding process in his earlier work, has led to the assumption that the writer of the text is the “real author” who, when writing, literally creates the “implied author.” So we have the division of labor that “the historical author writes […]; the implied author means […]; the narrator speaks” (Nelles 1993, 22; Kindt and Müller 2011, 68). In this division of labor, the implied author tends to be confined within the text, even reduced to a mere “semantic relation” (Kindt and Müller 2011, 69). And the epithet “implied” is taken to be an antonym of “historical,” “real,” or “actual,” thus depriving the implied author of any historicizing potential. This fundamental decontextualization of the implied author has also played a role in the decontextualization of its counterpart, “implied reader” or “authorial audience,” another key rhetorical concept that, in fact, also requires the consideration of the relevant historical context (see below). It is significant that, although Booth’s implied author has a textual emphasis, it forms a key element in Booth’s revision of the text-oriented position of the first generation of Chicago critics, as represented by R. S. Crane. While Booth aims at distinguishing the role-playing writer of a text from the same person in daily life and in writing other texts, Crane is concerned with the isolation of the text from its very writer. Crane’s method is one which depends on the analytical isolation of works of art, as finished products, from the circumstances and processes of their origin. It is better fitted to explain those effects which

8 The term “real author” is potentially misleading, since the person outside the writing process is referred to as “author.” In “The Resurrection of the Implied Author” (2005), Booth consistently uses “the FBP” (the flesh-and-blood person) or the FBP plus the person’s name, instead of “the real author.” In fact, the epithet “real” and “flesh-and-blood” could be potentially misleading too, since the implied author is also a “real” and “flesh-and-blood” person. What Booth wanted to distinguish is the person in the “role-playing” writing process from the same person in daily life, out of the “role-playing” writing process (see Shen 2011, 2013a).

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would be specifically the same in any other work, of whatever date, that was constructed in accordance with the same combination of artistic principles than those effects which must be attributed to the fact that the work was produced by a given artist (1952, 92; emphasis added)

Compare the following observation by Booth (quoted above): Just as one’s personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer [the implied author] sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works.

In contrast with Crane’s emphasis on the same effects “in any other work,” Booth’s emphasis is on the contrast among the different textual norms created by the different implied authors “depending on the differing relationships with each” targeted type of reader and “the purpose of each” text. While in Crane’s poetic theory we lose sight of the writer and only have in view a timeless and autonomous text, in Booth’s rhetorical theory it is the communicative or rhetorical purposes of the role-playing writer that form the focus of attention. Crane’s work is very important and valuable in redressing the long-term neglect of poetic form, but he has gone too far in decontextualization, leaving the author to work in a realm above and beyond social and cultural history. However, I do not mean to suggest that, when putting forward the concept of the “implied author,” Booth had in mind both a textual emphasis and a historical requirement. Booth followed the ahistorical position of the first generation of the Chicago School when writing The Rhetoric of Fiction in the mid-twentieth century, a time marked by the reign of formalism. But as discussed above, in shifting from textual poetics to author-audience rhetoric, Booth significantly revised the relation between the author, text and reader. In contrast with the first generation of the Chicago School’s treatment of textual effects as ‘authorless’ (“the same in any other work”), autonomous and timeless (“of whatever date”), Booth emphasized the rhetorical purposes and overall textual design of the implied author of a given text who has in mind a particular type of audience when making the textual choices for producing specific rhetorical effects. Since the implied author writes in a given historical period and his or her textual choices may thus be influenced by historical factors, and since the type of audience the implied author has in mind is one with knowledge of the relevant historical factors, Booth’s shift from poetics to rhetoric enables the theory to take on a contextualizing potential. In other words, rhetorical theory’s requirement for a correct understanding of the implied author’s rhetorical purposes and textual norms is at the same time an implicit requirement that the relevant contextual factors be taken into account.

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In the poetic theory of the first generation of Chicago critics, as represented by R. S. Crane, we not only lose sight of the particularity of the writer and only see a timeless and autonomous text, but we also lose sight of the particularity of the reader. Indeed, in Ralph Rader’s words, for Crane and Sheldon Sacks, “a twentieth-century reader, taking Tom Jones from a drugstore rack, could find himself in immediate contact with its moving aesthetic force, that is to say, with the essential meaning and value of the novel” (Rader 1999, 49). The case is fundamentally different with the rhetorical theory of the second and third generations of the Chicago critics, as represented by Wayne Booth, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. As already pointed out, for Booth, the implied author of a given text “sets himself out with a different air […] depending on” the relationship with the particular type of reader he or she has in mind, and he designates this particular type of reader the “implied reader.” In support of his rhetorical position, Booth quotes Montgomery Belgion’s words: “Only when the moral beliefs of the reader tally exactly with those on which a story is based will the reader have the whole of the emotion which it is potentially able to produce in him” (Booth 1961, 118). In the afterword to the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth (1987 [1983/61], 422–424) subscribes to Rabinowitz’s distinction between “authorial audience” (the implied author’s ideal or hypothetical audience, resembling Booth’s “implied reader”), “narrative audience” (corresponding to the narrator, believing that the events of the story are real) and the flesh-and-blood “actual audience” (Rabinowitz 1977, 126–128). Rabinowitz defines the “authorial audience” as unequivocally contextualized, stating: Like a philosopher, historian, or journalist, [the author of a novel] cannot write without making certain assumptions about his readers’ beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions. […] Demby’s The Catacombs, for instance, takes place during the early sixties, and the novel achieves its sense of impending doom only if the reader knows that John F. Kennedy will be assassinated when the events of the novel reach 22 November 1963. Had Demby assumed that his audience would be ignorant of this historical event, he would have had to rewrite his book accordingly. Since the structure of a novel is designed for the author’s hypothetical audience (which I call the authorial audience), we must, as we read, come to share, in some measure, the characteristics of this audience if we are to understand the text. (1977, 126)

In his book-length study Before Reading, Rabinowitz makes a more comprehensive discussion of the diversified assumptions the implied author has in mind when writing the text for his or her particular type of authorial audience. According to him, “Some assumptions are historical: Flaubert assumes considerable knowledge of the revolution of 1848 in Sentimental Education. Some are sociological: at least one critic has argued convincingly that The Turn of the Screw makes

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proper sense only to a reader who knows something about the conduct deemed proper to governesses in the nineteenth century” (Rabinowitz 1987, 21). Just as the actual writer, the role-playing implied author creates the text in history, and his or her textual choices are often based on contextual information accessible to readers in that particular socio-historical period. That is to say, the authorial audience or implied reader the implied author writes to is essentially a contextualized or historicized audience. When the implied Fielding was writing Tom Jones in eighteenth-century England, he intended the novel for an authorial audience with the knowledge of “the latitudinarians and eighteenth-century thought” (Rader 1999, 49). According to Rader (50), they are Fielding’s “likeminded” contemporary audience, when reading Tom Jones in the twentieth or twenty-first century France, America or China, we need to take into account the relevant historical information in order to enter the position of Fielding’s “likeminded” authorial audience in that socio-cultural context. Similarly, when the implied Edgar Allan Poe was writing “The Tell-Tale Heart” in nineteenth-century America, he had in mind an authorial audience well informed of the insanity debate going on in that historical context, and this historical information is indispensable for entering the authorial audience in order to perceive the ironic undercurrent centering on the narrator-protagonist’s self condemnation (cf. Shen 2014, 44–49). In a like manner, when Katherine Mansfield was writing “The Singing Lesson” in early twentieth-century England, she intended the text for an authorial audience who knew that Victorian England regarded a woman who could not catch a husband as worthless, a kind of social knowledge necessary for discerning the covert textual progression as an implicit protest against phallocentric social forces (cf. Shen 2014, 111–116). In such cases, unless we enter the position of the implied author’s “like-minded” authorial audience in history, we cannot gain an adequate understanding of the implied author’s textual choices and rhetorical purposes, and there cannot be successful communication between the implied author and us readers. Seen in this light, the consideration of the historical context in which a text was produced is not only allowed but also required by rhetorical narrative theory. Curiously, this contextual requirement in rhetorical theory has been backgrounded and very much neglected by many scholars, both outside and inside the rhetorical camp, due in part to misunderstanding the key rhetorical concept “implied author” and its counterpart, the “authorial audience.” In fact, Booth himself has also played an important part in backgrounding the contextual potential of rhetorical theory in the first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction. Writing at the height of formalist criticism, he “arbitrarily isolated technique from all of the social and psychological forces that affect authors and readers” and thus failed to consider, let alone mention, the contextual requirement that implicitly

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exists in his implied reader. Although much more open to the historicist approach and heartily praising Bakhtin for his ideological and historical criticism of literary works in the afterword to the second edition of his The Rhetoric of Fiction (1987 [1983/61], 414–415), Booth still insisted on his “transhistorical” (not antihistorical) position (413). But of course, Booth was talking about the nature of his rhetorical project—one concerned with uses of “rhetoric in fiction” across the history of the novel, rather than with a historicist project that will make historical categories such as “Victorian” and “modernist” primary. When Booth introduced Rabinowitz’s “authorial audience,” he discussed two kinds of difference between the actual readers and the authorial audience. One is how a reader’s reading of a text changes in the course of the reader’s development (e. g., “the changes the years had produced in [Booth’s] reading of Anna Karenina”; 420). The other is how different actual readers, such as male versus female readers, would come up with divergent readings of a text. However, this concern with the “transhistorical” results in backgrounding the historical dimension implicit in the “authorial audience”: Rabinowitz’s way of talking about the authorial audience underlines a complicating fact that my discussion does not make clear: the reader whom the implied author writes [original emphasis] to can be found as much in the text’s silences as in its overt appeals. What the [implied] author felt no need to mention tells us who he thinks we’ll be—or hopes we’ll be. “Demby’s The Catacombs […] takes place during the early sixties, and the novel achieves its sense of impending doom only if the reader knows that John F. Kennedy will be assassinated when the events of the novel reach 22 November 1963.” Precisely because the novel remains silent about this fact, we can infer that members of the “authorial audience” already know it. The same thing holds for our beliefs about values: what the [implied] author feels no need to mention, of the values the story depends on, tells us who he thinks we are before we start to read. (Booth 1987 [1983/61], 422–423; emphasis added, except where noted)

Here we can see the essential similarity between Booth and Rabinowitz in terms of the historical requirement: both regard the historical knowledge of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 as a prerequisite for entering the position of the authorial audience of Demby’s The Catacombs. But instead of stressing that readers must have or gain specific historical knowledge in order to enter the authorial audience (in which case the historical requirement will be foregrounded), Booth assumes that readers all know this historical event “before [they] start to read.” Booth does not consider the fact that the authorial audience the implied author has in mind is often situated in another historical context, and that when reading the text in a later period or in a different sociocultural context, readers may need to gain the relevant historical information so as to enter the position of “the reader whom the implied author writes to.” Needless to say, this

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is a point that Booth would wholeheartedly endorse if there were such a lack of historical knowledge in actual readers. When Booth was writing the afterword to his book in 1983, what he called “reader-critics” dominated the scene, and the concern with the textual techniques the implied author uses to persuade the readers was under attack. Booth took a defensive stance and stressed “the relatively stable audience postulated by the implied author—the readers the text asks us to become” (1987 [1983/61], 420). This stress also played a role in backgrounding the contextual requirement of the “authorial audience.” Indeed, from the 1970s up to the present, many scholars have believed that “all knowledge is relative to analytical frameworks, epistemological perspectives, subject positions,” and rhetorical critics have continued to see the need to argue for the point that “knowledge and understanding can be shared across frameworks, perspectives, and positions” (Phelan 2005, 183; see also Phelan 2007). I fully subscribe to the rhetorical argument. But at the same time, we need to emphasize that readers in different sociohistorical contexts may not be able to enter the authorial audience and share reading as intended by the implied author unless they have and consider the relevant historical information. This contextual requirement is inherent in the notion of authorial audience, but it has remained underdeveloped in rhetorical theory and largely unacknowledged by scholars outside the rhetorical field. With the realization of the contextual demand of the implied author and “authorial audience,” we can see that the rhetorical narrative theory has a stronger requirement of considering the historical context of literary creation than the theories of what Booth calls “reader-critics.” If what matters are only analytical frameworks, epistemological perspectives or the subject positions of actual readers, we can ignore the implied author’s rhetorical purposes and thematic design in history and be satisfied to subject the text to present-day interpretive frameworks or subject positions. Precisely because rhetorical theory requires actual readers to find in the text “what the IA wanted them to find” (Booth 2005, 86), actual readers need to take into consideration the historical context in order to enter the implied author’s like-minded audience in history; otherwise, there cannot be successful communication between the implied author and us readers. Interestingly, some challenges to the rhetorical approach from a historical or cultural perspective implicitly affirm and consolidate the rhetorical contextual requirement. Within the Chicago School, Ralph Rader is a good case in point. In his “Tom Jones: The Form in History,” Rader criticizes Crane, Sacks and also Booth for failing to consider the historical context of literary creation and reception. Curiously, Rader does not perceive that by shifting from textual poetics to author-audience rhetoric, Booth’s theory takes on a historicizing potential that does not exist in the theory of Crane or Sacks. Nevertheless, his historicized

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investigation of Fielding’s Tom Jones can be regarded as an explicit realization of Booth’s implicit historicizing requirement. Although Rader does not use the rhetorical concepts “implied author,” “authorial audience” or “textual norms,” what he investigates and reveals is what the rhetorical concepts are (implicitly) concerned with, namely, that the implied Fielding wrote Tom Jones for an authorial audience he considered would be knowledgeable of “the latitudinarians and eighteenth-century thought”; this means that when reading the novel in twentieth-century America, readers need to take this historical information into account, if they are to become Fielding’s “like-minded” audience and gain a more adequate understanding of the textual norms. Outside the Chicago School, a case in a similar vein is Vera Nünning’s “Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms,” which is regarded as a representative work of what Bruno Zerweck (2001, 151) calls the “second fundamental paradigm shift, one toward greater historicity and cultural awareness” in the discussion of narratorial unreliability.9 But Nünning’s essay is in fact an affirmation or consolidation of the contextual requirement in rhetorical theory. It begins with the following words, “The history of unreliable narrators from Gargantua to Lolita is in fact full of traps for the unsuspecting reader.” This statement by Booth has certainly proved to be an accurate prediction. […] Booth’s statement is also relevant in another respect, because the history of the reception of the individual unreliable narrator is not only a minefield for critics, but for the unsuspecting reader as well. (2004 [1998], 236)

Unwittingly adopting a rhetorical yardstick, Nünning tries to reveal the various traps of interpretation—how different historical contexts affect readers’ conceptual schema and consequently distort the original meaning. It is in essence a matter of the failure of actual readers in different historical contexts to enter successfully the position of the implied author’s like-minded “authorial audience.” Nünning claims that “we can at least eliminate one possible trap of interpretation by taking into consideration the values that were current during the period when a specific text was written” (248). Formulated in rhetorical terms, the claim could be expressed as follows: we can at least eliminate one possible trap of interpretation by trying to enter the position of the authorial audience the implied author

9 The so-called “first paradigm shift” in the discussion of narratorial “unreliability” is from the rhetorical to the cognitive, which is regarded by many scholars as a desirable replacement of the rhetorical with the cognitive (see my defense of the rhetorical approach below as well as my more detailed discussion in Shen 2014 [2009]).

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had in mind, a reading position informed of the values that were current during the period when the implied author made the textual choices. If Vera Nünning’s historically-oriented investigation of unreliability serves to consolidate rather than to subvert the rhetorical approach, many cognitive approaches to unreliability also essentially operate in the same way. The cognitive approach to unreliability arose as a reaction to the rhetorical approach. Many narratologists take the two approaches to be in conflict with each other and think that the cognitive should replace the rhetorical. Zerweck, for example, says, “Within the theory of unreliable narration such a cognitive turn represents a first paradigm shift. It allows a radical rethinking of the whole notion of narrative unreliability. Instead of relying on the device of the implied author and a text-centered analysis of unreliable narration, narrative unreliability can be reconceptualized in the context of frame theory and of readers’ cognitive strategies” (2001, 151). Significantly, when cognitive critics undertake analysis of narratorial unreliability, they themselves often have recourse to the methods of the rhetorical approach. In Tamar Yacobi’s (1981) foundational essay for the reader-oriented approach, for instance, we see an implicit shift from the cognitive to the rhetorical stance. After expounding the five reader-oriented mechanisms of integration, Yacobi narrows down to the issue of unreliability and observes as follows: To construct a hypothesis as to the unreliability of the narrator is then necessarily to assume the existence of an implied (and by definition reliable) author who manipulates his creature for his own purposes. However, the invariability of this rule must not blind us to the wide variations, from work to work and from passage to passage within the same work, in all that concerns the modalities of the unreliable source(s) of narration vis-à-vis authorial communication. (1981, 123)

Although context is taken into account, it is only textual context, and the implied author still functions as the criterion for measuring narratorial unreliability (“visà-vis authorial communication”), just as in the rhetorical approach. On the whole, when cognitive narratologists are concerned with actual readers’ different interpretations of narratorial unreliability, they tend to give up the authorial yardstick and claim that all interpretations are equally valid; but when they are discussing unreliability from their own point of view, they often explicitly or implicitly shift to the rhetorical stance. Ansgar Nünning, another representative of the cognitive branch, has more recently adopted a synthetic “cognitive-rhetorical” approach, and he asks the following questions: “What textual and contextual signals suggest to the reader that the narrator’s reliability may be suspect? How does an implied author (as redefined by Phelan) manage to furnish the narrator’s discourse and the text with clues that allow the critic to

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recognize an unreliable narrator when he or she sees one?” (A. Nünning 2005, 101; emphasis added). These questions consolidate the rhetorical concern with unreliability as encoded by the implied author for the implied reader (or readers who try to enter that position) to perceive. On the rhetorical side, influenced by Rabinowitz’s distinction among different types of audience, many rhetorical critics have paid attention to the different interpretations of actual readers.10 Although the rhetorical critics have a different purpose in mind, namely, to show how the personal experiences and social positioning of actual readers stand in the way of their entering the position of the authorial audience/implied reader, their concern with actual readers’ divergent interpretations implicitly function to consolidate the cognitive concern with the pragmatic effects of textual phenomena. In Yacobi’s more recent essay, “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)reliability, Divergent Readings” (2005), we see the consolidation of both the rhetorical criterion of unreliability and the cognitive concern with actual readers. Yacobi’s analysis shows that, in order to grasp the “authorial rhetoric,” we must try to enter the position of the authorial audience/implied reader so as to arrive at the authorial reading. By contrast, “divergent readings” are attributable to the differences among actual readers and various contexts. So long as a literary narrative is regarded, in Yacobi’s words, as an act of communication that cannot be defined without reference to “an implied (and by definition reliable) author who manipulates his creature for his own purposes,” cognitive critics, like rhetorical critics, still stick to the author rather than shift to actual readers as the yardstick of narratorial unreliability. But the two approaches do form a contrast with each other in term of focus of attention: the rhetorical approach centers on communication between the implied author and the authorial audience (readers who try to enter that position) whereas the cognitive approach tends to concentrate on the difference in reading strategy, conceptual framework or cultural/historical context that underlies the divergent readings of actual readers. The point is that there is no real conflict, but only essential complementarity between the two approaches. To conclude, the postclassical narratological period is marked by various attempts to connect form with context. There is no doubt that we need to investigate the contextualized significance of narrative form in texts as communicative acts and that we need to trace the historical development of narrative structures. But in terms of narrative poetics, there is virtually no room for considering specific

10 See e. g., Booth (1987 (1983/61): 420–423) and Phelan (1996: 100–102 and 167–170; 2005: 5; 2007: 183 and 129–131).

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contexts. On the surface, we have a rectifying evolution from formal narrative poetics to contextualized feminist poetics, cognitive poetics or other contextualized poetics. But as far as the investigation of generic structures is concerned, we have to leave aside varied specific contexts and focus on the decontextualized structural properties shared by specific uses in narrative texts of the same genre, whether the genre is narrative or a type of narrative. As discussed above, feminist poetics and cognitive poetics are as decontextualized as classical poetics, and they function to consolidate and enrich, rather than to subvert, formal narrative poetics. In the case of rhetorical narrative theory, although it has been criticized as a decontextualized approach, contextualist challenges actually function to bring into play the contextualizing potential of rhetorical narrative theory itself. Moreover, there is no real conflict between the rhetorical and the cognitive approaches to unreliability. That is to say, the picture is not, finally, as controversial or diverse as it has appeared. In various contextualist approaches, form and history can exist harmoniously in a similar relation between decontextualized poetics and contextualized criticism; and in rhetorical narrative theory, form and history can in fact enjoy a balance, since the theory has in essence a textual emphasis and a historical emphasis.

Works Cited Booth, Wayne C. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Booth, Wayne C. 1987 [1983/61]. “Afterword” to The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd edition, 401–457. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Booth, Wayne C. 2005. “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 75–88. Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. 2003. Psychonarratology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Case, Alison. 2005. “Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 312–321. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?” Poetics Today 11 (2): 309–328. Crane, R. S. 1952. “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones.” In Critics and Criticism, edited by R. S. C., 62–93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Currie, Mark. 1998. Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: St. Martin. Darby, David. 2001. “Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology.” Poetics Today 22 (4): 829–852. Fludernik, Monika. 2005. “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 36–59.

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Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. 2004 [1994]. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd edition. Revised by Christian Matthiessen. London: Routledge. Herman, David. 1999. “Introduction: Narratologies.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by D. H., 1–30. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller. 2011. “Six Ways Not to Save the Implied Author.” Style 45 (1): 67–79. Lanser, Susan Sniader. 1981. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lanser, Susan Sniader. 1986. “Toward a Feminist Narratology.” Style 20 (3): 341–363. Lanser, Susan Sniader. 1992. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lanser, Susan Sniader. 1995. “Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratology.” Narrative 3 (1): 85–94. Margolin, Uri. 1984. “Narrative and Indexicality: A Tentative Framework.” JNT: Journal of Literary Semantics 13 (3): 181–204. Nelles, William. 1993. “Historical and Implied Authors and Readers.” Comparative Literature 45 (1): 22–46. Nünning, Ansgar. 2000. “Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology: A Survey of Diachronic Approaches, Concepts, and Research Projects.” Anglistentag 1999 Mainz Proceedings, edited by Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts, 345–373.Trier: WVT. Nünning, Ansgar. 2005. “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 89–107. Nünning, Vera. 2004 [1998]. “Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms: The Vicar of Wakefield as a Test Case of a Cultural-Historical Narratology.” Style 38 (2): 236–252. Onega, Susana and José Ángel García Landa. 1996. Narratology. London: Longman. Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James. 2007. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. 2005. “Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Narrative Theory.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 1–16. Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1977. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry 4 (1): 121–141. Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1987. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rader, Ralph W. 1999. “Tom Jones: The Form in History.” In Ideology and Form in EighteenthCentury Literature, edited by David H. Richter, 47–74. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.

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Shen, Dan. 2005. “Why Contextual and Formal Narratologies Need Each Other.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 35 (2): 141–171. Shen, Dan. 2011. “What is the Implied Author?” Style 45 (1): 80–98. Shen, Dan. 2013. “Implied Author, Authorial Audience, and Context: Form and History in Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory.” Narrative 21 (2): 140–158. Shen, Dan. 2014. Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots. New York and London: Routledge. Shen, Dan. 2014 [2009]. “Unreliability.” In Handbook of Narratology, 2nd edition, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, vol. 2: 896–909. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Also available in the living handbook of narratology at: http://www. lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/unreliability (Revised 31 December 2013) Tillotson, Kathleen Mary. 1959. The Tale and the Teller. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Warhol, Robyn. 1989. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Warhol, Robyn. 1996. “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine of Persuasion.” In Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, edited by Kathy Mezei, 21–39. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Yacobi, Tamar. 1981. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics Today 2 (1): 113–126. Yacobi, Tamar. 2005. “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 108–123. Zerweck, Bruno. 2001. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35 (1): 151–180.

Jannike Hegdal Nilssen (Oslo)

Rethinking the Unreliable Narrator: Is the Demarcation Heterodiegetic/ Homodiegetic Necessary? 1 Introduction In their article “The Fifth Mode of Representation: Ambiguous Voices in Unreliable Third-Person Narration” (2011), Behrendt and Hansen discuss unreliability in third-person narration, and they begin by pointing out how almost all discussions of unreliable narration over the last decades have focused on first-person narrators (219). At first sight, it may seem that this is the path I will also follow, as Linn Ullmann’s Before You Sleep (2000 [1998]), my tutor text, appears to engage mainly a homodiegetic narrator. A first-time reader of the novel is likely to think that the novel employs the plot of a Bildungsroman and that the protagonist matures and changes throughout the novel. However, uncertainty as to whether it is the voice of the narrated “I” we hear or that of the retrospective “I” leads to the question as to whether the expected distance between the narrated “I” and the retrospective “I” and their merging actually pertains here. Behrendt and Hansen (2011) discuss unreliability in third-person narration by exploring what they label ambiguous discourse. In addition to the four discursive modes of speech representation,1 a fifth mode of representation on the discursive level is introduced. Ambiguous discourse is the mode of ambiguity and unreliability resulting from the convergence of free indirect discourse (FID) and character-(in)dependent discourse (CID). In light of that article, I will investigate the ambiguity of free indirect discourse in a number of seemingly paraleptic passages from Ullmann’s novel. While Behrendt and Hansen address the topic of first-person narration in disguise, this article will explore whether it is possible to speak of third-person narration in disguise. This leads to asking why the case of Before You Sleep is not just a regular unreliable character narrator. Could we not simply speak of the author or implied author as the orchestrator of the construct-

1 The four modes are direct discourse (quoted monologue) (DD), free indirect discourse (narrated monologue) (FID), indirect discourse (psychonarration) (ID) and character-(in)dependent discourse (where consciousness is represented exclusively through behavior and speech) (CID) (Behrendt and Hansen, 2011, 228). DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-002

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edness of this story?2 My suggestion will involve rethinking the concept of the traditional demarcation between the heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrator types. To demonstrate how a rethinking of this demarcation is relevant, I will proceed by looking into three different ways or levels of understanding the novel Before You Sleep. Each level delves a little deeper and adds meaning to the interpretation of the novel. Briefly, they can be described as the level of the Bildungsroman, the level of the unnatural construction of a Bildungsroman and the level of hidden unreliability and ironizing over the Bildungsroman genre. When discussing the third level, I will deal with passages that are seemingly paraleptic. First, however, I will consider the concepts of implied author and Bildungsroman.

2 The Implied Author and the Bildungsroman Since Wayne Booth coined the term implied author in 1961, there has been much debate as to whether or not it is a necessary concept and what it entails. Wolf Schmid (2014 [2009]) gives a detailed presentation of the discussions and what he calls an impartial definition, a much-needed synthetic approach. Regarding Gérard Genette’s ambivalent definition, according to which the implied author cannot be a “narrative agent” (1988 [1983], 148), Schmid points out that Genette was not really positioning himself far from some of the defenders of the concept. Schmid’s concluding definition makes much sense to me in that he states the purpose of the implied author is to help us “describe the layered process by which meaning is generated” (2014 [2009], 296). According to him, “[t]he presence of the implied author in the work, above the characters and the narrator and their associated levels of meaning, establishes a new semantic level arching over the whole work: the authorial level” (297). In his call for a resurrection of the implied author in 2005, Booth embellishes on his original definition of the implied author, earlier defined as “the core of norms and choices” (Booth 1983 [1961], 74). He calls the flesh-and-blood-person (FBP) author’s activity of masking, meaning that the implied author can be regarded as how the work conveys the values and norms of a better self, as com-

2 See also Per Krogh Hansen’s contribution to this volume. He considers the unreliability of the author-narrator in the genre of autofiction without seeking recourse to the implied author. As my analysis will show, our approaches are quite different, but in my opinion, what they have in common is that something other than the implied author is responsible for unreliability.



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pared to those of the FBP author (Booth 2005, 78).3 This is an intriguing idea that might be relevant in terms of how much masking the reader is able to perceive at each different level of understanding in Before You Sleep. As we will see when delving deeper into the three levels, the most “unmasked” level is the least ideal level in terms of possibilities for a positive outcome. The implied author is a central concept to bear in mind when speaking of the genre Bildungsroman. According to Mikhail M. Bakhtin, the Bildungsroman is “the image of man in the process of becoming” (1986 [1936–38], 19). Theorists have put forth a variety of criteria for what must be prevalent in a novel for it to be a Bildungsroman, but it is commonly accepted that this process of becoming involves the development or formation of the protagonist. This suggests that the implied author’s norms are not consonant with the norms of the protagonist at the beginning of the novel, but that this changes toward the end. Franco Moretti even says that as soon as the Bildung has occurred, the story ends: Unlike the usual nineteenth-century novel, in the classical Bildungsroman the ending and the aim of narration coincide. The story ends as soon as an intentional design has been realized: a design which involves the protagonist and determines the overall meaning of events. (Moretti 2000, 55)

If there is a first-person narrator, and one that is the protagonist as well, the Bildungsroman will have to include a merging of the two, since the protagonist gradually becomes as wise and mature as the retrospective first-person narrator. When mentioning the Bildungsroman, Genette notes that all autobiographical narratives start out with a difference in age and experience and that this difference is “inevitably decreasing in proportion as the hero progresses in ‛apprenticeship’ to life, […]” (1980 [1972], 253). This means that the implied author’s norms and those of the narrator will be consonant with those of the protagonist by the end of the story.

3 For a detailed commentary on these issues, see Dan Shen’s contribution to this volume, especially section 2.

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3 The First Level of Understanding: The Bildungsroman Having looked at the concepts of implied author and Bildungsroman, I will now explore what I call the first level of understanding the novel Before You Sleep. This is the surface level, the easy-to-access one. Judging from a number of the blurbs for the novel, it is clear that the publisher and the author are seeking to promote the novel as, among other things, a Bildungsroman. Also, the reliability of the narrator—explicitly marked as the protagonist Karin—is questioned. The following is my translation of the Norwegian publisher’s original blurb: Before You Sleep is the young Karin Blom’s narrative about herself and her large, strange family. In Karin’s world, imagination and reality glide almost unnoticeably into each other. She narrates, disturbs, and seduces—while everybody around her irrevocably moves toward loneliness. Before You Sleep is a novel that spans from New York in the 1930s to Oslo in the 1990s, through a variety of fantastical stories, burlesque scenes and silent gravity. In that way, this is both a novel of growing up and a family portrait through a century. But most of all, it is a novel about endeavors of love—of marriage, infidelity, family connections, vanity and hope. (Blurb by Ullmann 2000)

In the current English blurb from the author’s webpage, which is often found to present the book in online bookstores, the authority of the narrator is explicitly marked as unreliable: Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator Karin, Before You Sleep reaches back from present-day Oslo to Brooklyn in the 1930s to relate the emotional legacies of the Blom family. Karin is both playful and melancholy [sic]—a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her life: her mother, Anni, alluring, manipulative, and melodramatic; her sister Julie, a wife and mother undone by suspicions of her husband’s infidelity; her aunt Selma, the world’s angriest old woman; and her soldier-grandmother June who bets that Karin will be the best damn soldier of them all. (Ullmann 2001)

From these two blurbs, Karin is presented as the narrator, telling her and her family’s story while also adding fantastical elements and exaggerating the truth. It even says that she beguiles the reader or is an unreliable voice. Clearly, we should be skeptical of what she says,4 since none of these claims is in any way a stretch of interpretation. The novel even has explicit discussions about her habit of lying:

4 Interestingly, the novel’s German title is Die Lügnerin [the liar].



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I don’t mean to brag. Or make things up. Or bite off more than I can chew. But sometimes it’s actually necessary—to tell it not just like it is—but to tell it a little more than it is. When I was a child, Grandma and Anni worried that I didn’t tell the truth. They said that liars would not be tolerated in a community. They said I exaggerated to make other people like me. [author’s blank line] (132)

I would suggest that the understanding we gain from the blurbs is one of a protagonist who tells the story of herself and her family. The reader can perceive that the novel is entertaining but that it gets more serious toward the end and that Karin’s character develops as a result of the events that Karin and her family experience throughout the novel. A preliminary narratological analysis demonstrates that the first two pages of the novel constitute the beginning of a frame narrative. It is narrated by a heterodiegetic narrator using internal focalization through the protagonist Karin. At the beginning of the novel’s part one, “Wedding, August 1990” (5), there is a shift to a homodiegetic narrator who comes across as Karin the character. It appears that the narrator tells the story about her family to make time pass while—in the frame narrative—she and her nephew Sander are waiting for his parents to call from their vacation in Italy, where they are attempting to salvage their marriage. The larger chunk of the novel contains a complex web of internal and external analeptic as well as internal proleptic stories ranging from the 1930s to the “present” 1990s with various characters from Karin’s family. On the surface, the only development in the novel is that the frame narrative starts seriously and that, after a series of fantastical and seemingly superficial stories, things take a more serious turn. Karin’s character begins to take form as she starts out by living a carefree and careless existence until more serious events intervene, culminating when her sister fails to call to say she is okay and apparently leaving Karin’s nephew to face the prospect of orphanhood. Up to this point, this could be a classical Bildungsroman plot, constituting what I call the first level of understanding the novel. But where then is the closer connection between the story Karin tells and the frame narrative? What role do these events play in the formation of Karin’s character?

4 The Second Level of Understanding: The Unnatural Construction of a Bildungsroman The reviewers seemed to agree with the blurbs about the content, even though not everybody was entirely happy with the novel. Some felt that this large variety of fantastical stories does not add up properly toward the end of the story, so that

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the novel is mostly for entertainment (Wærp, 1998; Bergström-Edwards, 1999). Hans H. Skei (1999) claims that there is a lack of focus in the novel while Henning H. Wærp (1998, 170) criticizes the missing connection between the confident, desperate man hunter he sees in the protagonist Karin and the wise reasoner he sees in the narrator who gives us the stories of her family. In effect, he is critical of the failure of the acting “I” to merge with the narrating “I,” a merging we should normally be able to find in a Bildungsroman, where the protagonist becomes consonant with the implied author’s norms. What in one way seems to be a development might not turn out to be exactly that. Thus, we must delve into what I call the second level of understanding the novel. Careful analysis will disclose a sjuzhet with a complex analeptic and proleptic structure, as already mentioned. These disruptions in the chronology are carefully designed to make it seem like we have a classical Bildungsroman plot. By using the distinction fabula/sjuzhet rather than story/discourse, I intend to emphasize the more plot-related connotations that hinge on the term sjuzhet (cf. Herman 2005; Abbott 2007), as this will prove highly relevant to the constructedness of this novel.5 As the following analysis will show, the sjuzhet is constructed in such a way as to make it seem that the narrating “I” merges with the implied author. This configuration can be characterized as “unnatural.”

4.1 An unreliable sjuzhet? As visualized in table 1, the order of events is far from chronological. The text in bold lists the few events we can follow in chronological order after the frame narrative. In between these events are quite a few external analepses, internal analepses and internal prolepses. Also, to the right are events that it is not possible to place in the fabula with any clear time markers. This massive shuffling of events, particularly in parts two and four, is not easy to detect. Each of the five parts of the novel has a name that to some degree signals that the sjuzhet resembles the fabula, i. e., that the order of events in the two cases is quite similar.6

5 For a definition of the terms, I refer to James Phelan: sjuzhet is defined as “[t]he fabula rendered in a specific narrative discourse; the synthesis of story and discourse” (2005, 218); fabula is defined as “[t]he what of narrative before it is rendered in a discourse; the sequence of events in chronological order” (215). 6 This is also part of the reason why it makes sense to speak of a first level of understanding.



Table 1: Order in Before You Sleep

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The names in the translated version of Ullmann’s novel are (in this order): “Wedding, August 1990” (3), “Days, 1990–1997” (91), “America” (165), “Faces” (213) and “Sander, December 1998” (249).7 From these names, we might gather that the “America” and “Faces” parts take place after the days of 1997; however, as table 1 shows, this is not the case. The external analepsis relating what happens in NYC in the 1930s is quite explicit, as specific dates and historical events are mentioned several times in this analepsis. The fact that Karin’s mother Anni travels to NYC the same year as Julie’s wedding is not equally obvious, as the date is stated at the beginning of part one (5) but narrated in parts three and four. It is also stated in part one that aunt Selma is 82 years old (22), so that when it is said in part four that she died at 83, the reader needs to remember her age to know that her funeral takes place in 1991. As both of these events come after a largely shuffled account of the days of 1990–97, I will venture that it is unlikely that the casual reader will take note of this intuitively, i. e., that Anni’s NYC trip and Selma’s funeral actually take place in 1990 and 1991, respectively. Both parts three and four of the novel are more serious and in a graver tone than parts one and two, and as I have already established above, Karin the character changes from her carefree and careless ways at the beginning of the novel to become a more responsible and serious adult toward the end. The result of this shuffling of the events in the fabula is that the sjuzhet becomes unreliable. This is a different type of unreliability than that of ambiguous discourse, which Behrendt and Krogh Hansen explain this way: it “leads the reader to overlook story world facts of decisive importance for understanding the story” (2011, 230). Although you cannot apprehend this shuffling of events by investigating ambiguity between CID and FID, the effect here is exactly the same. The narrating instance has constructed the sjuzhet in such a way as to make the reader overlook certain story world facts. The sjuzhet makes it seem like there is a causal connection between events even when this is in fact not the case. Actually, the ambiguities and discrepancies between the sjuzhet and the fabula cause the reader to overlook the fact that in the story world there is no causal connection between the events in part three and those portrayed in the following the two parts. Another example of such misfits can be seen in the way the protagonist’s encounter with five different men is presented in the sjuzhet. One of Karin’s aims is to seduce men, but she does so rather half-heartedly, her intent being, appar-

7 In the original Norwegian version, these parts are also marked with roman numbers, I–V, but in the English version, they are omitted. For simplicity’s sake, I will continue to refer to the parts as part one, part two, etc.



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ently, only to engage in casual sexual encounters (21). For instance, she lures Billy to bed by rolling apples after him in the supermarket: It takes me four weeks to persuade Billy to sleep with me. I never thought about giving up. I don’t give up once. I’ve made up my mind. That’s the whole point. But Billy got on my nerves. Billy irritated me. I felt more like slapping him than sleeping with him. Regardless, I finally talk him into it. This is how it happens: […] I take one apple after another out of the cart and roll them across the floor. Over to Billy. Lots of apples. […] […] Suddenly he lets go of his cart and comes toward me. I hide behind the shelves. He lets go of his cart and comes toward me. I hide behind the shelves. I run away. I hide behind the shelves. Billy comes toward me and finds me and grabs my arm and says, Let’s go. (95; original emphasis)

It is hard to believe that this is a realistic account of what happened. Billy is the second man she seduces in the sjuzhet. The third, Carl, is even harder to believe. Karin’s encounter with Carl is the most fantastical of the five, as this is the man who transforms into a fish, a mackerel, the morning after because Karin removes Carl’s magic cowboy boots against his will while he is sleeping (138–139). If one looks at the first letters of the names of all five men, one will find that the order in which they are presented is not random. The sjuzhet presents the men alphabetically: Aaron in part one; Billy, Carl, and Dag in part two; and Edwin in part four. This alphabetical order suggests that there is a connection between these encounters: if we look for a causal connection in how Karin acts around men, it can be found. For each man she wants to seduce, it seems to get harder, and the accounts become more unrealistic. Aaron is quite easy (74); Billy takes four weeks to seduce in the supermarket; and for Carl she puts on a big singing and dancing show in order to sweep him off his feet: “[…] and I dance Carl like Carl has never been danced before” (131). The next is even harder, and she needs to get him drunk unawares before she can have her way: “I bend down, lift Dag off the floor, sling him over my back, and take him home with me” (163). Doing so, she takes on a stereotypical male part in terms of cultural gender roles, where the man is the decisive, unstoppable hunter in the seduction game. Also, we do not really believe that she would be able to do this, slinging him over her back. The fifth encounter, with Edwin, is different and suggests that Karin is undergoing change. At first, he will not notice her, and when he finally does, she walks away. I’m going now. Okay, Edwin? I don’t want you after all. I don’t want you. (241)

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The reason might be that this time the seduction got so difficult that she gave up—a radical change of attitude from the time when she was pursuing Billy. The reason Edwin will not notice her is that he is playing with his daughter and is more engaged with his child than he is with Karin. The narrating “I” claims that she goes away because she perceives that the child does not want her there and because Karin seducing Edwin would mean forgetting about the child. This is the message the narrator wants to convey: The little girl notices it too. He’s no longer with her. She turns around and sees me. I don’t want to go home with you, do you understand? her eyes say. That’s fine. I understand. Could you leave now so my father can be my father again? Yes, I’ll go. (240; original emphasis)

One or the other is true: either she does not succeed with the last seduction or she changes to become less ruthless and thus more mature. So far, this is consistent with the first level of understanding the novel and exemplifies the Bildungsroman plot. However, the encounters with these five men are shuffled in a very specific order. The sjuzhet places them alphabetically, but this order results in an unreliably constructed causal plot that does not resemble the fabula. The fabula order is Aaron, Edwin, Billy, Dag and Carl. On this basis, Karin’s suggested maturity (visible in the Edwin encounter) should already have been apparent in her encounter with Billy, Dag and the mighty and fantastical Carl. The effect of this reshuffling of the order of events is that the reader will understand the encounter with Edwin in light of the others that have already been narrated. This being the case, the reader can detect a change of course from the narrated “I” and thus conclude that the plot follows the pattern of the Bildungsroman. Even so, analysis will reveal that the narrated “I” does not change in the course of the fabula.

4.2 A merging of the retrospective narrating “I” and the implied author? Instead of a plot where the character actually changes in the course of her experiences, the point might be that we can only change by narrating our own story. Through the act of reviewing or “undergoing” her story in the order of the sjuzhet, it can be said that Bildung occurs. It would seem that this Bildung takes place because of the order in which the events occur; through careful analysis of the sjuzhet, however, we can see that it is the act of reviewing or “undergoing” the



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story in the order of the sjuzhet that brings Bildung about. This brings us to a similar point made by Per Krogh Hansen (2011) in his study of “reversed film” narratives such as Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible and Christopher Nolan’s Memento. The events in Before You Sleep, though, are more shuffled than they are directly backmasked, i. e., episodically reversed. Hansen’s topic in this article is unnatural narratives, and he concludes with an interpretation that could just as well refer to Before You Sleep in the sense that it becomes clear that the way we perceive the reordering of events in Before You Sleep as a coherent succession (first level of understanding) could be a way of “naturalizing” the “unnatural.” If one were to understand that Karin’s character does not really change, then the “natural” would be meaningless and the second level of understanding could be a way of making sense of the natural by “denaturalizing” it (Hansen 2011, 183). It is in this sense, along with the more “conventionalized” (in the sense of Alber et al. 2012) unnatural elements (i. e., fantastical stories that are not realistic), that I perceive this novel as “unnatural.” Achronological order in itself might not make a discourse unnatural, but a sjuzhet that creates such an ambiguity due to the extensive shuffling of events and other features is something I would call an unnatural narrative. A character narrator who changes and matures in the course of telling the story, and where this changing and maturing is not really visible after a careful analysis, differs from the traditional idea in which the narrating “I” and the retrospective “I” merge. In the following, I will take this point further by trying to identify a point in the fabula where the retrospective “I” is narrating and has matured. At what point does this character narrator become endowed with maturity by telling the story? The narrating time of the story is not marked very specifically. Part one opens with the narrator starting the story: “Once upon a time, almost nine years ago” (5). This suggests that the narrating time is almost nine years after August 27, 1990. It would be reasonable to start out assuming that the narrating time is the night when Karin is waiting for Julie’s call, since, as I have already suggested, Karin starts to tell the story to make time pass while waiting. The question is: would the narrator say “almost nine years” if the narrating time was December 27, 1998? That would mean less than eight-and-a-half years. I think not. Adding to this mention of “almost nine years” are several narrator comments suggesting that Julie was away for a while at the time of narrating. The most explicit comment is: “Only once, before she disappeared, did I ever see her cry” (15).8 This

8 Other quotes from Before You Sleep that suggest that time has passed and that Julie does not exist any longer are the following: 1) “I don’t know whether Julie found Aleksander contemptible.

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comment requires more knowledge of the situation than what Karin knows at the time while she is waiting for her sister’s call. In the frame narrative, it is implied that Julie is missing because Karin and Sander are worried that she has failed to call them, even though it is not established that she did in fact disappear. Nevertheless, and although the passing of narrating time is not made explicit, it can be determined that time has passed since the night of waiting for Julie’s call. Throughout the entire novel we find ambiguity between the carefree, beguiling liar and the more serious, responsible truth teller even though, toward the end of the novel, this ambiguity does diminish. From the beginning, both the narrating “I” and Karin the character’s actions encourage telling lies as a life motto, while the implied author’s norms do not seem to concur. As we can see in the second external analepsis of part one, the narrating “I” presents herself as a quite un-sympathetic person at age eleven: That day I understood the difference between a lie that paid (that Pete [Anni’s dog] had done number one and number two) and a lie that didn’t pay (that I had killed Pete with a rock and thrown her into Oslo Fjord). A lie that had to be taken back and replaced with the truth was a useless lie that didn’t pay. But a lie that didn’t have to be taken back, that might, with time, be replaced by a new lie, but never—never!—with the truth, was a lie that paid. Since I had now learned the difference between a lie that paid and a lie that didn’t, I decided to lie as much as possible for the rest of my life. And that’s how it turned out. (37)

Given the narrator’s comment in the last sentence, there is no reason to believe that the narrator is simply telling about her previous self. It seems that the narrator’s norms are still consistent with this episode, just as carelessness is characteristic for other narrated events in the novel. This carelessness is counterbalanced a little later when the narrator, in another external analepsis, tells of the time her sister Julie attempted to commit suicide: [Julie] got in Anni’s car and drove like mad toward the city—she’s never been a good driver, anyone who longs for death should take a ride in the car with Julie, and back then she didn’t even have a license. Thank God the cops stopped her before anyone got hurt. So, finally she slit her wrists in the shower, and that’s when Anni found her. Luckily. Because this time she hadn’t made a single mistake. (85)

I think she did. I did, at any rate” (108); 2) “I’m not going to ask you to believe that Carl had magic cowboy boots. I might have said something like that to Julie, Torild, and Val Bryn one evening when we were out on the town. There are lots of things I say after a few too many glasses of one thing or another. (So if you run into Torild or Val Bryn sometime, and they happen to mention […]” (132); 3) “You were much lonelier than me, Julie” (132).



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Even though the narrator jokes about Julie’s driving skills, there is also a serious concern at the end of this passage that is more consonant with the implied author’s norms. This type of tension between serious truths and praising the habit of lying produces a sense of ambiguity throughout the novel. What tells us that narrating time is passing while Karin the narrator is narrating is that the narrator’s norms seem to change and gradually merge with the implied author’s norms. This can be seen in the last sentences of part four, consisting of aunt Selma’s fantastical words of wisdom to Karin. I characterize this speech as fantastical because it occurs at aunt Selma’s funeral and because the reader is told the dead aunt sits down by Karin during the ceremony. One clearly perceives that the narrator is imagining this: You’re a smart girl, Karin, but sometimes you exaggerate a little too much for your own good. One day something might happen in your life that is a lot more serious than what’s come before. One day something might break inside you, and you won’t be able to play as carefree as you have. One day life will demand that you take responsibility, little Karin. (247)

What is different here from the narrator’s other made-up stories is the serious content, a content that is probably consonant with the implied author’s norms. As mentioned above, the funeral takes place in 1991, but in this context right before part five it functions as a prolepsis to what comes next, namely Julie’s disappearance. Again, we can see that the sjuzhet provides the reader with a Bildungsroman plot. Another sign of the retrospective “I” merging with the implied author’s norms is the change in the way that the narrator tells the story. The fantastical elements (which could be seen as synonymous with her habit of lying) become less visible toward the end of the sjuzhet and are practically non-existent in part five. Even though the funeral speech is imagined, it is a more solemn, serious lie that points toward the seriousness ahead in part five. Because of the change in the way of narrating from beginning to end, and because of the change in Karin the narrator’s norms, it can be concluded that narrating time in this novel is not a fixed point, but rather occurs over time. To sum up this second level of understanding the novel: we have an unreliable sjuzhet that gives the impression of a Bildungsroman plot in the course of which the character narrator undergoes changes. The traditional change from distance between the narrated “I” and the retrospective narrating “I” to their merging is not exactly what happens in this case. What occurs instead is that the retrospective narrating “I” merges with the implied author’s norms, since these norms are not consonant with those of the retrospective “I” at the beginning.

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5 The Third Level of Understanding: Hidden Unreliability and Ironizing over the Bildungsroman What is problematic about the second level of understanding the novel is the way it blurs the lines between the homodiegetic narrator as a psychological character and a narrating instance employing internal focalization. For the third level of understanding, I wish to suggest that in order to propose a narrator who changes in the course of telling her story, an orchestrator is required who is above the speaking instance of the sjuzhet. Some might say that this instance is the implied author. As I have already stated, however, I do not regard the implied author as an active agent. Also, as this orchestrator is clearly unreliable, I do not see how it can be compared to something resembling an implied author or as something such as the values and norms of a work. My claim is that to explain how the sjuzhet manipulates the fabula to make it seem as though Karin the character changes in the course of the novel—when it is actually the retrospective narrating “I” who changes—speaking of an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic third-person narrator makes more sense. To employ Genette’s terms (1980 [1972], 1988 [1983]), the narrating instance of the frame narrative is an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator of an intradiegetic frame narrative. While in part one there is a shift in voice to a narrating “I,” it is reasonable to say that we have a homodiegetic narrating instance and that this voice remains throughout the novel. Karin is then both an intradiegetic narrator and a metadiegetic character. I will now delve into the option that the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator also remains throughout the entire novel.

5.1 Some seemingly paraleptic passages Some of the passages that it is not possible to place in the fabula with any clear time markers (as visualized in table 1) are passages where we find alterations that first seem to be paralepses.9 The “I” narrates events and other people’s thoughts that she would not normally be able to know about. One paralepsis starts like this:

9 “Paralepsis can likewise consist, in internal focalization, of incidental information about the thought of a character other than the focal character, or about a scene the latter is not able to see.” (Genette 1980 [1972], 197)



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I am Karin. Julie is my sister, married to Aleksander. If anyone should ask me how things are going with them, I could tell one of many stories. This is one of them: (96)

This is the first of four bedroom chapters. They seem to form a continuous scene from the bedroom of her sister and her sister’s husband Aleksander even though they are not consecutive chapters. This comment, prior to a seemingly paraleptic passage, makes it seem like the narrator is simply making up the story that is about to come. In regards to these four bedroom chapters, though, only the first has an introduction like the one quoted above. An example from the second of the bedroom scenes is: He listens to her breathing, that regular deep breathing of hers. Her eyes are closed. What does she think? That he doesn’t know she’s awake, that he doesn’t know she’s awake and noticing every single movement he makes? She thinks that he thinks she’s asleep. (115)

If these sentences are the voice of the retrospective “I” of Karin, then this must be a paralepsis, as Aleksander here is the focalizing instance. It could be argued that there is zero focalization in the last sentence as well, and that the ambiguity resulting from which mode this actually is creates what Behrendt and Hansen (2011) call ambiguous discourse, the mode of ambiguity and unreliability resulting from the convergence of FID and CID. However, the context of the sentences prior to and following this one supports the notion that we are dealing with FID and that Aleksander is the experiencing, focalizing instance. However, the ambiguity whereof we suspect narrative unreliability does not come from the question of whether we have CID or FID here alone. The ambiguity that causes a blur between the story world and discourse world (cf. Behrendt and Hansen 2011, 223) stems from the above-quoted narrator comment placed prior to these four seemingly paraleptic passages. The narrating “I” sets us up to believe that it is she who is narrating the passages and that she might be making them up. Along with this confession comes doubt because of the length of the passages in question. This results in unreliability. Throughout the novel, the narrating “I” tells numerous stories that are apparently paraleptic, but that are also fantastical and that she quite clearly could not have experienced herself. We have already seen the example of the imagined speech aunt Selma gave at her own funeral. Other examples include the external analepsis of what happened in NYC in the 1930s in part three and the internal analepsis of what happened between Anni and Preston in NYC in part four. These stories both have narrator comments that suggest that it is Karin the narrator who is imagining things. For example, when Anni in NYC sees Preston:

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She wants him to talk to her. She doesn’t know who he is, but he has a nice smile, she thinks, and it’s been such a long time since anyone smiled at her that way. What can I do? I can’t stop this. I’m in Oslo thinking that Anni’s in New York and behaving like an ordinary mother on vacation. (211)

Passing from the two first lines to the following three will leave the reader confused as to who is actually speaking. Taken together, the five sentences could suggest FID and thus a paralepsis or CID and two different narrators. In neither case can ambiguous discourse be ruled out. Combined, these examples of seemingly paraleptic passages all give the impression of being uttered by an unreliable narrator, similar to the one described by the blurbs. Is this a case of moral unreliability, then, that the narrator is simply creatively inventing, like a zero focalized homodiegetic narrator could? That is one option. Another option is that this passage may not be a paralepsis at all, but a third-person narrating instance in disguise, orchestrating the whole narrative. Behrendt and Hansen have pointed out how Isak Dinesen’s “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale” is a first-person narrative in disguise, as the ending of the story reveals that the sailor-boy “lived long enough to tell this story” (2011, 236). It is also observed that this third-person narrative demonstrates that the “[…] distance between the protagonist and the narrator (and their merging in the last sentence) is similar to the distance (and merging) between the retrospective and the narrated ‘I’ in a first person narration” (237). If we explore the idea of a covert extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator “breaking through” in the seemingly paraleptic passages as well as in the frame narrative at the beginning of the novel, then it would be far less problematic to claim that the sjuzhet creates a story that is quite different from the story that emerges out of the fabula. As I have already pointed out, the sjuzhet manipulates the fabula to make it seem as though Karin the character changes as the story advances, when it is actually the retrospective narrating “I” who changes; thus, the expected “from distance to merging between the narrated ‛I’ and retrospective ‛I’” does seem to occur. With this understanding, it is the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator who manipulates the fabula and demonstrates how a character can change by narrating her own story.



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5.2 Ironizing over the Bildungsroman Arguing that there is actually a covert extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrating instance throughout the novel explains why there is not any real merging between the narrated “I” and the retrospective “I.” This covert project constitutes the narrator’s unreliability, as in Behrendt and Hansen’s definition for unreliability in the fifth mode of ambiguous discourse: it “leads the reader to overlook story world facts of decisive importance for understanding the story” (2011, 230). In this case, however, it is not the convergence of CID and FID that is at issue, but the convergence of the first-person narrator and the third-person narrator. On the metadiegetic level, we have an intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator who is also a metadiegetic character. But could this covert extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator also be present the entire time, visible only in occasional narrator comments and in passages that seem to be paralepses? If we go by this idea of an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator in disguise in the novel, a narrator who must thus be omniscient, then the thematic point will necessarily change. The added element in relation to the second level of understanding the novel is that the covert omniscient extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator—an instance positioned outside the story world—is the one who enables the sjuzhet to communicate the plot of the Bildungsroman as opposed to the character narrator relating her own development. This is a point that would be hard to defend if we were to say that, except in the frame narrative, an intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator prevails throughout novel. It is how we choose to narrate and talk about our own lives—the way we present our personal fabulas as a sjuzhet when we speak of ourselves—that decides the outcome of our story or our identity. Of course, the irony with this novel is that given that there is a covert extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator, Karin is not really telling her own story. A traditional Bildungsroman always seems to show how a character narrator testifies to have changed and matured through his or her experiences. What the overarching narrating instance communicates is that what really happens, ironically, is only a constructed change. This constructed change consists of how the character chooses to see herself as having changed in the course of narrating her experiences. Thematically, this point gets lost if we consider that Before You Sleep has only an unreliable intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator.

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6 Theoretical Implications: Rethinking the Demarcation Heterodiegetic/Homodiegetic The potential for richer interpretation of a narrative afforded by taking a critical look at the heterodiegetic/homodiegetic demarcation invites further reflection. Narratologically speaking, what gets lost if we consider this novel to have only an unreliable intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator is the possibility of explaining a fictionalized narrator with particular psychological traits without having to succumb to the mimetic bias (cf. Alber et al. 2012). How then do we explain the unnatural fact that a heterodiegetic narrator might just as easily be homodiegetic (as Behrendt and Hansen 2011 have shown) and that this could also apply the other way around? And is it really possible that the demarcation between the two is not necessarily as bulletproof as it is traditionally regarded? I have already mentioned the Genettian narrative levels, which are extradiegetic, intradiegetic or metadiegetic. Genette was emphatic in his Narrative Discourse Revisited that we should not confuse the phenomena of person and level: “[…] the confusion that develops between the attribute extradiegetic, which is a phenomenon of level, and the attribute heterodiegetic, which is a phenomenon of relation (of “person)” (Genette 1988 [1983], 84). However, I would like to explore the possibility of introducing different degrees in the relation between heterodiegetic and homodiegetic. What if the narrating instance could be regarded along a scale that determines the narrator to be more or less heterodiegetic or more or less homodiegetic? This would simplify some of the discussions regarding natural and unnatural narratology. The whole question of whether or not the narrator is a character in the story fails with the mimetic bias. For what is the narrator that is not a character in the story: a character outside the story? Why does it have to be one way or the other? In Before You Sleep, I suggest, the heterodiegetic narrator is at the level above the homodiegetic narrator, and thus the latter can always be seen as embedded in a heterodiegetic narrator. But why then is it not just a homodiegetic narrator using zero focalization? The answer is that it is hard to explain the changes a narrator undergoes without making her into a fictional psychological character. And once you have a character it is hard to avoid trying to find mimetic explanations for unnatural or omniscient knowledge. One explanation is to invent another level, so that the narrative this intradiegetic narrator is narrating becomes a metadiegetic narrative and what concerns the character narrator happens on the intradiegetic level. Since a homodiegetic narrator cannot be reduced to not being a character, the relation between the narrated “I” and the retrospective narrating “I” cannot be properly



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addressed without another instance on a level above the homodiegetic narrator. This cannot be the implied author, since the implied author is not an agent. It is possible to argue along the lines that to determine who the narrator is, you need traces in the text. This also entails that any presumed heterodiegetic narrator who makes metanarrative comments, attracting attention to writing the story, for instance, is rather a character narrator, but on a different diegetic level. My suggestion is that if the pronoun “I” is used in a narrator comment, then we are in the presence of a character narrator. Booth was the first to observe that as soon as the narrator has referred to an “I,” the narrator has been dramatized (1983 [1961], 152). But what now if there is clearly only an “I” who is synonymous with the protagonist who is visibly present? How could it be claimed that we are also in the presence of a heterodiegetic narrator? In a chapter on paralepsis, Paul Dawson investigates the omniscient homodiegetic narrator in his recent The Return of the Omniscient Narrator (2013). He discusses Rüdiger Heinze’s (2008) view that an omniscient first-person narrator is not omniscient but rather that any omniscient features must be attributed to paralepsis (Dawson 2013, 201). Dawson looks into Heinze’s five types of paralepsis, of which only two are actual paralepses, because they cannot be naturalized in the narrative. This is the case when, for instance, the character narrator is just making things up (204). Dawson argues that one should see the omniscient elements of these apparent paralepses as the narrator’s rhetorical strategy: “So rather than charting different types of paralepses according to degrees of naturalization, we might think about different rhetorical mobilizations of the conventional performative authority of omniscience” (204; original emphasis). Again, if we were to consider Karin the narrator as employing a rhetorical strategy while telling about things we would regard as paraleptic or as signs of omniscience, it still would not remove the reader’s need to explain this narrator psychologically. For example, as soon as a narrator starts out with a narrative comment referring to the writing situation of the discourse, then the reader will automatically imagine a person with psychological traits. I am suggesting that a less problematic way of approaching the dilemma is to not make a clear distinction between the heterodiegetic and the homodiegetic. If there is a seemingly stable and reliable narrating “I,” then clearly there is little heterodiegetic presence. But as soon as there is ambiguity as to who speaks, it will be more difficult to determine exactly which is what. I am proposing that to include both would be more fruitful, even though this might be less necessary in cases where there seems to be no doubt about what kind of narrating instance we are dealing with. To be able to speak of a narrating instance, it is clearer to define this as a heterodiegetic narrator who in fact is not a character in the story world or who is outside the story world. As soon as you build a picture of a narrator whose voice

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you can gather to be some sort of person, I would claim that this is a character narrator, whether it is a character inside or outside the story world, and that this narrator always has an omniscient heterodiegetic narrator above, functioning as a “chief” narrating instance. This is what I have tried to demonstrate in the novel Before You Sleep, where the presence of an “omnipresent” heterodiegetic type of narrator can explain alterations and paralepses. As for the apparent paralepses discussed above, they can still be regarded as employing the mode of ambiguous discourse; however, the Aleksander-focalized passages would then be extradiegetic-heterodiegetic, and not paraleptic. The ambiguity would consist of whether the passage is in CID or in FID. The key to viewing this proposal as not being reductive is to see how the intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator and extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator function together. They need to be considered more or less simultaneously. The third level of understanding the novel Before You Sleep does not make much sense without the presence of the first two levels: the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator covertly structures the sjuzhet to make it seem as though the character Karin and the narrator Karin are both changing while at the same time the narrator Karin is narrating. There is much more meaning to harvest from the discourse when regarding all the options simultaneously. Combined, they contribute more layers of meaning than when one feels constrained to decide between one or the other.10

Works Cited Abbott, Porter. 2007. “Story, plot and narration.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 39–51. New York: Cambridge University Press. Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Brian Richardson. 2012. “What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?” Narrative 20 (3): 371–382. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1986 [1936–38]. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel).” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 10–59. Austin: University of Texas Press. Behrendt, Poul, and Per Krogh Hansen. 2011. ”The Fifth Mode of Representation: Ambiguous Voices in Unreliable Third-Person Narration.” In Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, edited by Per Krogh Hansen, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Rolf Reitan, 219–251. Berlin: De Gruyter.

10 I wish to thank Paul Dawson, Wolf Schmid, John Pier and Per Krogh Hansen for their very helpful comments and suggestions for improvements to this article.



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Bergström-Edwards, Pia. 1999. “Suck!” In Aftonbladet. August 16. http://www.aftonbladet.se/ vss/kultur/bokbanken/recension/0,2024,9113007475,00.html (Accessed 19 May 2005) Booth, Wayne C. 1983 [1961]. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd edition. London: Penguin Books. Booth, Wayne C. 2005. “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother? ” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 75–88. Dawson, Paul. 2013. The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1980 [1972]. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1988 [1983]. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hansen, Per Krogh. 2011. “Backmasked Messages: On the Fabula Construction in Episodically Reversed Narratives.” In Unnatural Narratives—Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, 162–185. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Heinze, Rüdiger. 2008. “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction.” Narrative 16 (3): 279–297. Herman, David. 2005. “Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 19–35. Moretti, Franco. 2000. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Schmid, Wolf. 2014 [2009]. “Implied Author.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, 288–300. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Also available in the living handbook of narratology at: http://www. lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/implied-author-revised-version-uploaded-26-january-2013 (Revised 16 May 2014) Skei, Hans H. 1999. “Glimt frå bokhausten 1998.” In Norsk litterær årbok, 209–217. Oslo: Samlaget. Ullmann, Linn. 2000 [1998]. Before You Sleep. Translated by Tina Nunnally. New York: Picador. [Translation of Før du sovner. 1998. Oslo: Tiden Norsk Forlag A/S] Ullmann, Linn. 2001. Before You Sleep. (Online novel blurb). Sonnet Media. http://www. linnullmann.no/en/books/2001/04/15/before-you-sleep/ (Accessed 3 October 2014) Wærp, Henning H. 1998. “Litt fra bokhøsten 1998. II Familiefragmenter.” Nordlit 4: 197–180.

Per Krogh Hansen (Kolding)

Autofiction and Authorial Unreliable Narration In recent years, the concept of “the unreliable narrator” has been among the most debated within narrative theory. In the wake of a series of provocative articles from the late 1990s by Ansgar Nünning (Nünning 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1999), questions have been asked again and again regarding on what basis we determine whether a narrator is unreliable and how broad the scope of the concept is. Is the presence of an unreliable narrator in a given text the result of an author’s intentional decision, or is narratorial unreliability a historically variable reader response to textual inconsistencies and/or changing cultural norms? Does the concept belong exclusively to fiction, or does it make sense to approach factual or “real” narrators with the same concepts we encounter in fictional narrators? In this article I will address these questions with reference to the genre of “autofiction” (a genre parallel to or a sub-genre of autobiography) with special attention to the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume novel Min kamp (2009–11). I want, on the one hand, to discuss how autofiction makes itself vulnerable to narratorial unreliability due to the complex truth status of the told and, on the other hand, to use this genre to question the concept of unreliable narrator in rhetorical criticism as dependent on an intentional act by an (implied) author. This is not to say, however, that unreliable narration cannot be a narrative technique deliberately used by an author in the creative act of novel writing, but that by using the concept exclusively in relation to this phenomenon, we lose sight of important alternative (but comparable) versions. Among these is the kind of unreliability we can encounter in autofiction.

1 The Real Fiction of the Self When Serge Doubrovsky coined the term “autofiction” in relation to his 1977 novel Fils, he defined it, rather paradoxically, as “Fiction, of strictly real events and facts.”1

1 Doubrovsky coined the term on the back cover of the novel, where he wrote: “Autobiographie ? Non, c’est un privilège réservé aux importants de ce monde, au soir de leur vie, et dans un beau style. Fiction, d’évènements et de faits strictement réels ; si l’on veut autofiction, d’avoir confié DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-003

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Doubrovsky’s work was inspiringly provoked by the fact that Philippe Lejeune, in his influential 1975 study Le pacte autobiographique, failed to leave room for blending novelistic fictional writing and factual autobiography. Lejeune defined autobiography as a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality. (Lejeune 1989 [1975], 4)

Lejeune stated that if a reader was confronted with a text where author, narrator and protagonist were the same, he or she would not accept counterfactual events or incidents as a matter of fiction. “False” information in autobiographical writing, Lejeune claimed, would instead be related to “the order of lying” (“l’ordre du mesonge”). Doubrovsky broke this dogma two years after Lejeune’s study when he published the novel Fils and proclaimed a new genre: ‘autofiction’. For Doubrovsky, it was characteristic of this new genre that it required homonymy between its author, narrator and character and that it played on the generic ambiguity of its contradictory pact: on the one hand, the work is claimed to be absolutely referential and factual; on the other, it is claimed to be a novel, that is: fiction. The result is not only a contradictory pact but what Poul Behrendt (2006) has labeled a “double contract.” On the one hand, the text is subject to the rules governing our social and cultural interactions, that is, where people have real names and responsibilities, where (at least in our part of the world) there is freedom of speech, but also laws protecting us from defamation, etc. On the other hand, the text also relates to the communicative system of fiction, where reader and author have agreed that exceptions exist. Here, the distinction between lying and truth is disregarded: ideas and beliefs can be expressed, even if they are counterfactual,

le langage d’une aventure à l’aventure d’un langage en liberté, hors sagesse et hors syntaxe du roman, traditionnel ou nouveau. Rencontres, fils de mots, allitérations, assonances, dissonances, écriture d’avant ou d’après littérature, concrète, comme on dit musique.” (Doubrovsky 1977) “Autobiography? No, that is a privilege reserved for the important persons of this world, in the evening of their lives, and in a beautiful style. Fiction, of strictly real events and facts, autofiction if you will; to have given the language of an adventure to the adventure of a language in freedom, without wisdom and outside the syntax of the novel syntax, traditional or new. Interactions, threads of words, alliterations, assonances, dissonances, writing before or after literature, concrete, as they say music.” (translation mine) Today, the term is included in French dictionaries, and in Canada it is widely used as a genre concept, printed on the cover of novels.



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as contributions to the ongoing negotiation of the constitution of our culture and “reality.” Here is not the time and place to follow up on the development of the concept suggested by Doubrovsky in detail, since it has been scrutinized and developed by several since then—most importantly perhaps by Gérard Genette in his Fiction and Diction (1993 [1991]). Genette suggested that all cases in which an author of fiction includes his own person (or a character with the same name as the author) in his fictional story should be considered autofiction. If so, works like Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–15) and Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1555) would be included in the category. But as it has been noted, Genette thereby disregarded the second part of Doubrovsky’s characterization, namely that the work has to play on the generic ambiguity that comes out of the claim of absolute referentiality and absolute fictionality at one and the same time. Illustrated with another example: when in City of Glass (1985), the first part of Paul Auster’s New York trilogy, a character with the name “Paul Auster” appears and is furthermore presented as an author living in New York in an environment that reminds us of the real Paul Auster’s surroundings, it is less an autofictional than a metafictional strategy that is being implemented. The intention is not to tell the story of Paul Auster in fictional terms, but rather to enter a mode comparable to romantic irony. What autofiction does is quite radical in the sense that instead of demarcating fiction from reality it blurs the border. This can be accomplished by promoting a picture of the authorial self which confirms, negates, transforms or plays with the public understanding of this self. Such is the case of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park (2005), where the author mixes known public events and incidents from his real life with counterfactual and even paranormal events and incidents. The blur between fiction and reality can also result from using the novel form and the narrative techniques related to this form to investigate and depict the history of the author’s own self. This was what J. M. Coetzee did in the three volumes of autofictional memoirs—Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009)—when he chose to let the first two volumes be told heterodiegetically in third-person narration and the third to take the form of a fictitious biographer’s interviews with five factual people from Coetzee’s past. Coetzee himself is claimed to be dead in the novel, and his voice only appears through a number of third-person fragments of the kind the reader already knows from the first two volumes. But even though no one would question that the trilogy most certainly is written in fictional terms and therefore cannot be understood literally, the books are also understood to be about Coetzee’s own life. In this perspective, autofiction pushes what is a general paradoxical characteristic of practically all storytelling, namely that stories tell the (or some) truth, even though what they are telling might not have happened.

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It is therefore also evident that we cannot always rely on the factuality of the story being told by the author. But can we approach this authorial unreliability in terms of ‘unreliable narration’?

2 Factual Unreliable Narration? It has been claimed that only in fictional narrative can we have true cases of unreliable narration. The argument goes that narrative unreliability depends on, if not difference, then at least on distance between narrator and authorial agent. In her essay on discordant narration, Dorrit Cohn claims that the diagnosis of ‘discordance’ can apply only to a fictional narrative, not to the kind of storytelling (oral or written) that presumes to refer to real facts: though we often apply the term ‘unreliable’ to voices we regard as wrong-headed in non-fictional works (historical, journalistic, biographical, or autobiographical), the narrator of such works is the author, the author is the narrator, so that we cannot attribute to them a significance that differs from the one they explicitly proclaim. (2000, 307)

This assumption was challenged by James Phelan in the chapter from Living to Tell About It on Frank McCourt’s memoir novel Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (1996). Phelan demonstrates how McCourt has “built his narrative on the foundation of unreliability and the virtual absence of reflection in his authorial voice.” McCourt’s “trick” is, as Phelan writes, to conceive “memoir,” not as an art of direct telling from author to audience, but as an art of indirection. Rather than speaking in his own voice at the time of the telling, McCourt uses the historical present and speaks in the voice of his former self […] at the time of the action. (Phelan 2005, 67)

What makes the narratorial unreliability possible in McCourt’s case is that he uses what Phelan recognizes as a “nonstandard technique” for his autobiographical purpose when he “re-invents” his childhood-persona’s perspective on the incidents. This technique is, on the other hand, a standard novelistic, fictionalizing technique: McCourt-the-Author has given the voice and the perspective to a less experienced narrator, Frankie (McCourt-the-boy-character), and even lets him tell from the moment of the action that is in the first person and in the present tense. Hereby the difference or distance claimed by Cohn as a necessity for the formation of an unreliable narrator is reinstated. We might therefore also conclude that the extended use of this fictionalizing technique relates McCourt’s memoir-novel to the genre of autofiction more than



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it does to autobiography proper. Angela’s Ashes is “[f]iction, of strictly real events and facts,” and it suggests homonymy between author, narrator and character, although this homonymy cannot be considered absolute: it is nominal and personal, but not temporal. Furthermore, it plays on the generic ambiguity of what Doubrovsky called autofiction’s “contradictory pact”: on the one hand, the work claims to be absolutely referential and factual; on the other, it makes extended use of a standard novelistic technique and therefore relates to fiction, too, at least in Richard Walsh’s understanding of fictionality as a rhetorical rather than an ontological quality. Fictionality should not, in this perspective, “be equated simply with ‘fiction,’ as a category or genre of narrative: it is a communicative strategy, and as such it is apparent on some scale within many nonfictional narratives” (Walsh 2007, 7). But what would the result be if one’s attention were directed toward a work that is not composed with the same obvious distance between the authorial I, the narratorial I and the character I? If we were to follow Phelan’s line of argument, where unreliable narration is defined as narration “in which the narrator’s reporting, reading (or interpreting), and/or regarding (or evaluating) are not in accord with the implied author’s” (Phelan 2005, 219), then it is quite unlikely that the narrator would be unreliable in such a case, since the necessary distance between the subject positions is eliminated from the very outset. The question, then, is whether Phelan’s exclusion would be correct—or whether it is the result of too narrow a conception of unreliable narration.

3 A Norwegian’s Struggle with his Past and Present That it is the latter which is the case I will try to demonstrate by looking at an example of autofiction which makes us consider the reliability of the narrator without seeking recourse to the concept of the implied author. The example is the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume autofictional novel Min kamp, meaning My Struggle.2

2 The first volumes have been published in several languages including German, English and French. Due to the obvious allusion to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (an issue to which attention is given in the sixth volume of the series), the books have appeared under other titles than in Scandinavia. The first volume is called Sterben (2011) in German, La Mort d’un père (2012) in

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My Struggle is among the greatest literary sensations in Scandinavia in decades. Not only because it has been a huge sales success, but also because the publication of the six volumes has been accompanied by a heated debate about the use of autobiographical elements in fiction, and vice versa. In the six books, Knausgård gives a detailed description of his life from the day he was born until the moment he types the final sentence of the manuscript of volume 6, taking into account the reception of the first volumes of the project and the effect it has had on himself and his relationships. Knausgård tells the story in the first person and from the position of the writing situation, the first and the last volumes in particular containing long essayistic passages reflecting on life, death, art and literature. In long sections he changes the focalization and even the narrative tense from past to historical present, so that it isn’t the narrating I’s but the experiencing I’s (Karl Ove’s) perspective we are confronted with. In these chapters there are numerous examples of the kind of unreliability Phelan focused on in McCourt’s case, with the difference, however, that unreliability is established here due to the distance between a diegetic narrator and a fallible filter. But these examples are less interesting in the present perspective. It is more interesting that there are aspects of the work which raise doubts about and even undermine the author-narrator’s reliability. In volume two, in the midst of a very detailed retelling of a long conversation during a dinner party at a restaurant, Karl Ove and his friend Geir agree upon the fact that Karl Ove has always had an extremely bad memory. Due to the frame, the statement becomes a variant of Epimenides’ paradox: “All Cretans are liars.” An author giving a hyperdetailed account of a long-past situation cannot in the same situation claim to have a bad memory. The impact of this inconsistency is quite remarkable. The conversation between Geir and Karl Ove is on a very highbrow intellectual level of almost Socratic-dialogic dimensions, focusing on, among other things, the personal costs connected with “the authorial call,” etc. But the remark concerning Karl Ove’s weak memory makes the reader speculate whether the whole dialogue isn’t more a matter of the authorial I’s creative attempt to put himself in a better light, due to the decisions regarding family life and relationships he has had to make to pursue his career as an author. We begin speculating whether Knausgård-the-author’s reporting is reliable. Another example: over the course of the six volumes, Knausgård returns to some of the significant incidents in his life. Among these is his complicated relationship to his tyrannical and choleric father who died of alcohol abuse ten years

French and A Death in the Family (2012) in English. In the latter case, the series has been called My Struggle. In the following pages, I will refer to the series name.



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prior to the time of writing. The last period of the father’s life, as it was experienced by Karl Ove, is focused on in both the first and the last volumes. But in the latter case, the description is much more downtoned than in the former. And where Karl Ove and his older brother Yngve were pretty much alone in cleaning up the mess after the father in the first volume, they receive attention and help from an uncle and aunt in volume 5. Both descriptions focalize the incidents through the experiencing I, but it seems as if the narrating I—the author—through the process of writing the novel, develops his understanding of the story as it is told, a contradiction that exposes a dynamic unreliability regarding values and judgments. In volume 6, Knausgård receives an angry letter from his uncle (his father’s brother) in which the author’s version of the incidents in relation to the father’s death is being questioned with reference to supposed hard evidence. And even though Knausgård becomes aware that there might be flaws and misjudgments in his former retelling of the incidents, he is not abandoning it. As he says to a prosecutor in an imagined trial: “This is how I remember it” (volume 6, 303; translation mine). But as we (and he himself) know: he has an extremely bad memory. The death of the father is not the only example of this kind of unreliability. In volume 1 we are told that Knausgård spent four years with a girl he didn’t love; but when the relationship is described for us in the fifth volume, it most certainly seems characterized by love. Again: the authorial perspective on and understanding of the incidents has taken over, and the result is that our natural urge to rely on the authorial voice of the narrative is challenged. Where our expectation with regard to the authorial narrative agent is that it is stable and sanctions the norms and values of the storyworld, we are instead engaging with inconsistencies, and the result for our reading is that we redirect our attention from the told to the teller and thus see the misrepresentations and inconsistencies as an expression of character traits and unreliable narration. In that sense, Knausgård is, either intentionally or unintentionally, flouting the assumption of a stable author. In the beginning, we greet the representation as reliable. But as the telling and retelling progress, we start having second thoughts, just as Knausgård himself does in the sixth volume, when (as pointed out above) he refers to memory instead of fact. The examples commented on so far are all intra- or internarrational insofar as the effect of unreliability is a result of contradictions within the narrator’s discourse or between his discourse and the differing perspective of others (e. g., his uncle’s) perspective on the same incidents.

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But there are also examples of extratextual circumstances influencing the author-narrator’s reliability.3 Even though the books were published as “novels,” Knausgård claimed that everything he told was true. All material had been presented to the persons concerned, and only a few names were changed at their request. Everything in this work is depicted with an attention to detail that marks the work as a fictional recreation of the past: no one can remember their past as clearly and elaborately as Knausgård does. And even though we as readers might accept the level of detail, bearing in mind that this is also a work of fiction, the authenticity is punctured from inside the storyworld by the aforementioned unreliability signals. Due to the work’s claim to factuality, moreover, it was also punctured from the outside by the persons and family members depicted. Several felt exposed and misrepresented and expressed their displeasure and disappointment through the media. Fourteen family members even announced that they wanted to bring Knausgård to trial for his “Judas literature.”4 Now, Lejeune claimed that when an author writes in his own name, he signs an autobiographical pact in which everything stated is to be considered true. If something turns out to be false, it is not a matter of fictionalization but, as quoted earlier, relates to the “order of lying.” This rather strict understanding of autobiography’s truth value has been revised in later conceptions of the genre. As Phelan notes, autobiographical theory has repeatedly shown that “subjective truth is far more important to memoir than literal truth […] because it is crucial to the autobiographer’s ability to give shape and meaning to experience” (2005, 73). But as he also remarks, subjective “truth must also be accountable to some extent to facts, people, and events that have an existence independent of the autobiographer’s perception” (73). With reference to Lejeune’s initial distinction, it can be observed that a radical subjective recounting of the story jeopardizes the author’s reliability and makes us, the readers, react in the same way as when we get suspicious about a narrator’s account in fictional narrative: we read with precaution and look beyond the authorial representation of the facts; we try to figure out the true facts of the case

3 The concepts intranarrational, internarrational and extratextual unreliability belong, together with intertextual unreliability, to a taxonomy of different ways of signaling/detecting unreliable narration. For further detail, see Hansen (2005, 2007, 2009). 4 Uncle Gunnar (which isn’t his real name) was among the most critical voices to the project, notably in a commentary published in the newspaper Fædrelandsvennen (cf. Kristensen 2011). Knausgård’s estranged ex-wife, Tonje Aursland, also retorted in October 2010 in a radio documentary broadcast on NRK.



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and use our observations to construct a critical picture of the authorial self about which we make ethical judgments. We might even press charges against this self due to the fact that autobiography belongs to the system of factual communication that is restricted by responsibilities and protection against defamation. It is also in this respect that we find the main source of the difference between the everyday use of the concept of unreliability and its use within the context of fictional narrative: where the two forms of unreliability both invoke the reader’s ethical judgment, only the latter opens up for an esthetic judgment. Autofiction blurs this distinction. Insofar as Knausgård’s work is also claimed to be fiction, the system of factual cultural interaction and communication is partly suspended, and instead the rules governing fiction takes over: whatever is depicted is fictionalized, and thus a simulated reality is told from a given perspective. Considered an author of a work of fiction, Knausgård cannot be blamed for the misrepresentation of persons and events or for his exaggerated remembrance of details. Under the auspices of novelistic fiction, this kind of re-creational depiction of the past is expected and allowed. This, of course, also has significance for the reader’s approach to the authorial self. Due to the many misrepresentations in Knausgård’s narrative, the ethical judgments passed on both the actions of the author and the characters and the critical and questionable aspects of the author’s telling are accompanied by esthetic judgments. The narrative is not read as an author’s telling about his past, but as a refiguration of that past. By making himself the author, the narrator and the protagonist of his work and at the same time claiming the storyworld to be in accordance with reality, Knausgård’s result is more or less doomed to be an act of unreliable narration. Reliability is dependent on a perspective that can tell the truth. This is why, on a general level, it makes sense to speak of fictional truth, insofar as narrative fiction is the creation of a storyworld from a given perspective. But reality as such does not support one truth alone. Truth in reality is perpetually being renegotiated. When Knausgård claims that he tells the truth, but does it within the framework of fiction, he suspends the negotiable nature of factual truth. By doing so, he is both hit and saved by what we could call the “kernel paradox” of autofiction: he claims that what he tells is true, thus opening up the possibility of negotiation, while at the same time claiming that what he says is fiction, authorizing the truth value of the told. It is in this tension between author and narrator that Knausgård’s unreliability comes into being. More generally, autofiction as a genre must at the very least be suspected of extratextual unreliability.

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4 Auto-Mocking and Self-Deception From the perspective of unreliable narration as narration “in which the narrator’s reporting, reading (or interpreting), and/or regarding (or evaluating) are not in accord with the implied author’s” (Phelan 2005, 219), autofictional authorial unreliability of the kind we find in Knausgård’s novels will clearly fall outside the definition. We could therefore choose to invent a new term to cope with these deviant cases.5 But insofar as there are quite a few common aspects between the two sorts of unreliability, I would like to avoid throwing yet another narrative term on the heap of narratological concepts and models. Let me instead close this article by considering whether room can be found within the standard conception that will allow us to accommodate narrative works such as Knausgård’s. The concepts that serve as the toolbox we label “narratology” come from a great variety of disciplines and discourses and are brought to foreign areas thanks to the fact that someone has found an item that lacks description but shares significant aspects with another item that has already been described. The reason for this travelling applicability is the fact that narrative is a transtextual, transgeneric and transmedial phenomenon. Applying general narrative concepts developed in one context to comparable items in another context gives us the added advantage of providing our analysis with considering whether the conception has been biased by the fact that it is formulated within a framework of one genre, mediality or communicational mode. Scholars from literary studies in particular have provided narratology with a nearly endless series of useful concepts for the transmedial and transdisciplinary study of narrative. But they have also quite often made themselves guilty of making general claims as to what narrative is and does, whereas what they are actually describing are specific features for the prose fiction, not narrative in general. The concepts of unreliable narrator and unreliable narration have travelled between genres and modalities ever since Wayne Booth coined the term more than fifty years ago in his study of the rhetoric of novelistic narrative fiction. Initially, at least, he did not consider whether the concept was of general relevance or limited to literary fiction. Even so, it seems that Booth did have a vague idea that there was more to the story than he told. Booth has often been blamed for the inconsistency of his initial formulation:

5 Phelan (2011) has suggested that we should distinguish between unreliable and deficient narration, the latter covering an example such as the one I have discussed here.



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For lack of better terms, I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not. (Booth 1991 [1961/83]: 158–159)

All discussions of the concept since then have their basis in differences of accentuation in this definition. Rhetoricians working on literary narrative have focused on the parenthetically mentioned authorial agent, intentionality and normativity (understood as ethics) whereas more semiotically oriented approaches have highlighted the lack of accordance between the narrator’s representation of the storyworld and the actual constitution of it. One might claim that the former has developed the Boothian concept with respect to the fact that he was working with literary, fictional narrative, whereas the latter have tried to include it in more transdisciplinary approaches. If we can agree that the concept has proven its value as a traveling concept, I think we owe it ourselves to reconsider Booth’s definition and liberate the “narrative/narratological” part of the concept from the literary part. By focusing on unreliability in Knausgård’s autofictional case, it is clear that the implied author component is not a necessary part of the unreliable narrator machinery. Rather, it is a concept that proves helpful in the distinct cases of unreliable narration in which it is used as technique for what Phelan calls “indirection.” This, we could claim, is a feature related to fiction, a matter of fictionality, and thus important to study in the study of narrative fiction. With regard to the reliability of the narrator, seeking explanatory recourse in the implied author is a matter of framing. What relates unreliable narrators across the fact/fiction distinction, across genres and modalities, is that they do not speak or act in accordance with the norms, values or facts of the storyworld. As discussed above, it is characteristic for fictional storyworlds that their constitution can be authorized by an authorial agent. In factual narratives, by contrast, author and narrator are often (as Cohn stated) the same. This, however, does not rule out the possibility of unreliability. The storyworld is simply not governed by an implied author in these cases, but rather by sensus communis to the extent that readers have a stake in it. Autofiction is a special case, since it blurs the borders between author, narrator and character as well as between fact and fiction. In itself, it is an extremely unreliable genre, and it can thus take either the form of intentional auto-mocking, as in McCourt’s example, or that of seemingly unintentional self-deception,

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as in Knausgård’s. So perhaps, after all, there is still room and a need for new conceptions and distinctions.6

Works Cited Behrendt, Poul. 2006. Dobbeltkontrakten. En æstetisk nydannelse. København: Gyldendal. Booth, Wayne C. 1991 [1983/61]. The Rhetoric of Fiction. London, etc.: Penguin Books. Cohn, Dorrit. 2000. “Discordant Narration.” Style 34 (2): 307–316. Doubrovsky, Serge. 1977. Fils. Paris: Galilée. Genette, Gérard. 1993 [1991]. Fiction and Diction. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hansen, Per Krogh. 2005. “When Facts Become Fiction: On Extra-Textual Unreliable Narration.” In Fact and Fiction in Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Lars-Åke Skalin, 227–307. Örebro: Örebro University. Hansen, Per Krogh. 2007. “Reconsidering the Unreliable Narrator.” Semiotica 165 (1/4): 227–246. Hansen, Per Krogh. 2009. “Unreliable Narration in Cinema. Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies.” Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (ACJN) 5. http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a09_ hansen.htm (Accessed 15 February 2016) Knausgård, Karl Ove. 2009–2011. Min kamp 1–6. København: Lindhardt og Ringhof. Kristensen, Eivind. 2011. “‘Onkel Gunnar’ tar knallhardt oppgjør med Knausgård.” Aftenposten. 17 February 2011. http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Onkel-Gunnar-tarknallhardt-oppgjor-med-Knausgard-6699655.html (Accessed 15 February 2016) Lejeune, Philippe. 1989 [1975]. On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCourt, Frank. 1996. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. New York: Scribner. Nünning, Ansgar. 1997. “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” AAA. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22 (1): 83–105. Nünning, Ansgar. 1998a. “Unreliable Narration zur Einführung. Grundzüge einer kognitivnarratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens.” In Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzähllitteratur, edited by Ansgar Nünning, Carola Surkamp and Bruno Zerweck, 3–40. Trier: WVT. Nünning, Ansgar. 1998b. “Unreliable Narrator.” In Encyclopedia of the Novel, edited by Paul E. Schellinger, vol. 2: 1386–1388. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Nünning, Ansgar. 1999. “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of ‘Unreliable Narration’: Prolegomena and Hypotheses.” In Grenzüberschreitungen:

6 I would like to thank Professor James Phelan (Ohio) for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.



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Narratologien im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, 53–73. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James. 2011. “The Implied Author, Deficient Narration, and Nonfiction Narrative: Or, What’s Off-Kilter in The Year of Magical Thinking and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?” Style 45 (1): 127–145. Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

David Stromberg (Jerusalem)

Beyond Unreliability: Resisting Naturalization of Normative Horizons “Why is it that a novelist […] should go out of his way to force inconsistencies on us?” H. M. Daleski (1985, 16)

1 The Unreliability Debate The term “unreliable” was introduced by Wayne Booth to describe narrators who, he claimed, speak or act in a way that is not “in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms)” (Booth 1983 [1961], 158). Booth further described “unreliability” as a distance “between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator” (158). However, by discussing such distance as separating a work’s narrator from the thematic or authorial norms implied by that work, Booth isolated an integral element of a work’s literary dynamic—its problematized narrator— and normatively detached it from the rest of the work. He formulated a narrative’s internal tension in terms of a normative separation between narrator and an author’s work even though the narrator is deployed by the author as part of the work. By framing the discussion in terms that privilege the position of the author or work over that of the narrator, Booth’s approach resolves a tension that, when preserved, may be full of significance. Another confusion about the use of unreliability arises from Booth’s having largely elided the nature of the norms in relation to which the narrator diverges from the work—whether they are artistic, moral, cognitive, ideological, political, cultural, social, etc.—or the dynamic relationship that exists between different kinds of norms. The term “unreliable narrator” was used mainly to relate either to the cognitive abilities or to the moral attitudes of a narrator. The two are distinct but interconnected and have ethical implications, particularly when cognitive inadequacy leads to moral errors. But as I shall suggest in the example of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” (1953), a story that raises this specific normative tension in the figure of its narrator, resisting a naturalizing judgment of a narrator’s cognitive or moral reliability can open broader aspects of its significance. Scholarly attempts to parse the meaning of unreliability have aimed to clarify the different levels and kinds of distance that are most commonly encountered in literary works. Many theorists attempt to discern between narrators who are unreDOI 10.1515/9783110555158-004

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liable because they do not know better and those who are unreliable by malice.1 The past decade, in particular, has seen repeated attempts by narratologists and narrative theorists to synthesize positions on the subject.2 Several of these critical works point to a need for further classification of the different “types” of unreliability; others extend the scope of meanings projected by narrative unreliability.3 As a result, scholars who seek to widen the discussion continue to use unreliability as their starting point. The language of unreliability introduces value judgment into the discussion of a literary phenomenon that merely points to a distance engendering tension. In trying to resolve narrative tension, readers and critics tend to judge its agent in a critical equivalent of shooting the messenger. I would suggest that it may be more helpful to think about the distance as being between the narrator and story— pointing to a tension between the teller and the told—and that we can evaluate the distance using a dynamic doubt-faith paradigm rather than a static naturalizing principle like unreliability. This preserves awareness of a narrative tension that, I believe, opens our interpretive horizons. Unlike the finalized nature of the

1 Martínez-Bonati notes three levels: “First, there are unreliable basic narrators whose mimetic sentences are uncertain but not necessarily false […] Second, there are unreliable narrators that speak some false and mostly true mimetic sentences […] Finally, there are unreliable narrators whose mimetic sentences of necessity cannot all be taken as true, but the reader cannot decide which are true and which false. This is the logical structure of unsurmountable contradiction” (1981 [1960], 116–117). 2 Notable attempts to rethink and extend the notion of unreliability include Greta Olson (2003), Bruno Zerweck (2001), Tamar Yacobi (1981, 2001), Ansgar Nünning (2008), Per Krogh Hansen (2008) and a recent volume focusing on “trustworthiness” edited by Vera Nünning (2015). Many articles build on or debate Nünning’s work on integrating narrative unreliability with cognitive theory, Monika Fludernik’s work on “natural” narratology, and Dorrit Cohn’s on “discordant narration.” The present volume includes two contributions dealing with unreliability, one by Dan Shen, the other by Per Krogh Hansen. I agree with Shen that rhetorical and cognitive approaches in many ways converge rather than diverge although I would contend that “authorial audiences” do not necessarily involve shared contextual or historical conditions, since values can have valiance across time and space. I also agree with Krogh Hansen that unreliability is not necessarily intentional, but would argue that this ultimately relates to the “trustworthiness” of the narrator’s character. My contribution adopts an analytical approach to describe narrators who generate doubt so that narrative and character qualities can be discussed separately rather than lumped together under “unreliability.” 3 “Narrative theorists […] debate whether unreliability is located in the reader, in the text, in the author, or in some interrelation between them; whether the concept of the implied author is more of a hindrance than a help in our understanding of unreliability; whether a naïve narrator’s accurate but uncomprehending reports should be called unreliable narration, discordant narration, or something else” (Phelan 2007, 225).



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reliability judgment, phenomena such as doubt and faith are intertwined and changeable. A declaration of faith or doubt is never final, and the debate about tension always remains open. To discuss literary phenomena that affect a reader’s relation to a narrative’s significance, including problematic narrators, I wish to introduce the notions of narrative faith and narrative doubt.

2 Narrative Faith Maurice Merleau-Ponty described “perceptual faith” as a “conviction that there is something, that there is the world, the idea of truth” (1968 [1964], 30). Whereas Edmund Husserl began his phenomenological investigation by refusing to take the “world” as a given, Merleau-Ponty reminded us that the mind’s reflection on the world is preceded by a brute perception by the senses. That is, before philosophers began questioning the notion of “world,” they functioned in the world with the assumption that it exists, constituting a kind of natural faith. The “world,” however, does not refer exclusively to nature and its objects. It also includes creative action that brings forth new objects that become part of the world. These objects can be papyruses, scrolls, books or oral transmissions of stories that record what we call a “narrative”—a telling that describes, remembers, reports, suggests, comments on or otherwise refers to a sequence of events experienced in the world.4 And if perceiving natural objects depends on perceptual faith, then we might say that a measure of faith is involved in the apperception of narrative— in the cognizing of its concretized form as speech or writing or image and then turning it into a mental impression. In the simplest sense, “narrative faith” can be understood as a parallel or complementary conviction to “perceptual faith”: an assumption that narrative, regardless of its form, relates to something, to the world, to some idea of truth. This faith extends over both real and fictitious narratives and thus to the realm of literature. In his work on the cognition of the literary work, Roman Ingarden (1961 [1937], 290) suggested that when experienced aesthetically, objects are reconstituted into “aesthetic objects” regardless of whether they are “real” or “fictitious.” Later, Wolfgang Iser developed this line of thought by arguing that the fictionalizing act actually connects the imaginary with the real by relating

4 Gerald Prince defines narrative as “a discourse representing one or more events” and “the recounting of a series of situations and events” as well as “a context-bound exchange between two parties” (2003 [1987], 58, 60).

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unverifiable facts and events as actual. Hence, he claimed, “fiction is a means of telling us something about reality” (Iser 1980 [1978], 53). This conviction, I believe, depends on an unarticulated faith: an unverifiable conviction that narrative maintains a potential relevance to human life in the phenomenal world even when it is the product of imagination. Part of literature’s singular nature, then, is that it can communicate significances that resonate in us as “true” in the world through what Félix Martínez-Bonati (1992, 152) calls “quasipropositional assertions.” Such assertions are comparable to what Ingarden (1973 [1931], 173) termed “quasi-judgments.” The “quasi” nature of these assertions and judgments suggests that they do not fall neatly either into the realm of the imaginary or the real. The telling of such events, characters, circumstances or states of being can complicate narrative faith by leading us to question the relevance of what is told to what we experience as reality in the world. This complication is often “patched over” by the effect of verisimilitude, that is, plausibility or believability. For while readers of fiction do not assume that reported events are strictly factual, they are nonetheless “interested in recognizing them as more or less ‘verisimilar’” (Eco 1984, 12). Structurally, verisimilitude in literature rests not solely on a storyworld’s similarity to the experienced world, since the world is experienced in a variety of ways, but on what Gérard Genette (1980 [1972], 195) called a narrative’s “coherent context,” that is, a “code which governs” the “course” of the narrative’s unfolding. We can accept the plausibility of events and characters in a novel, no matter how “unrealistic” they may seem to us based on our experience, if these events and characters develop in a way that is coherent within the novel’s code. Beyond the structural code, verisimilitude in novels also rests on the use of language, in other words, the linguistic coherence of a narrative’s telling. In fiction, then, verisimilitude includes both the imagined events, their order and form represented through language, and the discourse and style used in the telling, including the linguistic expression and evocation of internal processes such as cognition or emotion. Such use of language within a coherent context, both structural and discursive, gives a literary work its overall verisimilitude: the effect that allows us to relate to its imagined aspects in such a way that we can glean from them significance that is “true” in what we call reality. This dynamic recalls the notion of the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). What is often forgotten is that for Coleridge such “suspension” has a broader purpose: reaching the “dramatic truth of […] emotions” through “poetic faith.” His description, often shortened to mention only “willing suspension,” actually suggests that literature does more than voluntarily tolerate the non-actuality of imagination: it uses this



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tolerance for the sake of truth of a different order. Such “poetic faith”—not to be confused with trust—is comparable to narrative faith in that it points to the significance of literature in the world. It expresses the overall dynamic of literature as a process involving similitude, truth and faith. Looking to move beyond what she saw as the strict limits of classical narratology, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan wrote of the possibility of moving beyond doubt toward a faith that she described as a “spiraling movement that integrates skepticism and yet glances beyond it,” thus “shifting the ground” and opening “access” to reality “through narration” (1996, 128). This suggests that narrative gives us access to reality through a faith that incorporates doubt while also “glancing” beyond it toward the world. In a sense, narrative faith is a conviction that, regardless of its source in the imagination, literary narrative retains its relevance to both the phenomenal world and to human life in that world.

3 Narrative Doubt Opposing the effects of verisimilitude is the recurrent recognition of a literary narrative’s illusory status. Narrative strategies that pose a challenge to readers (for example, by emphasizing a distance between the narrator and the story) problematize verisimilitude by instigating questions about narration. They induce hesitation between the believability of the illusion and the consciousness of the story as invention. This hesitation is an important aspect of a literary work’s relation to what we experience as reality.5 When specific narrative strategies are used to instigate such hesitation, they can be considered a structural element. On the one hand, since they problematize verisimilitude, such “narrational border crossings” carry an “artistic cost” (Daleski 2009, 244). On the other hand, narrational border crossings “demonstrat[e] the importance of the boundary they

5 Different kinds of audience hesitation have been registered as intrinsic to a variety of aesthetic responses. Tzvetan Todorov (1975 [1970], 167) claims that hesitation is what distinguishes the genre of the fantastic from the uncanny (étrange) and the marvelous; he goes on to note that such hesitation questions “precisely the existence of an irreducible opposition between real and unreal” (167). Leona Toker believes that hesitation about the factographic pact is a feature of the poetics of documentary prose, adding that “[b]y placing us in the area of hesitation, the author invites us to treat the stories as true […] and yet also to ask of them the kinds of aesthetic questions that are usually reserved for works of fiction” (1997, 200). In an essay titled “Music Discomposed,” Stanley Cavell suggests that “the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art” (2002 [1969], 188). Similarly, the kind of hesitation I deal with takes shape in interaction between narrative faith and narrative doubt.

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tax […] in defiance of verisimilitude” (Genette 1980 [1972], 236). By brushing up against the border of the imagined and the real, such border crossings foreground narrative tension. Problematizing narrative techniques includes what Genette (195) calls “modulation.” This can refer to a shift either in focal position, which refers to the perspective from which the story is told, or in narrative level, which distinguishes between a voice that is presumed to be inside or outside the story’s diegesis. Such modulation can result from narrative “alterations” including paralepsis and paralipsis (giving either more or less information, respectively) than is available to the focal character at any given moment in the narrative. Or modulation can result from metalepsis, a narrative “transgression” in which a voice from one diegetic level crosses into another (as when a speaker understood to be outside the storyworld engages directly with the story that is told; cf. Genette 1980 [1972], 234). Other problematizing narrative strategies can include “disnarrated” alternatives (Prince 1992, chap. 3) included in the telling as possibilities but which do not materialize; narrative “gaps” and “blanks” (Ingarden 1973 [1931]; Iser 1972) which the reader is led to fill in either with information given by the text or by employing information from his or her own frame of reference; or “stumbling-blocks” which create tension with the reader’s personal preformed expectations (Harrison 1993). Such narrative techniques, among others, often seem to deviate from a narrative’s “coherent context,” thus problematizing verisimilitude and triggering narrative doubt. In literary criticism, doubt can lead to analytical activity that examines those aspects of a narrative that were previously taken for granted. But doubt in a novel’s narrative strategy can also seep into doubt about a narrative’s broader significance. When narrative doubt extends beyond our experience of the constructed narrative agent—the narrator—into a precipitate judgment of the narrative itself, this tends to undermine narrative faith. That is, doubt about the narrator may spill over into doubt about the narrative. And since the narrative is said to invoke the world, this doubt is liable to extend to the narrative’s interrelation with experience in reality.6

6 Such attitudes may be behind criticism of Dostoevsky’s Demons as untidy (Magarshack 1959 [1953]) or as having glaring defects (Carr 1962 [1931]) as well as attacks on Camus’ The Plague as “teach[ing] men to ignore history” (Barthes 1993 [1955]) and on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Penitent as “lacking in […] invention” (Wisse 1996).



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4 Doubting Unreliability Tamar Yacobi (1981, 113) questioned the notion of narrative unreliability by asking a basic question: “Are reliability and unreliability value-judgments or descriptions?”7 Twenty years later, she took this matter up again, arguing that there is not necessarily “a linkage between the teller’s overall makeup […] and the (un)reliability of the telling” (Yacobi 2001, 223). She thus made an initial distinction between the judgment of a narrator’s character and the judgment of a narrative’s significance. She also pointed out that “the judgment of a narrative as unreliable—or otherwise—is always [a] hypothetical move” (2001, 224). Calling it an “unreliability hypothesis,” she framed the notion in terms of a question rather than a solution. In her analysis of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Gimpel the Fool” (the story of a village fool who all his life is deceived by his fellow villagers), Yacobi looks beyond a single normative horizon to identify what she describes as a “hierarchy of norms” (2001, 226): a cognitive level on which she identifies Gimpel as negative (by dint of being deceivable), and a moral/ethical level on which she identifies him as positive (first by not deceiving others and subsequently by refusing to seek revenge on his neighbors). Hence, she argues that “Gimpel’s narration is better integrated within a hypothesis of ultimate reliability—despite appearances—than in terms of apparent folly” (2001, 226). So while Yacobi begins by questioning how we think of unreliability, she returns to the concept of unreliability by “integrating” narrative tension. Identifying a “hierarchy” of norms (rather than a field of normative horizons, for example) comes from a lingering tendency to integrate the various normative levels which she has identified. Faced with the doubt generated by Gimpel’s telling, she seeks to bring “discordant elements into pattern” (2001, 224) by rehabilitating the narrator’s moral reliability. Yacobi’s reading is complicated, however, by Gimpel’s own admissions of his tacit better judgment: “To tell the truth, I knew very well that nothing of the sort had happened” (Singer 1988 [1957], 5), he says of one of the lies. Elsewhere he admits: “I realized I was going to be rooked” (7). And again, he problematizes what is perceived as his gullibility: “To tell the plain truth, I didn’t believe her” (9). Though he says he knows that Elka, the woman the town wants him to marry, is a “whore,” he allows himself to fall under the town’s influence, placat-

7 While Yacobi uses this question as a springboard to further develop the notion of unreliability, I contend that the very need to ask this question should make us reserve the term “unreliability” only for those cases when we mean it as a judgment on the narrator’s norms (cognitive, moral, ideological, etc.), and not as a description of narrative infractions.

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ing himself with such false notions as “when you’re married the husband’s the master” and “you can’t pass through life unscathed” (6). His foolishness comes less from others’ deception than from his refusal to take responsibility for what he himself sees and understands—including twice finding other men in bed with his wife. Gimpel is not merely being deceived by others. He is actually deceiving himself. We understand from Gimpel’s narrative that, after twenty years, he has actually resigned himself to a status quo of lies until, on her deathbed, his wife confesses that his children are not his. This shocks him not because he did not know this (he admits several times throughout that they were not his) but because she shatters the lie with which he has been willing to live. The seeming cognitive deficiencies that had relegated him to the status of “fool” come into question. For the first time, Gimpel can no longer blame deception on someone else. It is when Gimpel is faced with his own hypocrisy that his true moral makeup is tested. His first reaction leads to potential revenge: he bakes his own urine into the townspeople’s bread. But after he does this, his deceased wife comes to him in a dream and exposes to him the most disturbing truth: “I never deceived anyone but myself. I’m paying for it all” (19). It is at this point that Gimpel becomes aware of his deepest crime: his own self-deception. There is no sense in taking revenge on the townspeople because the guilty one is he himself. Gimpel decides to bury the soiled bread. The temptation of revenge which wells up in Gimpel when he is faced with the truth, and his conscious choice to reject it, is what delineates the story’s normative horizons. When the tension is preserved, we understand that Gimpel must face the lies he has accepted under the guise of “fool”—including his own responsibility in those circumstances—without projecting onto others the anger this realization engenders. This is what turns the same behavior—tolerance of the wickedness of others—from foolish to morally significant. The story, therefore, only seems to privilege morality over cognitive competency. The challenge is to be cognizant of one’s circumstances, even when injustice is perpetrated, and yet continue to act ethically, taking responsibility for one’s own share in those circumstances. Gimpel’s success in rising to this challenge is underscored by the fact that he cannot easily live down the full awareness of his self-deception: it has such a profound effect on him that he is incapable of continuing to live in the town. He leaves everything to the children and becomes a wandering beggar. The ethical horizon that emerges when we refrain from a hierarchical “integrated” analysis expands toward the difficulty of being both moral and cognizant. Whereas Yacobi ends by endowing Gimpel with “ultimate reliability,” part of the story’s power, I believe, is due to the tension that remains in the irreducible and irreconcilable distance between moral and cognitive understanding. The



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doubt raised by Gimpel’s narration prompts readers to ask these questions, and by retaining this tension through narrative faith, we are able to move beyond reliability to fathom the narrative’s broader significance. Hard as it is for us to accept antithetical states, Gimpel is neither reliable nor unreliable. He remains flawed, yet becomes enlightened. That his response to this epiphanic understanding is to abandon everything further suggests the intensity of the moral-cognitive conflict which cannot be easily integrated into a single interpretive solution. What makes Gimpel no longer a fool is that he can no longer face the lie that is his life.

5 Beyond Unreliability James Phelan, like Yacobi, betrays reluctance about reliability when introducing the notion of “bonding unreliability,” which he describes as “unreliable narration that reduces the distance between the narrator and the authorial audience” (2007, 223–224). He suggests that a single overall unreliable narrator can be alternately “bonding” or “estranging,” depending on his or her distance at any given moment from the implied author. But in principle, neither position—bonding or estranging—need necessarily be “endorsed” by the implied author. That is, a narrator can be both bonding and estranging without ever being aligned with the implied author.8 Since unreliable narration is by nature estranging, Phelan seeks to determine whether a bond might be forged between the implied author and the authorial audience, one that, for him, has a single “ideal” reaction.9 Alternatively, he attributes what he calls “disparate responses” to the so-called flesh-and-blood reader (2007, 223–225). But these varying responses can in fact be understood as potentialities encoded in the narrative and thus as manifestations of a potential “ideal” collective response.10 Each interpretation is an attempt to use the fecund narrative to reach some sort of significance that is not concretely stated but that

8 Consider the first part of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937) in which Harry Morgan, even in the moments he appears to bond with the reader (e. g., suspiciousness about the man who chartered Morgan’s boat for three weeks without paying), does not represent sentiments that the implied author can be imagined as sharing. 9 Phelan describes Rabinowitz’s notion of “authorial audience” as the “hypothetical, ideal audience for whom the author constructs the text and who understands it perfectly” (1996, 215). 10 “To make a story good, it would seem, you must make it somewhat uncertain, somehow open to variant readings, rather subject to the vagaries of intentional states, undetermined” (Bruner 1990, 54).

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nonetheless comes from within that same narrative. The inherent “alternatives form a duality rather than an ambiguity” (Toker 1989, 218), and thus the authorial audience can embrace these alternatives—the spectrum of meaning latent in the narrative—no less than the flesh-and-blood reader. Honing his definition of bonding unreliability, Phelan admits that this leads to a paradox: “although the authorial audience recognizes the narrator’s unreliability, that unreliability includes some communication that the implied author— and thus the authorial audience—endorses” (2007, 225; emphasis added).11 Since unreliability can hardly be a bonding force, however, what appeals to the reader is rather this other unspecified aspect of communication which transpires via the doubt-generating narrator. Phelan’s answer in searching for the source of this bonding is to look to the implied author. But this authorial entity, in addition to constituting the bonding communication, has also conjured up the doubt-generating narrator who is no less essential to the literary work in question than its fabula. That is, the author is the source of this “bonding” communication no less than of the “estranging” techniques that affect our attitude to the narrator. When we keep in mind that the author, as the origin of aberrant textual signs, situates or retains them in the text deliberately, we as readers and critics can question whether and how this formal aberrance may be connected with a work’s thematic or ethical implications. The estranging devices, then, remain an integral part of the narrative’s normative and interpretive horizons. They are no less necessary to the dynamic of such a literary work than the bonding devices, and no less promoted by the (implied) author. What emerges is an authorial model with two poles, one bonding and the other estranging, and an oscillation between them which provokes readers to ask questions. Thus the bonding pole and the estranging pole are counterbalances, and neither can necessarily stand alone as a normative measure. Together, they foster a dynamic narrative that alternates between positions and opens upon a normative field with alternate horizons. Such a dynamic can overcome the stretching of verisimilar boundaries, which might be read as unreliable, and foster a reclaimed narrative faith which, I believe, is of a different nature from reliability. In that sense, narrators who generate doubt are not reliable or unreliable: rather, being reliable and unreliable in turn, they result in oscillation between bonding and estrangement. Yet notions such as bonding and estrangement, like unreliability, produce rhetorical effects with assumed normative values, a kind of built-in prej-

11 A similar construction is Yacobi’s view of Gimpel’s “ultimate reliability—despite appear­ ances” (2001, 226).



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udice which the doubt-faith paradigm aims to avoid. On recognizing this, the discussion turns from the narrator’s reliability vis-à-vis (implied) authorial norms to the tension between the narrator (who is telling) and the narrative (what is told). This tension is paramount to the significance of these kinds of literary works, and any attempt to diffuse the tension through the use of naturalizing concepts results in flattening the significance of the literary works. For if, despite the doubt generated in and by a narrator, the reader nonetheless bonds to some aspect of a narrative, this is for reasons other than reliability or unreliability—something lying beyond the narrator’s reach. It is due to the literary dynamic of narrative.

6 Resisting Naturalization The tendency to look to unreliability as a solution for narrational border crossings came, in many ways, on the heels of research on narrative “naturalization,” a principle that contributed to the cognitive turn in narrative theory which focuses on how “readers relate what they read to ordinary human actions, motivations, and behavioral scripts” (Olson 2003, 98).12 One form of such naturalization is Yacobi’s five principles of “integration” which readers use to “resolv[e] textual tensions […] referential difficulties, incongruities, or (self-) contradictions” (1981, 114).13 She singles out two principles in particular that are often used to integrate such tension: the “genetic” principle, which refers to the author, and the “perspectival” principle, which refers to the narrator. If analysis deems such problems accidental or as resulting from carelessness, the genetic principle is used, and the author is regarded as lacking in artistry. If such tension is seen as a deliberate formal aspect of the work, readers will seek to integrate it by assigning culpability to the narrating agent, thus reconciling the story’s border crossings by attributing them to a storyteller lacking one or another sort of competency. That is, in trying

12 Jonathan Culler wrote that “to naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of disclosure or model which is already, in some sense, natural and legible” (1992 [1975], 138). 13 The five principles of integration used by readers to “resolv[e] textual tensions […] referential difficulties, incongruities, or (self-) contradictions” are as follow: genetic—causal factors that produced the text without coming to form part of it (i. e., creative process, history of finished product, situation of historical producer); generic—the genre of the text; existential—resolutions in terms of the world; functional—the work’s aesthetic, thematic, and persuasive goals; and perspectival—the peculiarities and circumstances of the observer through whom the world is taken to be refracted (i. e., narrated, experienced, evaluated) (Yacobi 1981, 114).

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to integrate the tension caused by literary phenomena such as narrational border crossings, readers and scholars tend to judge the narrator as unreliable. It is the push for naturalization that has, in my opinion, fueled over-dependence on the notion of unreliability. In searching for an alternative to naturalization, I propose complementing the concepts of narrative doubt and narrative faith with a phenomenological attitude described by Husserl as “bracketing,”: the attempt to “abstain from any […] opinions, judgments, and valuations” of the narrator while reading without foregoing a narratological evaluation of its strategies and techniques (1964 [1931], 7–8).14 This “abstention” is a temporary suspension for the sake of a more careful perception of a work’s tension. In the framework of narratological inquiry, such an attitude might be called structural bracketing. This does not mean eschewing an evaluation of either the characters, the narrator or the narrative. Rather, it aims to avoid judging narrational border crossings prematurely by assigning blame either to a would-be unreliable narrator or to an inept author and thus to take into consideration the complexities of the relationship between structure and theme using a dynamic paradigm. The variety of narrational border crossings already mentioned can be discussed not in terms of a narrator’s unreliability but in those of the doubt generated by a given narrator and the influence of this doubt on a reader’s narrative faith. To some extent, structural bracketing is tantamount to a kind of “negative capability” described by John Keats in which one tolerates “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after facts & reason” (2006 [1817], 942). Whereas Keats recommended this for poets, I am putting it forth as a strategy for readers and critics. In exploring a variety of narrational border crossings, such an attitude aims to purge narrative modulation of the normative, and particularly of the moral or cognitive, presuppositions found in discourse on narrative unreliability. This approach has certainly been recognized and applied in literary criticism before, but I suggest that it be extended to assessing narrative modulations without necessarily naturalizing them, thus retaining literary elements in tension while restraining the impulse to resolve them. If we assess narrative tension within a non-naturalized conception of narrative so as to behold unpatterned elements and restrain the impulse to integrate or resolve them, we might find this departure from interpretive convention in some ways more rewarding, even if disconcerting and destabilizing in other ways.

14 This term is adapted from Husserl’s “epoché,” which comes from “suspension” in the ancient Greek and was also used by Descartes. Husserl also uses the term “reduction” to describe a similar process. For a distinction between bracketing and the “natural attitude,” see Husserl (1964 [1929], 14–15).



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7 Preserving Tension If, despite a narrator who generates doubt, we detect a different type of communication taking place through the same text, the work as a whole can retain our narrative faith and thus its claim of relevance to reality. One already much discussed model of this kind of process can be exemplified by Nabokov’s Lolita, where the reader who carefully parses its textual signals may see not merely a compulsive pedophile’s crafty and entrapping confession of his perversion15 but also “a sensitive representation of the human price that such an obsession exacts” (Toker 1989, 207). If we are prepared to situate these textual signals within a larger normative context (aesthetic, cognitive, moral, ideological, etc.), we may be able to retain the narrative faith which such a text evokes and also partly subverts. The doubt generated by a narrator implies some preexistent faith—a belief, without proof or justification, in the narrative at hand as working toward a truth relevant to the phenomenal world. And in tracing how a reader might nonetheless believe in, rather than just believe, the narrative of a doubt-generating narrator, a narrative can shake our faith and yet reclaim it. When we understand that “[t]he same strategies, differently used, serve both the destabilization of representation and subjectivity and their rehabilitation” (Rimmon-Kenan 1996, 130), we can perhaps map the way in which “various inconsistencies of [a] method” which we think “would fragment [a] novel” actually “help to bind it together” (Daleski 1985, 16). Rather than create an “unnecessary problem for the reader” by implying that the “only recourse, in face of the ‘host of different perspectives’ that confront him, is to try to ‘make them consistent’,” we come to understand that sometimes “it is quite impossible to reconcile the contradictions thrown up by [a] narrative” (16). Indeed, by “accept[ing] the blatant inconsistencies,” we are led back to the question with which we started: “why [is it] that a novelist […] should go out of his way to force inconsistencies on us?” (16). By preserving the irreconcilabilities of a narrative, we may perceive more of the horizon of a literary work’s norms along with the tensions created by their conflicting interplay—tensions which, if naturalized, integrated or resolved, may limit a work’s interpretive horizons. The motivation behind such a turn is to avoid the interpretive risk of reacting to a narrative’s problematic textual signals without duly considering their various implications and connections in respect to the literary work’s form and multitudinous normative layers. Instead, it promotes the discernment of problematizing

15 “[T]he audience […] begins to derive a pleasure from the account of the pursuit of ecstasy and to ignore the price of this pursuit.” (Toker 1989, 202)

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techniques without extending a narrator’s moral makeup to the significance of the narrative, thereby facilitating the reader’s communication with the (implied) author despite or through the doubt-generating narrator and reclaiming narrative faith in the course of this dialogue. With narrative faith, “obstacles to reliability in the classical sense [can] become assets” (Rimmon-Kenan 1996, 25). My aim in suggesting this provisionally neutral method of formal analysis is to discuss the specificities of the relationship between a narrative’s form and the worldview that this narrative constructs. Analysis of this interrelation makes it possible for a narrative’s significance to survive the doubt generated by narrational border crossings and to justify, in a way that is no longer naïve but rather complex, the narrative faith that a literary work may have initially engendered.16

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1993 [1955]. “La Peste, annales d’une épidémie ou roman de la solitude.” In R. B. Œuvres complètes, I, edited and introduced by Éric Marty, 540–545. Paris: Gallimard. Booth, Wayne. 1983 [1961]. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carr, E. H. 1962 [1931]. Dostoevsky 1821–1881. London: Unwin Books. Cavell, Stanley. 2002 [1969]. “Music Discomposed.” In S. C. Must We Mean What We Say?, 180–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1817. “Chapter XIV.” Biographia Literaria. http://www.english.upenn. edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html Culler, Jonathan. 1992 [1975]. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Daleski, H. M. 1985. Unities. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Daleski, H. M. 2009. “Narrational Border Crossings in Major Early-Twentieth-Century English Novels.” Poetics Today 30 (2): 237–255. Eco, Umberto. 1984 [1979]. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of the Text. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1980 [1972]. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harrison, Bernard. 1993. “Gaps and Stumbling Blocks in Fielding: A Response to Černy, Hammond and Hudson.” Connotations 3 (2): 147–172. Husserl, Edmund. 1964 [1929]. The Paris Lectures. Translated by Peter Koestenbaum. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

16 The author wishes to acknowledge the guidance of Professor Leona Toker. This narratological departure would not have reached the present destination without her knowledge and wisdom.



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Ingarden, Roman. 1961 [1937]. “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 21 (3): 289–313. Ingarden, Roman. 1979 [1931]. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation of the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic and the Theory of Language. Translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1972. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” New Literary History 3 (2): 279–299. Iser, Wolfgang. 1980 [1978]. The Act of Reading. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Keats, John. 2006 [1817]. “Letter to George and Thomas Keats.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eight Edition, Vol. 2, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 942. New York: Norton. Magarshack, David. 1959 [1953]. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Devils, vii–xvii. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Martínez-Bonati, Félix. 1981 [1964]. Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature. Translated by Philip W. Silver. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Martínez-Bonati, Félix. 1992. Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel. Translated by Dian Fox. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968 [1964]. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nünning, Ansgar. 2008. “Reconceptualizing the Theory, History and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration: Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” In Narrative Reliability in the Twenty-First Century First-Person Novel, edited by Elke D’hoker and Gunther Martens, 29–76. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Nünning Vera, ed. 2015. Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Olson, Greta. 2003. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative 11 (1): 93–109. Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Phelan, James. 2007. “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita.” Narrative 15 (2): 222–238. Prince, Gerald. 1992. Narrative as Theme. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Prince, Gerald. 2003 [1987]. Dictionary of Narratology. Revised edition. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1996. A Glance Beyond Doubt. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. 1988 [1953]. “Gimpel the Fool.” Translated by Saul Bellow. In I. B. S. Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, 3–22. New York: Noonday Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975 [1970]. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Toker, Leona. 1989. Nabokov: the Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Toker, Leona. 1997. “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose—From the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies.” Poetics Today 18 (2): 187–222. Wisse, Ruth R. 1996. “Singer’s Paradoxical Progress.” In Critical Essays, edited by Grace Farrell, 102–112. New York: G. K. Hall.

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Yacobi, Tamar. 1981. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics Today 2 (2): 113–126. Yacobi, Tamar. 2001. “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s (Un) Reliability.” Narrative 9 (2): 223–229. Zerweck, Bruno. 2001. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35 (1): 151–178.

Valery Timofeev (Saint Petersburg)

Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule”: An Exercise in Generative Narratology 1 Introduction

The main part of my paper is a close reading of the first page of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule,” published in Russian in 1942. This reading will at the same time be an exercise in generative narratology as a framework for analyzing fiction whose aim is to show fiction in its making. What underlies the Generative Narratology Framework is not a single and unique theory, but rather a complex set of various interdisciplinary approaches. The overall cohesiveness of this approach is a result of my thirty years of research in literary theory, narratology, reader-oriented criticism and cognitive studies implementing multiple approaches and methodologies for analyzing English and Russian fictional texts. I am well aware that any description of the authorial creative process inferred from reading a text in which the text is the sole foundation for insights into its author’s mind is nothing more than an example of critical speculation, being, by definition, hypothetical. Understanding what others think involves complex operations (cf. Dimaggio et al. 2008; Lane and Schwartz 1987). Attempts to infer what the author was thinking while creating the text require comprehension of even the tiniest signals the text might contain to indicate the author’s motivations. The main challenge, as I see it, is the need to distinguish between our perspective as readers and the narrator’s perspective. Naturally, the narrator’s perspective is to be distanced from that of the author, as well. While the narrator’s motivations, mental states, emotions, etc. might be quite explicit, describing them as related to a distinct cognitive process may be quite erroneous, since a narrator is but a phantasm created by the author. Though my reading of Nabokov’s text is an exercise in metacognition, rightfully “referred to as fuzzy by many scholars” in an informative literature review on the subject (Akturk and Sahin 2011, 3731), it is meant to reconstruct, or rather construct, a hypothetical version of the way the creative process is organized in terms of monitoring, regulating and controlling narrative progression.

DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-005

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1.1 Authorial self-consciousness Since reading as mindreading aims, figuratively speaking, at gaining access to authorial self-consciousness, the latter needs to be defined, if it is to become an operational concept. I suggest that a person who experiences authorial self-consciousness needs specific abilities that go far beyond the phenomenal or first level of consciousness, which is sufficient only for primary self-consciousness (cf. Fletcher et al. 1995; Vogeley et al. 2001; Kircher and Leube 2003). One of these abilities is ‘concept possession’, whereby the subject is aware of him/herself as an author. The hypothesis that concept possession is essential for primary self-consciousness, as advocated by Savanah (2012), provoked a lengthy discussion in Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) as to whether this concept extends beyond primary self-consciousness. The authorial notion is obviously far more complex than a set of mineness features acquired by humans during their first few years of life. Authorship is historically variable, especially in those elements of its content structure that are shared by authors linked by similar aesthetic background which, to begin with, includes the aesthetic, not ontological, parameters of the author’s status (e. g., how authors understand their mission, how the fictional world they create correlates with the world they live in, etc.1). The conceptual facets related to authorial self-consciousness must be divided into two separate sectors: self-reflexiveness and internal state awareness. This part of the overall hypothesis complies with most of the studies that use the self-consciousness scale (e. g., Fenigstein et al. 1975). Theories of the two sectors of conceptual facets prove to be very helpful for explaining the forms and features of I-thoughts, as shown by Kristina Musholt (2013, 653–657), although I consider the distinction between self-reflexiveness and internal state awareness to be incomplete, especially when dealing with authorial self-consciousness. We thus need to contrast two modes of thought about thinking: the introspective mode and the reflexive mode. In what follows, I will explain why I consider these two modes to be important, both for the theory of authorial self-consciousness and its practical implementations in the field of literary analysis.

1 A list of the elements contained in the concept of authorial self-consciousness is discussed in detail elsewhere (Timofeev 1999).



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1.2 Introspection vs. reflection The basic idea that underlies the hypothesis of this section arises from what Wittgenstein (1958) described as the necessity to distinguish between two different types of I-thoughts: I-as-subject and I-as-object (1958, 66–67). I argue that the introspective mode of thinking about one’s own thinking—no matter how we use the first-person pronoun I-as-subject or I-as-object—does not allow the I we are thinking about to be defamiliarized. The same is true in cases of mindreading when we think about the thinking of another person, no matter which pronoun we use: I or you. It might result from empathy, to use a psychological term, or from some other factor such as “the paradox of self-consciousness” (Bermúdez 1998). When we think introspectively, we do not, or cannot, use our ability to differentiate between our own perspective and that of someone else we are thinking about. That, on the one hand, often leads to misidentification errors while on the other, it helps us to be emotionally engaged when reading fiction. The reflexive mode of thinking, on the contrary, starts with self-estrangement or defamiliarization. No matter whose thinking we are thinking about, no matter what pronoun (I or you) we use when describing the process, we tend to treat both the thought and the thinking subject as at least partly estranged from us. In other words, the introspective mode would unite and homogenize whereas the reflexive mode tends to decompose. Content and form would be dealt with separately by a reflexive thought. This might be explained in terms of conceptual blending: when we use the introspective mode of thinking, the elements at work are blended in a process known as the basic blending network (Schneider 2012). When we apply the reflexive mode to think about thinking, not only do we use the results of blending, but we also observe the process of blending, paying special attention to the fact that some elements belong to one input space while others belong to another. I will provide numerous examples of the reflexive mode of thinking at work, or reflexive narrative, later in this paper. The notion I use here is close to David Herman’s approach (2004, 2006), where narrative reflexivity is treated as a cognitive instrument used to “constitute, along with representational properties of the medium, the interpretive activity of readers, and other factors, a gestalt or system for distributing intelligence that is ‘smarter’ than the sum of its parts” (2006, 374). When writing fiction, authors adopt both modes of thinking. Most people also use both modes although for some reason not everyone is capable of maintaining the reflexive mode while engaged in the introspective mode. Moreover, some authors use the reflexive mode more extensively than others, with Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Joyce, Pirandello and Nabokov figuring in the reflexive mode’s Top-10 list. Reflexive authorial self-consciousness seems to prosper more in some historical periods than in others. Some aesthetic systems

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or literary movements, such as Naturalism or Realism, tend not to tolerate reflexivity whereas Romanticism, especially in Germany, cannot be imagined without the prominent role granted to reflexivity. Postmodernism obviously thrives on reflexivity, as well. Alongside individual or historical choices in favor of reflexivity, as some critics would put it, there are certain technical reasons for preferring the introspective mode. Introspection is required to create characters, since this is a clear case of mindreading. Here, reflexivity would be of no use: imagine Leo Tolstoy paying a short but reflexive glance at himself in the middle of working through an internal monologue of the young Natasha Rostova. I can well imagine Tolstoy bursting out in laughter at the glimpse from aside of an overweight middle-aged gentleman mentally armed and dressed as a girl in her teens! An entirely new set of questions arises if the correlation of authorial self-consciousness and the narrator’s self-reflexivity is to be studied. It seems quite improbable for a self-reflecting narrator to be created by an author lacking a good amount of experience of thinking in the reflexive mode. A self-reflecting narrator, like the one who narrates in Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule,” should explicitly demonstrate habitual self-estrangement. As it will be shown in the next section of the paper, Sineusov controls every word of his narration and scrutinizes every idea that comes to his mind, constantly looking at himself from aside and providing us with perfect examples of the reflexive mode of thinking about thinking. We can see this, for example, when Sineusov addresses his recently deceased wife. In the one-page narration of the opening episode I have chosen for analysis, he manages to ask her only a couple of questions. The rest, which is approximately seventy-five per cent of the text, is a series of comments on his own comments, multiple analyses of his own speech, its lexis and grammar, free association games, bitter irony followed by regrets, etc. Nabokov himself is no less self-reflexive than the Sineusov he creates. In no way, however, is the story a case of self-representation: Nabokov shares no more of his own emotional life experience with his character than Leo Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoj) did imagining Nataša Rostova getting ready for her first ball. Nabokov might compete with the Almighty Creator as most other self-reflexive authors do. James Joyce enjoyed the if-God-were-me-his-act-of-creation-would-result-in-a novel game as well as the if-Homer-were-me game. Authors cannot create aux nihil: they need material. What Nabokov used as material to design Sineusov and his narration were not specific memories or certain states of mind, but mental experience. Patterns were distilled out of experience and provided to Sineusov—as well as to all other narrators of his fiction—to be exercised as drills. That means that if we enter the “grammar” of the narrator’s thought, we might believe we are observing the way the text was being generated. In that case, though, the pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of fiction



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known as aesthetic illusion might be slightly undermined. Readers will have to be immersed in their own interpretive activity no less than in the represented world of the story. The usual position of the aesthetic illusion lies between the two poles “of total rational distance (disinterested ‘observation’ of an artifact as such) and complete immersion in the presented world (‘psychological participation’) in the represented world” (Wolf 2014 [2011], 270). When the Generative Narratology Framework is used, the position of the aesthetic illusion on the scale between the two poles will definitely move towards the pole of observation due to the special attention paid to interpretive activity, the instruments we use for thinking. The amount of pleasure will stay intact. We might lose something in terms of psychological participation while we will gain a lot intellectually. Though my observations are made with a certain degree of approximation, I believe that the following section will shed light on these issues.

2 “Ultima Thule” The original Russian text was written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1940 and first published in 1942. The story was translated into English by Dmitri Nabokov with the author’s collaboration in 1973 and published in The New Yorker. “Ultima Thule” and “Solus Rex” were supposed to be chapters of a novel, but the project was never realized. The narrator of “Ultima Thule” is Sineusov, an artist who is heart-broken by the death of his wife. Sineusov imagines himself talking to his late beloved wife. The story seems, at least at the outset, to be a set of “voluntary memories” as contrasted with Marcel’s involuntary memories in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Passed. The first phrase of the story might be seen as a clear allusion to the “madeleine episode” in Proust. “Ultima Thule,” though full of references and allusions to texts from all over the world, is quite subtle in its treatment of Proust’s theme of achieving eternal life by turning le temps perdu into art in a much more concise yet more sophisticated way. The structure of the story can be described as a set of invertible matrëškas (Russian dolls) playing strange games when the smallest one turns inside out so as to envelope all the others, as in a number of key phrases in the story: “the dream within a dream (when you dream you have awakened)”; or “If you don’t remember, then I remember for you; the memory of you can pass […] for your memory” (Nabokov 1973 [1940], 38). The same trick occurs with the idea of the Other World. Passing through several stages, it is transformed first into the Christian concepts of good and evil, then into Dante’s version of hell mixed with paradise only to turn into eternal aesthetic reality while remaining

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an ironic parody of Plato’s cave allegory. Falter, Sineusov’s former tutor, claims that a momentous truth has been revealed to him, just as philosophers claimed in Plato’s Republic, while Sineusov, an artist who is incapable of seeing anything but the shadows of the essential Ideas, should be ridiculed and banned from the ideal world. Plato’s concept of art’s inferiority to life, due to its distance from Ideas, is clearly opposed by the Romantic concept according to which artists are the only ones to have the “true” worldview. The romantic notion is referred to several times in “Ultima Thule,” though somewhat ironically. Other motifs and key ideas, including those of good and evil, to say nothing of other poetic commonplaces such as muses, mermaids, etc., reveal similar invertibility, playing a cat-and-mouse game with the readers of the story. Do you remember the day you and I were lunching (partaking of nourishment) a couple of years before your death?2 [Помнишь, мы как-то завтракали (принимали пищу) года за два до твоей смерти?]3

In the opening lines, our narrator is appealing to his addressee, i. e., the narratee, who is apparently extremely unreliable. Standard narratology has studied unreliable narrators in depth; here, however, we are confronted with an unreliable addressee. There are serious doubts concerning her memory, so even zavtrakali (lunching: the Russian original actually means ‘having breakfast’) needs to be explained: prinimali pišču (partaking of nourishment). One cannot but be struck by the addressee’s unreliability on reading the phrase “a couple of years before your death.” This means that the addressee is not a living being! No sooner has the reader started occupying the addressee position, which is “You,” than “your death” halts the process. This is the first reason why it is a problem for the reader to enter the narrated world. The second barrier is space. The spatial coordinates remain uncertain for quite a long time, thus keeping the reader in suspense. The temporal coordinates remain unspecified, as well. The “now” in the opening phrase immediately turns into the departing point of a dizzying process. The incident in question took place “a couple of years before your death,” but nothing is stated about how long ago the addressee died. The reader is informed of the fact, but not of the time, and, as we are soon to learn, the addressee can remember nothing.

2 All English quotes of “Ultima Thule” are from Nabokov (1973 [1942], 38). 3 All Russian quotes of “Ultima Thule” are from Nabokov (2000 [1942], 113–115).



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Assuming, of course, that memory can live without its headdress? [Если, конечно, память может жить без головного убора.]

Suspicion about lack of memory is made explicit here, since memory may not be able to survive without a head. Curiously, the word “head” is replaced with “headdress” for a reason we are as yet unable to see. Let us imagine—just an ‘apropositional’ thought—some totally new handbook of epistolary samples. [Кстатическая мысль: вообразим новейший письмовник.]

What is this ‘apropositional’ thought? Here is where the process of cognitive blending enters the picture. There must be two related entities (or input spaces) involved, two beings, neither of which is a “handbook of epistolary samples.” What has one had to look at so that the handbook-of-epistolary-samples idea can come to mind? All we have had so far is the memory that cannot live without its headdress. What does “without its headdress” have to do with a handbook of sample letters? What do they have in common? What does “without a headdress” actually mean? The idea of “some totally new handbook of epistolary samples” was introduced as an “‘apropositional’ thought.” In the Russian original we find kstatičeskaja mysl’, an authorial neologism coined in violation of the morphological norms of the Russian language, since adjectives are not formed in this way and since the adjective in question does not exist. This is a perfect example of the switching-on of the estrangement effect, a phenomenon defined by the Russian formalists as a device used for shifting the reader’s attention from content to language. By introducing a piece of ambiguous information, the author adds new barriers to understanding that keep the narrated world detached, thereby forcing the reader to perceive it rationally rather than emotionally. Each time we come across such a coinage in the text, we face a flash of hypertrophied reflection, by which I mean a thought directed towards itself, aiming at the very same thought. The question is: what exactly is this thought targeted at if it triggers the idea of a totally new handbook of epistolary samples? The reader is prompted to follow the narrator’s reflection so as to find out the origin of the ‘apropositional’ thought. In this process, the estrangement effect shifts the reader’s attention from content to language. This means that the source of the ‘apropositional’ thought should be looked for in the sphere of language. This source may be a part of speech or a lexical unit. In terms of lexis, what is

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meant by “living without a headdress”? Headdress is a euphemism, because what does a headdress have literally to do with memory? For memory, the head is relevant: memory is “dressed in head,” so to speak, so that in fact bez golovnogo ubora (without its headdress) is a noun phrase with “head” being an attribute to the noun “dress” (the Russian golovnoj is an adjective): “head dress” is “a dress of head,” “dress made of head.” This is what memory cannot live without. Instead, we are told that memory cannot do without a headdress. What, then, does this euphemism mean? How is it related to a handbook of epistolary samples (pis’movnik)? Euphemisms are subject to two sets of rules. The first consists of language rules, since a euphemism is a linguistic phenomenon, a figure of speech. In Žit’ bez golovnogo ubora (to live without a headdress), as in bez golovy (without a head), the correct case must be retained. The other set of rules, which for euphemisms is much more important, is comprised of ethical norms. Under certain circumstances, we are disinclined to pronounce a certain word or phrase and say something else, particularly for ethical reasons or as a matter of decorum. The same goes for a “handbook of epistolary samples” (novejšij pis’movnik): there are linguistic rules as well as ethical rules to be taken into account. In fact, the purpose of such a handbook is to teach epistolary etiquette, to instruct readers on how to express themselves properly. The examples given are quite monstrous. To a lady who has lost her right hand: I kiss your ellipsis. [К безрукому: крепко жму вашу (многоточие).]

Since there is no hand, there is an ellipsis instead. To a deceased: Respecterfully yours. [К покойнику: призрачно ваш.]

Quite elegant, isn’t it? That is also a kind of euphemism. Etiquette is followed and at the same time morbidly violated. But enough of these sheepish vignettes. [Но оставим эти виноватые виньетки.]

Once again we face a reflexive mode of thinking. Being reversive by definition, it works in two directions: it looks at what has just been said, drawing a conclusion: “enough of these sheepish vignettes.” In the original, there is a pun here, with



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repetition of the vin- element, which stands for “guilt”: vinovatye vin’etki. This repetition shifts the meaning. Vignettes normally have nothing to do with guilt, but accompanied by vinovatye (guilty) they acquire guilt. What are the vignettes in question? According to the text, they stand for a surplus illustration, an extra and unnecessary ornament which violates some ethical parameters and are thus related to guilt. As a result, we have another euphemism, a version of how ethics meets linguistics: vinovatye vin’etki. Social conventions that underlie the euphemism and the epistolary samples are deautomatized and estranged, to use the Russian formalist terms. Conventions that are to be obeyed automatically in our case are exposed so as to attract attention. The conventions are still at work, but they work unconventionally. Instead of camouflaging things for good reasons, they reveal their covers and their dresses are stripped off, similarly to Hans Christian Andersen’s “the king’s new clothes.” The emotions hinted at here belong to the narrator, or rather to one fraction of his consciousness, split due to the reflexive mode of thinking. The narrated world is still kept detached, preventing the reader from feeling involved or affected. Textually, the vignettes are unnecessary extras, and guilt is a moral evaluation of such an ornament. To see how the reflexive mode of thinking works, let us imagine a dragon with three heads since, in terms of the blending theory, two channels or input spaces are involved. While blending theory describes how two ideas merge, generative narratology seeks to explain how two ideas meet in such a way that a third idea emerges. One “head” says something while another looks on, assessing what has been said and adding remarks, whereupon the third “head” takes its turn. If you don’t remember, then I remember for you; the memory of you can pass—grammatically speaking, at least—for your memory, and I am perfectly willing to grant for the sake of an ornate phrase that if, after your death, I and the world still endure, it is only because you recollect the world and me. [Если ты не помнишь, то я за тебя помню: память о тебе может сойти, хотя бы грамматически, за твою память и ради крашеного слова вполне могу допустить, что если после твоей смерти я и мир еще существуем, то лишь благодаря тому, что ты мир и меня вспоминаешь.]

This passage is quite complicated. Toward the end is an image that is almost a parody of the Romantic type of worldview, with reality split in two. The first reality is that of the primitive empirical world of trivial physical phenomena; the second is represented by the magical, superior, true and invisible essence behind it, or rather above it. Irony is another important feature of Romanticism we unmistakably perceive in the Nabokov text: radi krašenogo slova (“for the sake of an ornate phrase,” or literally: “for the sake of a painted word”) is a perfect example of this.

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The upshot of it is that the world exists only due to the fact that we live in a dead person’s memory. This is the Romantic outlook, turned upside down! Radi krašenogo slova (for the sake of a painted word) is the author’s neologism. It is formed out of the deformation of an idiom, as though a non-native speaker of Russian were translating it backwards from memory. The original Russian idiom is “ради красного словца,” radi krasnogo slovca (“for the sake of a red little word” in which “red” archaically stands for “beautiful”). Slovco is a diminutive, turning “a word” into “a small word,” as slovo (word) sounds much more respectful. Krasnoe (red) is the archaic for krasivoe (beautiful), as dictionaries of Russian normally inform us, although the modern meaning of the word krasnoe (red) refers mainly to the color. In order to become red, the word needs to be painted, so to speak. Here, the logic takes us in the opposite direction. As mentioned above, blending involves information going through two channels which somehow merge to let a third meaning appear. In the “painted word” passage, by contrast, it is the third (resulting) meaning that splits and runs along two channels, up-stream rather than down-stream. Thus, we see that the two currents of information are not of the same origin. If you don’t remember, then I remember for you; the memory of you can pass—grammatically speaking, at least—for your memory. [Если ты не помнишь, то я за тебя помню: память о тебе может сойти, хотя бы грамматически, за твою память.]

Is it possible for “the memory of you” to pass grammatically for “your memory,” the two wordings being evidently different grammatically, both in Russian and in English? Their semantic difference is grammatically regulated by the morphological relations of cases in Russian and by the parts of speech in English. This suggests that our narrator’s mind bears the notions of “memory of you” and “your memory” in some language other than Russian or English. Latin will do perfectly: memoria tui. It is in Latin that “the memory of you” and “your memory” share the same form. The narrator is most likely to stand in front of the inscription in Latin, or he imagines beholding the inscription. Since the addressee is a dead person, we might suppose that our narrator is either imagining himself being at a cemetery or he is actually there. The memoria tui motif is also a complex case of simultaneous usage of two modes of thinking: the self-reflexive and the introspective. Normally, we might need two thinking subjects, two heads engaged in thinking at the same time. It is stated in a pointed manner, through the use of a euphemism, that the addressee has no head of her own. This means that we need something like a head-withina-head-within-a-head, a matrëška structure capable of changing places or invert-



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ing so that the smaller structure can develop the larger one. Nabokov is known for his Matrëška structures (cf. Davydov 2004), but, as we have suggested, these matrëškas are able to turn inside out. This is the first time that we are warned that the narrator and the narratee relate to each other not just like Matrëška dolls, but rather as special invertible matrëškas ready to change places. The Memoria tui motif as well as the three examples discussed above, confirm that special tools are needed for singling out the input spaces that “are not even explicitly mentioned,” as is the case in most blends (Schneider 2012, 8), but that have been intentionally masked. The narrator uses ambiguous information intentionally to make the reader stop, shift attention and make a special effort to comprehend the passage. To reconstruct the narrator’s self-reflexive and elusive reasoning, the reader must turn to the self-reflexive mode of reading. The Russian formalists laid the groundwork for studying the literary devices used by authors to create poetic language. The Generative Narratology Framework goes further, however, in that it helps us to observe the “how-to” of the process by taking account of the cognitive mechanisms the reader employs when processing ambiguous information. I address you now for the following reason. I address you now on the following occasion. I address you now simply to chat with you about Falter. What a fate! What a mystery! What a handwriting! [Сейчас обращаюсь к тебе вот по какому поводу. Сейчас обращаюсь к тебе вот по какому случаю. Сейчас обращаюсь к тебе только затем, чтобы поговорить с тобой о Фальтере. Вот судьба! Вот тайна! Вот почерк!]

The triple repetition evokes the story’s opening, with its repeated Pomniš … (Do you remember…). Triple repetitions are typical of fairy tales and other folklore genres. What they mark is a shift of linguistic register to turn ordinary speech into the magical incantation of a sorcerer’s spell. A cemetery is a perfect place for talking to the dead. To do so, you just need to switch registers. Otherwise you will be talking to the tombstone instead of communicating right through it! When I tire of trying to persuade myself that he is a halfwit or a kvak (as you use to Russianize the English synonym for ‘charlatan’). [Вот судьба! Вот тайна! Вот почерк! Когда мне надоедает уверять себя, что он полоумный или квак (как на английский лад ты звала шарлатанов)…]

‘Kvak’ stands for ‘Quack’ in the translation, adding yet another language into the original Russian text.

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He strikes me as a person who… who, because he survived the bomb of truth that exploded in him… became a god! Beside him, how paltry seem all the bygone clairvoyants: the dust raised by the herd at sunset, the dream within a dream (when you dream you have awakened), the crack students in this our institute of learning hermetically closed to outsiders; for Falter stands outside our world, in the true reality. Reality!—that is the pouter-pigeon throat of the snake that fascinates me. [я вижу в нем человека, который… который… потому, что его не убила бомба истины, разорвавшаяся в нем… вышел в боги!—и как же ничтожны перед ним все прозорливцы прошлого: пыль, оставляемая стадом не вечерней заре, сон во сне (когда снится, что проснулся), первые ученики в нашем герметически закрытом учебном заведении: он-то вне нас, в яви,—вот раздутое голубиное горло змеи, чарующей меня.]

The Russian passage is geometrically peculiar. If we regard the syntax of the above passage, we will see a complex correlation which can be described as follows. There is a certain picture involved here which denotes a kind of closed space. Spatially, there are two directions, two vectors, one of which is centripetal, the other centrifugal. The whole text is perfectly consistent—one may even say boringly so—in building up the same picture: Я вижу в нем (“He strikes me as” or, more precisely: “I see in him”) is internal movement; человека, который… который… потому, что его не убила бомба истины разорвавшаяся в нем… (a person who… who, because he survived the bomb of truth that exploded in him…). The bomb explodes externally. Вышел в боги (“became a god” or, literally: “went out into a god”) is directed, both inside and outside, with both vectors involved (went out, but into a god). The passage might be described as a set of invertible Matrëškas playing strange games when the smallest one turns inside out to envelop all the others. И как же ничтожны перед ним все прозорливцы прошлого (Beside him, how paltry seem all the bygone clairvoyants). The geometry is quite complex, since, etymologically, prozorlivtsy (clairvoyants) are supposed to look into the future, which is not at all obvious in this sentence. Once again, the reader has to overcome informational ambiguity. Russian prozorlivtsy proshlogo (literally “clairvoyants of the past”) can have two meanings. The clairvoyants are either “bygones,” so that they are looking from the past, or they see the past instead of the future. The next phrase is no less peculiar, if not hilarious. Пыль, оставляемая стадом на вечерней заре means “the dust raised by the herd at sunset,” or rather “the dust left on the sunset,” as it literally says in Russian. Sunset is an indication of time; but to “leave the dust on the sunset,” i. e., to leave it on time, one needs to see time spatially. That suggests an allusion either to Mikhail Bakhtin (Mixail Baxtin) or to Albert Einstein: “dust on the sunset” is an example of chronotope or spacetime. Baxtin’s essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”



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was first published in Russian in 1937, and Nabokov might well have been aware of Einstein’s ideas of spacetime or of Ukhtomsky’s (Uxtomsky) interpretation of the notion. the crack students in this our institute of learning hermetically closed to outsiders [первые ученики в нашем герметически закрытом учебном заведении]

This idea of hermetically closed space is the author’s neologism, since the dictionary meaning of “hermetically closed” does not coincide with the usage of the phrase applied to a type of educational institution. Once again, two channels are involved, channeling the same thing from bottom to top rather than vice versa. Under natural circumstances, information travels down the channels from Input Space 1 and Input Space 2 to meet at the Blended Space as a basic blending network, as described by Schneider (2012, 4). In Nabokov’s text, meaning is generated in the opposite way: the reader has to unfold the blended meaning by following the information channels upwards to scrutinize the initial ideas that were used for Cross-Space Mapping. In other words, the reader is to track the author’s way of thinking step-by-step while at the same time taking the same route backwards to understand how such notions as hermetically closed schools come into being. that is the pouter-pigeon throat of the snake that fascinates me [вот раздутое голубиное горло змеи, чарующей меня]

This passage contains a literalized metaphor. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince (1943) is a famous image of a snake that has swallowed an elephant. But already in Nabokov’s text, “the pouter-pigeon throat of the snake” stands for a snake that has eaten a pigeon. Up to this point, our locus has been limited to a cemetery as the place for the narrator to address his deceased wife. Now, what kind of snake would you expect to encounter at a cemetery? And what sort of pigeon (in Russian, golub’ is both pigeon and dove)? The Holy Spirit and the Serpent of the Judeo-Christian tradition naturally come to mind; the Serpent has swallowed the Holy Spirit. The Serpent and Eve motif seems no less appropriate here. Eve can easily stand for the narrator’s wife. The Serpent fascinated (or, in Nabokov’s Russian original, enchanted) Eve. Why “fascinates me?” To understand the passage, we should go back to Memoria tui motif described as invertible matrëškas, a head-withina-head-within-a-head, i. e., the narrator and the narratee capable of changing places. The serpent is fascinating, that is, it tempts the narrator with the enigma

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of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Thus the central theme of the story, as it is commonly accepted by the critics (cf. Johnson 1985; Dolinin 1997), is introduced in the story. Remember the we lunched at the hotel managed by Falter near the luxuriant, many-terraced Italian border, where the asphalt is infinitely exalted by the wisteria, and the air smells of rubber and paradise? [Помнишь, мы как-то завтракали (Remember the time we lunched) в ему принадлежавшей гостинице, на роскошной, многоярусной границе Италии, где асфальт без конца умножается на глицинии, и воздух пахнет резиной и раем?] We have entered paradise at the luxuriant many-terraced Italian border. Most obviously, this alludes to Dante. And the many-terraced border is something that must smell, if not just of paradise, at least its combination with rubber. Adam Falter was still one of us then, an, if nothing about him presaged—what shall I call it? [Адам Фальтер тогда был еще наш, и если ничто в нем не предвещало—как это сказать?] With a textual and spatial reality constituted in this way, as pointed out earlier, several dragon heads are involved. One of them says, “What shall I call it?” [kak ėto skazat’?—literally: “How to say it?”], and another replies, skažu (I’ll say it): […] say, seerhood, nevertheless his whole strong cast (the caromlike coordination of his bodily movements, as though he had ball bearings for cartilages, his precision, his aquiline aloofness), now, in retrospect, explains why he survived the shock: the original figure was large enough to withstand the subtraction. […скажу: прозрения,—зато весь его сильный склад (не хрящи, а подшипники, карамбольная связность телодвижений, точность, орлиный холод) теперь, задним числом, объясняет то, что он выжил: было из чего вычитать.]

This passage allows us to see perfectly well how the author’s thought is being born. It is not just a chain of associations, but a chain moving in reverse. In sil’nyj sklad, the reflexive mode of thinking is at work as if it had a whole thesaurus at hand. A number of cognates of sklad, if not all, are activated at once, as well as its different meanings. Sklad is a storing place, hence ne xrjašči, a podšipniki (not cartilages but ball bearings), which are best stored in a warehouse. But “not cartilages” means it is not only sklad as a warehouse, but also as a body-build. “Ball bearings for cartilages” is all about bodily movements, derived from the male physical build. The “caromlike coordination” comes from Carom, a type of billiard game whose peculiarity is that the table is pocketless so that the balls go



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from one side of the billiard board to the other and points are scored in one shot. This makes Carom a very complicated game in terms of body movements as well as in sight and thought. Therefore, we read točnost’, orlinyj xolod, where “precision” is meant literally as very precise movements of the body and “aquiline aloofness” (literally “cold”) is a contamination of two phenomena: the eagle’s keen eyesight and a cool head. Teper’, zadnim čislom means “now, in retrospect,” or literally: “now, by back number.” The word čislo (number) actualizes still another meaning of sklad as složenie (mathematical addition), adding a pun of withstanding the subtraction: “now, in retrospect, explains why he survived the shock: the original figure was large enough to withstand the subtraction.” Oh, my love, how your presence smiles from that fabled bay [О, моя милая, как улыбнулось тобой с того лукоморья]

It is now worth noticing that at first our addressee was headless, which was hinted by her lack of headdress; now she gains a smile. There is no head, but there is a smile! This is also how two cats appear in the text. One is from England: Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, with the smile appearing independently of the rest of the body; the other is from Alexander Pushkin. Nabokov’s Russian original “fabled bay” is the Lukomor’e in the opening lines of Pushkin’s 1820 poem Ruslan and Ljudmila: There’s a green oak-tree by the shores Of the blue bay; on a gold chain, The cat, learned in the fable stories, Walks round the tree in ceaseless strain: Moves to the right—a song it groans, Moves to the left—it tells a tale.

Thus, Pushkin’s cat, the narrator telling tales, is in Lukomor’e. By using a passive structure (non-standard Russian toboj ulybnulos’: “it smiled by you” instead of “you smiled”), the narrator declares that the addressee, who coincides with the narratee, turns into the narrator (a smiling storytelling cat). “You” are the narrating cat. The narrator and the narratee are ready to change places again. First, the Memoria tui motif, then ‘the pouter-pigeon throat of the snake” episode. All three episodes contain a similarly working “reversing device”: a complex case of using two modes of thinking simultaneously, one self-reflexive, the other introspective. —and nevermore!—oh, I bite my knuckles so as not to start shaking with sobs, but there is no holding them back; down I slide with locked brakes, making ‘hoo’ and ‘boohoo’ sounds, and it is all such humiliating physical nonsense: the hot blinking, the feeling of suffocation,

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the dirty handkerchief, the convulsive yawning alternating with the tears—I just can’t, can’t live without you. I blow my nose, swallow, and then all over again try to persuade the chair which I clutch, the desk which I pound, that I can’t boohoo without you. [—и никогда больше, и кусаю себе руки, чтобы не затрястись, и вот не могу, съезжаю, плачу на тормозах, на б и на у, и все это такая унизительная физическая чушь: горячее мигание, чувство удушья, грязный платок, судорожная, вперемежку со слезами, зевота,—ах не могу без тебя… и высморкавшись, переглотнув, вот опять начинаю доказывать стулу, хватая его, столу, стуча по нему, что без тебя не бобу.]

The passage is structured by a sequence of interchanging modes of perception. It starts with a visual image of the narrator glancing at himself from aside. An audio version of the same thing follows with a “boohoo” resulting from nasal congestion, whereupon mogu (can) in “I can’t [do] without you” sounds like boboo (in Russian). Thus, tactile perception is present, as well. Everything is compacted into one episode, even though some thirty or forty years later psychologists would try to convince us that every person has a dominant mode of perception. This may be the case with people, but it is not with narrators in literary fiction. This type of method in Nabokov has been described in detail by Marina Grishakova (2002). “To persuade the chair which I clutch, the desk which I pound” is replete with reminiscences of Russian literature, ranging from Chekhov’s (Čexov) character in The Cherry Orchard addressing a piece of furniture as “My dear and honoured case!” to Nikolaj Gogol’s The Inspector General where we read “Alexander of Macedon was a hero, it is true. But that’s no reason for breaking chairs.” The last phrase is well known in Russia and often used to ironically describe people who tend to be too self-involved and taken away by their own stories to react politely to others. The English version contains an allusion to “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, which is not so evident in the Russian original. The allusion to Poe might well be a marker of Nabokov’s ironic self-reference to the American icon he was to later use so extensively in Lolita. That’s from a banal questionnaire, which ghosts do not answer… [Слышишь ли меня? (Are you able to hear me?) Банальная анкета, на которую не откликаются духи…]

Here, a sequence is at work which Bakhtin would characterize as dialogism. In my terms, however, this is not an instance of dialogism but of the reflexive mode of thinking. One asks, and the other responds. It is very peremptory: no sooner has a smile, not even a head, appeared, than it is endowed with no less than the



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authority of narration, whereas a second voice says that ghosts do not answer, so that there is no point in asking silly questions. but how willingly our death-cell mates respond for them: ”I know!” (pointing skyward at random), “I’ll be glad to tell you!” [но как охотно за них отвечают односмертники наши; я знаю! (пальцем в небо) вот позвольте я вам скажу…]

The picture drawn with odnosmertniki (deathmates) is quite peculiar. The morphological model according to which this neologism is formed is frequent: classmates, schoolmates, flatmates, cellmates, etc. A group of individuals having a common attribute is identified, distinguishing that group from all others. Classmates are those who were in the same class, where others do not belong. In Nabokov’s text, on the contrary, the attribute is non-distinctive: death is something that envelops all, with no chance for anyone to escape. Here, blending is reversed once again. The contradiction contained in the word “deathmates” results not from the word itself, nor is contextual. To grasp the bitter irony of the word, one has to go back to its origin, the way it was produced step-by-step. the hollow of your temple, the forget-me-not gray of an eye squinting at an incipient kiss, the placid expression of your ears when you would lift up your hair [Милая твоя голова (Your darling head), ручеек виска, незабудочная серость косящего на поцелуй глаза, тихое выражение ушей, когда поднимала волосы]

Here comes the head. Ručeëk viska (literally, “the streamlet of your temple”) suggests staring closely at something from an extremely short distance. “The forgetme-not gray” is meant to be misleading, since forget-me-nots are not gray at all. One might wonder why the color of the flower is changed. The author, of course, is free to choose any attribute to match any color. Naïve realism is being playfully attacked in this passage. What was the color of the real eyes? Were there any real eyes at all? Whose eyes? As if authors should always go by some reality… And of course, each character must have a prototype for eye color, inherited rather than invented. Such naïve realism was often played with during the twentieth century, rebuking nineteenth-century realism, when the aim of literature was to portray reality. So, how might “the forget-me-not grey of an eye squinting at an incipient kiss” be understood? Let us count the kissing heads. There is a kiss, and an eye squinting at it, and another one looking at the temple… So there are at least three people involved. We confront a monstrous three-headed dragon: two heads are kissing, the third is watching. Alternatively, the whole process may be a mere figment of the imagination, as artists are free to imagine whatever they think

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appropriate. “The placid expression of your ears when you would lift up your hair”: why “placid,” or even “quiet”? Here, translation from the English is literal, which is hard to trace in the backwards translation of an “I’m all ears” kind of idiom. What is meant here is that the heroine is very attentive. This is not the first occurrence of English in Nabokov’s Russian text: she spoke some English, and the cat was partly English (from Cheshire), to say nothing of “nevermore” standing next to Pushkin and Carroll to refer to Edgar Allan Poe, whose cats (e. g., “The Black Cat”) are quite famous, too. So why should English be left out if Latin has been brought in? how can I reconcile myself to your disappearance, to this gaping hole [in life] into which slide everything—my whole life, wet gravel, objects and habits—and what tombal railings can prevent me from tumbling, with silent relish, into this abyss? Vertigo of the soul. [как мне примириться с исчезновением, с этой дырой в жизни, куда все теперь осыпается, скользит, вся моя жизнь, мокрый гравий, предметы, привычки… и какая могильная ограда может помешать мне тихо и сытно повалиться в эту пропасть. Душекружение.]

Once again, we are confronted with a case of complex geometry. Imagine that life can have a hole in it, like a bagel, and watch what happens next. Everything, including life itself, slides into that bagel’s hole. This means the bagel has collapsed into its own hole! That is another example of invertible Matrëškas. “Tombal railings” helps us visualize a cemetery. And yet I am inclined to think that the locus is highly imaginary and that the imaginary nature of the cemetery is emphasized. The reason is that a tombal railing is a distinctive feature of Russian Orthodox graveyards, while this would be quite unusual in Italy or France, where the story takes place. Dušekruženie (vertigo of the soul) is yet another of the author’s numerous coinages, confirming that we are in this multiheaded space of self-reflection. Moreover, the reader has to decide how to overcome the obvious ambiguity at the end of passage. “Vertigo of the soul” might be read as the answer to the “What tombal railings can prevent me from tumbling […] into this abyss?” Or it might be understood as a self-reflexive comment on the passage we have read. It may also introduce the passage that follows as a shifting device to keep the reader trapped in the eternal “Do you remember?” repetition. Remember how, right after you died, I hurried out of the sanatorium, not walking but sort of stamping and even dancing with pain (life having got jammed in the door like a finger)… [Помнишь, как тотчас после твоей смерти я выбежал из санатория и не шел, а как-то притоптывал и даже пританцовывал (прищемив не палец, а жизнь)…]



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Jamming not a finger but a life is another bagel. Jamming of life has occurred, but the picture goes on to show how a jammed life is an inverted literalized metaphor—like a finger (or a toe, as in Russian the same word, palec, means both). For this reason, I went “not walking but dancing,” since my toe (life) hurts. This is a reverse move, a metaphor broken down into its literal meaning, working instead of or even as a metaphor. Normally we are not supposed to see the literal meaning of metaphors, just the figurative ones. Nabokov often does this the other way round. As it turns out, both meanings are at work in this passage: jamming of life and jamming a toe. alone on that winding road among the exaggeratedly scaly pines and the prickly shields of agaves, in a green armored world that quietly drew in its feet so as not to catch my disease. […один на той витой дороге между чрезвычайно чешуйчатых сосен и колючих щитов агав, в зеленом забронированном мире, тихонько подтягивавшем ноги, чтобы от меня не заразиться.]

We have to diagnose a hypertrophy of the subject using a term taken from literary theory—metaphor—so as to avoid adopting psychiatric language. The narrator has such a peculiar relationship with the world that the world is afraid of catching his life jamming. In other words, the world can also see that life is “jammed” and draws its feet back just in case, so as not to go limp, and it is awfully scared. “[E]xaggeratedly scaly pines and the prickly shields of agaves” expresses the idea of armor: the world is trying to defend itself. Ah, yes—everything around me kept warily, attentively silent, and only when I looked at something did that something give a start and begin ostentatiously to move, rustle, or buzz, pretending not to notice me [О да, все кругом опасливо и внимательно молчало, и только когда я смотрел на что-нибудь, это что-нибудь, спохватившись, принималось деланно двигаться или шелестеть или жужжать, словно не замечая меня]

This is how children behave in a nursery school. When the teacher enters, they pretend to be asleep. In Nabokov’s text, this is reversed. When the narrator enters, Nature pretends not to notice him. What a wonderful world! “Indifferent nature,” says Pushkin. Nonsense! A continuous shying away would be a more accurate description. [«Равнодушная природа»—какой вздор! Сплошное чурание, вот это вернее.]

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The allusion to Pushkin is left for the reader to grasp in the original. What a shame, though. You were such a darling. [Жалко же. Такая была дорогая.]

The juxtaposition of žalko and dorogaja makes up a double beat of lexical units, as in a dictionary. Žalko has two meanings: the emotion of pity and the condition of greediness. Similarly, dorogaja can mean dear to me emotionally or expensive, pricey. Following is another case of informational ambiguity for the reader to overcome: And, holding on to you from within by a little button, our child went with you. But, my poor sir, one does not make a child to a woman when she has tuberculosis of the throat. Involuntary translation from French into Hadean. [И держась снутри за тебя, за пуговку, наш ребенок за тобой последовал. Но, мой бедный господин, не делают женщине брюха, когда у нее горловая чахотка. Невольный перевод с французского на адский.]

Here, the whole idea is structured backwards. You died in your sixth month and took the remaining twelve weeks with you, not paying off your debt in full, as it were. [Умерла ты на шестом своем месяце и унесла остальные, как бы не погасив полностью долга.]

This is where žalko and dorogaja, the words that have put both the emotion of pity and the condition of greediness into play, are fully literalized. The guy was robbed of three months. How much I wanted her to bear me a child, the red-nosed widower informed the walls): the red-nosed widower is the narrator, so he has switched over to third-person narration. [А как мне хотелось, сообщил красноносый вдовец стенам, иметь от нее ребеночка.] Êtes-vous tout à fait certain, docteur, que la science ne connaît pas de ces cas exceptionnels où l’enfant naît dans la tombe? “And the dream I had” that garlicky doctor [who was at the same time Falter] replying with exceptional readiness that yes, of course it sometimes did happen, and that such children [i. e., the posthumously born] were known as cadaverkins.



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[И сон, который я видел: будто этот чесночный доктор (он же не то Фальтер, не то Александр Васильевич) необыкновенно охотно отвечал, что да, как же, это бывает, и таких (то есть посмертно рожденных) зовут трупсиками.]

This last neologism, trupsik (cadaverkin), is coined in accordance with a pattern that did not exist in the Russian language at the time of Nabokov’s writing, even though it is typical for English. One word slips into another like a banknote goes into a wallet. Such is the case with Nabokov’s trupsiki: the word trup (cadaver, dead body) is full, and the pupsik part is just guessable. Pupsik is a very small baby doll, so the word is used tenderly, similar to English “baby,” “sweetie,” etc. The cadaverkin image uses the same geometrical pattern as a number of other episodes we have already discussed. The cadaverkin image, along with an ‘Indifferent nature’ citation, is part of a lengthy allusion to Pushkin’s poem “Wondering the noisy streets” (“Brožu li ja vdol’ ulits šumnyx”). If we take the poem as a whole, we will find all of its themes in the opening episode of Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule”: death, temple, oaktree, infant, grave. In Nabokov’s text, everything is turned inside out, though, and inverted. In Pushkin’s poem we read: “When I caress a dear child, I’m already thinking: goodbye!”

3 Conclusion Pushkin’s allusions, and the numerous invertible Matryoshkas and cases of informational ambiguity we have observed in the opening page of Nabokov’s story, show how the basic structure and general mechanisms of blending theory might be used to observe narratives in their making. When used with a reflexive mode of thinking as an additional tool, it reveals the two or more input spaces several times in a row. Once blended, the elements are then separated only to be blended again. We need to go from blended space upward, checking the input spaces to see where the elements at work belong and how both the ideas and their form develop in interaction with each other. I call this method of analysis Generative Narratology Framework and submit that it might be used to construct a hypothetical version of the way the creative process is organized in terms of monitoring, regulating and controlling narrative progression.4

4 I would like to thank my friends and colleagues Olga Voronia, Boris Averin and Ivan Delazari for their help and encouragement. The paper was made possible by the support of a Saint

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Works Cited Akturk, Ahmet Oguz, and Ismail Sahin. 2011. “Literature Review on Metacognition and its Measurement.” Social and Behavioral Studies 15: 3731–3736. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981 [1937]. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” In M. M. B. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 41–83. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bermúdez, José Luis. 1998. The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dimaggio, Giancarlo et al. 2008. “Know Yourself and You Shall Know the Other… to a Certain Extent: Multiple Paths of Influence of Self-Reflection on Mindreading.” Consciousness and Cognition 17: 778–789. Davydov, Sergey. 2004. Teksty-matryoshky Vladimira Nabokova [Matryoshkky Style Texts by Vladimir Nabokov]. Saint Petersburg: Kirtsideli. Dolinin, Aleksandr. 1997. “Zagadka nedopisannogo romana” [The Enigma of the Unfinished Novel]. Zvezda 12: 215–224. Fenigstein, Allan, Michael F. Scheier and Arnold H. Buss. 1975. “Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 43 (4): 522–527. Fletcher, Paul C. et al. 1995. “Other minds in brain: a functional imaging study of ‘theory of mind’ in story comprehension.” Cognition 57: 109–128. Grishakova, Marina. 2002. “Vizual’naia poetika V. Nabokova” [Nabokov’s Visual Poetics]. Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 54 (2): 205–228. Herman, David. 2004. “From Narrative Narcissism to Distributed Intelligence: Reflexivity as Cognitive Instrument in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.” Frame 17 (2/3): 27–43. Herman, David. 2006. “Genette meets Vygotsky: Narrative Embedding and Distributed Intelligence.” Language and Literature 15 (4): 69–79. Johnson, Donald Barton. 1985. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Kircher, Tilo, and Dirk Leube. 2003. “Self-consciousness, self-agency, and schizophrenia.” Consciousness and Cognition 12: 656–669. Lane, R. D., and G. E. Schwartz, 1987. “Levels of Emotional Awareness: A Cognitive Developmental Theory and its Application to Psychopathology.” American Journal of Psychiatry. 144: 133–143. Musholt, Kristina. 2013. “Self-Consciousness and Nonconceptual Content.” Springer Philosophical Studies 163: 649–672. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1973 [1942]. “Ultima Thule.” Translated by Vladimir Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov. The New Yorker April 7: 38–54. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2000 [1942]. “Ultima Thule.” In V. N. Sobranie sočinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomax [Collected Russian Language Works in Five Volumes], edited by M. Kozikova. 113–139. Saint Petersburg: Simpozium. Pushkin, Alexander. 2004a.[1820]. Ruslan and Ludmila. Translated by Yevgeny Bonver. http:// www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/pushkin/ruslan_and_lyudmila.html

Petersburg State University Grant (Cognitive mechanisms overcoming information ambiguity 0.38.515.2013).



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Pushkin, Alexander.1999 [1829]. “Wondering the noisy streets.” Translated by Babette Deutsch. http://www.albionmich.com/inspiration/pushpoems2.html#wan Savanah, Stephane. 2012. “The Concept Possession Hypothesis of Self-Consciousness.” Consciousness and Cognition 21: 713–720. Schneider, Ralf. 2012. “Blending and the Study of Narrative.” In Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, edited by R. S. and Marcus Hartner, 1–26. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Timofeev, Valery. 1983. “O metodah realizacii filosofskoi koncepcii v khudozhestvennom proizvedenii” [Methods of Manifestation of a Philosophical Concept in a Work of Literature]. Tret’ja vsesojuznaja konferencija molodyh uchenyh-filologov, edited by G. M. Čoxonelidze, 171–172. Tbilisi: Mincniereba. Timofeev, Valery. 1999. “O jazykah avangarda” [Languages of the Avant-Garde]. Vestnik fililogicheskogo fakul’teta Instituta Inostrannyh Jazykov v Sankt-Peterburge 2/3: 59–62. Vogeley, K. et al. 2001. “Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms of Mind and Self-perspective.” Neuroimage 14: 170–181. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations. New York: Harper & Row. Wolf, Werner. 2014 [2011]. “Illusion (Aesthetic).” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1: 270–287. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Also available at: living handbook of narratology: http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/illusion-aesthetic (Revised 17 January 2014)

Natalya Bekhta (Giessen)

Emerging Narrative Situations: A Definition of We-Narratives Proper Recent years have seen a considerable rise in interest in fiction that challenges existing narratological paradigms. Untypical strategies of narration give rise to new narrative forms. Since the end of the twentieth century, there have been an increasing number of second-person texts, narratives in the plural and other experiments with narrative voice. At present, second-person texts have been theorized to a considerable degree, but narration in the plural still remains under-researched. This is especially obvious from articles on we-narratives in which extremely diverse texts are grouped under a single rubric. Defining we-narrative is difficult for a number of reasons, but doing so is necessary, I claim, for the phenomenon to be accessible to systematic investigation. In order to delimit we-narrative proper, I propose to combine the existing structuralist and contextual approaches. This definition requires a re-conceptualization of the narrator category and thus of the narrator’s identity, knowledge, scope of focalization and narrative levels. Furthermore, such a definition will contribute to current attempts to revise classical theories of narrative. On the one hand, the suggested definition of we-narrative proper relies on the criteria used for identifying ‘narrative situations’ (cf. Stanzel 1984 [1979]) and can be considered as a diversification of the classical typology of narrative forms. On the other hand, when defined as a separate narrative situation, we-narratives undermine the very paradigm used for their description and call for a re-conceptualization of the defining categories. In Stanzel’s terms, narrative situation offers a cluster of concepts for describing forms of narration based on mode (Who is narrating? Is there a narrator?), person (What is the relationship between the narrator and the narrated?) and perspective (How is ‘the fictional reality’ perceived? Whose perception mediates the access?).1

1 Here I follow Dorrit Cohn in my observations that Stanzel’s ‘nuclear typology’ of mode, person and perspective anticipates many subsequent discussions such as the division of voice and vision or the fact that there is a close affinity between Stanzel’s and Genette’s principal categories in spite of what is usually acknowledged (Cohn 1981, 159–160). Thus, in what follows I shall use Genette’s hetero- and homodiegesis together with Stanzel’s ‘first person’ and ‘authorial’ narrators whenever the two systems are complementary. Otherwise, I give preference to Stanzel’s terminology for describing the narrator, as it does not automatically relate to categories of narrative embedding (extra- and intradiegesis) which make Genette’s four-part model internally DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-006

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When combined, these categories of narrative transmission2 also serve as defining features for we-narratives, although in a modified form. My reason for drawing on the idea of narrative situation is that it is by treating these features in their totality that one can establish the structurally significant and thus defining qualities of narrative form. The analysis of structural features also requires that contextual considerations be taken into account. In this way, it becomes possible to delimit we-narrative proper, which I call the ‘performative we’, from other uses of we-discourses in fiction, or the ‘indicative we’.3

1 An Emerging Narrative Situation: We-Narration versus We-Narrative When it comes to emerging modes of narration, pronominal experimentation is, arguably, one of the major developments in narrative form since the second half of the twentieth century. Let us consider, for example, alternations between firstand third-person accounts in texts like Alberto Moravia’s novel Io e lui (1971) or Christa Wolf’s Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968); use of two second-person pronouns to designate protagonists in Julio Cortázar’s short story “Usted se tendió a tu lado” (1985); a venture beyond first-person in Monique Wittig’s Le corps lesbien

contradictory (cf. Walsh 2010, 37–41). Furthermore, the hybrid nature of narrative situation can be considered salutary in so far as it highlights a “disregard for the communicative model’s commitment to a literal mode of transmission” (Walsh 2010, 44)—a destabilizing aspect of Genette’s model that has led to problems with classifying plural narrators and otherwise untypical strategies of narration. 2 The notion of narrative transmission (or mediacy in Stanzel’s use) calls for a caveat: it underlies the idea of narrative situation but at the same time cannot be extended to all narrative fiction. It applies well to we-narratives, as such narratives have a manifest narrator with a distinct voice and produce the effect of ‘re-telling’ of a story. However, ‘transmission’ is not a universal quality of narratives. I elaborate on this point is Section 5 below. 3 It must be clarified from the outset that in this article my goal is to delimit a new narrative form with the help of the notion of narrative situation and not to revise the Typological Circle as such which has proved a daunting and unsuccessful task, pointing out many contradictions inherent to this form of typology. Besides an attempt to update the Typological Circle with the second-person narrative undertaken by Fludernik (see Reitan [2011] for a summary and critique), I have in mind Richardson’s (1994, 77) attempt to place we-narrative on the Circle which, while schematizing the relationship between ‘we’ and other narrative modes metaphorically, is not compatible with the classificatory principles of the Circle and cannot be regarded as a revision. For a critique of the term narrative situation itself (especially its hybrid aspect), see Wolf Schmid (2010 [2005], 90–91).



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(1973). More recently, narrative theorists have drawn attention to an abundance of second-person narratives such as Lorrie Moore’s short stories (1985), Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) or Édouard Levé’s Suicide (2008).4 Clearly, the Genettian choice between two grammatical forms (first or third person) no longer covers the gamut of the contemporary novel. The time has thus come to act on one of the possibilities for revision of Stanzel’s typical narrative situations: the three most frequently developed types “in the history of the novel”5 which, he noted, “can be revised at any time, should the future development of the novel demand it” (Stanzel 1984 [1979], 61). Two new narrative situations that emerge in contemporary fiction are both primarily modifications of the distinction of person: second-person narrative and first-person plural narrative. While there have already been several publications on the topic, namely by Susan Lanser (1992), Uri Margolin (1996, 2000), Brian Richardson (2006), Amit Marcus (2008b), Monika Fludernik (2011), to name the key ones, the term “we-narrative” in narratology is currently highly unconsolidated, and definitions of this phenomenon are sketchy at best. This becomes obvious when one studies a bibliography of we-narratives compiled by Fludernik (2011). Apart from her own examples, Fludernik includes texts analyzed in other articles on the topic. The bibliography contains a mixture of examples such as William Faulkner’s short stories “A Rose for Emily” (1995 [1930]) and “This Will Be Fine” (1995 [1935]), the former being a paradigmatic example of we-narrative proper and the latter, of a first-person narrative (sensu Stanzel), or novels such as The Virgin Suicides (1993) by Jeffrey Eugenides and Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987). Again, The Virgin Suicides is a good example of we-narrative, whereas A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is what Richardson might call a multiperson novel, composed of three sequential accounts by first-person narrators that contribute to a communal story. In this article, I suggest that we-narrative should be viewed in its own right, distinct from first-person singular. Yet it should also be distinguished from other

4 For further examples, see an extensive overview in Richardson (1994, 2006) and in Fludernik (1993). See Rolf Reitan’s (2011) insightful article for possibly the only attempt so far to bring together “to a real confrontation with one another” (148) the three perspectives on second-person narratives: Brian Richardson’s, Irene Kacandes’ and Monika Fludernik’s. The impetus behind Reitan’s article is similar to my present attempt to set properly we-narratives off from other uses of ‘we’ in fiction. 5 The three typical situations are first-person narrative (e. g., David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn), authorial narrative (e. g., Vanity Fair and Sons and Lovers) and figural narrative (e. g., A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Mrs Dalloway) (cf. Stanzel 1971 [1955]).

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uses of we-discourses in fiction.6 In fiction ‘we’ is regularly found in non-narrative literary genres: lyrical poetry, hymns and songs (e. g., of solidarity and protest) or Greek tragedy (the chorus’ speeches).7 Non-fictional narratives that employ the ‘we’ form represent a significant part of everyday storytelling and are, in most cases, reports of past activities of a collective agency (e. g., stories from a group of friends who have experienced an adventure or a couple that has just returned from holiday). So one may speak of the relatively few literary narratives that are written in the ‘we’ form. Instances of we-narration consist predominantly of short stories and individual chapters or passages of plural narration in otherwise multiperson novels.8 Entire novels that use we-narration throughout are relatively rare. Nevertheless, it has been noted that this form has started to gain in popularity in fiction as well as in theoretical investigations (Richardson 2009, 150–151). One of the broadest uses of the phrase “‘we’ fictional narrative” is proposed by Marcus, who subsumes under this heading texts with “a single narrator speaking on behalf of others (e. g., Franz Kafka’s ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’)” and those “co-narrated by two or more narrators (e. g., Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook)” as well as “narratives in which there are thematically significant shifts from ‘we’ to other pronouns and vice versa” (Marcus 2008a, 135). While acknowledging that there is a significant structural difference between these cases, Marcus nonetheless avoids “a more rigorous definition,” because of “the scarcity of such narratives” (2008a, 135) and because “some of the most noteworthy ways of employing the first-person plural are best illustrated in texts that alternate between ‘we’ and other forms of narration” (Marcus 2008b, 2). In light of this terminological confusion, I would like to propose precisely the kind of more rigorous definition that Marcus strives to avoid in the desire to cover as many examples of narration in the plural as possible. This definition will be based on maintaining the structural distinction between ‘narration’ and ‘narrative’ and on the contextual difference between indicative and performative uses of ‘we’-narration.

6 Instances of ‘we’-narration often occur in otherwise first-person narratives and cannot function as a qualifier of we-narrative proper. Much in the same spirit, Reitan (2011, 152) analyses the existing approaches to the definition of second-person narratives and concludes that some of its cases, namely the occurrences of ‘you’ in otherwise third-person narratives (i. e., authorial or figural narrative situations) does not create a second-person proper. 7 Cf. Margolin (1996, 116). 8 See bibliographies in Richardson (2006, 141; 2009, 158–159) and Fludernik (2011, 136–141).



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2 Creation of a Plural Narrative Voice and its Linguistic Peculiarities The first basic distinction that becomes obscured in Marcus’s work is that between ‘narration’ and ‘narrative’.9 Narration in the plural is a narrative technique used in various narrative situations: in first-person narratives (mostly indicatively), or in authorial narratives (indicatively and in the form of pluralis auctoris), or in what I propose to call we-narratives proper (mostly performatively). We-narration thus should not be equated with a full-blown we-narrative. In other words, most of the examples that Marcus covers as noteworthy instances of the first-person plural are passages of we-narration. These passages offer a lot of interesting material for analysis, but they do so within the dynamic of those narrative situations in which they are used and thus work differently from we-narration in a fully realized we-narrative. Second, I propose that we distinguish between two uses of the first-person plural pronoun: indicative and subjunctive, which might also be compared to constative and performative.10 In what follows, I shall use the pair ‘indicative’/‘performative’, as these terms have a wider currency beyond theoretical grammar. Strictly speaking, these grammatical distinctions, adopted from the category of the verb, do not describe the moods in which the we-pronoun is used, since pronouns cannot acquire moods. They can, however, be metaphorically applied to describe how the pronoun is used in a particular act and what its functions and effects are. For ‘we’, the prototypical function, as Johannes Helmbrecht’s suggests, is to establish, around the ‘I’ of the speaker, groups of “various sets of addressees and non-speech act participants” (Helmbrecht 2002, 44). This is what I would call a straightforward indicative use—that is, an indication or statement that something is the case. If ‘we’ does not do this, then one can single out two non-prototypical uses of ‘we’: (a) ‘we’ is used to express an emotional or a social connection of the speaker with a group but does not refer to the speaker herself, as she does not belong to this group properly speaking (e. g., a football fan saying ‘we won the

9 Marcus seems to be using the two categories synonymously, for example: “Like first-person singular narration, ‘we’ narration is based on personal experience […]. ‘We’ narratives lack the objectivity, reliability, and veracity conventionally attributed to third-person narration” (2008b, 1–2; emphasis added). 10 I am indebted to Daniel Hartley for this observation. My use of verbal categories in this case also alludes to Genette’s (1980 [1972], 161–162) approach to ‘narrative moods’ and his justification of the applicability of the category of mood to narrative discourse.

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game’); and (b) ‘we’ is used for singular reference, either referring solely to the speaker or to the addressee but not to any group. It includes: pluralis majestatis, or the royal ‘we’ (‘We are not amused’, said Queen Victoria) which, similarly to the nursery ‘we’ (‘And how are we doing today, sweetie?’), invokes “institutional power or superiority of the speaker” (Helmbrecht 2002, 35); pluralis modestatis, which is the muting of “I”;11 pluralis auctoris, or authorial ‘we’, which is sometimes inclusive (I+you) and draws in the speaker/writer and the listener/reader, often in order to invoke empathy (‘And so, dear reader, we shall come back to our hero’). I would like to suggest that a fictional narrating ‘we’, in its performative function, goes further than the non-prototypical ‘we’ and completely erases the need for the ‘speaker’ in the singular, being a reference of a group to itself—a reference which, at the same time, calls this group into being. So by the indicative use of ‘we’, I mean an individual speaker’s straightforward reference to herself and another person or group to which she belongs or with which she associates herself situationally (i. e., at the moment of speaking) or more generally. Typical examples of such usages of ‘we’ (e. g., ‘We need to buy more milk’) come from non-fictional non-narrative discourses: many kinds of speeches, reports, declarations, petitions and prayers—all designated to represent a collective agency of some sort, be it a political party or a community of academics working on a common project. This use will rely on the prototypical function of ‘we’. Crucially, the use of such indicative ‘we’ alone is not a sufficient condition for the creation of a plural, collective voice and a collective narration which is one of the defining features of we-narrative. For example, Faulkner’s short story “That will be fine” (1935) opens as follows: (1) We could hear the water running into the tub. We looked at the presents scattered over the bed where mamma had wrapped them in the colored paper, with our names on them so Grandpa could tell who they belonged to easy when he would take them off the tree. “This one is yours,” I said. “Sho now,” Rosie said. “You come and get in that tub like your mamma tell you.” (Faulkner 1995 [1976], 265)

The direct speech that comes immediately after the opening paragraph identifies the I-speaker, who is a child, and his nanny Rosie, making it clear that the ‘we’ in the opening paragraph is an indicative situational reference. The story itself is a typical first-person narrative where, unlike in we-narrative proper, the narra-

11 When one pronominal formula is used instead of another (‘we’ instead of ‘I’), the effect is that “the sender puts himself in the background and gives a general opinion without referring explicitly to himself” (Dieltjens and Heynderickx 2007, 237).



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tor-character is or has been physically present during the situations he is speaking about and is subject to the limitations of the first-person singular at all times, even when we-reference is used. The performative ‘we’, on the other hand, creates a more complex reference: it expresses something that is imagined or wished, creating something that did not exist before. The performative ‘we’ erases the single speaker who utters it and constructs a plural storytelling voice and a plural narrator, communal or collective. In other words, the speech act of the we-narrator with regard to itself is performative in that it creates this very narrator.12 As I shall discuss below, such performative ‘we’-references create plural narrators in the fullest sense. They have two salient features: first, they never imply the ‘I’ or even hint at the possibility of a singular individual speaking for the group; second, they often contribute to a narrative mode that James Phelan has termed “lyric progression” (Phelan 2005, 10). Importantly, however, these two features—as well as we-narrative proper as such—do not occur in one line or even in a few sentences. They become detectable over time, through repetition, and thus it is difficult to demonstrate this phenomenon in one quotation: it is the “[r]epeated use of the pronoun [that] reinforces the idea of solidarity, as each verb, each sentence marked by the first person plural suggests common thought and common action” (Fulton 2003, 1106). An example of we-narrative proper with a performative ‘we’ that creates such a communal narrator is Joshua Ferris’s novel Then We Came to the End (2007). Right from the beginning, a situation of narration is set up which recurs throughout the novel. (2) We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. (Ferris 2007, 3)

This passage introduces the novel’s plural narrator-protagonist: a community of office co-workers. Rather than voicing a fully homogeneous group, ‘we’ is used to move between general statements that are true for all group members such as “We were fractious and overpaid” and particularizations true only for parts of the group: “most of us,” “a few of us,” “one or two people”—the latter being the most group-detached reference. Moreover, the communal narrator acquires an

12 Here I directly contradict Margolin’s (2001, 244) observation that speech acts of such narrators regarding ‘we’ are primarly constative.

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individualized voice by expressing thoughts or dreams in what can be termed a free indirect we-mode, e. g., “Sometimes we questioned,” “We thought moving to India might be better.” No ‘I’-reference is conceivable—nor, in fact, needed. And the novel never provides one. Unlike Faulkner’s ‘we’, the office ‘we’ exhibits self-awareness: this community is capable of commenting on ‘ourselves’ being a community. Unlike Faulkner’s ‘we’, the office ‘we’ functions as a fully autonomous character, not only with collective actions but with thoughts, emotions, reflections on ‘our’ narration and comments to the narratee: “Is this boring you yet? It bored us every day. Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die” (Ferris 2007, 4). Such we-reference creates a communal character-narrator, capable of speaking as one, and establishes a peculiar narrative situation in which the authority of the narrative voice is at once personal and authorial, subjectively individual and generally true, all at the same time. The distinction between the uses of we-discourse is thus not grammatical but contextual. The opening sentences of Faulkner’s story and of Ferris’s novel can both be read as indicative. Yet, as the text progresses, the latter acquires a performative mode. So the first example (1) is a typical first-person narrative whereas the second (2) is what I propose to call we-narrative proper. As I have mentioned above, in fiction ‘we’ figures most prominently in non-narrative genres. In non-fictional, everyday usage of ‘we’, this pronominal form is familiar. In narrative fiction, however, ‘we’ can break its automatized perception: as a collective voice starts to take form, we-narration stands out as something distinct from its non-fictional applications.13 However, both in its indicative and performative roles, the we-reference remains “the most complex category of all person categories” (Helmbrecht 2002, 33), as has frequently been observed in linguistic investigations. In fiction and non-fiction alike, the major linguistic peculiarity of the first-person plural pronoun is its ambiguity of reference. Personal pronouns are semantically empty: they cannot have a meaning until assigned to a context. In other words, the reference ‘I’ is not clear until somebody utters it in a particular situation. With ‘we’, however, the situation is more complicated. Who utters ‘we’? From the viewpoint of enunciative linguistics, ‘we’ cannot have a voice, as a voice is an exclusive privilege of the first-person singular pronoun only. Often, it is not possible to identify all of the singularities that compose a ‘we’ even if the

13 Cf. Richardson (2006, 37) on a comparison between the “‘unnatural’ from the outset” second-person voice and a less odd we-narration, and Marcus (2008b, 2–3) on the semantic instability of the we-pronoun concealed by its everyday use.



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context is given. The first-person plural pronoun “annexes an indistinct mass of other persons to ‘I’” (Benveniste 1971 [1966], 203), thus producing a vast variety of possible combinations. In enunciation theory it is a given that the ‘I’ is one and subjective and does not allow for pluralization: If there cannot be several “I”s conceived of by an actual “I” who is speaking, it is because “we” is not a multiplication of identical objects but a junction between “I” and the “non-I”, no matter what the content of this “non-I” may be. This junction forms a new totality which is of a very special type whose components are not equivalent: in “we” it is always “I” which predominates since there cannot be “we” except by starting with “I”, and this “I” dominates the “non-I” element by means of its transcendent quality. The presence of “I” is constitutive of “we.” (Benveniste 1971 [1966], 202)

On the one hand, then, when somebody says ‘we’, it is a singular ‘I’ speaking for or on behalf of a group. There are only very few cases when ‘we’ can have a voice in the full sense of the word. That is, when all of the singularities constituent of ‘we’ can speak in unison: in hymns, collective prayers, etc. On the other hand, the uttered ‘we’ transcends, in some sense, the mere ‘I’ and can create a collectivity, a collective identity; and, at least in fiction, this collectivity can have a plural, collective narrative voice. Although classical narratology follows step-in-step enunciative linguistics and claims that the narrating voice is always an ‘I’, that there is always one single we-sayer on the highest level of narrative embedding,14 I suggest a (fictional) possibility of a plurally collective voice: a voiced totality whose components are equivalent, even if only in the moment of speaking. The ambiguity of the we-form is further complicated by the ability of this pronoun to bring about a change of referent within the same morphological form which, in its turn, brings about a change of perspective. That is, a we-group might change with respect to the number or type of its referents, but this will not be grammatically marked, since, in the English language, ‘we’ does not change.15 In literary narratives, I argue, the ‘we’-narration, if allowed to transcend the ‘I’, is a performative act of the creation of the collective and, in narratological terms, thus offers a technique that expands the epistemological and cognitive possibilities of first-person narration.

14 Cf. Genette (1988 [1983], 97), Prince (1982, 7–15) and Margolin (1996, 123), among others. 15 Cf. analysis of referential ambiguity in Joyce Carol Oates (1999) by Marcus (2008b, 5–6). In other languages the referential ambiguity of the ‘we’-pronoun might be a lot more limited: e. g., in Slovenian the forms of the verb signal the composition of the ‘we’ (as ‘you and me’ or ‘we all’). I am grateful to Wolf Schmid for this observation.

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3 Definition of We-Narrative One of the first attempts to address the phenomenon of narration in the plural was Susan Lanser’s book Fictions of Authority (1992). Lanser’s investigation focused on the relationship between narrative form and form-dependant construction of the authority of narrative voice. She introduces the notion of ‘communal voice’ to complement the categories of authorial and personal voices evoked by authorial and first-person narrative situations. Communal narrative voice is “either a collective voice or a collective of voices that share narrative authority” (Lanser 1992, 21)—authority that is invested in a definable community. This voice can be produced in “a singular form in which one narrator speaks for a collective, a simultaneous form in which a plural ‘we’ narrates, and a sequential form in which individual members of a group narrate in turn”—that is, in a collaborative effort (Lanser 1992, 21). Lanser’s choice of the adjective ‘communal’ to refer to this new type of narrative voice—as opposed, for example, to Margolin’s (2000) more general ‘collective’—has important implications. Based on Raymond Williams’ (1985 [1983]) observations, ‘collective’ seems to be the most encompassing and general designation. It was originally used as an adjective “to describe people acting together” (Williams 1985 [1983], 69). As a subject, it came to cover both a physical description of a group of people and the social and political sense of a specific unit. ‘Community’, on the other hand, as a form of social organization, refers to “the more direct, more total and therefore more significant relationships” as opposed to “the more formal, more abstract and more instrumental relationships of state, or of society” (Williams 1985 [1983], 76). Its distinctive meanings are those of direct relationships, immediacy or locality. Therefore, in the context of we-narration, I treat ‘communal’ and ‘collective’ as specific thematic types of plural narration. In some cases, however, it will be appropriate to use ‘collective’ narrator— in its first, simpler sense of people acting together—as a synonym for ‘plural’ or ‘we-narrator’. ‘Communal’, however, remains reserved to a we-narrator who, as a character, is manifest in a ‘more direct’ and local collective of people, as in the village of Jefferson in “A Rose for Emily,” the community of colleagues in Then We Came to the End, the group of boys and the suburban neighborhood in The Virgin Suicides, and so on. As I have suggested earlier, ‘we’ in narrative fiction is used in two contexts: in the indicative and in the performative. The performative ‘we’ is the core of the plural, collective narrator which is the key characteristic of we-narrative proper. Plural narrator can be described as the collective narrative agent, in Margolin’s sense: it is “a group of two or more individuals represented as a singular higher order entity or agent, a collective individual so to speak, with global properties



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or actions” (2000, 592). The ‘we’ in example (1) is a group of two individuals but does not compose a “singular higher order agent,” being, rather, a situational combination. The ‘we’ in example (2) is already such “collective individual.”16 For Lanser, on the other hand, communal narration is not only a we-narration and not just a multiperson narration, but a narration in which “narrative authority” belongs to a community and is expressed through singular or plural narrative voice, authorized to speak by that community. In recent usage, the term “‘we’-narrative,” it seems, has come to be employed in all three senses, and also in senses that Lanser (1992, 21) did not consider as instances of communal voicing: inclusive ‘we’, often used by George Eliot, Faulkner’s multiple narrators and in cases of several narrations of one and the same event, etc.17 The definition I propose limits we-narrative to Lanser’s simultaneous communal narration only, i. e., a form of collective narrative in which a plural ‘we’ narrates. Why such a limitation? The purpose of the narratological taxonomy of narrative situations is to give a rough description of a particular narrative form, its prototype, which will combine both structural and rhetorical-performative aspects. My purpose here is to define a new narrative form rather than to describe instances of peculiar we-narration. Single narrators speaking on behalf of a community, multiple narrators who narrate in turns and ‘I’-narrators, who indicatively use the pronoun ‘we’ to refer to themselves and other characters—these do not qualify as new narrative forms. In order to be classified as a narrative situation, a narrative form must exhibit a combination of certain formal characteristics. According to Stanzel, these are person (homo- or heterodiegetic, using Genette’s terminology), perspective (internal or external) and mode (teller or reflector). With we-narratives, the dominant characteristic is that of person. The narrator designated by the personal pronoun ‘we’ is both the teller and the character, i. e., a homodiegetic narrator.

16 Note that Margolin’s “collective narrative agent” is a broad designation and encompasses a variety of plural subjects: those covered by plural pronouns (we, they), definite articles/numbers/quantifiers + plural nouns (the girls, a hundred men, some of the students) and collective nouns (the gang) (cf. Margolin 2000, 592–594). Here it is a first-person plural that is understood under a collective narrative agent. 17 Most recently, Patrick Colm Hogan (2013, 248) has taken up the issues of plural narrating voice under the heading of “group narration,” repeating Susan Lanser’s classification: “instantiated group narration,” (an individual speaking for the entire group), “distributed group narration” (where group members speak “as distinct parts of the group”) and “collective voicing” (i. e., we-narration). However, he excludes any performative aspect (e. g., communal or collective) and thus the distinctions very easily become designations of any reference to a group rather than a specific reference to narrative forms.

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This excludes more straightforward cases of authorial inclusive ‘we’ (when ‘we’ is used only on the level of discourse) and indicative uses of ‘we’ by ‘I’-narrators (only on the level of story). Furthermore, we-narrative is characterized by a shifting perspective (of which more below) and teller mode, even though such a narrative often acquires the dynamic of the mode of lyric progression. In light of these considerations, we-narrative proper, even though definable in terms of the classical categories of narrative situation, calls for a modification of these categories. To start with the latter, teller mode in the case of plural narration acquires new characteristics which can best be described with the help of Phelan’s term ‘lyric progression’ (2005, 158–159). Phelan uses the phrase ‘narrative progression’ to refer to “the synthesis of the narrative’s internal logic, as it unfolds from beginning through middle to end, with the developing interests and responses of the audience to that unfolding” (19). Typically, narratives proceed by the introduction, complication and (partial) resolution of instabilities involving matters of story (characters and their situations) and/or discourse (e. g., in the case of unreliability). Lyric narratives, however, combine features of narrative and lyric poetry and are characterized by, firstly, the lack of change in the character narrator. Second, they focus on present situations: “even if […] most of the sentences of the text focus on past events, the narrative still directs our primary interest to the present situation of the character narrator” (Phelan 2005, 158). And, finally, the storyworld plays a secondary role for the reader’s ethical engagement as she engages with the “underlying value structure of the lyric narrative” (159). Typically, we-narratives proper, to a greater or lesser extent, approach this mode of lyric progression. For example, Julie Otsuka’s we-novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) describes the general situation of immigrant Japanese women in the U. S. in the early 1900s. At first sight, Otsuka tells a tragic life-story of Japanese women who travel to the US as ‘picture brides’ in the search of a better life. To do this, she uses the plural narrator but also adds a particularization of the collective voice which is similar to Ferris’s (‘one of us’, ‘some of us’). However, despite the particularizations, individual stories of these women yield themselves to a generalization as the narrative progresses. The story ceases to develop in the typical sense of ‘what happens next’ and lingers more and more on the present situation of the immigrant women. Despite their differences, women’s stories are alike in one crucial factor: they are all in the same social position. Being sent off to marry men they have never met before, these women find themselves under oppression and exploitation on both the domestic and public levels: (3) One of us blamed them [husbands] for everything and wished they were dead. One of us blamed them for everything and wished that she were dead. Others of us learned to live



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without thinking of them at all. We threw ourselves into our work and became obsessed with the thought of pulling one more weed. We put away our mirrors. We stopped combing our hair. We forgot about makeup. Whenever I powder my nose it just looks like frost on a mountain. […] We cooked for them. We cleaned for them. We helped them chop wood. But it was not we who were cooking and cleaning and chopping, it was somebody else. And often our husbands did not even notice we’d disappeared. (Otsuka 2011, 36–37)

The unifying and homogenizing quality of the we-voice thematizes the disappearance of the women’s individuality. Yet, Otsuka avoids the potential emotional dryness of a uniform voice by retaining the particularizations and by inserting quoted speech or thought of individual women, usually limited to one sentence or line. Everything individual, however, always feeds back into the collective. Very soon the focus shifts yet again—from the common misfortunes of women to those of the ethnic minority in general. Due to the morphological and referential nature of the ‘we’ pronoun, this transition to a different type of we-voice is seamless: toward the end of the novel, it turns out that the story is about the insignificance and effacement of the whole community—both women and men—under the working conditions for immigrants and racial attitudes in American society during the 1990s. The reader’s ethical engagement, as Phelan notices in lyrical narratives, becomes more than engagement with the fates of individual characters (whose stories are discernable threads in the collective one) and concerns the general ‘value structure’ of the novel. We-narrative proper is thus a narrative in which the first-person plural pronoun is used on both the level of discourse and on that of the story to designate the narrating instance(s) that are also the narrated entities.18 In the ideal case, this means that there is no reference to the ‘I’19—indeed, no possibility of such a reference—and the narrator is thus a fully-established community or collectivity (cf. office co-workers and women-emigrants in the examples (2)-(3)). Consequently, we-narrative proper is characterized by its peculiar epistemological composition, as it expresses collective knowledge. Another factor is focaliza-

18 Cf. Fludernik (2011, 105), Margolin (1996, 115–116 and 122). Obviously, such a we-group may be the protagonist of the story (as in Buddha in the Attic) or a witness (as in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, 1995) or it can play some other role a narrator-character can assume. 19 There is, however, a grey area on the scale from instances of we-narration in otherwise first-person narratives and we-narratives proper. The main tension in Toby Litt’s novel deadkidsongs (2001), for example, is created due to the strong sense that there is a reconstructible singular speaker behind the mask of the we-narrator. Technically, the novel is a first-person narrative because of the framing one-paragraph story in which a son explains that what follows is his father’s manuscript, a suicide note of sorts. The manuscript is a highly intricate combination of different narrative situations, the most prominent of which is the we-narrative.

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tion, which combines the possibilities of homo- and heterodiegetic narrator. More generally, as example (3) demonstrates, a basic feature of collective we-narratives is the alternation between the individual and the collective: “Both individual and collective levels exist concurrently and are irreducible to each other, so that [there is] an unresolved tension between the two” (Margolin 2000, 592). This tension will become most visible in collective focalization.

4 Narrative Levels in We-Narration Describing we-narratives in terms of narrative levels is known to be problematic. Homodiegesis becomes an unstable qualifier, since a we-narrator exhibits features of narrators from both authorial and first-person narratives, especially when it comes to ‘our’ knowledge. Richardson, for example, observes how we-narration “curiously occupies” both hetero- and homodiegetic levels at once, disclosing the contents of individual characters’ minds: a homodiegetic narrator discloses “that which can only be known by an external heterodiegetic intelligence” (2009, 154–155). In other words, as a character in the narrated story-world—as a homodiegetic singular (undisclosed) member of a group—the ‘we’-narrator cannot be simultaneously omniscient and act in a heterodiegetic authorial role by telling stories of the group’s individual members or other characters. Richardson’s observation, however, is implicitly rooted in the classical conception of the narrator.20 In the next section, I shall argue that this should not be the case with a collective narrator, if this narrator can be understood as a plurality. A we-narrator is a peculiar, amorphous one that spans across time and space and cuts across the level distinction. Fludernik, without relying on the limiting classical conception of the narrator, nevertheless speaks of a “puzzling and disturbing” “ontological illogicality of a crossing of borders” (2011, 120–121) in we-narration. She observes how, in examples of pluralis auctoris, “the personae stationed on the extradiegetic level of the narrative seem to be moving metaphorically into the fictional world” (2011, 121)—a move for which the communication model of narrative cannot account. Extradiegesis thus becomes problematic, as the authorial and reader positions coincide with the intradiegetic we-voice in the storyworld. Fludernik suggests that, since the boundary between the extradiegetic and the diegetic levels is

20 Cf. his analysis of Conrad’s we-narrator (Richardson 2009, 146). For an overview of the socalled pan-narrator theory of narrative and a convincing critique, see Köppe and Stühring (2011).



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not watertight, there is a continuity between the fictional and factual realms: a we-reference makes the real-world reader immerse into a fictional text (2011, 122). While it might be argued that with real readers this kind of immersion may sometimes be the case, Fludernik’s approach also extends similar immersive abilities to fictional narrators: for her, extradiegetic narrators are outside fiction, and in we-narratives, “at key moments they step into the fiction and seem to become part of it” (2011, 120). This, of course, is already a reference to real authors rather than to fictional narrators. Narrators remain fictional no matter what the diegetic level, except when they become comparable to real authors who may appear to be talking in their own voices, even though this is under the regime of fictionality (cf. Walsh 1997, 510–511). Without going into a more extensive debate, it suffices to say that we-narratives demonstrate the limitations of Genettian narrative levels in several ways. What could then be a more suitable terminological language for a description of the workings of we-narrative? One of the few radical critiques of the communicative model for fiction and Genettian level distinction has been launched by Richard Walsh. As Walsh observes in his essay “Person, Level, Voice” (2010), Genette’s model of levels and persons is self-contradictory, and the distinctions cannot be sustained, even notwithstanding the complications of plural narration. Homo-/heterodiegesis, being “a matter of the status of narrative act,” is an epistemological matter (Walsh 2010, 38): whether or not the narrator is involved in the story has consequences for the types and scope of information she can be privy to (e. g., other character’s thoughts). This distinction rests on the ontological discontinuity between the levels. Extra-/intradiegesis is an ontological matter of narrative embedding and becomes problematic at the extradiegetic level, since it both demands and contradicts ontological discontinuity. For Genette, the extradiegetic narrator has to be both outside diegesis (extradiegetic) (as Fludernik also notes) and still part of fiction, that is both representing (in terms of level) and represented (in terms of person, e. g., homodiegetic). Extradiegetic homodiegetic narrators, which would be a typical case of we-narrators, “are indeed characters, and if there is any meaninglessness lurking in that formulation, it can be located in the concept of the extradiegetic itself. Narrators are always outside the frame of the stories they tell: ‘Extradiegetic’ appears to have an additional force of placing the narrator outside representation” (Walsh 1997, 498). What Walsh advocates, instead of the Genettian approach, is a return to Plato’s distinction between diegesis (the poet speaking in her own voice) and mimesis (the poet speaking in the voice of a character) with the acknowledgement that any narrative may contain other narratives. The consequences this rhetorical model has for the problem of the we-narrator is that it allows for a simple but

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liberating recognition of “fiction’s imaginative freedom” (Walsh 2010, 45). Thus, a narrator in Then We Came to the End (2007) can be a group of office co-workers, and this group can tell stories which might contain other stories in other narrative modes, as is the case in a chapter written in third-person figural narration of Lynn Manson’s battle with cancer (Ferris 2007, 196–230). Authors may choose to create (i. e., ‘imitate’, speak ‘as if’) collective and communal voices. By virtue of being a collectivity and not due to belonging to a certain level, these narrators can make use of particular forms of collective knowledge, spatial, temporal and other possibilities outside the scope of a typical first-person singular narrator.

5 Plural Narrator We-narrative proper establishes the dominance of a collective narrative agent and makes it analytically unproductive to insist on the singularity of the narrator that would somehow frame such collective narration. A plural, collective narrator is not ‘actually’ a covert singular one on a virtual extradiegetic level, nor is it an anonymous member of the we-group who ‘actually’ does all the talking but without referring to herself. As an example of false interpretative problems that the latter approach creates, one can refer to numerous attempts to establish the singular gendered identity of the narrator behind a we-narration in Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.” Without any evidence from the text, the narrating ‘we’ has nevertheless been referred to as an anonymous male narrator who is either Emily’s neighbor, a former suitor or an old friend of her father’s.21 But it is precisely by refusing to provide any textual evidence as to gender and singular identity of the narrator that Faulkner constructs a townsfolk community of Jefferson, thus conveying an image of the South and creating the ethical ambiguity of “A Rose for Emily.” The reader of the story faces a moral dilemma and is unable to either condemn or justify Emily for the murder she committed. The need to hunt for evidence of a singular narrator has been motivated partly by the classical definition of the narrator as an always-present singular structuring authority and partly by the logic of the non-fictional communicative act applied to fiction: since out of three pronominal persons it is only the ‘I’-sin-

21 The community that narrates has been treated, for example, as an anonymous narrator-neighbour (Kempton 1947, 104), a male “spokesman for the community” (Brooks 1983, 8), “the elderly narrator, possibly contemporary with Miss Emily” (Skinner 1985, 43) and “an unidentified citizen of Jefferson” (Towner and Carothers 2006, 64).



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gular that can speak, then the ‘we’, just like second and third persons, cannot and does not have a voice. Telling a story in unison is not possible in non-fictional communication. However, fictional narrative is not a literal communicative act, and the absence of the ‘I’ of the speaker is conceivable. For the possibility of such a conception, one only has to take apart the communicative model of narrative. Walsh’s work The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007), for example, provides one such a step towards a new conception of narrative and a new theory of fiction. The gist of his critique is that a communicative model of narration rests on narrative transmission taken quite literally. Transmission means a “reproductive mediation of a prior discourse” (2007, 36) which, in the case of fiction, does not exist prior to the narration, i. e., it cannot be transmitted. A fictional narrative, however, can represent a narrative transmission as an imitation of such discursive form and represent an ‘as-if’ re-telling of a previously known or experienced story. In other words, narration primarily consists of narrative representation, and only secondly, if at all, of narrative transmission.22 What this approach to narrative means for a definition of the narrator is that, firstly, narrators are represented characters and thus that there can be narratives without such narrators. For the classical approach, the text has to have a fictional narrator, even if only implicitly, because otherwise there is no way of distinguishing between fiction (in the sense of a report of imaginary events by a fictional narrator) and non-fiction (report of true events by an empirical person, an author). However, the need for the ever-present narrator disappears if we take fictionality, not the narrator, as the key distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Consequently, when a narrative represents narrative transmission, as is the case with we-narratives, narrators can come in all shapes and forms, including communities or other collectivities.

22 Denying the communicative model, Walsh contends nonetheless that fictional narrative is indeed a communication. However, communication is not a structure “within which a communicative model of narrative acts is implied” (Walsh 2010, 35), but rather a real-world communicative act, albeit an act under the regime of fictionality. For a further discussion of the peculiarity of fictional narratives as real-world communicative gestures, see Walsh (2007). See also Phelan’s (2011) critique of the communicative model from the standpoint of character narration.

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6 Collective Knowledge and Focalization The construction of a plural narrative agent is often a performative act that constitutes a unified collective. The structural consequence of such a narrative agent is the possibility of thematizing collective knowledge and employing a combination of closely interlinked external and internal focalizations. However, the tendency has been to treat we-narratives (or instances of we-narration) from the perspective of the first-person realist novel (variously called ‘conventional fiction’, ‘mimetic narration’ or ‘natural narrative’; cf. Richardson 2009, 144), and in particular from that of the limitations of a first-person singular narrator in such novels. This seems to be the reason why the we-narrator’s knowledge has been predominantly described as ‘transgressive’, ‘problematic’ and otherwise abnormal: “knowledge that they cannot normally have acquired” (2009, 144). Similarly, when ‘we’ narrate an individual character’s thoughts and feelings, for example, or when focalization moves from the collective (i. e., the narrator’s) to individual characters, this is “something of course a first-person narrator, singular or plural, is not supposed to be able to do” (2009, 145). The we-narrator’s knowledge spans individual members of the we-group and makes interpreters wonder “How does the narrator know what he (mainly) knows?” Hans Skei poses this question about the we-narrator in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”: how can ‘he’ “have access to information which does not come from having watched, eavesdropped and listened to secrets and which simply does not fit in with the implied restrictions of the first-person perspective”? (Skei 1999, 155). Investigating collective ‘group narration’, Patrick Colm Hogan observes that it projects uniformity that might be problematic because of political implications and also because “in the real world, groups are not all so uniform as collective […] voicing implies,” further raising “issues about narrator knowledge and reliability” (2013, 236).23 Marcus equates we-narration with first-person singular narration, as the former is also “based on personal experience and is thus limited to the scope of human knowledge (in contrast with omniscient narration)” (2008b, 1). Collective, however, cannot be compared to personal, since it transcends personal experience. My contention regarding collective knowledge and focalization is that these features should be treated under the conditions of we-narrative proper specified above and not as extensions of a first-person narrative situation.

23 It is important to note that there is a difference between uniformity and collective properties of the the macro-level that individuals acquire as part of a group. Cf. Margolin (2000, 595) who relies on a sociological account of intra-group relations by Raimo Tuomela (1995).



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The limitations of a first-person singular narrator cease to be those of a we-narrator, if the broader possibilities of the plural narrator are taken into account. The distinguishing features of the plural narrator are more comparable to those of the authorial narrator (and to omniscient narration) than they are to those of the first-person narrator. Hence, these ‘transgressions’ hardly go noticed by the readers.24 Furthermore, mimetic narration is not a default mode of fiction, and thus cannot be a measure of transgressions. Nor can mimetic narration in fiction be equated with non-fictional narration (telling about something as it is). I wish to avoid, then, any characterization of this narrative technique as problematic even if it does not match the situation in the ‘real world’. I also refrain from calling the technique of plural narration ‘unnatural’ since, in its current use, this term remains inconsistent and self-contradictory. As an alternative, Richardson proposes ‘anti-mimetic’ to speak of those narratives that “[traduce] the conventions of nineteenth century realism” (2009, 150). ‘Anti-mimetic’ thus applies, for example, to the twentieth-century fiction of postmodernism. Some we-narratives fall under this criterion, but since my goal is not to describe a historical literary movement but a narrative situation, I refrain from this term as well. The question of whether or not one wants to talk about fictional groups in comparison to real-world ones loses its significance when it comes to collective knowledge. Knowledge, in the philosophical sense as a justified true belief that something is so, acquires the very status of knowledge by being collectively accepted (Tuomela 2004, 112). In other words, knowledge is created institutionally and is social and collective. So, whereas collective story-telling voice might be referred to as impossible and transgressive, when compared to its hypothetical non-fictional counterpart, collective knowledge loses in this comparison in either case. If one approaches it as a narrative technique that straddles realist distinctions, a counterpoint can easily be made that collective knowledge is mimetically justified (see the example of Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” below). However, if one treats collective knowledge as such that subverts ‘what it is like in the real world’, epistemology argues the opposite. To state the obvious again, fiction can do more. A collective fictional narrative can draw our attention to “the possibility of genuinely sharing ideas, understandings, and emotions,” as Hogan (2013, 249) aptly observes. “The cultivation of such sharing—or at least an aspiration toward it—is important for a range of

24 See Phelan’s (2013, 174–175) analysis of breaks in what he calls the dominant mimetic code of narration, and especially his examination of the reasons why epistemological ‘transgressions’ in paraleptic narratives often go unnoticed by readers. I believe Phelan’s list applies very well also to the case of we-narratives.

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authors trying to create a sense of national or other social unity. The use of group narration is clearly a possible discourse correlate of such shared mentalities” (249). As a narrative technique, we-narration “glides between the individual subjectivity and collective omniscience, between a strict and a more lax denotation, and between mental experiences that are entirely, partially, or minimally shared” (Richardson 2009, 152). Obviously, authors can choose whether or not to make their plural narrators comply with ‘real-world’ limitations and to what ends they wish to use a collective character. Hazard Adams, for example, problematizes the group uniformity questioned by Hogan in a laborious way: he lists what seem to be all of the opinions and views of his communal narrator (a group of students and faculty members) on any topics they bring up. The only way the narration can progress is thanks to ‘our’ agreement on facts because ‘our’ opinions about them are, usually, too multiple to be shared, generalized and collectively told. Hence, they are presented in a listing manner: (4) We quarrel at once. Various groups among us claim that the author does not want trouble, does want trouble, does not care one way or the other, wishes to trouble us, does not wish to trouble us, is punishing us, testing us, playing with us or saving us, or is not really involved one way or the other in the matter. Some claim it is not a matter at all. And some claim there never is any matter. (Adams 1999, 15)

Adams continues in this manner for most of the page. Sometimes even such meticulous listing cannot quite cover it: “It is virtually impossible for us to issue a statement regarding taste, since we represent so many shades of it ourselves” (64). Then, again, writers need not resort to such extreme meticulousness: the use of the collective narrator offers broader epistemological possibilities that can also be justified under the conditions of realism. A good case in point here is “A Rose for Emily,” where the information about Emily that circulates in the Jefferson community comes from observations, rumors, gossip and from individual accounts of the ‘we’-group members that feed back into collective knowledge. What the community members did not have access to remains unknown: a Baptist minister was asked to visit Emily but “[h]e would never divulge what happened during that interview” (Faulkner 1995, 126). In this way the information ‘we’ have about Emily fits in very well “with the implied restrictions” (Skei 1999, 155) of the first-person narrator, but of the collective one, of the ‘we’-narrator rather than the ‘I’. Finally, like collective knowledge, collective focalization can be justified realistically. As Margolin observes:



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[A]ny ‘we’ sayer who makes assertions such as ‘we felt that…’ or, ‘our current state of mind is…’ combines in fact immediate knowledge as regards his/her own internal states with beliefs (second or third person attributions), based upon inference from external data, concerning the internal states of the other individuals in the ‘we’ reference class. (Margolin 1996, 117)25

Thus, a collective statement of the kind ‘We felt that…’ usually does not draw attention to itself. It is the collective narrator’s access to individual characters’ minds that has been troublesome. However, the ‘we’-form can also expand cognitive possibilities connected with the narration of individual minds. The we-narrative’s peculiar collective focalization combines an external perspective on the narrated with a generalized internal one that characterizes the narrating group without giving access to the group’s mind(s).26 In order to have this, more intimate, access, the two perspectives can shift to those of individual characters, often in the free indirect style. This dynamic is visible in the following example of we-narration from Toby Litt’s novel deadkidsongs (2001). The novel opens similarly to examples (2) and (3) with ‘us’, four boys, describing ‘ourselves’ as Gang. The ‘I’ of the narrator is completely removed from the scene (as well as never disclosed openly in the narrative). Located in the present, the ‘we’-voice narrates a story of ‘our’ long-gone childhood adventures. Often collective perspective gives way to individual perspectives and the we-narrator retreats into the background:

25 Cf. Hogan (2013, 237–238) for a similar reliance on Theory of Mind and folk psychology to explain the realist component in collective focalization. 26 I am aware that a mention of ‘group’s mind’ resonates with Alan Palmer’s (2005) notion of ‘intermental mind’. I do not adopt Palmer’s terminology for two reasons. First, I believe that Palmer’s ‘literal’ use of ‘intermental mind’ as ‘actual’ social mind (2007, 218) is highly metaphorical and thus that much of what he describes with this category can be handled more precisely in terms of social conditions or ideology. As Manfred Jahn commented: “If ‘social mind’ were literal, it should no longer be called ‘mind’, if only to avoid confusion” (Jahn 2011, 252). Moreover, a shared group mentality is a logical consequence of establishing a plural we-narrator as a character capable of collective action, shared opinions, emotions, etc. Second, the usefulness of Palmer’s terminology for literary narratives is rather vague: Palmer describes it as “increased explanatory power” and an economic gain of “postulating one theoretical entity” instead of, for example, “the two individuals” sharing a mentality (Palmer 2005, 430). Based on his examples, the idea of intermental mind seems more useful for symptomatic cognitivist analyses which are beyond the scope of this article, i. e., for the studies of narrative to investigate human cognition in general and the ways “narratives participate in larger, socially embedded systems for thinking” (Herman 2003, 328).

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(5) Matthew was having some trouble keeping pace with the rest of us. He was feeling dizzy, and couldn’t see quite as well as usual. Whilst we walked, Paul tried to keep as much distance as possible between himself and his father. There was the terrible possibility that his father might put his arm around him or even kiss him on the cheek. (Litt 2001, 28)

In this passage, ‘our’ external perspective on each of the boys gives way to Matthew’s and Paul’s perception or thoughts. The first sentence is still focalized collectively, whereas the second belongs to Matthew’s scope of perception. Then, ‘we’ take control again only to hand it over to Paul’s perception of the same situation. Over more extended passages of individual focalization, the collective recedes into the background completely, while still containing the characters’ vision. It can thus be seen that we-focalization always frames that of its individual members and does not allow individual passages to be interpreted separately. This phenomenon of embedded focalizations can be described with the help of Marie-Laure Ryan’s ‘stack’ model of recursiveness as revised by Walsh (2010, 42–43). What happens when the reader attends to the current narration and focalization is that all intermediate, embedding layers get occluded. In other words, in the example (5) above the reader attends to the individual minds in the passage as they come about without worrying about their correlation with the embedding collective mind. If we treat the analysis of collective focalization not as “a complicated matter of the relation between narrators’ vision and knowledge and characters’ vision and knowledge but a straightforward question of who perceives” (Phelan 2001, 63), then in the case of we-narrative, perception is oriented by the collectivity and its individual members interchangeably.

7 Concluding Remarks To recapitulate, in this article I have attempted to suggest a more rigorous definition of we-narrative proper as a separate narrative form, distinct from first-person narrative. Rather than describing as many types of narration in the plural as possible, I have proposed to define a particular narrative form in its structural and rhetorical-performative aspects. This, I believe, is the move that can make the phenomenon of we-narration more accessible for systematic investigation. The definition I have proposed is based on maintaining the structural distinction between ‘narration’ and ‘narrative’ and on the contextual difference between indicative and performative uses of ‘we’-discourses in fiction. By the indicative ‘we’, I mean a prototypical function of the pronoun when an individual speaker refers to herself and another person or group, indicating that there exists a col-



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lectivity, either situationally or on a more general scale. The use of the indicative ‘we’ alone does not create a plural narrating voice that contributes to we-narrative proper. The performative ‘we’, on the other hand, does: it erases the singular speaker and goes beyond the need for ‘I’. A performative we-reference of the narrator creates a collectivity with a plural, collective voice that did not exist before. In other words, I claim that there exists a plural storytelling voice. It has two salient features: it does not imply or need a singular individual speaking for the group, and it approaches the narrative mode of ‘lyric progression’. Crucially, this performative creation of a plural voice comes about through repetition by duration. That is to say, it does not occur within a single we-reference and can be distinguished only in the context of a given narrative on the whole. A we-narrator, whether collective or communal, is thus the first defining element of we-narrative proper. Recognition of the plural nature of the narrator leads to a more accurate analysis of the epistemological possibilities (rather than limitations) of we-narratives and of their ability to shift effortlessly between external and internal perspectives, both collective and individual. This, then, calls for re-thinking the relationships between the narrated and the narrating and focalization. Such re-thinking, I suggest, can be made possible within a re-conceptualized theory of narrative.

Works Cited Primary sources Adams, Hazard. 1999. Many Pretty Toys. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cortázar, Julio. 1985. “Usted se tendió a tu lado.” In J. C. Los relatos, 90–99. Madrid: Alianza. Faulkner, William. 1995 [1976]. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage International. Ferris, Joshua. 2007. Then We Came to the End. New York: Little, Brown and Co. Levé, Édouard. 2008. Suicide. Paris: P. O. L. Litt, Toby. 2011. deadkidsongs. London: Penguin. McInerney, Jay. 1984. Bright Lights, Big City. London: Bloomsbury. Mda, Zakes. 1995. Ways of Dying. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Moore, Lorrie. 1985. Self-Help. New York: Warner Books. Moravia, Alberto. 1971. Io e lui. Milano: Bompiani. Oates, Joyce Carol. 1999. Broke Heart Blues. New York: Dutton. Otsuka, Julie. 2011. The Buddha in the Attic. London: Fig Tree.

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Secondary sources Benveniste, Émile. 1971. “Relationships of Person in the Verb.” In É. B. Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, 195–204. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press. Brooks, Cleanth. 1983. William Faulkner: First Encounters. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1981. “The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel’s Theorie des Erzählens.” Poetics Today 2 (2): 157–182 Dieltjens, Sylvain, and Heynderickx Priscilla. 2007. “Strategic Uses of the Pronoun We in Business Communication.” In Discourse, Ideology and Specialized Communication, edited by Giuliana Garzone and Srikant Sarangi, 233–249. Bern: Peter Lang. Dorris, Michael. 1987. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. New York: H. Holt. Fludernik, Monika. 1993. “Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography.” Style 28 (4): 525–548. Fludernik, Monika. 2011. “The Category of ‘Person’ in Fiction: You and We Narrative-Multiplicity and Indeterminacy of Reference.” In Current Trends in Narratology, edited by Greta Olson, 100–141. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Fulton, Dawn. 2003. “‘Romans des Nous’: The First Person Plural and Collective Identity in Martinique.” The French Review 76 (6): 1104–1114. Genette, Gérard. 1980 [1972]. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1988 [1983]. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Helmbrecht, Johannes. 2002. “Grammar and Function of We.” In Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures, edited by Anna Duszak, 31–49. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Herman, David. 2003. “Regrounding Narratology: The Study of Narratively Organized Systems for Thinking.” In What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 303–332. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2013. Narrative Discourse. Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Jahn, Manfred. 2011. “Mind = Mind + Social Mind? Response to Alan Palmer’s Target Essay.” Style 45 (2): 249–254. Kempton, Kenneth Payson. 1947. The Short Story. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Köppe, Tilmann, and Jan Stühring. 2011. “Against pan-narrator theories.” Journal of Literary Semantics 40 (1): 59–80. Lanser, Susan Sniader. 1992. Fictions of Authority. Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marcus, Amit. 2008a. “Dialogue and Authoritativeness in ‘We’ Fictional Narratives: A Bakhtinian Approach.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6 (1): 135–161. Marcus, Amit. 2008b. “We are You: The Plural and the Dual in ‘We’ Fictional Narratives.” Journal of Literary Semantics 37 (1): 1–21. Margolin, Uri. 1996. “Telling Our Story: On ‘We’ Literary Narratives.” Language and Literature 5 (2): 115–133. Margolin, Uri. 2000. “Telling in the Plural: From Grammar to Ideology.” Poetics Today 21 (3): 591–618.



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Margolin, Uri. 2001. “Collective Perspective, Individual Perspective, and the Speaker in Between: On ‘We’ Literary Narratives.” In van Peer and Chatman, eds., 241–254. Palmer, Alan. 2005. “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind.” Style 39 (4): 427–439. Palmer, Alan. 2007. “Universal Minds.” Semiotica 2007 (165): 205–225. Peer, Willie van, and Seymour Chatman, eds. 2001. New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press. Phelan, James. 2001. “Why Narrators Can Be Focalizers—and Why It Matters.” In van Peer and Chatman, eds., 51–64. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell About It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James. 2011. “Rhetoric, Ethics, And Narrative Communication: Or, from Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 94 (1/2): 55–75. Phelan, James. 2013. “Implausibilities, Crossovers, and Impossibilities: A Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Code of Mimetic Character Narration.” In A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Brian Richardson, 167–184. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology. The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin and New York: Mouton. Richardson, Brian. 1994. “I Etcetera: On the Poetics and Ideology of Multipersoned Narratives.” Style 28 (3): 312–328. Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Richardson, Brian. 2009. “Plural Focalization, Singular Voices: Wandering Perspectives in ‘We’-Narration.” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert, 143–159. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Reitan, Rolf. 2011. “Theorizing Second-Person Narratives: A Backwater Project?” In Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, edited by Per Krogh Hansen, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Rolf Reitan, 147–174. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2010 [2005]. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Skei, Hans. 1999. Reading Faulkner’s Best Short Stories. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Skinner, John L. 1985. “‘A Rose for Emily’: Against Interpretation.” JNT 15 (1): 42–51. Stanzel, Franz Karl. 1971 [1955]. Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Translated by James Pusack. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Stanzel, Franz Karl. 1984 [1979]. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Towner, Theresa M., and James B. Carothers. 2006. Reading Faulkner. Glossary and Commentary. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Tuomela, Raimo. 1995. The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tuomela, Raimo. 2004. “Group Knowledge Analyzed.” Episteme 1 (2): 109–127. Walsh, Richard. 1997. “Who Is the Narrator?” Poetics Today 18 (4): 495–513.

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Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Walsh, Richard. 2010. “Person, Level, Voice: A Rhetorical Reconsideration.” In Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, 35–57. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1985 [1983]. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Wittig, Monique. 1973. Le corps lesbien. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Wolf, Christa. 1968. Nachdenken über Christa T. Halle (Saale): Mitteldeutscher Verlag.

Nora Berning (Gießen)

Critical Ethical Narratology as an Emerging Vector of Narrative Theory and Autobiographical End-of-Life Stories Ever since David Herman first made the distinction between classical and postclassical narratology in his programmatic 1997 article “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,” there has been a veritable boom of “hyphenated and compound narratologies” (Nünning 2003, 258). Among the most prominent postclassical approaches, Vera and Ansgar Nünning (2002) have identified three productive branches that refer to the development of transgeneric, intermedial and interdisciplinary narrative theories. Critical Ethical Narratology (CEN), an analytical framework specifically designed for the analysis of the representation, dissemination and construction of values and norms in hybrid genres as one finds them in various types of media (Berning 2013), draws on all of these border-crossings and thus bridges the gap between classical, structuralist narratology and postclassical narrative theory. Rooted in the disciplinary triangle of literary and cultural studies, media studies and moral philosophy, CEN can be considered an emerging vector of narratology. While the focus of this article is on nonfiction in general and, more specifically, the appearance of nonfictional genres characterized by literary elements on the Internet such as Weblogs, or blogs, points to narratology’s continued trend toward diversification, the analytical framework of CEN reflects a phase of consolidation insofar as the forms and functions of narrative are at the forefront of not just ethical but also other double-entry narratologies. Emerging lines of research are currently one of the most reliable indicators of the fact that the artificial divorce between narratology and various theories of interpretation has not done much for either side. Instead of propagating a strict separation between description and interpretation, a twenty-first century narrative theory should combine systematic poetics and interpretive activities and be conceptualized in such a way that transgeneric, intermedial and interdisciplinary expansions form an integral part of narratological analyses. One of the consequences of the paradigm shift in narratology from classical, structuralist narratology to postclassical narrative theory has been a renewed interest in politics and the ways in which narratives contribute to cultural world-construction. In addition, the “narratological renaissance” (Herman 1999, 2) has led narratologists to reconsider Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ideology of form (Jameson 1983 [1981], 141). However, postclassical narrative theory has DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-007

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not yet produced a satisfactory account of the ways in which “narrative structures are ideologically informed” (Helms 2003, 7). Hence, CEN is best understood as an incentive for revisiting Jameson’s form-as-content argument with regard to the rise of new genres and media formats. Both genre-specific and media-specific structures shape a work’s dialectic of form and content and thus inform processes of cultural world-construction. Form, genre and mediality trouble not only our understanding of what narratives are and what they can do, but they also serve as a forceful reminder that narratives embody a tacit knowledge that cannot be reduced to a fixed moral message (Eagleton 2012). Although critical appraisal of form, genre and mediality is a necessary step in the direction of a twenty-first century ethical narratology, CEN is more than the sum of its parts (form, genre and mediality). Rather, it is an analytical framework that merges thematic and formal narratologies (cultural extensions of classical narratology), ethical narratology and transmedial narratology, and in this way it narrows the gap between classical, structuralist narratology and postclassical narrative theory. CEN is not only a particularly fruitful framework for shedding light on the ways in which narrative techniques and strategies are semanticized (Nünning 2013) to the extent that they convey culturally specific notions of storytelling and ideologically charged values and norms. It is also a valuable framework for attending to recent developments in genre theory and such important processes as hybridization and medialization and the ways in which they function as catalysts for generic evolution, change or innovation and for the development of new thematic foci in emerging genres and media formats (Basseler et al. 2013). Though not new in terms of their thematic focus, autobiographical end-of-life stories published on the Internet are best understood as an emergent genre that distinguishes itself from ‘traditional’ autobiographical writing through its innovative techniques and strategies of narrating death and dying. For the purpose of this article, the autobiographical end-of-life story will be defined as a factual illness narrative (Hydén 2005) written by a terminally ill person who makes use of fictionalizing strategies in the story. Autobiographical end-of-life stories published on the Internet such as the famous Schlingenblog (2008–10) by Christoph Schlingensief or Arbeit und Struktur (2010–13) by the now deceased best-selling author Wolfgang Herrndorf pose a number of challenges to narrative theory. It is worth mentioning that autobiographical end-of-life stories, which can be defined as a hybrid genre that oscillates between the worlds of fact and fiction, do not figure prominently in classical, structuralist narratology. If narratologists want to cease neglecting generic hybrids, however, the concepts, models and methods used for analyzing them have to be fine-tuned to the epistemological



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underpinnings of hybrid genres that proliferate not just in the electronic environment but also in other media (Berning 2011). Second, end-of-life stories present at the same time a great challenge to contemporary narrative theory and genre theory. Life-writing—which in the context of autobiographical end-of-life stories means narrating about one’s own death as implied by the notion of autothanatography (Derrida 1987 [1980], 393)—questions narrative theory as regards the relationship between narrative and knowing and, more specifically, the role of narrative form in the production of knowledge. Furthermore, these particular kinds of stories challenge the static models of formalism and structuralism which contributed to the idea that “[t]he human became an effect of the system, rather than the reverse” (Gibson 1996, 245). Consequently, the task for a CEN that concerns itself with autobiographical end-of-life stories is to try to re-humanize the narratological toolkit so that it can effectively deal with the human problem of suicide (Mandle 1984). If one endorses, moreover, Anne Nesbet’s (1991) thesis that end-of-life stories are a sign of genre in crisis, then this explains not just the ongoing fascination of genre theorists with suicide and death, but it also invites narratologists to conceive of such stories both as an aesthetic means and as fulfilling certain normative functions, besides the cognitive and emotional ones (Baumbach et al. 2009). Suicide is simultaneously a literary-cultural subject with a long literary history (extending from Cato, young Werther and Madame Bovary to Anna Karenina) and a media phenomenon (e. g., Bronfen 1992; Skelton 2003). Besides the mediatized suicides of the German soccer goalkeeper Robert Enke and the photographer and self-proclaimed playboy Gunter Sachs, a number of suicides that gained traction in the mainstream media were either made public via social networking websites (e. g., Twitter, Facebook) or they were webcasted. For instance, John Patrick Bedell left YouTube videos that could be read as a suicide note; Paul Zolezzi indicated via Facebook his intention to commit suicide; and Kevin Whitrick as well as Abraham K. Biggs webcasted their suicides. The tendency among so-called digital natives to interneticize their end-of-life stories suggests that every crisis of genre contributes to a new configuration of the cultural subsystem of literature. In the case of autobiographical end-of-life stories, this new configuration is closely linked to such processes as hybridization (Nünning and Schwanecke 2013) and medialization (Nünning and Rupp 2013). Since the present article deals with autobiographical end-of-life stories on the Internet, specifically Herrndorf’s blog Arbeit und Struktur, the interpretation and ‘negotiation of values’ (Korthals Altes 2014) poses an additional challenge because “electronic literature is a ‘hopeful monster’ (as geneticists call adaptive mutations) composed of parts taken from diverse traditions that may not always fit neatly together” (Hayles 2008, 4). This is especially true for blogs whose origins

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can be described as “a hybrid of existing genres, rendered unique by the particular features of the source genres they adapt, and by their particular technological affordances” (Herring et al. 2004, 10). Herrndorf’s suicide blog shares its episodic structure with epistolary novels and diaries (Walker 2003) and its thematic priority with the suicide novel. His blog also has some characteristics in common with the (Internet) diary (Kapp 1987), a genre that also hinges closely on the writer’s place and circumstance of writing. These “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein 1968 [1953], 32) with other confessional genres that are currently on the rise (famous examples include, for example, James Frey’s 2004 fictionalized memoir A Million Little Pieces or Delphine de Vigan’s Nothing Holds Back the Night 2013) make the blog a particularly adequate means “to explore the emergent culture of the early 21st century” (Miller and Shepherd 2004) with the help of the analytical framework of CEN. CEN assumes that there is an anthropological, psychological and cultural necessity for a non-essentialist ethical discourse for the formation of personal and collective identities under late capital. Using the example of Herrndorf’s blog, it will be shown in the analytical part of this article that blogs can assist terminally ill people in mending the fragmented self. Considering that weblogs are not only widely disseminated but also a particularly controversial site for reframing the literary-cultural concept of suicide (Berning et al. 2014a), it is quite astonishing that autobiographical end-of-life stories on the Internet have not yet been examined through the lens of narrative theory. Valuable though Lore Knapp’s (2012) analysis of the Schlingenblog is, it says very little about thanatopoetics and the negotiation of values surrounding suicide (Bronfen 1992; Hook 1927). Suicidologists define suicide as a multidimensional illness that is inextricably linked to the Wish To Hasten Death (WTHD), which has a multi-factor basis encompassing pain, physical suffering, psychiatric disorders and psychological or existential distress (Monforte-Royo et al. 2011). A fluctuating and unstable feeling, the WTHD can also be perceived in Herrndorf’s blog. One of the most urgent needs in clinical studies is to arrive at “[a] better understanding of the WTHD, one which clarifies its conceptual limits and distinguishes between different stages or situations” (Monforte-Royo et al. 2011, 802). In order to improve our knowledge of suicide and develop adequate interventions, it is fruitful to bring together clinical studies on suicide and insights from narrative theory. My analysis of Herrndorf’s blog is therefore best understood as a contribution to the interdisciplinary field of narrative medicine in general and narratives of illness in particular (cf. Charon 2008).



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1 Theorizing and Historicizing the Cultural Dynamics of the Blogosphere In a study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, bloggers are described as “the internet’s new storytellers” (Lenhart and Fox 2006). The study suggests that storytelling techniques have migrated to the blogosphere. Blogs, a term coined by the American blogger Jorn Barger in 1997, are “frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence” (Herring et al. 2005, 143). The genre expectation of blog entries is nonfiction (Walker 2003). The specificity of autobiographical entries is rooted in the reader’s belief that the author, narrator and protagonist of the narrative are one and the same, as implied by the autobiographical pact (Lejeune 1989 [1973]). Herrndorf, to illustrate the complex relationship between genre expectations and autobiographical end-of-life stories, is the chronicler of his own life and death: since it is logically impossible to gain reliable knowledge about death or suicide, an experience that resists explanation from the inside (Brooks 1985), Arbeit und Struktur provides an incentive to have a closer look at aesthetic communication and the negotiation of values on the Internet. Herrndorf’s blog is based on new ways of conceptualizing authenticity that invite the reader to problematize and question the medium. It is a kind of authenticity that takes shape in the form of a ‘metafictional maneuver[]’ (Hutchins 2012, 81), for it “does not aim at finding the actual self, but rather at recognition of the subjective game being played” (81) by the medium in question. The blog’s structure is determined by an innovative, relational mode of knowledge production. The blog merges current thinking and empirical research on suicide with introspection. Since the narrative oscillates between fact and fiction, the blog raises intriguing questions about the reliability of the narration. Moreover, hybrid genres such as autobiographical end-of-life stories serve as an indicator of new forms of life that are linked to “medical advances, which have transformed diseases that once led to a quick death into chronic illnesses” (Monforte-Royo et al. 2011, 802). Due to these medical advances, the WTHD is gaining more and more currency in contemporary society. According to Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd (2009, 266), the history of blogs can be divided into three phases: prior to 1999, “blogs were used primarily by websavvy individuals […] to share information with each other.” At a time when search engines did not exist, blogs served as a means to exchange links to new websites. They functioned as a “subjectively uninvolved source of information” (Shankar 2010, 529) that developed independently from the more subjective Internet diary, which emerged in 1994 and developed out of personal home pages (McNeill 2009).

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In 1999, free fill-in-the-blank site-building tools and publishing software became available. Knowledge of HTML was no longer required, and anyone with an Internet connection could create a blog by using the new tools and software. These changes in technology opened the way to the second phase of blogging, with a new kind of user, younger and less technologically adept, and a new emphasis on personal commentary rather than links, self-disclosure rather than information sharing. (Miller and Shepherd 2009, 267)

During this second phase, blogs mushroomed and became less and less distinct from the Internet diary (McNeill 2009; Herring et al. 2005). The advent of social networking websites in 2002, which marks the beginning of the third phase, changed the way in which blogs were accessed, primarily via a link on the user’s profile. From a formal point of view, blogs have evolved rather slowly over the last two decades (Miller and Shepherd 2009). If one wants to provide a comprehensive description of the blog and its generic variants, however, it is important to pay attention to formal, functional, communicative and narrative as well as media-specific features. Though figure 1 does not shed light on the blogosphere from a diachronic perspective, the typology by Ansgar Nünning and Jan Rupp (2012, 31) is nevertheless useful for differentiating between different variants of the blog.

Figure 1: Classification of blogs according to formal, functional, communicative, narrative and media-specific features (© 2012 Ansgar Nünning and Jan Rupp)



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Whereas the x-axis represents a continuum between Individual I-blogs and Community We-blogs, supplemented by a scale indicating an intensification of interactivity, multiperspectivity and multimediality from left to right, the y-axis covers a spectrum that ranges from personal modes of narration with a focus on a limited audience to topical/corporate blogging targeted at a larger audience. Herrndorf’s blog breaks new ground because it mixes so-called stream-of-consciousness blogging with elements of literary blogs. It is important to point out, though, that this classification is dependent on whether one conceives of an individual blog entry or of the blog as a whole as a unit of analysis. In the former case, Herrndorf’s blog presents itself as a narrative chameleon that is characterized by the combination of different literary styles and sign systems. If one considers the entire blog as a unit of analysis, Arbeit und Struktur closely resembles literary blogs where multiperspectivity and interactivity as well as multimediality play a subordinate role. In both cases, however, the emphasis in terms of the functional aspect is on individual identity construction (Tophinke 2009). The blog “is a contemporary contribution to the art of the self” (Miller and Shepherd 2004). Moreover, blogs give “credence to the commensurate realization […] that we are each of us, in a global sense, bound inextricably to one another” (Shankar 2010, 540). The search for empathy, friendship and even love that technological enthusiasts employ in order to propel web-based tools and applications has become a prolific means to capitalize on the ideological construct of global interconnectedness. The blog is, of course, not immune from this logic of capital (Puschmann 2012). A distinction between static, conventionalized and flexible features shows that blogs are always partly determined by the software code and partly by the user. The formal characteristics (deictic markers, perspective, temporality, discursive relations) and the flexible characteristics (style, length of the entries, thematic foci, frequency of publication, interactivity, design) that are set by the user have an impact on the communicative situation and functions of blogs. In Herrndorf’s blog, the communicative situation is extremely complex and involves high expectations on the part of the blogger toward the reader. He or she is invited to act as a Witness testifying to the experience; Therapist unconditionally supporting emotions; Cultural theorist assessing the contestation of meanings, values, and identities in the performance; Narrative analyst examining genre, truth or strategy; and Critic appraising the display of performance, knowledge and skill. (Scheidt 2006, 202)

That Herrndorf’s communicative goals are closely linked to the imagination of a diverse readership may seem speculative at first sight, but in Herrndorf’s case the unseen audience does not operate completely in the shadows. In contrast to the

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Schlingenblog, which was accessible to a vast readership from day one, Arbeit und Struktur did not at first function according to the principle of open access that is typical of blogs, listservs and online journals (Shankar 2010). When the blog was made public, however, it became immediately clear that entries are meant to be read as a “purposive communicative act” (Phelan 2007, 203), that is, as a cry for help, which serves both a personal and political purpose. In this context, it is striking that Herrndorf does not make use of one of the principal characteristics of digital media: interactivity. As a result, his blog remains a self-contained and self-referential universe that people can comment on only retrospectively in other media.

2 Herrndorf’s Thanatopoetics, or: The Negotiation of Values on the Internet Though the Internet has expanded the opportunities for language use and textual innovation, electronic literature is not fundamentally different from traditional literature. Hence, it “can be analyzed well within the parameters of established categories of literary theory” (Zenner 2005, 6). The reason why Herrndorf’s blog Arbeit und Struktur (AuS) does not require new interpretive strategies on the part of its readers is that, in contrast to complex electronic literature such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987–90), Herrndorf’s blog contains only a few links. Since there is no possibility for users to comment on the text, the commonly held view of the death of the author does not apply to the structural level of Herrndorf’s narrative, although there is a grain of truth in it insofar as the author’s suicide “shapes a new life-narrative within the space defined by death” (Higonnet 2000, 299). Herrndorf’s blog, which was written over a period of approximately twoand-a-half years (8 March 2010–20 August 2013), is divided into forty-two chapters. In addition to the individual chapters, it contains a closing word by Sascha Lobo, a friend of Herrndorf’s who set up the blog for him. In February 2010, a few weeks before Herrndorf began to work on the blog, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of forty-five. As the title of his blog indicates, the author of three best-selling books—In Plüschgewittern (2002), Tschick (2010), Sand (2011) and a collection of short stories titled Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels (2007)—was obsessed with work both before and after his diagnosis. I feel the best, when I work. I work in the tram on printouts, I work in the waiting room for radiotherapy, I work the minute that I have to stand in the changing room, with the paper on



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the wall. I sink into the story, which I write there, as I sank at the age of twelve years when I read books.1 (AuS, Chap. 4) [Am besten geht’s mir, wenn ich arbeite. Ich arbeite in der Straßenbahn an den Ausdrucken, ich arbeite im Wartezimmer zur Strahlentherapie, ich arbeite die Minute, die ich in der Umkleidekabine stehen muß, mit dem Papier an der Wand. Ich versinke in der Geschichte, die ich da schreibe, wie ich mit zwölf Jahren versunken bin, wenn ich Bücher las.]

As much as his work as an author and public figure shaped his personal life, his personal diagnosis shaped Herrndorf’s late work insofar as writing came less and less naturally to him. Not only does Herrndorf find it increasingly more difficult to express himself coherently, but he also has trouble connecting with the world beyond the screen. As a remedy for loneliness and as an attempt to distract himself from his panic attacks and anxieties, Herrndorf resorted to literature as “relationship and human connectivity” (Newton 1995, 7). I am a writer, and one will not believe that literature would otherwise have left me cold. But what now returns when reading is the feeling that I last had during childhood and adolescence regularly and thereafter only very sporadically and in a few books: that one participates in an existence, in people and in the consciousness of people on something about which you usually do not have much opportunity to learn something in life, even, to be honest, only rarely, in conversations with friends and even more rarely in movies, and that there is a difference between art and shit. […] One can of course also take a critical view: The sliding into a fantasy world as an expression of perfect helplessness. (AuS, Flashback, Pt. 1) [Ich bin Schriftsteller, und man wird nicht glauben, daß Literatur mich sonst kaltgelassen hätte. Aber was jetzt zurückkehrt beim Lesen, ist das Gefühl, das ich zuletzt in der Kindheit und Pubertät regelmäßig und danach nur noch sehr sporadisch und bei wenigen Büchern hatte: daß man teilhat an einem Dasein und an Menschen und am Bewußtsein von Menschen, an etwas, worüber man sonst im Leben etwas zu erfahren nicht viel Gelegenheit hat, selbst, um ehrlich zu sein, in Gesprächen mit Freunden nur selten und noch seltener in Filmen, und daß es einen Unterschied gibt zwischen Kunst und Scheiße. […] Man kann das natürlich auch kritisch sehen: Das Absacken in die Phantasiewelt als Ausdruck vollkommener Hilflosigkeit.]

In this introspective passage, the author puts emphasis on a relational mode of knowledge production via narratives. The ethical status attributed to narrative is based on what Adam Newton (1995) describes as an intersubjective chain of narrative relations that bind the narrator and the reader in a dialogic relationship

1 Note that this article was composed before Herrndorf’s blog Arbeit und Struktur was turned into a book of the same title, published by rowohlt in December 2013. All German quotes are from Herrndorf’s blog and have been translated by Jill Grinager for the purpose of this article only.

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where authenticity and the construction of norms and values emerge from the interaction of several agents involved in aesthetic communication. In this context, ethics “signifies recursive, contingent, and interactive dramas of encounter and recognition” (Newton’s 1995, 12), exactly the sort of dramas which Herrndorf’s blog transmits. What can be observed in the above-quoted passage, then, is how norms and values become objects of reflection in their own right. By attributing to narrative a kind of ethical status, Herrndorf implicitly thematizes the ethics of his own suicide blog. The narrative situation of Herrndorf’s blog is heavily shaped by the specter of suicide, which serves both as an aesthetic device that punctuates the autobiographical quest and as a contentious ethical issue that undermines the widespread “assumption that life, however painful, is worth living” (K. Ryan 2004, 95). Arbeit und Struktur can be regarded as a continuation and postmodern update of a long philosophical tradition of discussions about suicide as well as the tensions between freedom, determinism and morality in the works of David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer and Jean-Paul Sartre. Through the personal union of the author, the narrator and the suicidal protagonist named Wolfgang, Herrndorf seeks to establish suicide as “the essential autobiographical act” (Higonnet 2000, 229) and uses his blog as a medium of critique in the Kantian sense of the term, that is, as a medium of reasoning and also revision. Arbeit und Struktur can be read as a revisionist narrative that stands in stark contrast to the tradition of theologians who purport to know suicide. “The Lutheran Bishop of Hanover, Margot Käßmann, sees that it is a great danger to provide patients with the availability of a fast, effective death. ‘It leads one to think one can even decide about death.’” Piteous stupidity, over-qualified for the office of German President. (AuS, Chap. 5) [“Die Landesbischöfin von Hannover, Margot Käßmann, sieht eine große Gefahr darin, Patienten einen schnellen, effektiven Tod zur Verfügung zu stellen. ‘Es führt dazu, zu meinen, man könne mal eben über den Tod entscheiden.’” Mitleiderregende Dummheit, für das Amt des Bundespräsidenten überqualifiziert.]

The narrator’s lack of understanding of Margot Käßmann’s opinion is based on the belief that the feeling of having an terminal disease generates a kind of expert knowledge that only those affected have access to. The narrative situation is shaped, moreover, by the narrator’s view that suicide is sometimes ethically justifiable. For example, he criticizes the German advance health care directive for not catering to a patient’s wish to control how and when he or she wants to die. There are many other examples in the narrative that imply that the blog is geared



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toward an ethical pluralism. The narrator constantly puts emphasis on the values of living rather than the value of life (Hook 1927). Herrndorf’s blog inevitably raises questions about the narrator’s reliability, since suicide is something that lies beyond the borders of the known (Higonnet 2000). Arbeit und Struktur is a narrative that is told by an autodiegetic narrator who is both suicidal and has a tendency to hallucinate. Considering that the narrator emphatically tries to dismiss his conversations with physicians either as rubbish or reframes them as if they were dialogues taken from a crime novel that he is working on, doubts about his reliability are more than justified. The reliability of the first-person narrator is undermined in two ways: on the one hand, the fact that the blog merges different narrative levels (e. g., metalepsis occurs between the intra-diegetic and the extra-diegetic level) makes it hard for the reader to tell whether the narrative is an exercise in autosuggestion or a genuine attempt at demystifying death. On the other hand, the question of whether the reader can trust the narrator is linked to generic aspects, specifically the ways in which the worlds of fact and fiction interpenetrate in the narrative. Passig names what I write here Wikipedia literature. New meaningless genre overloaded with reality that owes itself to the simplicity of the research. Defend me with the fact that most of it is simply invented. Two, three years ago, sometimes even started to write stuff in the Wikipedia that appeared in my novel. Either the fiction adapts to the reality or vice versa. The accusation of slovenliness will not be liked. (AuS, Chap. 9) [Passig nennt das, was ich da schreibe, Wikipedia-Literatur. Neues sinnlos mit Realien überfrachtetes Genre, das sich der Einfachheit der Recherche verdankt. Rechtfertige mich damit, daß das meiste ja doch erfunden ist. Vor zwei, drei Jahren auch schon mal angefangen, Sachen in die Wikipedia reinzuschreiben, die in meinem Roman vorkamen. Entweder die Fiktion paßt sich der Wirklichkeit an oder umgekehrt. Den Vorwurf der Schlampigkeit will man sich ja nicht gefallen lassen.]

In addition to these verbal cues of unreliability, the multimodal and media-specific elements of Herrndorf’s blog deconstruct dominant notions of socially accepted values and norms as well as discourses concerning normal psychological behavior (Zerweck 2001). For instance, in the flashback entitled The Penguin (Pt. 10), which brings the first one-third of the story to a close and is literally linked to the introductory chapter in the context of which the narrator recounts his admission to a psychiatric hospital, Wolfgang performs his illness in a theatrical fashion. Precisely because the dress of the penguin is beyond the socially acceptable and serves as a metaphor of cultural alterity, it questions the very authority of the narrator. The authority of the narrator is, furthermore, challenged with the help of a specific kind of psycho-narration (Cohn 1978) that has ethical implications.

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The persistent use of what Dorrit Cohn calls ‘fictional present’ is striking in this context. Herrndorf makes use of techniques of fictionalization that occasionally contribute to passages of local non-communication that do not appear to be addressed to someone. In these passages, psycho-narration serves primarily as a means of rendering transparent the consciousness of his Walther PPK and its opponent and interferer Wilhelm, the tumor. When trying to support the already successful Walther in its fight, I personify the disturbing instance at first as Störer (spoiler), then Wilhelm Störer. I try to speak to him and record his reactions. In contrast to the Walther he responds as well as not at all and likes to do the opposite of what I want. So I call on him in quieter periods to show up again and taunt him: Whether he no longer wanted or could interfere? Whether he was afraid of the Walther? And then he does not show up. No balls, the man. He prefers to show himself in the protection of other, positive thoughts. (AuS, Flashback, Pt. 5) [Beim Versuch, die ohnehin schon erfolgreiche Walther in ihrem Kampf zu unterstützen, personifiziere ich die störende Instanz zuerst als Störer, dann Wilhelm Störer. Ich versuche ihn anzusprechen und notiere seine Reaktionen. Im Gegensatz zur Walther reagiert er so gut wie gar nicht und macht gern das Gegenteil von dem, was ich will. Also fordere ich ihn in ruhigeren Phasen auf, sich doch wieder einmal zu zeigen, und verhöhne ihn: Ob er nicht mehr stören wolle oder könne? Ob er sich vor der Walther fürchte? Und dann zeigt er sich nicht. Keine Eier, der Mann. Er zeigt sich am liebsten im Schutz anderer, positiver Gedanken.]

The first-person narrator has a split personality and creates his own inter-textual universe. What happens is that the internal narrator undergoes a process of externalization, as a result of which multiple storylines are interwoven. Besides the experiential viewpoint of Wolfgang, the viewpoints of nonhuman objects are foregrounded. This turn toward the nonhuman serves to show how objects and other entities shape the construction of the self. That Wolfgang’s self is best understood as a sort of inter-text becomes clear when the narrator announces that he has found the world formula, that is, the key to his own text. I have found the world formula, terrible, the world formula is a vicious circle, we revolve forever in a loop, hell, and now the text, my text, the large text returns. But maybe it is a literary text? Yes, of course, that is the rescue: I am in my own text, therefore, set pieces of my other texts appear regularly, I can write it down, I have already written it down, it exists in my head […]. (AuS, Flashback, Pt. 8) [Ich habe die Weltformel gefunden, furchtbar, die Weltformel ist ein Zirkelschluß, wir kreisen ewig in einer Schleife, Hölle, und jetzt kommt der Text schon wieder, mein Text, der große Text. Aber vielleicht ist es ein literarischer Text? Ja, natürlich, das ist die Rettung: Ich bin in meinem eigenen Text, deshalb tauchen auch dauernd Versatzstücke meiner



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anderen Texte auf, ich kann ihn aufschreiben, ich habe ihn schon aufgeschrieben, er steht in meinem Kopf […].]

The narrator’s self-fashioning as the Borgesian Man of the Book is a strong image because it works not only as a mediating hinge between life and text—specifically the bringing of life into a text—but it also serves as a fruitful way to create suspense. The Man of the Book is a God-like creature who knows the master narrative. What Wolfgang means when he claims to have found the world formula is that he knows how the action of the story will be resolved. He has the end in mind because the narrative ends when his life ends. The problem with regard to the reliability of the narrator in this context concerns the “impossibility of reaching a ‘correct’ reading” (Higonnet 1985, 103). This is due, firstly, to the epistemological problem of gaining reliable knowledge about death and suicide and, secondly, to the chicken-and-egg dilemma that concerns the question of whether the narrative precedes the event (the suicide) or vice versa. All formal elements in terms of the unreliability of the narration must be interpreted as “sedimented content in their own right, as carrying ideological messages of their own, distinct from the ostensible or manifest content […]” (Jameson 1983 [1981], 99). In Herrndorf’s blog, unreliability does not only serve as a critique of traditional autobiographies, in the context of which reliability is the default option, but it also creates an interpretive void that is rooted in what Nesbet (1991, 835) circumscribes as “an uncanny fulcrum between ‘meaningful’ life and ‘meaningless’ death.” This uncanny fulcrum shapes not only the narrative situation, but also the temporal framework of Arbeit und Struktur, the construction of space as well as the configuration of the human body. Herrndorf’s blog is a temporal and spatial geography of death. The temporal framework of the narrative is complexly structured: it is organized in such a way that the past, present and future are woven into each other. The work on the blog itself serves as an inducement to live in the present, but the uncanny specter of suicide that haunts the author qua narrator makes him want to live in the past. Supposedly, sentimentality grows with age, but this is nonsense. From the beginning my gaze was fixed on the past. When in Garstedt the thatched roof house burned down, when my mother taught me the alphabet, when I got crayons for my first day at school and when I found the pheasant feathers in the aviary, I always thought back, and I always wanted standstill, and almost every morning I hoped the beautiful twilight would be repeated again. (AuS, Introduction) [Angeblich wächst die Sentimentalität mit dem Alter, aber das ist Unsinn. Mein Blick war von Anfang an auf die Vergangenheit gerichtet. Als in Garstedt das Strohdachhaus abbrannte, als meine Mutter mir die Buchstaben erklärte, als ich Wachsmalstifte zur

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Einschulung bekam und als ich in der Voliere die Fasanenfedern fand, immer dachte ich zurück, und immer wollte ich Stillstand, und fast jeden Morgen hoffte ich, die schöne Dämmerung würde sich noch einmal wiederholen.]

Herrndorf published new blog entries on an almost daily basis. The entries are interspersed with dream-like passages, extracts from his novel Tschick (2010), scattered readings of other novels, medical reports and statistics. This mixture of novelistic elements and empirical data conjures up the impression of a fragmented text that allows Herrndorf to convey the idea that suicide “does not fit into conventional narrative” (K. Ryan 2004, 96). Whereas all entries in chapters 1–42 are preceded by a date and time, the flashbacks do not contain any temporal deictic markers. However, by carefully scrutinizing the photographs in Herrndorf’s notebook, which form an integral part of the retrospective sections, the reader can extrapolate the dates of some flashbacks. Chapters 1–8, together with the subsequent series of flashbacks, cover a period of three weeks, that is, from mid-February 2010 when Herrndorf had his first surgery until he was admitted to the psychiatric hospital on 8 March 2010. In contrast to the thirty-four remaining chapters, the speed of the first third of the story is quite fast. The narrative speed, to put it in Gérard Genette’s (1980 [1972]) terms, can be described as a summary: the narrator summarizes the main events and creates the impression that he is still very much in control of his own life-narrative. Only gradually does the speed of the narrative slow down and the entries begin to read more and more like a farewell letter. With the diagnosis, life goes on, life without hope does not. In the beginning, I could always say to myself: You have still at least one year. A year is a long time. Even though I had to ignore the physical and mental deterioration which should deteriorate further over the anticipated 17 months still remaining. But after the greater part of the statistically expected time is over, the view of the dwindling remainder is increasingly disturbing. Although I (in a privately kept milkmaid-style bill) seem to have broken through after ten months without relapse already to the right side of the bell curve. But the days are dwindling, and with them hope. The work is getting continually heavier. The last few weeks frantically bolted together chapters, the sense of futility overwhelms me. (AuS, Chap. 12) [Mit der Diagnose leben geht, Leben ohne Hoffnung nicht. Am Anfang konnte ich mir immer sagen: Ein Jahr hast du mindestens noch. Ein Jahr ist eine lange Zeit. Auch wenn ich den körperlichen und geistigen Verfall, der von den avisierten 17 Monaten noch abgehen sollte, dabei ausblenden mußte. Aber nachdem der größere Teil der statistisch erwartbaren Zeit vorüber ist, ist der Blick auf den schwindenden Rest immer beunruhigender. Obwohl ich mich (private Milchmädchenrechnung) nach zehn Monaten ohne Rezidiv bereits auf die rechte Seite der Glockenkurve durchgeschlagen zu haben glaube. Aber die Tage schwinden dahin, und mit ihnen die Hoffnung. Das Arbeiten wird immer schwerer. Die letzten Wochen krampfhaft Kapitel zusammengeschraubt, das Gefühl der Sinnlosigkeit überrennt mich.]



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The sense of futility is one of the factors that Cristina Monforte-Royo et al. (2011) see as directly related to the WTHD. In Herrndorf’s case, psychological distress is coupled with physical symptoms, psychiatric disorders, social factors such as feeling like a burden to others and factors grouped under the label of psycho-existential suffering such as the loss of meaning of life. At several points in the story, Wolfgang considers giving up the biographical quest and shutting down the blog. The thought of stopping writing for good is particularly strong on those days when he is essentially waiting for death to come. The hoped-for release does not come, though. Rather, it seems as if time stands still and the narrator thinks his whole world is expanding. Wolfgang’s suicidal subjectivity has not only a huge impact on the order and speed of the narrative but can also be seen as an aesthetic means, especially when it comes to research. Research plays a significant role in the context of Herrndorf’s blog, in general, and in terms of the configuration of narrative time, more specifically. The narrator reads widely about glioblastoma. He googles, for instance, the latest studies on residual tumor cells and consults Wikipedia to interpret his symptoms. He also gains insights into his illness by reading relevant journals such as the Annals of Neurology. Based on his research, Wolfgang calculates his day of death and uses the preterit (“overlooking the water, there where I died” [“mit Blick aufs Wasser, dort, wo ich starb”]; AuS, Chap. 41) to refer to his suicide as a completed action in the future. Though Herrndorf does occasionally mention the sources of the studies that he quotes from, scientific research is re-appropriated by the narrator for the purpose of playgiarism, a neologism coined by the author Raymond Federman which refers to the playful re-use of existing source material. In Herrndorf’s blog, playgiarism takes place in an already barely regulated environment: the Internet. Since the narrator uses the electronic environment to put forth a particular conceptualization of time, playgiarism is anything but a neutral or value-free endeavor. Rather, it is an ideologically charged undertaking in Herrndorf’s blog that is questionable, considering that the result of decontextualizing scientific data is a loss of credibility in empirical research. As the following excerpt illustrates, the narrator’s goal is to deconstruct scientific research so as to shed light on the pseudo objectivity of the hard sciences and create his own individual timeline. The twelfth of August in my calendar is marked, grave stone shaped, my day of death, calculated in the week after the surgery based on the first of Passig’s downloaded statistics, seventeen point something months. The afternoon passes with a long beach walk in the rain down to Sellin and swimming twice in 15 degree cold water. Gorgeous waves, gorgeous everything. (AuS, Chap. 18)

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[Der zwölfte August in meinem Kalender ist eingekastet, grabsteinförmig, mein Todestag, errechnet in der Woche nach der OP aufgrund der ersten von Passig runtergeladenen Statistiken, siebzehn Komma irgendwas Monate. Der Nachmittag vergeht mit einem langen Strandspaziergang im Regen nach Sellin runter und zweimaligem Baden im 15 Grad kalten Wasser. Herrliche Wellen, herrlich alles.]

The alleged day of death is a day like any other. Hence, the narrator’s timeline of his death diverges from the statistics. The narrator is disillusioned with scientific research and starts to lean toward the other extreme, namely a romantic conception of the infinite and the relativity of all human values in the face of this infinity. The irony in this context is that Wolfgang uses the mathematical concept of infinity to deconstruct scientific studies that are primarily based on mathematical principles or formulas. While this is not a problem per se, the fact that the narrator instrumentalizes the notion of infinity in order to connote death and suicide is definitely problematic because it may cause a copycat effect or what sociologist David Phillips (1974) has dubbed the Werther effect. Thus, the double-edged nature of online communities is augmented in the suicide blog in the sense that the ethically sensitive issue of suicide is not only difficult to read and mourn but may also provoke impetuous and dangerous actions. At the same time, the deregulated writing space of the Internet, and particularly the blog, is a viable place for locating emotion related to death and suicide because it is an open and less confrontational space than the mainstream media or social networking sites such as Twitter, where people can comment instantly on someone else’s state of mind. In Arbeit und Struktur, spaces are emotionalized and inextricably linked to the degenerative processes of advanced cancer (Morris and Thomas 2007). The blog sheds light on space as a psycho-geographical category (Davidson et al. 2007), which points simultaneously to the experiential dimension of space and the spatial dimension of experience (Berning et al. 2014b). The geography of his death that Wolfgang creates is deeply personal, yet the fact that it is published online shows that (Wolfgang) Herrndorf’s actions are motivated by a sense of sharing. For some time already my empathy runs on a strange track. Previously, at some point I had imagined that the nearness of death could possibly trigger hatred, hatred against the world, envy of the survivors, perhaps even the desire to once again run amok and take along as many as possible. In fact, I had even started a text in this sense. But the reverse is the case. (AuS, Chap. 12) [Seit geraumer Zeit schon läuft meine Empathie auf seltsamer Spur. Früher irgendwann hatte ich mir mal vorgestellt, der nahe Tod würde möglicherweise Haß auslösen, Haß auf die Welt, Neid auf die Überlebenden, vielleicht sogar den Wunsch, noch einmal Amok zu



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laufen und möglichst viele mitzunehmen. Tatsächlich hatte ich mal einen Text in diesem Sinne angefangen. Aber das Gegenteil ist der Fall.]

Wolfgang’s feeling of empathy is conspicuous because it is integrated into a predominantly self-referential discourse. The writing space of the Internet runs counter to an understanding of emotions as relational fluxes between people. On the pragmatic level, it creates a pseudo-public sphere whereas on the semantic level, the virtuality of socio-spatial life is “a matter of finding the right fit between the medium and the form and the substance of the narrative content” (M.-L. Ryan 2004, 354). If one subscribes to the distinction between time-biased media and space-biased media (Innis 1964), then the Internet can be conceptualized as a space-biased medium because it obliterates space. If one adopts a deconstructionist perspective, one might even argue that Herrndorf subverts Innis’s distinction which goes back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by producing an emotional geography that develops out of a personal, disjointed logic of mentally created topologies that diminish the importance of both space and time. This undoing of previously established truths takes place not only on the level of form, but also on the level of the narrative content. In nonfictional illness narratives, embodied emotions are typically connected to specific sites and contexts which serve as metaphors for caring/careless environments (e. g., home, hospital, psychiatric ward). In Herrndorf’s blog, common stereotypes related to space and, more concretely, to the contrast between home comfort and places away from the patient’s home so typical of illness narratives is subverted through the narrator’s use of irony. The visit comes, the ward physician Dr. One brings concern to my enduring happy feeling. Hypomania is the word. She would like to keep me here for a bit longer, and that is exactly what I would like, too. I name my reasons, spacious rooms here vs. one-room hole at home, fantastic food, rest, concentrated work and a garden practically just for me, adding that it is like a holiday for me, that I consider it for the same reason as a waste of taxpayers’ money, and with this overall assessment I could apparently confirm her diagnosis of hypomania. (AuS, Chap. 2) [Die Visite kommt, der Stationsärztin Dr. Eins macht mein haltbar fröhlicher Affekt Sorgen. Hypomanie ist das Wort. Sie würde mich gern länger hierbehalten, und das ist genau das, was ich mir auch wünsche. Ich nenne meine Gründe, Räumlichkeiten hier vs. Ein-ZimmerLoch zu Hause, fantastisches Essen, Ruhe, konzentriertes Arbeiten und ein Garten praktisch für mich allein; füge hinzu, daß es wie Urlaub für mich sei, ich es aus demselben Grund für Verschwendung von Steuergeldern hielte, und habe mit dieser Gesamteinschätzung ihre Diagnose der Hypomanie offenbar befestigen können.]

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The narrator pretends to feel very much at home in the psychiatric ward where he can work on his manuscripts without being disturbed. The excerpt can therefore be seen as indicative of the impact that embodied, emotional and situational factors have on a person’s preference for place of death (Morris and Thomas 2007). It shows in what ways the experience of space affects the narrator’s subjectivity and his interpersonal relationships, which are framed in such a way as to foreground Wolfgang’s perception of people and things. In light of this, Herrndorf’s blog can be seen not only as a medium of emotional geographies, but also as an attempt to jump on the bandwagon of the neurological turn (Lovink 2010), which refers to the deep-seated interest of the humanities and the media in the workings of the human brain, (fictional and factual) minds and consciousness. Arbeit und Struktur, a stream-of-consciousness blog, is a particularly fruitful medium for studying minds, because it is able to shed light on suicidal subjectivity in a way that no other medium can. The medium shares with the subject of suicide the ability to function as a telling silence (Higonnet 2000). Like the topic of suicide, the blog is abundantly open and transgressive, a medium of liminality in the sense that “[i]t generates a multiplicity of interpretations and silences” (K. Ryan 2004, 96). Herrndorf uses the writing space of the Internet as a means to exhaust the therapeutic power of writing. This time, simple volition is not sufficient, and I have to install a very vividly envisaged Walther PPK in my head to shoot any unpleasant evolving thought: Bang, bang. Two bullets, and I think of something else. […] After a few hours, maybe it is also a day, I notice that it is cracking in my head, though I have not pressed the trigger. The Walther becomes independent. That is welcome to me, it does only its duty. It cracks and bangs in my head without my help, and the thought of death barely dips below the surface, while I am sitting unfazed by anything at my computer and work. (AuS, Flashback, Pt. 5) [Diesmal reicht eine einfache Willensentscheidung nicht aus, und ich muß eine sehr plastisch vorgestellte Walther PPK in meinem Kopf installieren, um jeden unangenehmen aufkommenden Gedanken zu erschießen: Peng, peng. Zwei Kugeln, und ich denke an etwas anderes. […] Nach einigen Stunden, vielleicht ist es auch ein Tag, bemerke ich, daß es in meinem Kopf knallt, ohne daß ich den Abzug gedrückt habe. Die Walther verselbständigt sich. Das ist mir willkommen, sie tut nur ihre Pflicht. Es klickt und knallt in meinem Kopf ohne mein Zutun, und der Todesgedanke taucht kaum noch bis unter die Oberfläche, während ich von allem unbeeindruckt am Computer sitze und arbeite.]

While the narrator is writing his tale of death, the Walther PPK is fighting against his tumor. In a way, the semi-automatic pistol serves the same function as weapons in a computer game: it is a tool against unsolicited visitors. On a photograph that shows the author’s Moleskine, which Herrndorf holds out to a



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webcam, the audience literally sees the forces at play in the author’s head: the Walther PPK versus Wilhelm Störer (the tumor) and Wolfgang (figure 2).

Figure 2: Walther, Wilhelm and Wolfgang (© 2010–2013 Wolfgang Herrndorf)

Underneath the drawing of the pistol can be read “the inseparable three” and Barack Obama’s famous slogan “yes, we can!” The photograph is particularly telling insofar as it speaks to the different spaces that the author (Herrndorf) and the narrator (Wolfgang) inhabit. The narrator is heavily implicated in the emotional geography that the author constructs, fighting his negative thoughts and battling death, while the author is sitting at his desk and creates increasingly grotesque scenarios and storyworlds. In Arbeit und Struktur, ways of worldmaking (Goodman 1992 [1978]; Herman 2009) that go into literary world-construction are shaped by the increasingly fragmented self of the author qua narrator and the feeling of being disconnected from one’s own body. The narrator gradually loses control over his body—the body referring in this context both to the body as a human organism and to the body as text. The former is a site of intense emotions and struggle which exudes pain and suffering. The reader becomes a witness of how the human “body turns against itself, becoming murderer and victim simultaneously” (K. Ryan 2004, 95).

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The body as text is closely linked to the representational dynamics of the human body. The textual as well as the physical body serve as a means of inscribing the loss of identity. One is suddenly no longer part of something that one was hitherto accustomed to perceiving as the self, as I, so questionable one has always found the synthetic construction of the self on an intellectual level (but purely on an everyday basis this I surely existed), and then it dissolves into the impersonal act of the average crazed representatives of this kind, very useful and at the same time moronic, adapted from the process of evolution to the hardships of the world. (AuS, Flashback, Pt. 10) [Man steckt auf einmal nicht mehr drin in etwas, was man bis dahin als Selbst wahrzunehmen gewohnt war, als Ich, so fragwürdig man die synthetische Konstruktion des Ichs auf einer intellektuellen Ebene schon immer empfunden hat (aber rein alltagstechnisch war dieses Ich doch sicher vorhanden), und dann löst es sich auf in das unpersönliche Agieren eines vom Evolutionsprozeß sehr sinnvoll und zugleich schwachsinnig an die Härten der Welt angepaßten durchschnittlich durchgedrehten Vertreters der Art.]

What Wolfgang describes is the feeling as though one is not completely occupying the body. His allusion to the Cartesian concept of the division of mind and body can be conceived as a meta-reference, that is, a narrative strategy that the author uses in order to convey the idea that the narrator’s loss of a sense of direction and time which, as a recurrent theme, stands for the author’s anxiety of getting lost in his own textual universe. The fear of losing a feel for the text is mediated through metaphors derived from bodily experience. The text, to put it in the words of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999), is “philosophy in the flesh.” It serves as a metaphor for thinking about the complex relation between life and narrative, corporeality and culture, and moral concepts like freedom and determinism. In short, the body as text invites reflection “on the nature of humanity itself” (White 1980, 5). In Herrndorf’s blog, the body serves as a map, for it renders intelligible or even systematizes knowledge and experience. Its function is twofold: on the one hand, the body serves “as part of a strategy of textual representation” (Punday 2003, ix) and as a relevant point of reference in terms of new ways of mapping suicide. On the other hand, the body is a key element in challenging received ideas that obfuscate critical knowledge about suicide. Furthermore, the body is part of a personal ordering of a universe. My body has exactly the same temperature and consistency as its surroundings, just like the bedlinen, I am a piece of linen between other pieces of linen, by a strange coincidence I became conscious, and I hope that it will always remain so. That is my first memory of this world. (AuS, Introduction)



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[Mein Körper hat genau die gleiche Temperatur und Konsistenz wie seine Umgebung, wie die Bettwäsche, ich bin ein Stück Bettwäsche zwischen anderen Stücken Bettwäsche, durch einen sonderbaren Zufall zu Bewußtsein gekommen, und ich wünsche mir, daß es immer so bleibt. Das ist meine erste Erinnerung an diese Welt.]

The childhood memory of a moment when Wolfgang’s body and its surroundings had the same temperature reflects a nostalgic feeling or yearning for being integrated and connected to the material world. Since Herrndorf can neither restore his health nor rehabilitate those feelings of connectivity and human relationship, the blog represents a kind of ersatz for being connected to the world. Literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness are part of the author’s toolbox, which is certainly shaped by famous literary examples such as James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) but that is shaped no less by the formal characteristics of the digital medium. It is in the writing space of the Internet that the meta-level and the object-level collapse into each other, as a consequence of which the author and the narrator, text and body, become almost indiscernible. Arbeit und Struktur poignantly illustrates the “fictionality of the real” (Zipfel 2009, 305), that is, the impossibility of a clear-cut distinction between fact and fiction as well as the need to acknowledge hybridization as a core catalyst for generic evolution, innovation and change (Nünning and Schwanecke 2013). Moreover, based on my analysis of the ethics and aesthetics of Herrndorf’s suicide blog, it has hopefully become clear that Arbeit und Struktur fulfills two additional cultural functions. First, Herrndorf’s use of the blog as a site of medial self-fashioning highlights the cultural trend toward intermedial and multimodal constructions of the self. Second, it underscores the need to delink medialization from the rise of electronic mass media in the 1960s: the more recent developments in the realm of digital media are an invitation to take into consideration medialization as another core catalyst for genre evolution and change (Nünning and Rupp 2013). To sum up, Herrndorf questions in his blog the therapeutic power of writing and renders intelligible the generic conventions, narrative schemata and building blocks of fictional end-of-life-stories (suicide novels) and their inability to produce genuine knowledge about suicide.

3 Conclusion In the present article I have argued that the analytical framework of CEN is best understood as an emerging vector of narrative theory that reflects simultaneously narratology’s continued trend toward diversification in the sense of increasing interdisciplinarity as well as a phase of consolidation insofar as analysis of the

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forms and functions of narrative continues to be at the forefront of narratological research. Drawing on the example of the autobiographical end-of-life story and, more specifically, on its manifestation on the Internet in the form of a blog, I have demonstrated that, by merging classical and postclassical concepts of narrative theory, CEN is a fruitful framework for studying the thanatopoetics and the negotiation of values surrounding the phenomenon of suicide. Suicide blogs are an integral element of postmodern literature and culture. They warrant attention because they foster new and innovative ways of knowledge production regarding the sensitive issue of suicide, and also because they serve as indicators of new forms of life (Wittgenstein 1968 [1953]) and nonfictional narratives of illness. In A Poetics of Postmodernism (2000), Linda Hutcheon argues that postmodern society is interested in margins rather than in centers. One need be neither a technological enthusiast nor a media determinist to think that suicide blogs will contribute to contemporary society’s growing fascination with margins and shape our horizon of expectations (sensu Jauss) with regard to confessional genres and/ or modes of storytelling (Gilmore 2001). Against this background, narratological analyses of sister genres of the autobiographical end-of-life story like drug autobiographies (Zieger 2007), for example, are but one of many fruitful avenues for further research. Furthermore, there are still many untrodden paths in the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities that this article could not explore in depth. Although I have briefly touched on the neurological turn, which is noticeable not only in the humanities and in Internet criticism but also in the natural sciences, it is important to underline that productive interfaces between the humanities, the social sciences and the arts extend far beyond the ‘neuro turn’. With my contribution, I hope to have shown that factual illness narratives provide a good starting point for delving deeper into the important role of narratives in terms of constructing forms of medical knowledge as well as its application in research and public health, on the one hand, and the role of narratives in generating knowledge in the social sciences regarding mental health, social relations and human development, on the other hand. As new paradigms of narratology emerge for showing that the gap between living and telling is a lot thinner than it is sometimes supposed (see Raphaël Baroni’s contribution to this volume), it is likely that the interdisciplinary scope of narrative theory, in general, and rhetorical or ethical narratologies that conceive of narrative as a “purposive communicative act” (Phelan 2007, 203), more concretely, will become much more relevant in the future.



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Manja Kürschner (Kiel)

The Fictionalization of History in Metahistoriographic Fiction after the Constructivist Challenge 1 Historical Fiction—Quo Vadis In 2004, Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen caused some confusion and surprise among readers and critics. The novel imitates historiography, since it contains many of the ingredients that, according to renowned historian Perez Zagorin, are required to create a good historical narrative: A history, unlike a novel in the realist genre, consists not only of specimens of narrative but of arguments, footnotes, of documentation and justification, acknowledgments of what isn’t known, discussions and evaluations of sources and evidence, and critiques of the view of other scholars (Zagorin 1999, 12).1 Drabble’s fiction combines historical facts about Lady Hyegyǒng, an eighteenth-century Korean Crown Princess, with the illusion of the Princess haunting twenty-first century Britain as a ghost. Although it is clear that what we read is fiction, the historical bits and pieces, as well as the procedure of writing history, are taken seriously. The fictionalized version of the historical Princess controls two modern protagonists who come into possession of Lady Hyegyǒng’s memoir, which, in turn, relates to a historical document of immense importance in Korean history. Despite its autobiographical form, the memoir and the information conveyed in it are part of the commonly accepted historical knowledge about the Korean court of the eighteenth century, and the official Korean court chronicles confirm it, which is why the memoir is categorized as solid historical evidence for the events at the Korean court. By explicitly commenting on the origins and the genesis of this memoir, the novel reflects upon the methods of historical research and writing. It points out that historical knowledge about the Crown Princess is treated as a fact on an intrafictional as well as on an extrafictional level, which is quite uncommon for a postmodernist historical novel.

1 Note that in the 1990s, Zagorin entered into a heated debate with Keith Jenkins and Frank R. Ankersmit, who represent a postmodernist textualist approach to the writing of history and who challenge the supremacy of historical narrative over fiction. DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-008

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Even if The Red Queen explicitly emphasizes the process of fictionalizing the memoir, it does not seem to mix fact and imagination; instead, it marks factual information as such. The inscribed author in Drabble’s fiction, also named Margaret Drabble, quotes, for example, Korean Kisaeng poetry and Lady Sŏnhŭi’s epitaph in one of the embedded narratives; she even gives references for these quotations in her acknowledgements. In her ‘Note on Sources’, Drabble assesses the different editions and translations of the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng. The novel concludes with bibliographic information about these editions and adds further book recommendations for research regarding the historical background of the period. David Jays, book reviewer for the Observer, calls Drabble’s attempt to fictionalize history a failure because, [l]ike a self-appointed anthropologist, she diligently explains culture and customs, and her wintry reflections suck the blood out of court life. In chilly posterity, the princess fashions her melodramatic experiences into a stilted seminar. […] The past ceases to be strange or beautiful and subsides under a dust of explication.2 (Jays 2004)

Jays blames the author for having written a novel that is too erudite and that lacks vividness, being “long on detail, but short on imagination.” Having anticipated an aesthetic illusion, which might allow for a more emotional approach to past experience, The Red Queen does not meet Jays’s expectations. In a review for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Bart Thurber, expresses his astonishment about the fact that Drabble places the focus on meticulously researched historical facts and sources instead of playfully trying to blur the lines between fact and fiction: Now, given that Drabble is one accomplished lady, the author of 14 or 15 prior novels, several of which wax seriously postmodernistic, my first thought was that she was going to Nabokov us to death with this, teasing us with nonexistent or endlessly self-referential references, shading us into the ways we construct and are constructed by our reading, but, well—no. I checked. Her sources are real. This novel is not Despair. Her academics, her intellectuals, are all real people and her translations are genuine, all three of them. (Thurber 2004)

In comparison to her postmodernist case studies of female protagonists in the 1960s and 1970s, Drabble’s prodigious output continues with her sixteenth novel,

2 Notwithstanding this criticism, the effects of this extensive heteroreferentiality are also widely praised in reviews of The Red Queen, which point out that the diary of the Princess “is especially interesting for the light it casts on a way of life almost unknown to contemporary westerners, and for this the novel is both important and fascinating.” See Mary Whipple’s review “Margaret Drabble ‘The Red Queen’” (2004).



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which Thurber aptly summarizes as being “seriously, even overwhelmingly, scholarly.” These reactions of surprise and disapproval indicate that Drabble’s way of writing about history in the realm of fiction deviates not only from the traditional historical novel, but also from the well-established postmodernist model of historiographic metafiction, as defined by Linda Hutcheon (1988).3 Monika Fludernik summarizes the main characteristics of the first prototypical examples of historiographic metafiction: In the post-modern world, it is argued, one’s worst fantasies are becoming true; in fact, actual events exceed fictional scenarios in their grotesqueness, paradoxicality and incomprehensibility. As Raven Quickskill says in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, “Who is to say what is fact and what is fiction?” It is this situation which critics have postulated to be at the root of historiographic metafiction, and which is argued to reflect the climate of the American 60s and 70s. It is therefore no coincidence that the great historiographic metafictionists are writing precisely during that period, producing representations of a chaotic world such as those found in Heller’s Catch-22, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Pynchon’ s Gravity’s Rainbow, or in the work of Hawkes and DeLillo. (Fludernik 1994, 84)

In order to account for the otherness of Drabble’s fiction, I will introduce and examine a subgenre of historiographic metafiction that I call post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction.4 Fludernik has already predicted the advent of a new form of self-referential historical novel as an upcoming trend in the mid-1990s:

3 With the advent of the narrative and cultural turn in historiography and literary studies in the 1960s, metahistoriographic and metafictional commentaries about the nature and function of historiography occur in large number in both disciplines. While representatives of narrative historiography such as Arthur C. Danto, Hayden White or Frank R. Ankersmit demonstrate the ways in which historians apply narrative techniques similar to those employed by novelists in order to create a coherent story of the past, historiographic metafiction is characterized as a genre that, according to Linda Hutcheon (1988, 48), merges metahistoriographic and metafictional comments with storytelling. Hutcheon postulates the rise of historiographic metafiction in the 1960s and 1970s, listing novels that “distrust history’s ability and will to convey ‘truth’” and that are no longer interested in “recounting the facts.” 4 In analogy to Ansgar Nünning (1995, 284), who criticizes the concept ‘historiographic metafiction’ for its misleading focus on metafiction instead of metahistoriography, I suggest a different term for the subgenre I investigate in this paper. Aware of the fact that the umbrella term ‘historiographic metafiction’ has already become canonical, I consider ‘post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction’ a more appropriate term, but do not suggest replacing the former concept. Rather than proposing to use Nünning’s term ‘fictional metahistoriography’ as a substitute for the entire genre of historiographic metafiction, I think it is necessary to focus on a subgenre of historiographic metafiction whose approach of fictionalizing history has changed. Instead of displaying either a positivist or a radical constructivist attitude towards the past, post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction does not represent history as true or false, but as more or less

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A new, more serious, mode of historiographic metafiction seems to be hatching, one that is less playful, more specifically concerned with ‘history’ (in different ways) and less simplistically and dichotomously mythological than most of the historiographic metafictions of the 1960s and 1970s. Should one therefore, as I have suggested, desist from calling such texts historiographic metafictions and talk instead of ‘the new historical novel’? That, I trust, history will tell. (Fludernik 1994, 101)

Similar to Fludernik’s approach, I do not aim to provide a fixed typology of the many different varieties of historiographic metafiction. I rather suggest having a closer look at one specific group that can be differentiated from what we consider the canonical examples of the genre.5 Whereas historiographic metafiction highlights the impossibility of writing reliable history, post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction written after 2000 refutes radical constructivist theories that postulate an all-encompassing unreliability of historical writing and storytelling. Taking up the constructivist challenge, this new form of metahistoriographic fiction presents history as a product of an agreement: a specific historical account is treated as valid as soon as a scientific community agrees on it and as long as it is not proven false by a competing explanation. Novels such as The Red Queen hence reflect the cultural discourses of the last two decades, which foreground the limits of contemporary historiography, but also start re-emphasizing its potentials.6

plausible: positivist claims that history reconstructs the ‘real’ past are replaced by the belief that history offers plausible hypotheses about what might have happened in the past. 5 In literary studies, novels such as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) are mentioned as prototypical British texts that exemplify Hutcheon’s genre classifications. Prototypical examples of American historiographic metafiction are, for instance, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1974) or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixon (1997). In these novels, history is presented as “yarn” or “reality-obscuring drama” (Swift 1983, 53 and 34). 6 It echoes a pragmatic view on writing history. According to historian Dominick LaCapra (1983, 38), historical inquiry is not meant to end all arguments and explanations about what happened in the past, but to make these explanations “as informed, vital, and undogmatically open to counterargument as possible.” Additionally, historian Richard Evans (1997, 79) points out that we do not have to question every single detail about the past, since there are at least some historical facts, such as the height of a tower, which are beyond doubt. “Only if new evidence is found to amend or cast doubt on the historian’s account of a fact […] does revision at this level takes place.” These pragmatic assumptions that writing history is still a viable procedure for deducing a plausible past from textual representations of past events have to be distinguished from Hans Kellner’s (2000, 280) or Hayden White’s poststructuralist claim that “when it comes to the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the record itself for preferring one way of



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Consequently, Drabble’s fiction defamiliarizes the process of writing history without completely undermining it. It asks serious questions about the writing and nature of history beyond postmodernist joking, and it intersubjectively inserts acknowledged narratives of what might have happened in the past. Based on the idea that provisional historical knowledge can still be produced and transmitted—on the premise that this knowledge is acknowledged by a scientific community and considered historically and culturally variable—Drabble’s novel refutes the idea that fiction and fact, as well as past and present, have indistinguishably merged: Time past and time present, London and Seoul, seem to be flowing through one another. They have not merged, they remain distinct, but they coexist, in some dreamlike time of correspondences. They do not fuse or melt. (Drabble 2004, 333–334; emphasis added)

2 After the Constructivist Challenge The subgenre discussed in this article uses specific narrative strategies to underscore this thematic focus. I will identify three of these strategies before I locate them in Margaret Drabble’s quintessential post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction: the use of heteroreferentiality; the employment of explicit metahistoriographic, metafictional and metanarrative commentaries; and the application of unreliable narration. These narrative strategies are the ones most affected by the changed premises of metahistoriographic fiction after the constructivist challenge. Since all three strategies are employed in both historiographic metafiction and post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction, the two types of novels cannot be differentiated by their inherent narrative strategies. Rather, the functions and effects of the same narrative devices differ in both cases. First, historical novels (and in particular historiographic metafiction) cannot do without instances of heteroreferentiality, i. e., intertextual references to fictional and non-fictional texts, as well as extratextual references to historical events, figures, objects or places. It is necessary to analyse in which ways the

construing its meaning rather than another” (1983, 136–137) as well as from Sir Geoffrey Elton’s resentful retort to the poststructuralists: In battling against people who would subject historical studies to the dictate of literary critics we historians are, in a way, fighting for our lives. Certainly for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights—the intellectual equivalent of crack. (Elton 1991, 41)

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texts refer to these entities outside of themselves. In contrast to historiographic metafiction, novels such as Drabble’s The Red Queen affirm the view that historiography proceeds under agreed rules and corresponds to specific criteria such as continuity, coherence or causality—criteria that specify what evidence is the most plausible, the most scientific. Examining the footnotes, bibliographies, quotations or non-fictional intertexts in these novels supports the claim that metahistoriographic fiction takes up established historical knowledge on which a scientific community agrees. Novels such as Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen, James Robertson’s The Fanatic (2000) or Adam Thorpe’s Hodd (2009) discuss the interplay of what Wolfgang Iser (1983, 122) calls the imaginary and the real in narratives about history and historiography. Neither the real nor the imaginary automatically turn into fiction once they are embedded into a fictional text; instead, they are fictionalized and thus turned into linguistic signs. The fictionalized real can interact with the fictionalized imaginary. While fictionalization is an essential process to enable the contact of the real with the imaginary on the same ontological level, some genres of fiction do not cease to mark the different origins of the narrative facts in the story. Similarly, The Red Queen does not modify the Iserian real in order to satirize or tease its readers, who still wonder whether the historical information given might be fictionalized beyond recognition. It no longer shares the assumptions of historiographic metafiction that, according to Fludernik, allow “for the ironic (ab) use of, and the self-reflexive play with, factual parameters” (1994, 91) due to the fact that “historical ‘reality’ itself is […] conceived of as fantastic and chaotic” in the “predicament of general disorientation” (92). The novel leaves no doubt that historiography and fiction can be distinguished due to conventions of reading and to intratextual and paratextual markers. In that, it echoes and exemplifies Fludernik’s apt remark that “one can exaggerate the fictionality of historiography” (82). Second, post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction stays true to the genre conventions of historiographic metafiction which prescribe explicitly-stated markers that give away the constructedness of the text. Metafictional autoreferentiality in metahistoriographic fiction makes the status of fiction explicit, and leaves no doubt about it. Metahistorical and metahistoriographic comments challenge the claim of positivist historiography to offer ‘true insights’ into the past. However, the narrators of the more recent subgenre, who comment on the conditions of historical knowledge, do not draw an entirely pessimistic conclusion as to the possibility of generating historical knowledge altogether. Post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction is a reaction to the radical claims of postmodernist thought in historiographic metafiction and—without



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abstaining from irony and meta-commentary—affirms the view that consensus on historical facts can be reached. This renewed interest in history corresponds to the rise of neo-realism in fiction. Josh Toth acknowledges the return to realism in postmodernist fiction as “ultimately symptomatic of a broad epistemological renewal of faith—that is, faith in the promise (of mimesis, of communication, etc.) and the impossible possibility that it will be fulfilled” (Toth 2010, 119). Without rejecting postmodern claims, “neo-realism seems willing to do what postmodernism was not (yet) willing, or able, to do: embrace both realism and metafiction as equally contingent ‘language games.’” (119). Post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction consequently uses references to reality and other markers of factuality to counterbalance the numerous markers of fictionality and to characterize the postmodernist obsession with meta-commentaries as yet another ideology. Third, I should hasten to add that the use of unreliable narration in novels such as Drabble’s The Red Queen serve as a means to distinguish between historiographic metafiction and its subgenre. Following Tamar Yacobi, I take narrative unreliability to be a “mechanism of integration” applied by the readers; an “inference that explains and eliminates tensions, incongruities, contradictions and other infelicities the work may show by attributing them to a source of transmission” (1981, 119). Since the 1990s, Kathleen Wall (1994) and Bruno Zerweck (2001) have argued that unreliable narration is no longer a heuristic category for the interpretation of postmodernist novels because of the lack of a reliable counterpart. Despite the recent trend to dismiss the concept of narrative unreliability altogether, reading the narrator as unreliable remains a useful interpretative strategy if the narration concerned emphasizes the question of reliability, both thematically and structurally. Narrative instances in historiographic metafiction frequently underline the limits of the story told, the act of storytelling and the storytellers in the realm of historical narratives. To pose and answer the question as to whether parts of the story are reliably told is hence constitutive to a genre that does not present its narrators as infallible historians, but as human beings with subjective reasons for their way of (re)telling history. Unlike historiographic metafiction, the more recent subgenre stresses the fact that it remains possible to present the course of events in a reliable fashion. Whenever narrative unreliability is evoked in the texts, it is limited to small passages and is seldom used to question historically established facts. When used selectively, it displays the belief that a subjective perception of past events will be considered as intersubjectively valid and reliable if it were to meet a

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consensus which obtains about cognitive standards of acceptability and plausibility (such as scope, explanatory power, consistency, adequacy) in evaluating the provisional truthclaims of historical inference to the best explanation. (Robinson 2011, 12)

We should not forget that there is a structural analogy between historiography and narrative unreliability in this matter. Assuming that it is worthwhile sticking to the heuristic value of both, historiography and narrative unreliability can still be distinguished from their counterparts, i. e., fiction and narrative reliability. If one assumes that the historical text can be regarded as a plausible representation of the past (which, however, cannot be proven beyond all doubt), one can also assume that in the realm of fictional stories there is still a possibility of a reliable report in the sense of trustworthiness and validity. Therefore, recent metahistoriographic fiction rejects radical calls for merging history and fiction into fiction as well as calls for repealing the concepts of reliability and unreliability. It is this difference that determines the major function of the subgenre of historiographic metafiction: to favour a contemporary historiography which acknowledges its limits of reliability but which at the same time responds to the need for reliable information.

3 “They do not fuse or melt”—Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen illuminates the ways in which heteroreferentiality, explicit metahistoriographic, metafictional and metanarrative commentaries, as well as unreliable narration, are employed as narrative strategies in prototypical post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction. Regarding the strategy of marking heteroreferentiality with the help of narrative signposts of factuality, a first observation reveals that Drabble’s fiction spatially separates those parts of the text that allude to the historiographic background and historical research on the topic. The novel contains a prologue, an afterword, acknowledgements, a note on sources and a bibliography. Not only does this narrative frame create the illusion of an editor-narrator who tries to make sense of a found manuscript before daring to fictionalize it, but it also encompasses meticulous descriptions of the editing process and of the research carried out by the inscribed author, Margaret Drabble. It also foregrounds the mechanisms and pitfalls of historiography by revealing the deficiencies of the historical manuscript on which the novel is based. All of this sounds familiar when recalling historical novels of the nineteenth century—and yet it is different.



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Although some of the time-honoured literary traditions (such as the topos of the lost and found manuscript) reoccur, the historical facts evoked in The Red Queen are not invented, but rather backed up by bibliographic notes. The narrative is inspired by the four Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng. Lady Hyegyŏng, Crown Princess of eighteenth-century Korea, narrates her life at court. In her fourth memoir, Lady Hyegyǒng talks about the death of her husband, Prince Sado, and the reign of King Yŏngjo, the twenty-first king of the Korean Joseon Dynasty. This period of reign has become famous because of a royal filicide: King Yŏngjo killed his son, Prince Sado, because the latter was accused of randomly killing people in the palace. The Crown Princess’s ensuing attempts to explain the motives of the different political agents in the conflict turn into the non-fictional historical basis of Drabble’s fictionalization. The Red Queen subsequently fills a gap in the official history of Korea, but it does not imply that history itself is a form of fiction. It enriches the historical knowledge handed down in the court chronicles by taking into account the memoir of an eyewitness. The latter is less objective, but nevertheless provides plausible reasons. The novel opens with a prologue in which a novelist-narrator and inscribed author states that she created a fictional account based on Lady Hyegyǒng’s memoirs. In order to mark her borrowings, the novelist-narrator explicitly declares: I have supplied some invention, and added some interpretations, most of which are overtly displayed as interpretations, rather than facts. There are (and have been) many possible interpretations of the story, and mine is only one of them. You will find details of sources and a bibliography at the end of this volume. (Drabble 2004, viii; emphasis added)

Clearly indicating the difference between the Iserian real and the imaginary by spatially separating them from one another in different parts of the novel, The Red Queen suggests that the real can be neatly distinguished from the imaginary. However, in her bibliography, the inscribed author includes one fictitious source which she has mixed in with the other sources of verified historical knowledge: The memoirs are known in English under various titles, and there are at least three translations, taken from variant texts. (The translation by Thea Ŏ. Landry mentioned in my text is, of course, a fiction.) (Drabble 2004, 355–356)

By adding two narratives that unfold the transmission of the fictionalized memoir from the Korea of the eighteenth century into contemporary Britain, Drabble chooses to show the fictionalized historical document as part of a complex network of communication. Simulating the transmission of the document

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through time and space, the novel emphasizes that establishing history is a collective, culturally variable activity based on consensus. This activity is dependent on the different agents who assess and combine historical facts to form a coherent historical narrative as well as on the readers of the resulting product. Despite the heteroreferential markers of factuality, the novel is brimming with meta-commentaries: reviewer Mary Whipple (2004) criticizes the mixture of metafiction, metanarration and metahistoriography for “lacking in subtlety.” While turning Lady Hyegyǒng’s historical autobiography into a novel, the inscribed author in the primary narration proceeds with caution and incessantly reminds the readers of the fact that they are merely reading a fictional adaptation: I have turned her story into a novel, of a kind. This is because I am a novelist, and, for better and for worse, writing novels is what I do. I do not know if this is what she would have wanted. She wanted something, but this may not have been it. It may well be that she would have utterly deplored the liberties I have taken with her story. Being dead, she has not had much say in the matter. She has had no control over how her readers interpret or adapt or translate her story. (Drabble 2004, vii–viii)

This passage contains ironic metafictional, metahistoriographic and metanarrative statements about the process of fictionalizing a historical document, decisions about how to tell the story and the ways in which the past can be distorted by historians or political agents. In outlining the characteristics and limits of her profession, the inscribed author cunningly concludes: “Novelists […] are not to be trusted. They steal; they borrow; they appropriate. You should never tell them anything, if you want to keep it a secret” (Drabble 2004, 351). Her ironic warning foreshadows what is going to happen: the inscribed author in the novel acquires a manuscript that she turns into fiction. Subsequently, the novel’s entire structure serves as a metafictional comment on the ontological status of the novel by reduplicating the communicative situation in the prologue of the inscribed author. In analogy to the real-life author, the inscribed author illustrates the relation between the real and the imaginary in the process of fictionalization while underscoring that the product, a “work of fiction and fancy” (Drabble 2004, viii), needs to be clearly distinguished from its historical origin. In comparison to the historical memoir, the novel adds markers that render certain sections unreliable. It is vital to explore the nature and the effects of these unreliably narrated passages, because they support what has been said so far about the novel’s approach to the ongoing discourse on historiography. Narrative



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unreliability in The Red Queen is not limited to the intranarrative, internarrative or intertextual realm, but extended to extratextual unreliability.7 When the inscribed author admits that the fictionalized Korean historian JaHyun Kim Haboush “does not endorse [her] interpretation, and has had no influence over the point of view or overall tone” (Drabble 2004, viii), she mirrors Haboush’s real-life reaction. The historian Haboush outside the novel expresses her dismay with the novel in an interview: There is a kind of moral authenticity that we are looking for, and in that sense, The Red Queen is Margaret Drabble’s imagination—it’s very much embedded in the British post-war literary generation, where enlightenment comes from the West. (Park 2004)

In the novel as well as in real life, Haboush thus accuses the novelist of having manipulated Lady Hyegyǒng’s historical voice and of relocating the narration to the present Western culture. Thereby, she casts suspicion on the authenticity and reliability of the historical account in the novel. Both Margaret Drabble as the empirical author of The Red Queen and the fictionalized version of herself, which she inscribes into the novel, meet this criticism by referring to their right to fictionalize and invent as part of their profession. Although Drabble indicates Haboush’s dismay due to the distortion of the ‘original’ voice, she stages the embedded narrative about Lady Hyegyǒng as a reliable narration: she invites a comparison of Haboush’s translation and her own account while only admitting slight, but clearly marked deviations from this translation. Additionally, however, Drabble creates the impression of Lady Hyegyǒng being a cunning and calculating woman—an impression that is not evoked in Haboush’s translation. The fact that Drabble’s narration sullies Lady Hyegyǒng’s reputation as an innocent victim of Korean history to a small extent might have increased Haboush’s anger. At an extratextual level, the limits of the metahistoriographic novel are evident: a reader from a different cultural and ideological background might not share the novel’s claim that history can be transmitted as a commonly accepted explanation of the past. At an intranarrative level, the representation of Lady Hyegyǒng as a calculating storyteller results in a stigmatization of the princess-narrator as morally unreliable: the Princess helps her husband to hide his deviant deeds from his father’s view in order to avoid the king’s rage. Instead of condemning her husband for raping her ladies-in-waiting, torturing her servants and finally killing them, the Princess starts defending these cruel deeds by reducing Sado to the status of a

7 See Per Krogh Hansen’s distinction (2007, 241) between the four different forms of unreliability.

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child: “But in truth I do see us, as from afar, like two dolls in a distant pageant. Two small, overdressed, unhappy, innocent dolls” (Drabble 2004, 87). As this statement indicates, the Crown Princess is well aware of her audience and addresses it directly by allaying the doubts referring to the narrator’s reliability. She enhances the impression of innocence while listing the attributes ‘small’, ‘overdressed’, ‘unhappy’ and ‘innocent’, which are combined with the noun ‘doll’. Directed and even dressed by others, the prince and princess are portrayed as passive and non-autonomous objects that cannot be held responsible. The discrepancies between the narrator’s attempt to protest her innocence, and the information that the Crown Princess actually assists her husband, can be naturalized by calling the princess unreliable. This trend persists when deceptive unreliability, as defined by Jan Stühring, can be associated with the princess-narrator in the first of the three embedded narratives. Stühring defines his notion of deceptive unreliability as follows: A narrative n of a work of fiction f is deceptively unreliable if and only if n justifies (at least temporarily) a belief b, such that b is ›p in f‹, and not all optimal possible interpretations agree on p in f. (Stühring 2011, 107)

In other words, a narration deceives the readers if it suggests and justifies a specific reading that is later refuted by other justified readings. In comparison to stereotypical examples of deceptive unreliability, such as Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the degree of deception in The Red Queen is nevertheless small: it only consists of the princess-narrator’s attempt to create the impression that she is innocent. Notwithstanding this ruse, later passages reveal that the princess has actively participated in the events that lead to the murder of her husband. Although Lady Hyegyǒng tries to win over her audience, textual discrepancies prevent the readers from seeing her as an innocent victim of court politics. When describing the first of her husband’s numerous killings, the narrator temporarily deceives the readers: I remember the illustrated text I was reading; I remember the pattern of blossom and butterfly; I remember the gilt thread; I remember even the vermilion and turquoise of the cloth spool on which the thread was bound. It was a tranquil domestic scene. […] So picture me, innocently employed, sitting on my low, silk-cushioned rosewood couch. Then suddenly my husband Prince Sado burst in, through the outer chamber, past the ladies-in-waiting, carrying before him a strange round object stuck on the end of a short spike—it looked to be about the size of a large cabbage. […] Trembling, I removed my glasses, and then I saw what I saw. Sado was bearing before him a severed head. It was not a papier-maché mask from a peasant puppet show, but a real head. […] I do not remember if I screamed or not. Later, my ladies assured me I conducted myself with dignity, but I cannot remember what I did or said. (Drabble 2004, 84)



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This part of the narrative contains numerous strategies to enhance the cruel visual impression on the readers. It is an adequate example for the narrator’s skill in selecting, arranging and presenting events which does not miss its effects. Introducing the scene with a stereotypical domestic and peaceful feminine setting, the male intrusion of violence seems aggressive and hostile. The fictionalized Lady Hyegyǒng foregrounds her vivid memories of the tranquil scene before the assault by repeating the phrase ‘I remember’ four times in one sentence. Thus, she stages herself as an innocent victim who tries to protect her family against male capriciousness: the gendered space of the princess is violently invaded by Sado, who forces his way into the last private resort of the princess, past the outer chamber and the ladies-in-waiting. The narrator then defers the identification of the ‘strange round object’ and again alludes to the foremost peaceful atmosphere by comparing the object to a harmless cabbage. When she finally reveals that her husband is not holding a cabbage but a severed head on a spike, she turns once more to a less violent comparison, a ‘papier-maché mask’, which elucidates the discrepancies between reality and her seemingly innocent attempt to comprehend and categorize the object. Finally facing reality, her repeated claim not to remember what happened in and after this recognition is contradicted to the repetition of ‘I remember’ at the beginning of her account: while the narrator remembers every tiny detail on the embroidery she made two hundred years ago, she denies having a memory of her reaction to the severed head. These discrepancies between existing and missing memories make readers aware of the fact that the narration is a carefully constructed tale. After all, the narrator has a vital interest in convincing her audience that the events took place in the exact same way as described in her account. Her claim, however, is undermined by her confession to have forgotten many crucial details: Strangely, I cannot remember what happened to my little brothers at this time. Were they with me and my mother in Pansong-bang, or with my father and the wet nurse? It is immaterial, but it is strange that I cannot remember. My memories are full of gaps. (Drabble 2004, 12)

Complaining about memory gaps is a topos that frequently occurs in historiographic metafiction aimed at underlining the factual unreliability of eyewitnesses in historiographic research. To fight this stigma of factual unreliability, the Crown Princess constantly compares her mental superiority and sanity with her husband’s insanity: “The madder Sado became, the more I believed in reason. I took refuge in reason and in the life of the mind. Posterity is witness to my rationality” (Drabble 2004, 72). However, Lady Hyegyǒng’s rationality is undermined

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by two important narrative facts: first, the Crown Princess is shown to be very superstitious and less rational than she pretends to be and; second, contrary to the non-fictional historical text, she is presented as a ghost in Drabble’s fiction.

4 Spectral Transformations The radical transformation of a historical eyewitness into a ghost-narrator in a fictional realm serves as a marker of fictionality. We have to ask ourselves what benefits this transformation brings, if any. One possible benefit is that a ghost can overcome the spatial and temporal restrictions and thus turns into a transcendental historian who functions both as a chronicler and as an eyewitness for the historical events. Using a ghost in the embedded story serves to make a point that cultural narratology has highlighted since its emergence: we need context-sensitive interpretations of texts, since the transmission and the reception of (historical) narratives are culturally dependent. Similar to many other conventional homodiegetic narrators in fictional texts, the narrating I of the first part of the novel writes history, or in this case herstory, by maintaining a temporal, spatial and emotional distance from the experiencing I of the eighteenth century. Although the Crown Princess cannot look into the minds of her husband or other members of the court, she can explain their potential motives with more hindsight. In this, she imitates a historian’s attempt to render an account of what actually happened. A second advantage of this narrative trick is that it enables anachronistic remarks such as the narrator’s musings on psychoanalysis or psychological terminology, although the story this terminology refers to is 200 years older than Freud. When analysing her mother’s behaviour after having given birth to her brother, the narrator, Lady Hyegyǒng, asks: “Was it a form of postnatal depression? Such a condition was not officially recognized or named in those days, though it was common enough” (Drabble 2004, 12). The use of a ghost narrator is a device to show how contemporary knowledge about the Korea of the eighteenth century replaces the knowledge visible in the historical document of Lady Hyegyǒng, and in what ways historical knowledge is affirmed or refuted by a later generation of historians. It enables a meta-commentary on the nature and development of historical knowledge. Third, the ghost represents the link between the first and the following two narratives: a character-narrator who has lived in one culture and period can



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compare it to the social and political evils of another.8 In an interview, the empirical author Drabble explains her decision to let her character-narrator haunt the entire setting of the novel on all diegetic levels: Well, I made her a ghost so that she could leap out of her own period and comment on the present day, because one of the things I was trying to do in the book was to point out that progress isn’t all it’s meant to be, that people still die very unpleasant deaths. (Lee 2007, 484)

The ghost as a marker of fictionality deviates from a realistic realm and enables a comparison of different factualities in different times and cultures. Instead of concluding that the Korea of the eighteenth century cannot be understood or compared to Great Britain in the twenty-first century, the novel uses the ghost of the Korean Crown princess as a mouthpiece to ask: “How much of the past, I wonder, lingers in the air?” (Drabble 2004, 160). The remaining parts of the text contain the answer to this question: history influences the present and can be narrated and transmitted in the acknowledged form of historical facts. Thus, despite the drawbacks and problems of narrating the past, The Red Queen still claims to offer a factual portrait of eighteenth-century Korea. The resulting picture corresponds to what Western readers believe Korea to have looked like two hundred years ago. Along cultural lines, however, the question remains whether a British author is entitled to modify, and is capable of critically assessing, Korean history in her fiction. In analogy to other examples of post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction, The Red Queen exemplifies a strategy for representing historical knowledge as well as doubts concerning this knowledge. Alan Robinson summarizes this strategy, which applies not only to Drabble’s fiction but also to non-fictional postmodernist historiographies: Although the avowedly provisional truth-claims of constructionist historians cannot be proven, acting pragmatically on the assumption that consensual views bear some plausible relation to truth is a strategy which works. (Robinson 2011, 27)

Thus, despite the signposts of fictionality, such as explicit metafiction and unreliable narration and despite the limits of transcultural understanding, The Red

8 Hence, the Crown Princess argues, for example, that the political leaders of Korea are frequently overrated: while King Sejong is said to have invented the Korean alphabet although he has only promulgated it, Kim Jong-il has not invented the massed dance notation, but only written a theory about it (Drabble 2004, 35).

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Queen claims to transmit intersubjectively valid historical knowledge: the narrators may be biased and may try to evoke sympathy in the reader, but they are still shown to render a reliable report which corresponds to the historical memoir. Moreover, narrative unreliability is limited to only a few specific passages. In their article on unreliability in autobiography, Dan Shen and Dejin Xu affirm the view that a verdict on a text or a narrator’s unreliability depends on the genre conventions and on the comparison with other texts of the same or a different genre: Hence we can see the functioning of two representative mechanisms: the generic mechanism: how one views the ‘factualness’ of autobiography as a genre affects one’s response to the autobiographer’s unfaithful presentation of facts, hence bearing on the interpretation of ‘factual unreliability’; and the comparative mechanism: the factual (un)reliability of the narration is judged in relation to other works of the same genre, and its ideological (un) reliability is judged in relation to the ideological behavior of other comparable persons […]. (Shen and Xu 2007, 78–79)

In comparison to historiographic metafiction, post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction considerably reduces the scope of unreliability. Notwithstanding all uncertainty and unreliability, novels of this type produce the effect that fictional and historiographic discourse can be distinguished and that the partial unreliability of the narrators does not exclude the possibility that their reports contain reliable information. Heteroreferential comments do not turn out to be invented and, if they are, they are marked as such. Historical information given in the fiction actually refers to the non-fictional historiographic sources indicated in the footnotes or the bibliography. Hence, there is little postmodernist play on historical facts. Nevertheless, the subgenre employs both: strategies that enhance the impression of factuality and metafictional comments that clearly point out the status of the text as a whole. As a result, the reader is made aware of the factuality of some passages, and of the fictionality of others, with the help of intratextual markers of fictionality and factuality.

5 Conclusion: Constructivism Reloaded Despite its similarities to historiographic non-fiction, recent metahistoriographic fiction does not pretend to serve the same functions. Its added value, in comparison to non-fictional texts about the past, is that the three narrative strategies (the



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use of reliable heteroreferentiality the application of explicit meta-commentary and the curtailing of unreliable narration) are used to satirize historiography. Having said this, I want to grant full force to the claim that the nature of satire has always been twofold. On the one hand, a specific convention is ridiculed and disclosed as a more or less arbitrary tool to convey a specific message. This is what happened to positivist historiography in historiographic metafiction in the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, satire helps to redeploy a strategy that has been subjected to close scrutiny in case it turns out to be a necessary way of dealing with what surrounds us. Satirical genres, such as historiographic metafiction or its subgenre, post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction, take up contemporary discussions about how to write and assess history. They either ridicule the attempt to write history or explore ways of coping with the difficulties of such an endeavour. The latter type of fiction tends to answer the call for viability instead of relativity when it comes to generating historical knowledge. Nevertheless, I have also highlighted the limits of this subgenre: its suggestion that the real and the imaginary can be neatly separated might be valid within the story world, but this is refuted by evaluations of extrafictional reviewers. These critics either disapprove the high amount of reference in fiction or the still-tooliberal adaptation of historical narratives in the realm of the novel. It clearly remains that the interaction of the real and the imaginary in fictionalized historiographic accounts needs to be examined further. Only if we start considering post-constructivist metahistoriographic fiction as a form of historical novel which uses constructivist historiography for new and pragmatic ends will we be in a position to assess new ways of dealing with history in fiction and outside. Much more work needs to be done if we want to gain a more complex picture of narrative unreliability and reliability of historiography in recent metahistoriographic fiction. Eventually, the ghost narrator in The Red Queen concludes and—with it—summarizes the state of the art in this field of research: “No story is ever finished. Mine continues” (Drabble 2004, 165).

Works Cited Elton, Geoffrey R. 1991. Return to Essentials. Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Richard. 1997. In Defence of History. London: Granta Books. Fludernik, Monika. 1994. “History and metafiction: Experientiality, causality, and myth.” In Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, edited by Bernd Engler, 81–101. Paderborn: Schöningh.

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Hansen, Per Krogh. 2007. “Reconsidering the unreliable narrator.” Semiotica 165 (1/4): 227–246. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Iser, Wolfgang. 1983. “Akte des Fingierens oder Was ist das Fiktive im fiktionalen Text?” In Funktionen des Fiktiven, edited by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser, 121–151. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Jays, David. 2004. “Seoul destroying: Margaret Drabble’s historical Korean fable, The Red Queen, is long on detail, but short on imagination.” The Guardian. 22 August. http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/2004/aug/22/fiction.features (Accessed 13 December 2013) Kellner, Hans. 2000. “Narrativity in History: Post-structuralism and Since.” In The Narrative Reader, edited by Martin McQillan, 275–283. London and New York: Routledge. LaCapra, Dominick. 1983. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lee, Young-Oak. 2007. “An Interview with Margaret Drabble.” Contemporary Literature 48 (4): 477–498. Nünning, Ansgar. 1995. Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion. Band I. Theorie, Typologie und Poetik des historischen Romans. Trier: WVT. Park, Ed. 2004. “A Talk With the Translator of the Memoir You Have to Read Next.” The Village Voice. 26 October. http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-10-26/books/a-talk-with-thetranslator-of-the-memoir-you-have-to-read-next/full/ (Accessed 26 December 2013) Robinson, Alan. 2011. Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shen, Dan, and Dejin Xu. 2007. “Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction.” Poetics Today 28 (1): 43–87. Stühring, Jan. 2011. “Unreliability, Deception, and Fictional Facts.” JLT 5 (1): 95–108. Swift, Graham. 1983. Waterland. New York: Poseidon Books. Thurber, Bart. 2013. “Go ask Margaret: ‘The Red Queen’s lost her head, and her way, in Drabble’s ambitious, confused tale.” U-T San Diego. 24 October. http://www.utsandiego. com/uniontrib/20041024/news_mz1v24queen.html (Accessed 26 December 2013) Toth, Josh. 2010. The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary. New York: State University of New York Press. Wall, Kathleen. 1994. “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1): 18–42. Whipple, Mary. 2004. “Margaret Drabble ‘The Red Queen’.” Mostly Fiction Book Reviews. 19 December. http://mostlyfiction.com/history/drabble.htm (Accessed 13 December 2013) White, Hayden. 1983. “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation.” In The Politics of Interpretation, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 136–137. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Yacobi, Tamar. 1981. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics Today 2 (2): 113–126. Zagorin, Perez. 1999. “History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now.” History and Theory 38 (1): 1–24. Zerweck, Bruno. 2001. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35 (1): 151–178.

Silke Lahn (Hamburg) and Stephanie Neu (Mannheim)

Towards a Crossing of the Divide between Fiction and Non-Fiction in European Television Series and Movies: The Examples of the Italian Romanzo Criminale and the Danish Klovn Non-fiction and fiction have generally been understood to be two distinct entities. Narratives were supposed to belong either to a factual representation of reality or to an invented representation. The only problem was to settle on an agreed definition for the categorial distinction of fictional and factual narratives—an endeavour which, to date, has yielded mainly an ongoing debate about determining acceptable criteria for fiction. Currently we find ourselves in the nascent phase of various forms of New Media which are struggling to define themselves and their relationship with existing genres in Old Media. This process is not only establishing new ways for how a (real or an invented) story can be told, but it is also influencing the old ones. Seen from this perspective, playing with the postulated divide of fiction and non-fiction seems a logical consequence: techniques and strategies that were long regarded as typical for one or the other now travel back and forth. The result is a growing number of new hybrid forms in which the receiver is frequently faced with the difficulty of deciding whether a narrative, in whole or part, is fictional or factual. Does this mean that the divide between fiction and non-fiction has finally become obsolete? On the one hand, Gérard Genette once claimed that “pure” fictional or factual narratives are mere thought experiments, only found in the “poetician’s test tube” (1990, 772). On the other hand, we still have a strong intuition that differentiating narratives according to “real” and “invented” content does matter. After an intense debate during the second half of the twentieth century that failed to achieve generally agreed positions, Richard Walsh (2007) proposed, in the tradition of the Chicago School, to redefine fictionality not as an ontological category but as a rhetorical mode. In our paper, we will test drive this suggestion by looking at two recent and iconic examples in European storytelling which mix supposedly irreconcilable elements of fictional and factual origin: Romanzo Criminale, an Italian movie (2005) and a television series (2008–10) based on a novel of the same name; and Klovn, a Danish television series (2005–09) and the subsequent film Klovn—The DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-009

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Movie (2010). All representations refer to real persons while at the same time employing storytelling patterns typically associated with fictional narratives. To begin, we give a short overview of the most relevant approaches to fiction theory.

1 The Problem of Fiction in Literary Theory 1.1 Classical approaches to defining fiction Following Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2014 [2009]), we subdivide the debate on how to differentiate fiction from non-fiction into three groups. 1) The semantic definition is inspired by philosophical theories of reference and rests on the idea of an ontological divide between fiction and non-fiction: either a narrative has a reference to the “real” world (in the case of factual narratives) or not (in the case of fictional narratives). A challenge for this approach arises from so-called immigrant objects (Zipfel 2001, 92), elements imported from the real world into a fictional universe (e. g., the notorious example of Napoleon’s appearance in a novel). Lubomír Doležel offers a solution by stating that real-world elements, when appearing in a fictive world, undergo “a substantial transformation at the world boundary into non-actual possibles, with all the ontological, logical and semantical consequences” (1988, 485). However, Doležel does not explain what this mystic conversion (e. g., of real-world persons) means in concrete terms; we agree with Frank Zipfel (2001, 94) that it is extremely counter-intuitive to label real persons or places in fiction as fictive objects out of the desire to achieve theoretical rigour. Wolf Schmid (2010 [2005], 32), on the other hand, highlights the consequent danger of gradating the fictive. 2) A syntactic definition seeks to distinguish fictional and factual narratives by means of distinctive formal criteria that are inherent to the text. Probably the best-known representative is Käte Hamburger, who describes assumed fiction-signals in third-person narratives. This occurs with the use of the epic preterit that ceases to indicate the past in fictional contexts, the use of verbs of inner action to portray a character’s inner thoughts and the use of free indirect speech (1973 [1957/1968], 59–133). Because of her logico-linguistic approach, Hamburger was led to exclude first-person narration from the realm of fiction which, as Schaeffer (2013, 189) rightly points out, is a highly counter-intuitive conclusion. Moreover, as highlighted by Walsh (2007, 44–45), the supposed essential formal characteristics of fictional narratives undergo changes and are thus not universally valid. Henrik Skov Nielsen (2011, 114) also objects to a syntactic definition, pointing



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out that alleged fictional techniques can be borrowed by non-fictional texts. It follows then that inherent signals of fiction are neither necessary nor sufficient to identify a work of fiction as such.1 3) A pragmatic definition is proposed by John Searle. By way of contrast to Hamburger, he dismisses the existence of a “textual property, syntactical or semantic” (Searle 1975, 325) that allows a clear distinction between fictional and factual narratives. Instead, he identifies as the decisive criterion the “illocutionary intentions of the author” (325) and defines fiction as a pretended speech act. Searle’s approach has been contested, among others, by Kendall Walton (1990), who rejects the idea that intentionality can suffice as a valid criterion for the definition of fiction. Nevertheless, Schaeffer points out the importance of the interplay between a “fictional intention” and the perception of a given work as fiction: “[I]f it is true that fictional intention cannot define fiction as a pragmatic stance, it is nevertheless the existence of a shared intention which explains the fact that the emergence of fictional devices has the cultural and technical history it has” (2014 [2009], 190). In short: fictionality, as defined in approaches which emphasize the pragmatic dimension, is not based on intrinsic features of a given work but rather on conventions and on a kind of contract between author and receiver.2 Nielsen (2011, 113–114) terms all three approaches that seek to define categorial differences between fiction and non-fiction as separatist or exceptionalist. Furthermore, he identifies two positions that do not consider fiction and non-fiction to be opposites: 4) A panfictionalist approach claims that all narratives are artificial and therefore fictionalizing because they are the result of a transformation of facts into language. Hayden White, one of the best known representatives of this position, states that historians, for instance, charge real events with the symbolic significance of a plot structure, a feature that is also typical of fiction (1978, 92). Nielsen is a resolute opponent of panfictionalist approaches: even if we agreed that all fiction is artificial and that all narrative is artificial, the logical consequence would not be that all narrative is fictional (2011, 114). 5) A similarist or non-fictionalist approach, inspired by cognitive theory and furthered by Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), is sup-

1 Two years later, Nielsen and his co-authors in Fiktionalitet were to outline ten theses about fictionality, where this position is summarized as thesis 5 (Jacobsen et al. 2013, 44). Again two years later, Nielsen et al. reworded this conclusion in the article “Ten theses about fictionality” as thesis 6: “No formal technique or other textual feature is in itself a necessary and sufficient ground for identifying fictive discourse” (Nielsen, Phelan, Walsh 2015, 66–67). 2 For a more detailed critique of Searle’s approach, see Zipfel (2001, 185–195).

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ported by David Herman, for example. According to Herman, conversational narratives are prototypical, and all other narrative forms derive from these. Moreover, he argues that we always activate the same cognitive repertoire and thus the same translation apparatus to understand all narratives (2009, 6). Diverging from Herman’s very popular approach, Nielsen and his co-authors argue that we activate a particular translation machine when dealing with fictionality (Jacobsen et al. 2013, 19–20). To summarize the debate, most recent contributions agree that none of the elements thus far examined deliver clear-cut criteria for identifying fictional narratives. On the other hand, approaches that eliminate the divide between fiction and non-fiction are also widely rejected. It seems that everybody recognizes fiction when they are confronted with it, but why this happens is still a mystery.

1.2 Richard Walsh’s rhetorical revision A new approach to tackle the mystery of fiction was presented by Richard Walsh in his 2007 book The Rhetoric of Fictionality, a deliberate echo of Wayne C. Booth’s seminal work The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Walsh strives to come up with a convincing pragmatic definition. For his starting point, he assumes that the reader does not expect literal truthfulness; it is rather the presumption of relevance that drives the reader’s search for an appropriate interpretative context. Thus, Walsh (2007, 23–29) re-reads Dan Sperber’s and Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance Theory, itself based on Paul Grice’s Maxims, and applies their insights to fictionality. “The relevance theory model allows for a view of fiction in which fictionality is not a frame separating fictive discourse from ordinary or ‘serious’ communication, but a contextual assumption” (30; emphasis added). Contextual assumptions result from paratexts as well as from cultural context in a broader sense: A rhetorical definition of fictionality is pragmatic, in that its criteria are not ultimately inherent in the narrative itself, but are contextual. The rhetoric of fictionality is brought into play whenever a narrative is offered or taken as fiction, regardless of issues of form, style, or reference. (44)

Walsh further stresses that this understanding of fictionality is not of any ahistorical essence due to the fact that the conventional forms of fiction are subject to change. From this, it follows that the “rhetorical scope and import of fictionality itself are both historically and culturally variable” (45).



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With regard to their relevance for our later discussion about the hybrid forms Romanzo Criminale and Klovn, we would like to outline three of Walsh’s main insights. 1) Instead of fiction, which is more a kind of “category or genre of narrative” (7), we should focus on fictionality, understood as a rhetorical mode. According to Walsh, fictionality “is best understood as a communicative resource rather than as an ontological category” (36), even though he does maintain the idea of its “categorical distinctiveness” (45). Fictionality as a communicative strategy “is apparent on some scale within many nonfictional narratives, in forms ranging from something like an ironic aside […] to full-blown counterfactual narrative examples” (7). In other words, fictionality can occur in every sort of communication, even on as limited a scale as a single word.3 2) Fictional communication is not a second-order phenomenon, but rather it is of fundamental relevance for our real lives and therefore a serious means “within a real-world communicative framework” (16): “The knowledge offered by fiction, however, is not primarily specific knowledge of what is (or was), but of how human affairs work, or, more strictly, of how to make sense of them—logically, evaluatively, emotionally” (36). In addition, we can understand it “as the exercise of our narrative understanding” (50–51). This is a relevant observation in regard to hybrid forms and their impact on “real life,” as we will see later in our examples. 3) Walsh rules out the narrator as a relevant entity in literary communication. He takes his departure from Genette’s classification and states “that all homodiegetic and intradiegetic narrators are equally represented and therefore characters” (9). For the remaining category of extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrators, Walsh sees no reason to distinguish these from the real author. He assumes that a distinction between authorial and narratorial personality was established to be “available to interpretation as a meaningful aspect of the text’s own representational rhetoric” (80).4 This is a tempting proposal for the field of filmic representation, as the question of whether a narrator is relevant or not is often discussed in audio-visual narratives. We will come back to this point later.

3 An example for the fictionality mode within everyday communication established in just one word could be: “Have you noticed how hard Sue is working on her new project? I wonder when she is sleeping. Extraterrestrial?” 4 The argument that unreliable narration justifies this duality is also rejected by Walsh (9, 78–80 and 174). In his view, considerations like these are unnecessary if we understand that the real author is fictionalizing.

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1.3 The extension of Walsh’s rhetorical approach to hybrid forms by Danish scholars Walsh’s approach has served as the basis for further theoretical considerations, especially for Danish narratologists at Aarhus University.5 This may be due to the fact that there is a prominent tendency to mix fictional and documentary formats in Scandinavia’s contemporary literature and media culture. This situation has called for a theoretical framework, as emphasized notably by Rolf Reitan (2013, 54). According to him, Walsh’s book represents the beginning of a new paradigm (Reitan 2011, 52), as it “opens up traditional narratology for pragmatic dimensions that have been and still are unknown to it” (Reitan 2013, 55).6 Reitan’s colleague, Henrik Skov Nielsen, also picks up the idea of fictionality as a rhetorical resource. He maintains “that fictionalization does not indicate a technique through which one removes oneself from the world, but a wide range of options to interact with the world” (Nielsen 2013, 81; cf. Nielsen 2011, 116).7 While Walsh stresses the importance of the paratext for the “production” of fictionality, Nielsen also outlines the importance of “techniques of fictionality”: Using any of a range of techniques of fictionality (including omniscience, free indirect discourse, simultaneous narration, imaginative supplementation, and counterfactual narrative) will locally produce fictionality that similarly invites certain interpretative operations at least towards parts of the narrative—without necessarily turning the whole narrative into a fictional text. (Nielsen 2010, 282; original emphasis)

In his inaugural lecture, Nielsen acknowledges that it is helpful to differentiate between fictionality and fiction but observes that he is unable to find in Walsh’s book “what this differentiation specifically implies for an understanding of fictionality outside of fiction and outside of works” (2011, 116). Nielsen therefore calls for an extension of Walsh’s approach, not only to fictional genres other than literature but to non-fiction narratives in general. Nielsen later published together with other members of the Aarhus-based research group “Centre for Fictionality Studies” a handbook entitled Fiktionalitet

5 See, for example, “Fiktionens forandringer” [The changes of fiction], a special issue of the journal Spring (2011) edited by Rolf Reitan et al., and “Fiktion og fortælling” [Fiction and narrative], a special issue of the journal K&K. Kultur og klasse (2013) edited by Per Krogh Hansen et al. Most of the articles in these publications take Walsh (2007) as their departure point. 6 All translations from the Danish are by Silke Lahn; all translations from the Italian are by Stephanie Neu. 7 In Fiktionalitet, Jacobsen et al. summarize this position as thesis 9: “Fiction is a fact. Fictionality is a reality” (2013, 45). A corresponding independent thesis is not listed in Nielsen et al. (2015).



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(Jacobsen et al. 2013) in which, like Walsh, they strictly differentiate fictionality and fiction. While Walsh was wary of presenting his understanding of fictionality bluntly,8 Jacobsen et al. offer a redefinition of the term to fictionalize, which they understand both as a communication strategy from the sender’s perspective and an interpretative hypothesis from the receiver’s perspective: Fictionality is a property of (mainly narrative) communication (visual, written, verbal, etc.) which a sender can signal that the communication possesses and which a receiver can assume that the communication possesses. These two actions can be called ‘fictionalization’. Fictionalization serves as a signal that the narrated does not in any immediate sense describe being and reality as it exists, but on the contrary describes the possible, the not-being, the potential, the future, the exaggerated, etc. (2013, 9)

The authors insist that this use of to fictionalize does not mean “that something non-fictive is transformed into something fictive but, on the contrary, that a relation to reality is ‘foregrounded’ which is non-limited and often non-referential” (43–44). Fictionalization thus differs from other communicative acts in that it does not deal with reality—that is, it is not referential—and it differs from lies because it does not seek to deceive; rather, it signals that reality is not depicted as it is (9). Another Aarhus scholar, Johanne Helbo Bøndergaard, explores what she calls a literary forensic mode. According to her, in order to deal with past events, “contemporary literary representations […] tend to use strategies conventionally associated with fictional representation as well as conventions associated with non-fictional genres and historical traces that seem to ‘prove’ an authentic relationship to the past” (2012, 3).9 Bøndergaard ties the inclusion of such “forensic”

8 Cf. Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen: “Richard Walsh expounds many of the benefits which derive from using the notion of fictionality, but he does not come up with an exact definition of the concept” (2013, 57). Reitan (2013, 3) states that it can sometimes be difficult to decide whether Walsh presents premises or conclusions; moreover, some expressions are explained as late as at the end of the book. After completion of our article, Gjerlevsen offered a full definition of the term: “fictionality, as a fundamental rhetorical mode, is understood as a means to communicate what is invented and as such transgresses the boundaries of both fiction and narrative. In this perspective, fictionality is not bound to any genre or limited to narrative representation. Building on this conceptual framework of fictionality as an autonomous concept, a definition of fictionality as intentionally signaled invention in communication has been put forth.” (2016, § 1) 9 Such traces of the past could be photographs, for example, but also “documents and other scraps of evidence” (59). It is important to highlight that these “scraps of evidence” do not have to be authentic; what counts is “the implicit suggestion of authenticity or truth that clings to the evidence” (38).

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(or “factual”) elements to one of the benefits of fictionality, as implied by Walsh and elaborated further by Jacobsen et al.: “Communicating through fictionality, then, is part of our cognitive ability to imagine the world as being different from the way it really is” (2013, 62). The insertion of forensic elements can be therefore an invitation to question ‘our’ reality: the reality these elements presumably refer to is “opened up for narrative embroidery […], imagination and emotional and ethical evaluation” (68). As we will see, this notion is of crucial importance for texts such as Romanzo Criminale. It is striking that almost all narratological studies cited so far have been primarily interested in fictionality and the problem how to define it. But what about factuality? Is it a kind of default case and so self-explanatory that we do not even have to theorize it? In our view, the answer is no. How, then, is factuality as a rhetorical strategy in fiction to be determined? How many factual elements are necessary in order for a work to change sides—across the postulated categorial ontological divide? And how do fictionalization and factualization interact? In our discussion of Romanzo Criminale and Klovn, we shall seek to answer these questions while keeping in mind Nielsen’s observation that “fictionalization is a way to do something with and about reality intentionally and with a purpose” (2013, 79). We shall also attempt to outline possible ways to deal with factuality by looking at stylistic devices in the sense of textual, acoustic and visual arrangements.

2 Romanzo Criminale: Between Truth, Facts and Fiction The story told in Giancarlo De Cataldo’s novel Romanzo Criminale [RC] is set in the 1970s and 1980s in Rome. It gives an account of the “Banda della Magliana,” a real gang of criminals. In 2005, the novel was made into a movie, directed by Michele Placido with the screenplay co-authored by De Cataldo. A television series soon followed, directed by Stefano Sollima (also co-authored by De Cataldo): from November 2008 to December 2010, two seasons were broadcast on the Italian pay-TV channel Sky Cinema 1.

2.1 Fact-based imaginative supplementation RC is a typical example of a story based on real events perpetrated by real persons. The story is told in genres which are conventionally marked and perceived as fictional. The paratext of all three representations of RC sends unequivocal mes-



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sages: the book is labelled “novel”; disclaimers at the beginning of the movie and in the end credits of the series clearly state that the narrated events are “free adaptions” of real events and that the characters are the product of the authors’ imagination.10 Nevertheless, references to real events are clearly evoked, as for example by a rhetorical question on the book cover: “In the very recent past, a band of street gangsters tried to take hold of the city of Rome. Did this really happen?” (De Cataldo 2006 [2002]). Additional material on the DVD-edition of the movie conveys a similar message: one of the features is dedicated to the interplay between “fiction and reality.” To put it in a nutshell: on the one hand, the movie deals with reality, while on the other it contains “imaginative supplementation” (Nielsen 2010, 282). This imaginative supplementation affects the plot and the main characters. The characters are shaped according to the genre conventions of the crime novel: a genre evoked by the title itself, Romanzo Criminale (crime novel). In the novel as well as in the movie and television series, the three gang leaders—Dandi, Libanese and Freddo—are fixed in predetermined roles from the beginning: Dandi is the good-looking playboy who enjoys good clothes, an elegant lifestyle and beautiful women; Libanese is an angry young man while Freddo, as his name (“freddo” means “cold” or “cool”) suggests, is the gang’s coldblooded mastermind. As is common in crime novels and movies, the gangsters have an antagonist: Commissario Scialoja, the police officer who tries to put an end to the gang’s criminal activities. Also, as is often the case in the tradition of the hard-boiled novel or film noir, a love plot counterbalances the crime plot: Patrizia, a prostitute, is pursued romantically by both Dandi and Scialoja. Due to their conformity with genre patterns, it is impossible to tell which characters are purely fictive and which are based loosely on real characters, for there are no intrinsic features which allow such hypotheses. It is only by consulting text-external material like articles, books and documentaries about the real Magliana gang that we can identify characters with real counterparts—Dandi, Libanese, Freddo—and those without real counterparts, such as Scialoja and Patrizia. As borne out by the many blog postings on the show, such interest in the historical “veracity” of the story told in RC is indeed en vogue among RC fans, who try to determine which of the characters’ features and actions correspond to those of the real criminals.11 This interest is certainly triggered by the paratext (e. g., the

10 Cf. the movie RC, 00:27, and the first episode of the first season of the series RC, 59:50. 11 See, for example, the Italian Wikipedia website dedicated to the television series http:// it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanzo_criminale_-_La_serie, which includes a chapter entitled “Correspondence with real facts.”

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book cover). Nevertheless, there are also text-internal formal features which may, in addition to the suggestions made in the paratext, direct the interpretation of RC in a more “factual” direction.

2.2 Formal techniques of fictionality and factuality: a comparative outlook An amalgamation of real and invented elements becomes more obvious in the movie adaptation of RC. Among other similar examples, we find television news images about the kidnapping of the politician Aldo Moro by a terrorist group in 1978. With regard to Bøndergaard’s approach outlined above, the scenes about the discovery of Moro’s dead body in the movie could be described in terms of a “forensic” mode. Thanks to the audio-visual montage, the historical footage is integrated smoothly into the sequence of events. First, we see in colour the image of a helicopter, filmed from below. Immediately following, we see images in black and white which show how Moro’s body is found in the trunk of a car. The point of view from high above suggests that we are watching the scene from the perspective of someone aboard the helicopter. Off-camera, we hear the blurred voice of one of the kidnappers talking on the phone and revealing the whereabouts of the dead body. At the same time, we hear, also off-camera, the distinct sound of a violin playing a sad tune. Obviously, this music is not part of the historical footage but, like the background music employed within the whole movie, serves as an implicit comment on the tragedy unfolding before the viewer’s eyes. The following images show some of the movie’s characters playing billiards and watching the news on television, where a speaker comments on the images that we, the audience, have just seen (54:19–54:40). Hence, the close connection is further underlined between the authentic images and the presumed fictive elements within the movie. In the series, news about Moro’s kidnapping is also shown. As in the movie, one of the characters is watching the television news, where he (and the audience) is informed of the kidnapping (season 1, episode 5). But the impact, we would suggest, is different: in the series, it is more akin to a “citation” so as to anchor the story in a certain historical context. In the movie, the authentic footage and the scenes featuring the film’s actors are put on the same level, since they are shown in rapid succession, as if they belonged to the same sequence of events. This minor interest in “forensic evidence” within the series could be understood as a signal for an evolution within the cosmos of RC: thanks to the novel, the movie and the public discussion about them, it can be assumed that the viewer is well aware of the interaction with the “real world” in RC. Against this



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backdrop, the producers of the series seem to be less concerned with signalling real-world references.12 At this point, one question arises: does the insertion of such “forensic” material alter the movie as a whole, or at least parts of it? The answer is a simultaneous “no and yes.” Although the insertion of the documentary footage does not turn the movie RC into a documentary, we observe a kind of factuality mode which triggers certain hypotheses about the link between invention and “real events.” If the viewer also possesses information about the historical subtext of RC, these scenes may unfold their full interpretative potential, inviting viewers to ask such questions as: Which parts of the movie are based on real events? Does the sequence of events correspond to the real criminal activities of the “Banda della Magliana”? Were they really involved in major political crimes such as the kidnapping of Moro?

2.3 Truth issues These questions are indeed asked by readers and viewers. RC—novel, movie and series—is perceived in terms of referentiality, i. e. as a useful source for understanding Italy’s recent past: “Romanzo Criminale has become—in common knowledge—one of these works one relies on when it comes to discovering hidden truths and refreshing the memory of certain historical arguments” (Nannucci 2013).13 Here, truth is understood as something which is “really” there and can be discovered. But this is only one of the many shades of meaning associated with “truth” when it comes to RC. In an interview, De Cataldo also describes the novel in terms of truth, as opposed to truthfulness: It is a fatal error to consider Romanzo Criminale a story of the Magliana gang. […] There is the need to draw a metaphorical and mythological line out of the bare facts and point to the heart of a false story: a story which, therefore, is more true, and in any case more convincing than the ‘official’ story. (D’Attis 2002)

12 Apparently, their interest is focused on the narrative potential of innovative formal techniques such as an unsteady camera, blurred margins of the images, frequent low angle shots— often in accordance with point-of-view shots—and jump cuts. Indeed, the series is frequently cited as an example of innovative genre fiction in Italy (cf. Marino 2009). 13 For similar comments, see http://www.offscreen.it:80/rece/romanzocriminale.htm (Accessed 14 December 2014).

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Here, truth is understood in terms of plausibility—a point of view also shared by critics who highlight the function of the novelist as a seeker of truth: “[T]he novelist-poet chooses a different approach to effective reality than historiography; but despite this, they are not less committed to the search for ‘truth’” (Sørensen 2010, 88). Truth is thus akin to filling in the gaps in the official history. This matches one of the functions of fictionality as outlined above, namely being a means of toying “with what is not the case and could never be the case, with what is not the case but could be the case, with what should have been the case, and so on” (Nielsen et al., 2015, 64). What can be observed here is what Bøndergaard, referring to Walsh (2007, 51–52), calls an “exercise of our narrative—counterfactual—imagination” (2012, 63). As mentioned above, the “knowledge offered by fiction […] is not primarily specific knowledge of what is (or was), but rather of how human affairs work, or, more strictly, of how to make sense of them—logically, evaluatively, emotionally” (Walsh 2007, 36). This, we would agree, also applies to RC. Its specificity, however, is that it is not only a general “exercise” about how human affairs work but rather refers to a specific real-world context: it offers reinterpretations of recent events in Italian history which are probably counterfactual but nevertheless plausible. In order to perceive RC as such, it is necessary to know about its reference to real-life events: “[De Cataldo’s] aim has been to reactivate this knowledge, still conserved within the collective memory; without this knowledge, Romanzo Criminale would have remained incomprehensible, or it would have been something completely different” (Sørensen 2010, 96). The “forensic” or “factual” elements outlined above help to trigger this connection, suggesting a direct correspondence between the story and real events. Thus, fictional and factual elements are not contradictory but rather interact with and enhance each other.

3 Klovn: Feedback Loop Between Film Art and Real World Klovn is a Danish comedy series that aired on the pay-TV channel TV Zulu from 2005 to 2009. Each episode was about 25 minutes long, with sixty episodes in total over six seasons. The show, widely regarded as the best Danish sitcom ever, was written by the famous stand-up comedians Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam. In 2010, a movie sequel was released which went on to become the most successful film in Denmark of the previous ten years. Both the series and the movie present the two scriptwriters as the main characters, using their reals names and (ostensibly) playing themselves. Frank and Casper run a small film company and



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share a great deal of their spare time together. The focus is generally on Frank, who is generally depicted in everyday activities (in the office with Casper and other colleagues, at home with his partner Mia, during leisure activities with Mia, Casper, his girlfriend Iben and various acquaintances). The comedy in both the series and the movie is built around awkward and embarrassing situations, mainly arising from Frank’s selfishness and clumsiness. Klovn is particularly discomfiting for the viewer because of its frequent “political incorrectness” and inappropriate responses to sensitive topics: for example, Frank frequently clashes with Muslim immigrants, fails to treat disabled persons with consideration or allows things go awry because of his “gay panic” nature. Canadian film critic Simon Howell justly describes the show as a “collusion between three recent strains of popular comedy”: the “comedy of embarrassment,” as found in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm; the Judd Apatow brand of “manchild comedies”; and the “debauched bro humor” of The Hangover (Howell 2011).

3.1 Conflicting markers of factuality and fictionality In Klovn, various signposts indicate a factual narration. Foremost amongst these is the fact that the scriptwriters are identical to the performers who are (ostensibly) identical to the characters. This self-appearance can be understood as a medial modified transfer of the canonical formula author = narrator = character for literary autobiographical narration and thus as a sign for a referential pact between author and reader (e. g., Genette 1990, 764), thus giving the impression that the series is a documentary. This impression is strengthened by the fact that the dialogues are delivered very naturally14 and by the large number of Danish celebrities who appear in person and with their real names as friends and business partners of Frank and Casper (e. g., legendary soccer player Michael Laudrup, award-winning director Bille August or famous television presenter Jarl Friis-Mikkelsen). Moreover, Klovn gives the impression of being filmed exclusively on location (in the real streets of Copenhagen, in real restaurants and offices). The technical design of the series also resembles that of a documentary because of the hand-held camera, imperfect light management or haziness when changing focus. This impression of reality is further underlined by the use of tracking shots that follow a character into a building from outside without a cut whilst

14 From the DVD’s bonus material, the viewer learns that the dialogues are not fully scripted but delivered spontaneously.

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disregarding the difficulty of varying light conditions; sometimes we can even register that the camera light is switched on when the character enters a room from the outside. In short, Klovn’s presentation corresponds to that of reality television programmes featuring the domestic life of celebrities, the most iconic example being The Osbournes (MTV, 2002–05) about the heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne and his family. Other elements in Klovn, however, do not follow the protocol of factual narration. For instance, the persons depicted are obviously not aware of the camera. And when the angle changes in the next shot, no camera can be seen in the position from which we saw the previous shot. Moreover, we are informed by the opening credits that the series is “Based on real events,” meaning that the series is based on real events but does not render real events. And in the end credits, we learn that all characters are credited with one single actor—sometimes with the same name on the left and on the right, sometimes not. Due to the conflicting signals, the viewer may be uncertain as to whether s/he is being presented with a fictional or a referential pact for the first few episodes. But soon, s/he will decide on that Klovn’s story line is a thoroughly scripted narrative, as each episode is a perfectly arranged and fully coherent whole which is too coherent to be merely observed. In fact, Klovn displays a “setup-payoff joke structure, in that every single character detail and comic possibility becomes a Chekov’s Gun, waiting to be deployed for maximum effectiveness” (Howell 2011). Now, how can we account for the fact that well-known people appear in a fictional work ‘as themselves’ using their real names and, in so doing, are being referential to the real world?

3.2 Self-appearance and autofiction In a literary narrative, the author can use any real human that s/he so wishes. In an audiovisual representation, however, the real live humans have to appear ‘as themselves’ in person before the camera. Thus, self-appearance is a genuine filmic means which strengthens the impression of factual narration. In the case of Klovn, we are (ostensibly) supposed to accept a referential-autobiographical pact, since Frank and Casper are depicted with an abundance of real biographical detail about Hvam and Christensen. Klovn-Casper’s girlfriend Iben, for instance, is a popular Danish actress; she is played by Iben Hjejle, who was not only Christensen’s partner in real life during the filming but actually is an acclaimed actress. And just as Hvam, Klovn-Frank was raised in Northern Jutland, far away from Copenhagen—a fact that often serves as an explanation for his failings. Moreover,



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Christensen’s and Hvam’s collaborations on earlier television series and Hjejle’s film roles are frequently referred to in Klovn. In literary theory, the combination of autobiography and fiction is known as autofiction, an expression coined by French author Serge Doubrovsky in the preface to his ‘novel’ Fils (1977) and introduced into academic research by Gérard Genette in his essay “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative” (1990). Discussions of the phenomenon can be divided into two main positions. First, autofiction is defined as a special form of fictional narration (e. g., by Genette). But this still leaves us with the problem, for example, of how to interpret the fact that the author and one of the characters share the same name. Second, autofiction is defined as the simultaneous combination of an autobiographical and a fictional pact without offering the reader the chance to classify the text, in whole or in part, according to one of the two pacts. Zipfel stresses that the last definition preserves the pragmatic paradox of the autofictional claim “It is me and it is not me,” thus maintaining the distinction between the two pacts. Zipfel assumes that the receivers experience the specific aspects of both pacts, not by following both of them at the same time, but by changing constantly from one pact to the other and back again in the course of reading (2009, 302–306). Other receivers may feel that both the referential and the fictional pact is broken and thus react with disapproval. This may be the reason why audience responses to an autofictional work are usually very polarized.

3.3 Jacobsen’s term “fictiobiographism” in the field of audiovisual works The concept autofiction, which is of literary origin and based on the author entity, can arguably cover the performance of Christensen and Hvam. However, it does not cover the self-appearance of real persons in audiovisual representations who are not the scriptwriters. Because of this shortcoming, Louise Brix Jacobsen (also a member of the Centre for Fictionality Studies at Aarhus University) introduced in 2008 the Danish term fiktiobiografisme, which includes any kind of self-acting in audiovisual narratives. Based on Walsh’s definition of fictionality as a rhetorical strategy, Jacobsen’s concept of fictiobiographism highlights the idea that fictionality can be used in all communication situations and in all media. In the light of series such as Klovn and its source of inspiration Curb Your Enthusiasm, she understands fictionality as a “performative self-fashioning strategy” (2012, 13 and 305) and stresses its special potential in audiovisual works (14). According to Jacobsen, self-acting results in “biographical undecidability” (2012, 12), as the ‘self-actors’

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both are and are not the same person at the same time. Such works are “biography and not biography at all. Both fiction and nevertheless not fiction” (2008, 1). Still, she insists (like Walsh and Nielsen) on the existence of a borderline between reality and fiction, even though it cannot be definitively localized. Faced with this situation, it is the declared aim of Jacobsen’s concept of fictiobiographism to problematize and challenge this borderline.15 Jacobsen points out that rumours form a central ingredient of many so-called fictiobiographical works. Gossip in tabloids or social media about real celebrities (e. g., rumours about unfaithfulness or homosexuality) is taken up, (ostensibly) confirmed and amplified by them ‘as themselves’ in the series.16 Following the broadcast, the rumours as enriched in the narrative may, in turn, be picked up again and further propagated by other media (Jacobsen 2008, 4). By this, a series like Klovn can initiate a “feedback loop” (Walsh 2007, 128) so that, in the end, it may be hard to say whether a rumour originated from a real incident or a fictive presentation. Hence, Jacobsen defines fictiobiographism as intermedially based and even as transmedial (Jacobsen 2012, 14 and 119). And what is in it for a self-acting VIP affected by slander? Celebrities appearing ‘as themselves’ in a fictiobiographical work are provided with an opportunity to playfully deal with these rumours in a fictional context, and thus a charming effect of self-mockery, since rumours are deliberately seized upon and even amplified, or because character traits are portrayed in an exaggerated way. For the case of Klovn, we can state that the viewers are not changing constantly between the referential and the fictional pact (as Zipfel assumes with regard to literary narratives), but that both contracts are fully present at the same time. And it seems that this applies not only for the narrative but for Hvam’s and Christensen’s

15 For a detailed delineation of the term fictiobiographism, see Jacobsen’s Ph. D. thesis (2012, 33– 37). Reflecting the fact that biographism is an expression with a negative connotation, Jacobsen proposes to expand its meaning: “Biographism becomes instead an expression for a trend where it is common and partly quite accepted to speculate about the private lives of self-appearing persons” (35). In her view, the spread of the phenomenon indicates a general artistic tendency across media and art, which is why she adopts the suffix -ism (4). We question whether the intended revaluation of the pejorative expression biographism can be successful, or even desirable, although we very much approve of the concept itself. Our second objection to Jacobsen’s term is the fact that a series like Klovn does not aim to portray its characters’ whole life story, or even an essential part of it, as the word part ‘biographi-’ would imply. After completion of our article, Jacobsen published a contribution in English, in which she replaces fictiobiographism with vitafication after “sparring” with international colleagues “in the process of developing a term more suitable in English” (2015, 266). 16 In Bøndergaard’s words, this makes the rumour and the performer a “forensic” element in a fictional surrounding (2012).



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non-fictional media appearances as well. In real interviews, for instance, it can be hard to decide whether the journalist is talking to the Klovn-characters or to Hvam and Christensen as they frequently and with relish use opportunities like these to challenge the divide between fiction and non-fiction from reality’s side as well. The result of the series’ specific autofictional or fictiobiographical nature and the actors’ behaviour outside the show fully blur the borderline between Christensen’s and Hvam’s real lives, on the one hand, and Klovn-Casper’s and Klovn-Frank’s fictional lives, on the other. To give an example of how fictionality can even invade reality itself and cause undecidable situations: at the Skanderborg music festival in 2010, an apparently confused Frank Hvam dressed only in his dirty underwear suddenly entered the stage and pushed the musician Thomas Helmig aside, who was in the middle of his famous song “Stupid Man.” Frank Hvam managed to yell desperately into the microphone for some Bo, crying out hysterically that this Bo had misunderstood everything. Two roadies then forced him off the stage. Helmig commented “Stupid man indeed” and started singing the song again.17 To understand this situation adequately requires the contextual knowledge that this real festival setting provided the background for a scene in the film sequel of the series, Klovn—The Movie, which was released later in 2010. But at the time, the Skanderborg audience only saw a seedy man acting extravagantly. And what about Thomas Helmig? Was he himself in that situation, or was he giving a fictionalized version of himself? This remains an unsolvable question.

3.4 Functions of fictionality in Klovn In Fiktionalitet, Jacobsen et al. (2013, 71–72) identify three functions of “fictionalization” on the side of the sender: 1) self-fashioning strategy; 2) a critique of contemporary society; 3) genre creation and genre critique. Here, we have mainly focused on the first-mentioned strategy but are convinced that Klovn deploys all three. Especially in Klovn, the viewer can identify another function of fictionality on the side of the sender. The show may be understood as a sacrifice on the altar of the Law of Jante, a well-known list of rules in Scandinavia with its central commandment: Do not think you are in any way special. As there is no denying that Christensen and Hvam have become very special in Denmark, their self-appear-

17 The scene can be looked up online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwVDLZtp5rk (Accessed 14 December 2014).

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ance in the series and the foibles of their ‘homonym’ Klovn-characters are not only to be received as self-deprecating humor and self-mockery but also as a form of atonement in order to make themselves and their success a little less ‘special’ again. A function of fictionality on the side of the receiver in Klovn might possibly be termed an “exercise,” extending a concept originally introduced by Walsh (2007, 50–51): the viewer can safely experience all manner of what appear to be real embarrassing situations without being involved in them personally and learn that selfishness and narrow-mindedness do not pay, as illustrated by Frank, who is repeatedly punished for his failings. In this light, Klovn conveys a highly ethical statement.

4 Conclusion Hybrid forms such as Romanzo Criminale and Klovn can be defined as transmodal in that they employ patterns of both fictionality and factuality, creating new forms for which the terms fiction and non-fiction seem inadequate. Against this background, it is important not only to outline the rhetorical quality of fictionality (on which literary theory has hitherto focused) but also to define the rhetorical quality of factuality. In our view, both fictionality and factuality can be seen as “invitations” to entertain “certain interpretative operations” (Nielsen 2010, 282). The two invitations can be accepted together but also separately: in this case, the perception of the work is altered but not compromised. The receiver of satirical and ironic representations who accepts both invitations may have difficulties identifying the forensic elements and understanding the line of attack; s/he may have to do considerable research in order to ferret out all the work’s ideas and allusions to reality, especially when the distance between the events portrayed in the work and the receiver is more than a generation. Klovn manages to avoid this dilemma. A self-mocking self-appearance of a VIP which plays on real gossip or biographical data may provide extra amusement for those in the know. However, most of Klovn’s story lines are universally understood because they deal with general human foibles. While RC—both the television series and the movie—can also be enjoyed as an entertaining piece of crime fiction, the integration of forensic material invites the receiver to consider RC in light of the historical facts alluded to in the story. This is certainly an extra effect which helps to explain why (especially in Italy) RC has been perceived as a truthful statement about that country’s recent history. What comes into play in both RC and Klovn is the understanding of fictionality as “the inaugurating



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move of a specific rhetoric, which enables a process of imaginative exploration of values” (Walsh 2007, 168) and—especially RC—the fulfilment of a function associated by Walsh with factual narratives: the “factual enrichment of the reader’s cognitive environment” (31). In summary: with their proposal of fictionalization as a strategy for both the sender and the receiver, Jacobsen et al. (2013) seek to reconcile apparent contrasts and provide an alternative to the either-or-question “fiction or non-fiction.” Their approach is not only a theoretical elaboration within a narratological framework; it also offers a set of heuristic tools applicable to a variety of texts, as demonstrated in our two examples. The receiver is thereby offered a strategy that undermines the categorization of television series and movies like Klovn as fiction or non-fiction (Jacobsen et al. 2013, 72). Moreover, their approach allows one to take into account the intuitive distinction between fiction and non-fiction we all experience everyday,18 even though we are hard put to substantiate this distinction with a syntactic or a semantic approach, or any other approach. With this in mind, we wish to conclude with three further remarks regarding possible future developments in the field of fictionality and factuality studies. First, we argue in favour of expanding the “techniques of fictionality” by including elements of the narrative discourse. The representation of characters, as we have shown here with our two audiovisual examples, can be shaped, to a certain extent, by genre conventions which are perceived conventionally as fictional. The employment of certain techniques in the representation of characters can thus function as a “technique of fictionality,” too. Our second point refers to the declared execution of the narrator. Here, Nielsen (2011, 119) agrees with Walsh, stating that the narrator is a theoretical fallacy. In his view, understanding the author’s activity as fictionalizing and inventionality makes the narrator dispensable: s/he loses all raison d’être because this concept replicates the author unnecessarily. Accordingly, Nielsen concludes: “The rebirth of the author and of fiction must therefore be paid for with the narrator’s life” (2011, 119). For a more or less classical narratologist, this is quite a bullet to bite. Nielsen may have a point in challenging the idea of a narrator when it comes to borderline cases such as Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, “where something is narrated in great detail from an episode where the narrator himself was absent” (Nielsen 2010, 278). But to dismiss the narrator completely because of this occasional problem—which could probably be solved within narratological models (e. g., via the concept of unreliable narration)—would mean to suspend

18 Cf. Nielsen (2011, 114): “It is as difficult to keep an idea of difference as it is impossible to eliminate ideas like these.”

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a valuable heuristic tool. Instead, we propose opting for a more balanced solution, subscribing not to the elimination of the narrator in favour of the author but maintaining that both entities must be taken into account according to the text at hand. Although we distance ourselves from biographism, we are well aware that an author—understood as “production entity”—may express his views (for example, in interviews), which can then be perceived as “ancillary texts” (Walsh 2007, 45) of the work in question, thus influencing the perception of a narrative as fictional or not.19 Our third remark concerns possible counterparts of fictionality and fictionalization. With hybrid forms such as RC and Klovn, we are confronted with a situation that has yet to be squarely met: if, as mentioned above, fictionalization is understood as a signal that the narrated events do not represent reality but rather describes the possible, the non-existing, then what about the opposite case in which it is implied that the narrated does represent reality and the existing? We have tried to take this into account by using the counter-expressions to factualize and factualization. In our view, the idea of a “rhetoric of factuality” as a counterpart to the “rhetoric of fictionality” deserves to be taken further.

Works Cited Primary sources De Cataldo, Giancarlo. 2002. Romanzo Criminale. Torino: Einaudi. [novel] Klovn. Broadcast 2005–09 by TV2 Zulu. Denmark. Directed by Mikkel Nørgaard and Niels Gråbøl. Written by Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam. [television series] Klovn—The Movie. 2010. Directed by Mikkel Nørgaard. Written by Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam. Denmark: Zentropa Productions, TV2 Zulu. [movie] Romanzo Criminale. 2005. Directed by Michele Placido. Written by Giancarlo De Cataldo, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli. Italy: Cattleya, Warner Bros et al. [movie] Romanzo Criminale. Broadcast 2008–10 by Sky Cinema. Italy. Directed by Stefano Sollima. Written by Leonardo Valenti, Barbara Petronio and Daniele Cesarano. [television series]

19 Speaking about the author’s ethos, in her seminal work Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction (2014), Liesbeth Korthals Altes outlines a promising way of how to take into account authorial statements for the interpretation of fictional texts.



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Secondary sources Bøndergaard, Johanne Helbo. 2012. Forensic Literature. Evidence and Fictionality in Contemporary Memory Narratives. MA thesis. Aarhus: Aarhus universitet. Booth, Wayne C. 1983 [1961]. The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. D’Attis, Nino G. 2014. “Intervista a Giancarlo De Cataldo.” http://www.blackmailmag.com/ Intervista_a_Giancarlo_De_Cataldo.htm (Accessed 14 December 2014) Doležel, Lubomír. 1988. “Mimesis and Possible Worlds.” Poetics Today 9: 475–496. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1990. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11 (4): 755–774. Translated by Nitsa Ben-Ari and Brian McHale. Gjerlevsen, Simona Zetterberg. 2013. “En seriøs sprogteoretisk fiktionalitetsdefinition.” In Hansen et al., eds., 57–68. Gjerlevsen, Simona Zetterberg. 2016. “Fictionality.” In living handbook of narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid: http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/fictionality (Accessed 22 June 2016) Hamburger, Käte. 1973 [1957/1968]. The Logic of Literature. Translated from the 2nd revised edition by Marilynn J. Rose. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hansen, Per Krogh, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Stefan Kjerkegaard, eds. 2013. “Fiktion og fortælling” [Fiction and narrative]. Special issue of K&K. Kultur og klasse 115. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA, etc.: Wiley-Blackwell. Howell, Simon. 2011. “Fantasia 2011. Klovn offers debauched manchild comedy, Scandinavian-style.” 11 July. http://www.popoptiq.com/fantasia-2011-klovn-offersdebauched-manchild-comedy-scandinavian-style/(Accessed 14 December 2014) Jacobsen, Louise Brix. 2008. “Klovnen og rygtet.” 16:9, no. 28. September. http://www.16-9. dk/2008-09/side04_feature1.htm (Accessed 14 December 2014) Jacobsen, Louise Brix. 2012. Fiktiobiografisme. Fiktionalisering som performativ strategi i dansk film og tv fra 2005 og frem. Ph. D. thesis. Aarhus: Aarhus universitet. Jacobsen, Louise Brix. 2015. “Vitafiction as a Mode of Self-Fashioning: The Case of Michael J. Fox in Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Narrative 23 (3): 252–270. Jacobsen, Louise Brix, Stefan Kjerkegaard, Rikke Andersen Kraglund, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Camilla Møhring Reestorff and Carsten Stage. 2013. Fiktionalitet. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Marino, Marco. 2009. “Romanzo Criminale La Serie—Stagione 1.” 19 February. http://serial. everyeye.it/articoli/recensione-romanzo-criminale-la-serie-stagione-1-8999.html (Accessed 14 December 2014) Nannucci, Teresa. 2013. “Doppio schermo. Romanzo criminale, dal film alla serie.” 5 March. http://www.serialmente.com/2013/03/05/doppio-schermo-romanzo-criminale-ilfilmromanzo-criminale-la-serie/ (Accessed 14 December 2014) Nielsen, Henrik Skov. 2010. “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration.” In Post-Classical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Monika Fludernik and Jan Alber, 275–301. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Nielsen, Henrik Skov. 2011. “Fiktion og fortælling. Tiltrædelsesforelæsning.” Kritik 201: 113–123.

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Nielsen, Henrik Skov. 2013. “Fiktionalitetens Retorik.” Reception 71: 78–90. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan and Richard Walsh. 2015. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative 23 (1): 61–73. Reitan, Rolf. 2011. “The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Intoduktion til Richard Walsh.” In R. R., Poul Behrendt and Marianne Barlyng, eds. “Fiktionens forandringer” [The changes of fiction]. Special issue of Spring 31/32: 22–56. Reitan, Rolf. 2013. “Walsh, kort fortalt.” In Hansen et al., eds., 33–56. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 2014 [2009]. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, vol. 2: 179–196. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Also available in: living handbook of narratology: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/ fictional-vs-factual-narration (Revised 20 January 2013) Schmid, Wolf. 2010 [2005]. Narratology. An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Searle, John R. 1975. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History 6: 319–332. Sørensen, Gert. 2010. “Letteratura noir e storiografia. Le voci del doppio Stato in Romanzo criminale di De Cataldo.” In Memoria in “Noir.” Un’indagine pluridisciplinare, edited by Monica Jansen and Yasmina Khamal, 87–106. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang. Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality. Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. White, Hayden. 1978. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” In H. W. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism, 81–100. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zipfel, Frank. 2001. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Zipfel, Frank. 2009. “Autofiktion. Zwischen den Grenzen von Faktualität, Fiktionalität und Literarität?” In Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, edited by Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer, 285–314. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

Brian Richardson (College Park, Maryland)

Unnatural Narrative Theory: A Paradoxical Paradigm

I will begin with some necessary definitions: what I call mimetic narratives are those works of fiction that model themselves on or substantially resemble nonfictional works. Mimetic works systematically attempt to depict the world of our experience in a recognizable manner; this is the traditional goal of works that strive for realism or verisimilitude. Nineteenth-century realist fiction is a major subspecies of the mimetic tradition. I define an unnatural narrative as one that contains significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, or frames. By antimimetic, I mean representations that contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres. There are many models of narrative theory, classical and postclassical, being employed today. A number of them come readily to mind: rhetorical, structuralist, Stanzelian, Tel Aviv school, cognitivist, Hamburg school and so forth. It is quickly apparent, however, that nearly all current models are mimetically centered, that they in fact are part of a larger paradigm that privileges mimetic constructs and/or conversational natural narrative models and views fictional constructs as generally or typically having a fundamental similarity to analogous constructs in nonfictional narratives. That is, most narrative theories begin by treating fictional narrators as if they were like human storytellers; fictional plots like events we might experience in our lives; fictional temporality like time in the real world. More generally, narrative theory, classical and postclassical, presupposes a stable, consistent identity in all its forms; most narrative theories don’t discuss spaces that are impossible, causality that moves backward, narrators who are not single, consistent personages, or characters whose selves split off or merge with other characters. And yet such fictional constructs permeate postmodern fiction and drama. I will argue instead for the importance of the unnatural narrative model as an essential corrective to the limitations, omissions, and blind spots of mimetic theories.1 In doing so, I will not claim that ours is a totally new paradigm that should

1 To reiterate: in this essay, I will be using the terms “mimetic” and “antimimetic.” Mimetic works systematically attempt to depict the world of our experience in a recognizable manner; this is the traditional goal of works that strive for realism or verisimilitude. Nineteenth-century realist fiction is a major subspecies of the mimetic tradition. An antimimetic (or antirealist) work DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-010

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replace older ones. I will argue that instead of supplanting them, our model should instead supplement them. Mimetic theories have done excellent work but have not exhausted all the important narratives of the world and the narratological concepts necessary to encompass them. Thus, in the case of narration or temporality, one may retain Genette’s ultimately mimetic accounts, but they must be augmented by new categories that can include the many important texts that elude or defy Genette’s model. Unnatural narratology thus offers a much more expansive vision of the field of narrative studies, but it may only require a partially new paradigm. Let us examine an example of an unnatural text. I offer the following passage from Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: He’s got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it—the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly. He kicks the tire; he takes off his jacket and shimmies under the chassis. He pokes around. He slides back out and wipes the grease off his shirt. He puts his jacket back on. He gets in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up, sending debris into the air and shattering windows for blocks. He gets out and says, Damn it! (1995, 59)

It quickly becomes evident that it is useless to apply a mimetic framework to this text. One cannot be blown up by a car bomb and then offhandedly inspect the damage to a car that has just been destroyed. There is no script, code, or model from our experience that corresponds to being blown up several times. This is not a mimetic representation of a possible event that we could experience in the world we inhabit; it is in fact a parody of such an occurrence.2 It is obvious that a very different kind of play with representation is occurring, and it is antimimetic. This requires us to jettison mimetic expectations—such events can only happen in fiction, never in nonfiction—and then to be receptive to the new, unexpected pattern that might be emerging, whether it is a parodic, abstract, or follows some other design. The fabula for such an event would have to state that the car was

like Beckett’s Molloy defies the conventions of mimetic (or realist) representation that are adhered to in a work like Anna Karenina. 2 It is true that in this case we need to be aware of the mimetic model to realize that it is being violated, as well as to derive humor from the divergence. However, the model is not the same as its violation, even if we need the model to perceive the violation. In other cases, however, like the novels of Robbe-Grillet, humorous or parodic intentions are by no means always evident; the antimimetic elements may seem instead like mistakes or deliberately contrived nonsense. I discuss the status of impossible fictional worlds in the second chapter of my book, Unnatural Narrative: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006).



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blown up and at the same time it was not blown up, that there were in fact several contradictory fabulas—something only unnatural narratology is prepared to do. As readers, we will abandon our sense of probability and may focus instead on the numerous impossible repetitions of the explosion. Even if we shift around looking for a non-literal way to read the material (is this an allegory of the blindly self-destructive nature of Western technological society? is it a parable of the total self-absorption of an egoistic individual?), we appreciate the work as one that cannot be recuperated by conventional strategies of representation. Our experience of starting cars or visiting service stations will only help us up to a point here, and no story we have ever heard about either is likely to allow us to understand these events (no one is likely to say, “Oh, yeah—I heard about cars like that in Nevada!”). Nor will any story about car bombs help much, either: this narrative is following a different trajectory, creating an impossible blend. One suspects that its author delights in this new path and is presumably indifferent to the feelings of confusion or resentment it might cause in more traditional, literal-minded, or insistently mimetic readers. More adventurous readers, however, follow along as they carefully observe how many repetitions there will be, how they will be varied, and how far they will extend: there would seem to be a rule to the effect that unnatural events generally progress to ever greater levels of extravagance and impossibility. We can even try to apply blending theory to these events and suggest that Leyner is taking a common situation, turning the key in the ignition when the battery is dead and nothing happens, and merging it with the video thriller scenario of the Hollywood car bomb scene. Though this account may explain some features of the text, it misses many of the most important ones; it does not allow us to predict what will happen next, what the consequences will be, or what other strange new blends might emerge. What does a single-model narratology do with a text like Leyner’s that resists the ordinary conventions of mimetic representation? In almost all cases, it marginalizes, ignores, or denies this kind of text. An antimimetic narrative theory is essential to supplement existing, monomorphic paradigms. We can see this clearly in a number of areas, many of which center on the representation of a sequence of related events. To demonstrate the importance of the unnatural paradigm, I will offer an analysis of the theory and practice of the fabula, emphasizing unusual, unnatural and impossible narrative sequences. Fabula, or the story that we infer from a text or performance, is one of the foundational ideas of narrative theory. This concept, established by the Russian formalists, has been around for nearly a century and is referred to in a variety of ways, including the French structuralist term histoire. Meir Sternberg has indicated its importance for narrative theory, asserting that “actional discourse, whether literary or historical or cinematic, presupposes temporal extension

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[which] provides a natural principle of coherence, one that enables the narrator to construct his presentational sequence, […] according to the logic of progression inherent in the line or chain of events themselves; from earlier to later and from cause to effect” (1981, 60–61). As his metaphors of line and chain indicate, Sternberg here reveals himself to be trapped by mimetic presuppositions. As Monika Fludernik has pointed out, “the story vs discourse opposition seems to repose on a realist understanding of narrative” (1996, 334). A consistent fabula can indeed be derived from most every nonfictional or conversational natural narrative, as well as the mimetic or realist works of fiction that strive to resemble these discourse types. There remain, however, a number of varieties of unnatural fabulas that elude the mimetic model which narrative theory needs to account for. Looking at these can help us formulate a revised concept of the fabula and thereby disclose what the unnatural paradigm can provide. Some texts, like Leyner’s piece, have several contradictory sequences of events (e. g., Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie 1957; Harold Pinter’s The Basement 1966; Anna Kavan’s Ice 1967; Robert Pinget’s Passacaille 1969; Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” 1969; Caryl Churchill’s Traps 1977). Some of the different, incompatible endings all present in Coover’s novella include the following: the babysitter accidently drowns the baby; the husband who hired her comes back early to have sex with her; a shy neighborhood boy visits her; two neighborhood boys encounter the father with the babysitter; the father surprises the boys with the babysitter; the babysitter chases off the boys; the babysitter is raped and accidently killed by the boys; the family returns to find all is well; and the mother learns that the children have been murdered, her husband is gone, there is a corpse in the bathtub, and her house has been destroyed. Churchill goes to some length to clarify the antimimetic nature of her drama and simultaneously to ensure that her work will retain its unnaturalness and not be simply reduced to a conventionalizing interpretive strategy. She affirms in her preface that Traps: is like an impossible object, or a painting by Escher, where the objects can exist like that on paper, but would be impossible in life. In the play, the time, the place, the characters’ motives and relationships cannot all be reconciled—they can happen on stage, but there is no other reality for them. […] the characters can be thought of as living many of their possibilities at once. There is no flashback, no fantasy, everything that happens is as real and solid as everything else within the play. (1985, 71)

The description Churchill provides of her play could well be a guide for the interpretation of the more extreme kind of unnatural narratives.



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Ursula Heise has observed that such narratives “project into the narrative present and past an experience of time which normally is only available for the future: time dividing and subdividing, bifurcating and branching off continuously into multiple possibilities and alternatives” (1997, 55). Instead of one event precluding several other possible options, many incompatible possibilities can be seen to have been actualized. In none of the examples noted in this section can one easily extract a single, consistent story from a fixed sjuzhet the way one might in any natural or realistic narrative.3 Alain Robbe-Grillet, referring to the contradictory fabula in La Jalousie, stated: “It was absurd to propose that in the novel […] there existed a clear and unambiguous order of events, one which was not that of the sentences of the book, as if I had diverted myself by mixing up a pre-established calendar the way one shuffles a deck of cards” (1965 [1963], 154). He went on to state that for him there existed no possible order outside of that found within the pages themselves. This text does not mimic realistic narratives whose sjuzhets will divulge a single fabula; here one has only an indeterminate, contradictory fabula—one that narrative theory needs to recognize and investigate.4 A narrative can circle back on itself as the last sentence becomes the first sentence and thus continues for eternity, its fabula infinite (e. g., Joyce’s Finnegans Wake 1939; Nabokov’s “The Circle” 1936; Beckett’s Play 1963). In the case of what I call denarration (Richardson 2005 and 2006, 87–94), the discourse erases the fabula as it is being articulated. At the beginning of Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth (1965 [1959]) we are told that “outside it is raining […] the wind blows between the bare black branches” (141); in the next sentence this setting is denarrated as we are informed instead that “outside the sun is shining: there is no tree, no bush to cast a shadow” (141). Inside the room, there is fine dust that coats every surface; this dust in turn generates what will become the definitive weather beyond the walls of the house: “Outside it is snowing” (142). In other works, time passes at different speeds for different groups of people. Thus, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, four days pass for the nobles

3 For additional discussion of many of these forms, see my articles “Beyond Story and Discourse” (2002) and “Unnatural Stories and Sequences” (2013). 4 It should be obvious that for me, a narrative does not have to be self-consistent; such a requirement is, from my perspective, just another mimetic prejudice. Some time ago Gerald Prince suggested that La Jalousie was not a narrative: it “is a novel, of course, but a pseudo-narrative one” (1982, 65). Such an argument sidesteps the debate over narrative (why can’t a narrative include contradictory events?), even as it neglects to explore the definition of a novel. What is a novel but an extended fictional narrative in prose? How can a work easily qualify as a novel without also being a narrative?

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in the orderly city while—at the same time—two days pass in the enchanted forest (cf. Richardson 1987). In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), twenty years pass for the protagonist while three-and-a-half centuries pass for those around him (her); similarly, in Caryl Churchill’s play, Cloud Nine (1979), twenty-five years pass for the characters while a full century passes for the rest of the world. These cases result in a dual or multiple fabulas, a possibility unimagined by most narratologists. Another experimental technique employs features of the discourse to create the fabula. These can be termed textual generators. We see them at work in the passage from In the Labyrinth just cited. Exactly as the dust in the generative room determines that snow will be the weather outside, other surface images on the inside of the house generate additional objects in the storyworld: the impression of a letter opener becomes a soldier’s bayonet; a rectangular impression produces the mysterious box that the soldier carries; a desk lamp gives rise to a street lamp outside in the snow, which in turn yields up a soldier leaning against it, clutching the box; and a realistic painting, “The Defeat at Reichenfels,” literally brings to life the military events it depicts. The descriptions here bring into being the events they suggest as the discourse creates the fabula. In other works the fabula is variable. In “choose-your-own-story” texts such as Raymond Queneau’s 1967 proto-hyperfiction, “Un conte à votre façon,” the reader is offered a series of options to choose from; the fabula is multilinear and variable, though once a particular event is selected, it becomes fixed; this is the principle around which many hyperfictions are constructed. Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) operates along similar lines. The book is composed of a series of letters sent by one of the characters, but not all are intended to be apprehended by the reader. Instead, the author offers three different reading sequences depending on the reader’s sensibility. Thus, the conformist is told to begin with letters 2 and 3 and then to go to number 6, while the cynic is to start with letters 3 and 4 before going on to number 6. The quixotic reader is offered yet another different sequence: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It is important to note that each sequence produces a different fabula, and recognize in our definitions that this is also an option that writers may turn to. Related to these works is the multiple ending that offers several possible conclusions. Malcolm Bradbury’s “Composition” (1993 [1976]) tells the story of a new teaching assistant at a Midwestern university during the Vietnam War. After completing his course on composition (but before turning in the final grades), he is invited to party with two of his female students. The evening itself is fairly innocent, though some extremely compromising photos are taken. The next morning, the instructor receives a sample Polaroid and a request for a higher grade for another student who has neglected to turn in a composition in order



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to more fully engage in political struggles; he has to decide what to do, knowing that if the pictures get circulated he is sure to lose his position. The earlier sections of the work are numbered 1 through 4; the final section offers three different resolutions, designated 5A, 5B, and 5C. In the first option, the instructor quietly raises the grade and saves his job. In the second, he corrects the grammar of the letter, sends it back to the blackmailers and defiantly turns in the correct grade. In the third, he agrees with the student that grades are crap and all words are inadequate; he destroys the grade sheet and abandons all academic drudgery in order to move on and devote himself to life and love. The text offers no indication of which of these possibilities will (or has been) be actualized; each option has a certain plausibility. I don’t see this as a hermeneutic test in which the reader needs to determine which is the most likely decision as much as the demonstration of a series of options that the reader is implicitly invited to choose from. As the instructor is informed by one of the other characters, “You have to write your own ending” (141). Here we have a fabula that forks into multiple incompatible directions at its end. In the texts I have just been considering, we have a partially variable sjuzhet that, once selected, produces different fabulas. It might be objected that after the choices have been made, each resulting narrative is entirely consistent, even mimetic. Porter Abbott explains, however, that narrative “is something that always seems” to come after the events it depicts; “to be a re-presentation” of them (2008 [2002], 36); it is the violation of this sense of the pastness of the narrative events that is foregrounded by such multilinear fabulas—if the events actually did occur in the storyworld’s past, they could not be altered. These examples clearly show the need for an expanded framework to account for other kinds of unnatural stories, including infinite fabulas; dual or multiple storylines with inconsistent chronologies; inherently vague and unknowable fabulas; internally contradictory fabulas; denarrated fabulas; and repeated, multiple versions of the same essential story. Elsewhere in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Abbott writes: “narrative discourse is infinitely malleable […], but as we take in information from the discourse we sort it in our minds, reconstructing an order of events we call the story [fabula]. Insofar as it is a story, it has its own length of time and an order of events that proceeds chronologically from the earliest to the latest” (17). It should be readily apparent that this account is far too limited; it and other standard definitions of fabula need to be revised, updated, and reconceived. Unnatural narrative theory is designed to account for such inventive cases, analyze their own unexpected trajectories, and provide a model that allows them to be understood theoretically. The mimetic/antimimetic opposition that I have been foregrounding in this paper has existed for some time and has been explicitly discussed. We recall the

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deep concern expressed by Henry James when he stated in an essay on Trollope that a novelist should “regard himself as a historian and his narrative as a history. […] He must relate events that are assumed to be real” (1972 [1883], 175). This is an excellent description of the goals of mimetic fiction, for James’s insistence on this poetics exemplifies the mimetic prejudice that has dogged literary and narrative theory since the Renaissance. James denounces all refusals to assume the pose of verisimilitude; he complains: Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and his trusting friend are only “making believe.” He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime, and it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. (James 1972 [1884], 30–31)

There are many ironies here, the most evident of which is that author and reader actually are making believe and the narrative can be given any turn that is desired. James claims to be shocked by a “terrible crime” that is both common and almost as old as fiction itself. Furthermore, James was more expansive and meticulous than Fielding, Thackeray, or Trollope in explaining his methods of constructing his novels, but he limited this critical discourse to his prefaces. James’s outrage was aroused not by this practice, but its placement within the fictional work and its consequent disruption of mimetic pretenses. As Linda Westervelt explains, “James does not criticize the intrusion of Trollope’s narrator, but Trollope’s destruction of the illusion that the events in the story actually occurred” (1983, 74). The same opposition was noted by Boris Tomaševskij in 1925. He, however, gives it an opposite valorization by reversing James’s privileging of the mimetic: Two literary styles may be distinguished in terms of the perceptibility of [literary] devices. The first, characteristic of writers of the nineteenth century, is distinguished by an attempt to conceal the device; all of its motivation systems are designed to make the literary devices seem imperceptible, to make them seem as natural as possible—that is to develop the literary material so that its development is unperceived. But this is only one style, and not a general aesthetic rule. It is opposed to another style, an unrealistic style, which does not bother about concealing the devices and which frequently tries to make them obvious, as when a writer interrupts a speech he is reporting to say he did not hear how it ended, only to go on and report what he has no realistic way of knowing. (Tomaševskij 1965 [1925], 94)



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To maintain both styles, both aesthetic rules, narratology needs a comprehensive paradigm that provides a dual or divided poetics, one for mimetic works, the other for antimimetic narratives. By definition, a mimetic model cannot comprehend antimimetic works that violate mimetic practices. A complete narrative theory requires a binocular vision and a dialectical poetics. Unnatural narratology is the more capacious paradigm that supplies the missing parts, the missing theory, the missing vision. Intriguingly, this discussion leads to another paradoxical observation. One may think of narratives as being of three fundamentally different types: nonfictional, which are subject to falsification; mimetic fictions, which substantially mimic nonfictional practices but cannot themselves be falsified; and antimimetic works, which flaunt their fictionality and cannot be reduced to the other types. We cannot simply rely on our experience of personal interactions in the real world if the fictional text defies those experiences; understanding people in real life may be of little use when apprehending a fictional work that does not employ human-like characters; there is little in our experience that corresponds to a character’s knowledge that he is a fictional character, and any experiences of our own that resemble this situation may not be especially helpful in comprehending it. It seems clear that if one insists on a unified, totalizing theory of narrative that can embrace both fictional and nonfictional stories, one must ignore, dismiss or deny the antimimetic. One cannot, in principle, have a single theory that is based on mimetic entities and events as well as the violation of the principles that mimetic representations require. On the other hand, if one desires a more capacious theory that can include the antimimetic, a different divide erupts: that between nonfiction and fiction. This in turn leads to a theory of fictional narratives that are all quite different in technique, import and pragmatic status from nonfictional narratives. Mimetic elements can be observed in antimimetic texts, just as antimimetic moments will be found in substantially mimetic works. Noted, too, will be the narrow divide between the conventions of fiction and the violations of those conventions in unnatural narratives: it is a short but highly significant step from first-person narration to second-person narration; from conventional omniscience to omniscient narrators who plead ignorance; from complex characters and events to mutually contradictory ones. In the end, one must choose between an incomplete mimetic paradigm for fiction (mimeticism) or a divided, double or even antithetical stance (the mimetic and the antimimetic); either choice entails a very different conception of fiction, and each requires a different narratology. In discussing mimetic models, it is important to note significant differences among them, both in theory and in practice. Some theories unnecessarily limit themselves to mimetic concerns. Structuralism attempts to transcend humanism, yet Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck (2005) have pointed out key instances of a

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residual humanism that is pervasive in the practice of structuralist narratology.5 As I and others have argued elsewhere, most cognitivist narratologists employ an extremely narrow mimetic framework, treating characters as people and narrators like actual storytellers in the real world (see Iversen 2013 and Mäkelä 2013). There is no inherent reason why this mimeticism should be so intransigent in their work; in fact, some theorists, including Jan Alber (2009) and Marina Grishakova (2006), have shown how a cognitive approach can be effectively welded to unnatural texts. Other approaches seem to have the opposite problem, leaving little space for unnatural concerns in their larger theoretical statements, yet trying nonetheless to accommodate unnatural practices, if only in a very limited fashion. A rhetorical model like that of James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz is resolutely anchored in a mimetic conception of fiction. For them, “narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (Herman et al. 2012, 3). Such a definition leaves no place for narratives like those of Samuel Beckett or many practitioners of the nouveau roman or postmodernism. In Molloy (1951), for example, the status of the narrator is inherently dubious: are there two or does Moran become Molloy? How do we account for the radical, seemingly impossible change in Moran’s character? Is Molloy, who can cite Continental Rationalist philosophers but does not know what the policeman means when he asks him for his papers, a plausible, consistent entity? What events, if any, really occurred? The systematic denarration of the first half and the global erasure at the end of the second half suggest that there may be no actual fabula to be recovered. Who could be the narratee of these outrageous events, and what is the purpose of their narration? Needless to say, attempting to answer such questions gets more difficult as we approach more extreme unnatural texts like Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953), Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de rendez-vous (1965) or Pinget’s Passacaille (1969). Despite the general mimetic position indicated by his definition, Phelan has nevertheless made important contributions to the theory and analysis of unnatural texts in his studies of redundant telling. However, the danger of such a conception is that it always treats the unnatural as a special case, possible addition or practice situated at the far end of the spectrum the theorist constructs, giving pride of place and definitional centrality to mimetic poetics. I urge that the practice of confining

5 They note, for example, that “the fact that structuralist narratology holds on to concepts such as hero and villain suggests that it still deals with characters in a very anthropomorphic way” (2005, 70). They also point out that similar problems occur in Genette’s temporal concepts (63– 64) other aspects of this model (41–101).



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the unnatural to the end of a spectrum of narrative possibilities be resisted; it is too important to be so easily marginalized. A final irony is that the unnatural model seeks to restore the paradigm employed by the Russian formalists but which has been largely abandoned by the many theoretical stances that claim to build on their work. The newest paradigm of narrative theory—unnatural narratology—thus calls for a resurrection of one that is a century old. In addition to the work of Tomaševskij, I wish to draw attention to Viktor Šklovskij’s theoretical pieces, one of which, “The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style” (1990 [1919]), though long neglected, is especially helpful in analyzing nonmimetic principles of story construction. Unfortunately, however, a new mimeticism has recently begun to emerge as narrative theories based on cognitive studies repeatedly insist on a homology between human experience and literary interaction. The cognitive theories developed by Richard Gerrig, David Herman and many others treat narrative in a largely or almost exclusively mimetic manner. Thus, for example, they consider literary characters essentially as if they were human beings or human-like persons. This bias forces them to neglect and leave untheorized the thousands of non- or anti-mimetic characters from those of Aristophanes to Beckett’s Unnamable to, for that matter, Bugs Bunny. What is especially disappointing in this context is that this is a mistake that we have seen many times before in the history of literary theory. We recall the naïve mimeticism that drove A. C. Bradley to speculate vainly on how many children Lady Macbeth had, or how many years Hamlet studied in Wittenberg. This “mimetic fallacy” can be traced back at least as far as Ben Jonson; now it threatens to enjoy a new resurgence.6 Those who appreciate either innovative literature or accurate theoretical formulations can only hope that the new mimetic bias does not take hold. As Lubomír Doležel has stated, Mimetic doctrine is behind a very popular mode of reading that converts fictional persons into live people, imaginary settings into actual places, invented stories into real-life happenings. Mimetic reading, practiced by naïve readers and reinforced by journalistic critics, is one of the most reductive operations of which the human mind is capable: the vast, open, and inviting fictional universe is shrunk to the model of one single world, actual human experience. (Doležel 1998, x)

6 For a sustained critique of cognitive mimeticism, see my response in Herman et al. (2012, 235–250).

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To reiterate: a narratological paradigm that restricts itself to standard, natural, common, mimetic or conventional narrative forms suffers several debilitating limitations. By contrast, a more open and expansive model offers numerous obvious benefits, particularly when it comes to the narratives any narrative theory should be able to cover. In conclusion, we affirm that fiction is different, often wildly different, from nonfictional narrative; it is different by definition and in practice, and this basic alterity needs to be taken account of in any narrative theory that aims at comprehensiveness. André Malraux clarifies this basic opposition pithily: “L’artiste n’est pas le transcripteur du monde, il en est le rival” (“The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival”) (1976, v). This is a good motto for us all.

Works Cited Primary sources Bradbury, Malcolm. 1993 [1976]. “Composition.” In M. B. Who Do You Think You Are? Stories and Parodies, 119–146. New York: Penguin. Castillo, Ana. 1992. The Mixquiahuala Letters. New York: Doubleday. Churchill, Caryl. 1985 [1978]. Traps. In C. C. Plays: One, 69–125. New York: Routledge. Coover, Robert. 1969. “The Babysitter.” In R. C. Pricksongs and Descants, 206–239. New York: Penguin. Leyner, Mark. 1995. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. New York: Vintage. Queneau, Raymond. 1967 [1961]. “Un conte à votre façon.” Les Lettres nouvelles jullietseptembre, 11–14. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965. Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy [1957] and In the Labyrinth [1959]. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove.

Secondary sources Abbott, H. Porter. 2008 [2002]. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alber, Jan. 2009. “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them.” Storyworlds 1: 79–96. Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Brian Richardson, eds. 2013. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Doležel, Lubomír. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge. Grishakova, Marina. 2006. The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames. Tartu: Tartu University Press.



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Heise, Ursula. 1997. Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson and Robyn Warhol. 2012. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. 2005. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Iversen, Stefan. 2013. “Unnatural Minds.” In Alber et al., eds., 94–112. James, Henry. 1972 [1883]. “Anthony Trollope.” In Miller, ed., 175–176. James, Henry. 1972 [1884]. “The Art of Fiction.” In Miller, ed., 27–44. Mäkelä, Maria. 2013. “Realism and the Unnatural.” In Alber et al., eds., 142–166. Malraux, André. 1976. Les metamorphoses des dieux. Vol. 3: L’Intemporel. Paris: Gallimard. Miller, James E., Jr. ed. 1972. Theory of Fiction: Henry James. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Amsterdam: Mouton. Richardson, Brian. 1987. “‘Time is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama.” Poetics Today 8 (2): 299–309. Richardson, Brian. 2002. “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction.” In Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, edited by B. R., 47–63. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Richardson, Brian. 2005. “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, 167–180. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Richardson, Brian. 2013. “Unnatural Stories and Sequences.” In Alber et al., eds., 26–48. Richardson, Brian. 2015. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965 [1963]. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove. Šklovskij (Shklovsky), Viktor. 1990 [1919]. “The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style.” In V. S. Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 15–51. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Sternberg, Meir. 1981. “Ordering the Unordered: Space, Time, and Descriptive Coherence.” Yale French Studies 61: 60–88. Tomaševskij (Tomashevsky), Boris. 1965 [1925]. “Thematics.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 61–98. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Westervelt, Linda A. 1983. “‘The Growing Complexity of Things’: Narrative Technique in The Portrait of the Lady’.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 13 (2): 74–85.

Göran Rossholm (Stockholm)

Causal Expectation

This essay is an attempt to give the discussion about causation as a narrative universal a new direction. The scholarly context consists of a discussion about causality in narratives conducted by three philosophers, Noël Carroll (“On the Narrative Connection” 2001), David Velleman (“Narrative Explanation” 2003) and Gregory Currie (“The Content of Narrative” 2010, ch. 10). The term “narrative” is used in a transmedial sense throughout the essay and thus includes narrative films, theatre plays, etc.; most of the time my use of the term “reading” should be understood in an accordingly wide and variable sense.1 Causality has been suggested as a characteristic of narrative ever since Aristotle, but it is rare that the concept as it is used in narratological contexts is critically analysed in terms of conditions. Carroll, however, does present such an analysis. His thesis as to what kind of causality characterizes narratives is criticized by Velleman, who refutes not only Carroll’s thesis of narrative causality, but all similar theses, every version of what I will call a Weak Causality Model. According to Velleman, causality is not what holds a narrative together. He argues partly by counter examples, in particular one taken from Aristotle’s Poetics, and he presents an alternative model, the Emotional Cadence Model. Currie, finally, admits that there are non-causal stories, or at least stories with no causality at their turning points, but, contrary to Velleman, he is not willing to throw the idea of narrative causation out of the discussion. He meets the presumed counter examples by attending to the notion of narrativity, instead of narrative, and by formulating a combination of two narrativity models, the Compensation Model and the Conflict Model. My position will be rather close to Currie’s; still, my basic idea about narrativity and causality will be quite different in one certain respect, coming closer to Velleman’s proposal in this regard. Like Velleman, I will move the focus from the story to the reader: I suggest that a narrative is something that gives rise to causal expectations.

1 The two terms in my title, causal and expectation, have been investigated in narratological contexts by many scholars, just as related concepts such as plot and anticipation or chance and surprise. Many of the results of these investigations are highly relevant in the present context, in particular Sternberg’s (1978) observations on suspense, curiosity and surprise and, with respect to the different kinds of reader expectation, Jauss’s (1982 [1977]) and Iser’s (1990, 1991) theories. However, to make the line of argument clear and straight, I concentrate my references on the publications of the three philosophers mentioned above. DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-011

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1 Causal Troubles Before entering the discussion, a few remarks are needed on causation in general and on the role of causation in narrative in particular. The concept of causality is philosophically and scientifically controversial, and the terms “cause” and “effect” and their closest semantic relatives have been used differently in different times and cultures. These circumstances call for caution. Currie (2010, 28–41) has suggested that we can speak about dependences in many cases instead of causation, and I agree. I shall come back to this point below. For the moment, though, suffice it to say that the notion should be interpreted as including sufficient causation as well as teleological forces of all kinds—mechanical causes as well as intentional ones, full-blown sufficient causes as well as tiny causal factors—and that the use of such a notion should go along with determinism as well as non-determinism. I believe that the loose concept of dependence is part of any more specific (and consequently more controversial and more culturally relative) concept of causation.2 One of the most quoted examples of causation and narrative comes from E. M. Forster: “‘The king died. Then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died. Then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” (Forster 1927 [1962], 93). Few, if any, have followed Forster in drawing a line between story and plot by using the criterion of causality; rather, the example is often used to shed light upon the question of whether any coherent discourse reporting two or more successive events is a narrative. A standard reference in this debate is Morton White’s (1965) classification of annals (records of successive events), chronicles (records of successive events with a single subject) and narratives (records of successive events with a single subject which are causally organized).3 Of course, other genres may be put into these three boxes: for instance, a witness report is about what a single subject has observed but without claims on causal links between the events perceived and is thus a “chronicle” but not necessarily a “narrative.” However, these distinctions are stipulations, and I’m far from certain that we will ever find any stable linguistic intuitions behind them. At most, we might say that many “annals” are less

2 The caution called for yields no requirement that every detail in the chosen concept—dependence in this case—should be embraced as the cement and propeller of the universe by any inhabitant in the same universe. I will in the following stipulate that dependence should be factual, not logical or conceptual—a distinction that is probably not universally acknowledged. 3 The first two categories mentioned in White’s annals-chronicles-narratives tripartition should be taken in a broad sense; for instance, when a person makes an account about his whereabouts in order to establish an alibi in a police investigation, the discourse may take the form of a chronicle.



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narrative than most “chronicles” and that many “chronicles” are less narrative than most “narratives.” This leaves us with several alternatives. For instance, we might draw a definitional line between “narrative” and the other two categories, or we might consider “chronicles” and “annals” (or only “chronicles”) as subspecies of “narrative.” As already said, I will follow quite another line of reasoning, and consequently I won’t go deeper into this. The causality claim does not answer the question: “How much?” In the first paragraph of the Grimm Brothers’ version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the reader is informed of the fact that the protagonist is given a hood which is red and made of velvet. The colour plays a causal role in the text (the girl is called Little Red Riding Hood because of the colour of the hood), but the textile material velvet does not. Does this disqualify the whole text as a causal narrative? Of course not. Every piece of information does not necessarily have a specific place in the causal web of the story. (This is so even though, as will be shown at the end of this essay, the textile material of the hood may be given a causal interpretation.) An unqualified thesis of causality may include too much causality. A statement such as “The sun shines” refers to a complex causal process, but it makes a poor narrative, if any at all. Currie points out that a representation of a person at different times is a causal representation because personal (gen)identity is a causal affair (Currie 2010, 38); similarly, Mackie discusses whether persistence in general presupposes causality (Mackie 1980, 156–157). However, none of these cases illustrate narrative causality because, I suggest, they don’t necessarily yield discourses that represent anything as a causal process. The sentence “The sun shines” neither spells out nor tacitly presupposes any specific and separate temporal items (events, circumstances, conditions) playing the roles of causal factors. Thus, to represent something that de facto is a causal process is not enough: it has to be represented as a causal process.4 Finally, we cannot require that a narrative should give us sufficient causes of the events represented. Many events in most narratives are not presented as the consequences of preceding determining causes; everything in every narrative is not causally explained. Some genres, such as the gothic novel, are characterized by the lack of convincing causal explanations, and most narratives, in particular good ones, are such that the process of events cannot be easily foreseen. Surprise is not only common in narratives but is often praised as a narrative virtue, and in some genres (narrative jokes, for instance) it is constitutive. Thus, narratives hang together by some looser link than sufficient cause and its effect.

4 For a more elaborate account of representing something as a causal process, see Rossholm (2012).

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2 Noël Carroll and the Weak Causal Model In order to cope with the problem mentioned in the last paragraph above, Noël Carroll puts forth a weak form of coherence. The cement he proposes has two ingredients. First, a narrative discourse must be held together by “a unified subject,” that is, it should live up to the requirements of a chronicle. Forster’s example of story coheres in this way. We take it for granted that the queen mentioned in second sentence is not just any queen but the one who is (or was) married to the deceased king. Discourse coherence is prototypically expressed by pronouns.5 We can make Forster’s sentences more explicit by paraphrasing them: “The king died. Then, his wife, the queen, died.”6 The second cementing element is causation, and this is the specifically narrative component of the connection. Carroll argues that we can’t require that narrative events be connected only by sufficient causal conditions (i. e., a condition which produces the effect); instead, he proposes necessary parts of sufficient causal conditions, so called INUS-conditions, as components binding a narrative together.7 As mentioned above, Currie suggests (2010, 40–41), with reference to David Lewis (1986), that causation in a still weaker sense could be paraphrased as dependence. One event or state of affairs depends directly or indirectly (in the case of INUS-conditions) on another event or state of affairs. He also takes two more steps to loosen up the causal knots still more. First, he allows not only categorical causal conditions of different sorts, but also probabilistic ones. Second, he accepts David Lewis’ suggestion that negative causal information may also be part of causal explanation. This idea means that facts that are only seemingly causally connected to the event to be explained are parts of the causal history of that event (Lewis 1986, 220) (see the example below). Finally, as mentioned above, we cannot require of any causal model that every piece of information should have a causal role to play, only that causation dominates the picture, and that the crucial turns of the plot are causally related to something else in the story.

5 On coherence and cohesion, see Michael Toolan (2014 [2009]). 6 I have advocated explicating this kind of coherence in terms of logical unitarity in Rossholm (2007). 7 The four letters are short for Insufficient but Non-redundant part of an Unnecessary but Sufficient condition (see Mackie 1965, 1980). A concept very similar to Mackie’s INUS-condition was introduced a few years earlier by Marc-Wogau (1962) under the name of “moment in a sufficient condition.”



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3 David Velleman and the Emotional Cadence Model David Velleman presents counter examples to this model. He does not deny that narratives often present sequences of causally connected events in accordance with the model, but this is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for being a narrative (the conditional terminology now used in its logical or conceptual sense). There are non-narrative discourses that comply with the weak causal model, and there are full-blooded narratives which do not comply: “A discovery due to serendipity, a tragedy narrowly averted by dumb luck, a mundane act that unforeseeably becomes the last in a life accidentally cut short […]” (Velleman 2003, 6). He provides examples drawing on narrative motifs such as improbable reunions of twins separated since birth and narrative genres such as joke-telling, and he finds support for his non-causal position in a passage from Aristotle’s Poetics: Tragedy, however, is an imitation not only of a complete action, but also of incidents arousing pity and fear. Such incidents have the greatest effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvellous in them then than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance. Even matters of chance seem more marvellous if there is an appearance of design as it were in them; as for instance the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the author of Mitys’ death by falling down on him when a looker-on at a public spectacle; for incidents like that we think to be not without a meaning. (Aristotle 1952, 9:1452, p. 686)

This story, the story of Mitys, may of course be interpreted as causally connected. In such an interpretation, the murderer is probably killed by Mitys’ spirit, or by the statue coming to life. After all, people are intentionally killed by statues in narratives  – as Don Juan is. But Aristotle is obviously presenting the case as a story about happenstance and coincidence, not about causal effect, and Velleman does so, too. How, then does Velleman analyse the concept of narrative? First, he moves the focus from the content of the story to the emotional experiences of its audience. What makes certain representations narratives is not their internal structure but the feelings they evoke: “So long as we feel an anxiety relieved or a hope dashed, we have the sense of hearing a story, even if we have no idea why events took the relevant turn.” (Velleman 2003, 7) Then, he specifies emotive content as instances of “emotional cadences.” The reader or spectator of a narrative experiences a sequence of emotions, indefinite in number but ordered in a certain way. The emotive sequence is initiated by an emotion that, in real life as well as in reading experience, is not typically the consequence of another emotion but

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comes, in Velleman’s phrase, from “out of the blue,” and this feeling is followed by one or more emotions which typically are emotion-determined. The sequence ends in a feeling of resolution, that is a feeling with no standard emotional follow-up. (You can hear Aristotle’s three-way split of “a complete action” into the causally determined parts “beginning, middle and end” behind these words.) One example: first, we have puzzlement (a feeling that is no standard consequence of another feeling), both in the story and its audience, then curiosity, then foreboding, then dismay and finally, as a consequence of the whole series, grief (a feeling with no standard emotional consequence). This is the emotive cadence of Oedipus Rex.

4 Gregory Currie, the Compensation Model and the Conflict Model Gregory Currie argues that Velleman’s narrative essence, the emotional cadence, is no sufficient condition of the occurrence of a narrative. A scientist making a discovery or formulating a proof may experience the same sequence of emotions. I would like to add that neither does Velleman’s model provide a necessary condition. His concept of narrative is too narrow, confined to stories with closure. Many narratives, written or not, literary or not, spontaneous or calculated, do not end in resolution. Further, there are stories (with or without closure) with such a low emotional temperature that the reader/spectator stays emotionally unaffected, yet recognizing what s/he reads as a narrative. Still, Currie admits that there are narratives with pivotal changes that just happen, with no obvious causal background. He adds one of his own making: “[A] story of man who successfully battles a life-threatening disease but who is killed in an unrelated car crash the day after his discharge from the hospital.” (Currie 2010, 32) There are, as we all know, a lot of such stories about sudden and inexplicable misfortune or fortune. Currie’s basic move in this troublesome situation (Velleman is correct in his diagnosis, but his cure to ordinate “emotional cadences” doesn’t help) is to attempt to find any narrative essence, any narrative connection, any defining characteristic of all and only narratives. He thus turns to the gradual property of narrativity. One discourse that is not a narrative may still be more narrative—i. e., have more narrativity—than another discourse: one definite narrative may be more narrative than another; two discourses in the grey area between narrative and non-narrative may differ in narrativity. Narrativity consists of a number of entities and features such as causation, characters, chronology, closure, conflict,



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surprising turns, narrative point or tellability, complications, suspense, experentiality, and so on. This move is far from new, the first to come to mind being that of narrative theorist Gerald Prince. In addition to the candidates mentioned, he suggests that “disnarration” is one more factor among the different features of narrativity. By disnarration he means “explicitly referring to what did not take place but could have.” (Prince 2008, 24) Each of these categories may be more or less manifest in a particular discourse, and when we have enough of these N-factors we have an exemplary narrative. This means that the loss of one feature may be compensated by an overdose of another. In addition, Currie points to the possibility that one salient feature may conflict with another. Take the story about the man who survived a dangerous disease only to be killed in a car accident. The point of the story might be to illustrate the unforeseeable changes and inexplicable variability of human life and death—or something of that nature.

5 The Causal Expectation Model Currie ends his discussion about narrative causation by saying that “causation is important in narrative; by and large we expect narratives to tell us a lot about causes, and to have their most salient events strongly embedded in causal contexts”; moreover, “narrativity varies to some extent with causal information.” (Currie 2010, 38) These quotes indicate that causation holds an exceptional position among the features of narrativity. On the whole, I find Currie’s suggestion about counter examples right. The step from narrative to narrativity, to narrative factors which may both compensate for each other and conflict with each other, is convincing. But I think that there is more to this complex question. Currie’s proposal does not have anything to say about what makes all the flowers in the bouquet of narrativity narrative flowers.8 Neither does he make clear why causation seems to take a somewhat privileged position among these different factors. I suggest that the answer to these questions is hinted at in Currie’s own words, just quoted: we, as readers, expect narratives to tell us a lot about causes. Narrative, causally organized or not, is something that raises causal expectations. This is, of course, no definition: other things, events and situations also evoke

8 Currie does not mention any more narrative factors than causality. The eclectic list presented in the previous section is of my own making.

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causal expectations. But, I suggest, it is an important characteristic of narrative in general. I will devote the rest of this essay to clarifying what I mean by “causal expectation” with respect to narrative. The proposal does not contradict Currie’s ideas: in fact, it suggests answers to some questions raised by his model as well by the weak causality model and the emotional cadence model. First, a few stipulations about the term “expectation.” An expectation may be conscious, but there are also unconscious expectations. An expectation may be or involve a belief of what will come to pass, but not necessarily. When something surprising happens, this is often testimony of the presence of a belief. If I turn on the shower I expect water, but I don’t necessarily form any conscious belief about it. I become surprised when nothing happens, and my surprise informs me about my until-this-moment unconscious belief. I might expect several possible outcomes in a certain situation. For instance, when going to the countryside for a weekend, I have no definite belief that it will be very rainy or that it will be dry and hot; but being prepared for any of these extreme forecasts, I bring both my umbrella and my bathing suit. It is within my anticipatory perspective, and in this sense I expect it. With respect to reading, Currie uses the apt term “salient possibility” (2010, 42–43).9 Both conscious and unconscious expectations and both belief-expectations and non-belief-expectations may be positive (that a certain event will/can happen) or negative (that something will not/may not happen). I always carry about with me a number of unconscious negative expectations such as, when expecting a student to come to my office I have no particular positive expectations about how he will be dressed, but still I feel surprised when he arrives in his pyjamas. Now, how does narrative causal expectation work? Currie’s formulation, “expect narratives to tell us a lot about causes” (2010, 38), comprises reference to expectations we already have before we start reading (or watching or whatever). From, and even before, the very start, we expect to be informed about individuals and events in a causal structure. During reading, this very sketchy anticipation is filled in by expectations of more specified information about these individuals, specifications that in turn are further specified or revised or thwarted as the reading goes on. The initial expectation, which we can call a frame expectation since it frames the whole reading and the whole story, is an external expectation: the stimulus for what we anticipate is not part of the content of the narrative. Such an external frame expectation may, however, be more specific, depending on our

9 Currie acknowledges Carroll (1990) for the idea about salient possibilities.



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acquaintance with the genre, the writer or some other external circumstance.10 If we decide to read an Agatha Christie novel, we expect from the beginning—and even before—that we will be informed about a murder which will necessitate an investigation that exposes the murderer who, as a consequence, will probably be caught and punished. If we decide to watch a programme of the TV-series Murder, She Wrote, our external frame expectations will be even more detailed, particularly if we have already watched previous adventures of this series.11 As fans of Murder, She Wrote, we expect to be informed about a nice young couple who, as a result of various causal turns, will unite in the end, and we will expect that someone will be murdered. We will expect the victim to be an unsympathetic character, both to us and to most of the characters in the story, and we will expect the murderer to be someone other than one of the two young lovers. We will also expect that the first person to be arrested will be proven innocent and believe that protagonist Jessica Fletcher’s own friends have nothing to do with the crime. We will expect the murderer to be identical to one of the characters with only a very weak causal function in the story (aside from his/her presumed participation in the murder, of course). We further expect that as a consequence of the murder, Jessica Fletcher will conduct an investigation that has the effect of the murderer being exposed and arrested. All this and much more belong to what the alert viewer can anticipate as s/he switches on the TV. As the story unfolds, we form expectations that specify these frame expectations: we predict that the wealthy stockholder and tyrannical father will be killed, that his son will be arrested and proven innocent by Jessica Fletcher and that the father’s cousin, a vague but harmless character, will be exposed as the murderer. In the confession, always given as a consequence of a set-up, he presents the causal material still to be filled in in order to make the causal blanket complete. Some of the expectations of causal links in narratives are external (mostly genre-determined) and some are internal, that is, elicited by the story information. Causal expectations may be divided along other lines as well, for instance, into effect expectations and causal explanation expectations. When reading a nar-

10 Gérard Genette’s (1997 [1982]) theory of architextuality (generic membership plus horizon of expectations) and paratextuality (the “threshold” beween the text and what lines outside) are highly relevant in the context of what I call frame expectations. 11 “Murder, She Wrote is an American television mystery series starring Angela Lansbury as mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher. The series aired for 12 seasons from 1984 to 1996 on the CBS network, with 264 episodes transmitted. It is one of the most successful and longest-running television shows in history, with close to 23 million viewers in its prime, and was a staple of its Sunday night lineup for a decade.” (Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder,_She_Wrote) (Accessed 10 August 2015)

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rative, I form an effect expectation when I receive story information that prompts me anticipate some event. Something in the information refers to (some part of) the cause of what I expect will happen. In the second case, causal explanation expectation, something makes me expect that a certain event or state of affairs will be given a causal explanation in the course of events to follow. The first case is exemplified by the information that someone takes out a gun from a drawer in preparation, the reader presumes, for a murder. The second kind of expectation is evoked by, for instance, a scene in which we see someone spying on someone else: at that moment, we have no idea why this is happening, but we expect to be informed of the causal context of the event. It should be noted that this example is also an example of an external expectation: we expect to be causally informed because we are reading a narrative. Very often, this kind of expectation is combined with an effect expectation. The obligatory confession scene in Murder, She Wrote can serve as an example: here the confession is an anticipated effect of Jessica Fletcher’s manipulations, and the information given by the murderer puts prior events in their proper causal context. Two points are to be made here. First, about internal and external stimuli: in crime stories genre features also motivate many, maybe most, expectations triggered by what happens in the story. Crime stories (at least certain kinds, to a lesser extent stories à la Raymond Chandler) should give this kind of information sooner or later. Second, about causal explanation expectations: the spying activities just mentioned may be totally irrelevant to the causal structure of the story, and this irrelevancy may be proven. Although no causality is found, the causal expectation has done its job by drawing extra attention to the (ir)relevancy of the spying incidents: the episode has stimulated our causal curiosity, thereby strengthening the causal expectation attitude. This hypothetical case corresponds to (a kind of) disnarration in Prince’s sense and negative causality in Lewis’ sense. (Lewis’ own example fits in nicely here: “Why was the CIA man there when His Excellency dropped dead? – Just coincidence, believe it or not.” Lewis 1986, 220) Which of these different kinds of expectation are what I have called causal expectations? First, of course, all expectations of elements of causal explanation, both causal frame expectations and more specific expectations of locating presented events in their proper causal context. This means that external expectations (i. e., anticipations made on external grounds solely) may be causal expectations insofar as they are causal explanation expectations. But can external expectations be effect expectations? They may point to the same events as internal causal effect expectations do, but they also have to link these events to their (partial) causes. When we meet two bears or two goats or two brothers in a fairy tale, we expect a third, and when the third one has arrived we don’t expect a fourth one. This has nothing to do with causation. Let’s look at one of the exam-



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ples in Murder, She Wrote. We expect that the one who is initially put behind bars is innocent. But of course he or she is not innocent because of the fact the he or she is the first one arrested. However, this, and other, external expectations are still very similar to internal effect expectations. They have the same form: The reader is informed that X is the first to be arrested, and therefore the reader expects that X will be released. The reader is informed that X has a watertight alibi, and therefore the reader expects that X will be released.12

Only in the second case are two causally related facts mentioned. In the story, that is. For in both cases a causal link is established within the reader: in the first case, his conviction about the arrest of X, and in the second, his conviction about the alibi—both of them causal antecedents of his expectation. But only in the second case do the mental causal poles, conviction and expectation, mirror a similar relation outside the reader. However, the difference is invisible in this formulation because the external basis of the information is left unsaid. A more explicit formulation of the first case should mention that the reader is also informed that in every Murder, She Wrote adventure the one who is initially arrested for the murder is innocent: The reader is informed that X is the first to be arrested and therefore expects that X will be released, because the first arrested is almost always innocent. The reader is informed that X has a watertight alibi and therefore expects that X will be released, because persons with reliable alibis are innocent.

The third, law-like, italicized line makes all the difference. In the second triple it exemplifies an internal law—something both Jessica Fletcher and the sheriff can agree on. The third is an external law, valid for the TV-series Murder, She Wrote. Jessica could not and would not argue that the sheriff should release his prisoner on the grounds that he is the first to be put behind bars in this case. However, we cannot dismiss all the external examples presented. The external clue that the arrested person is an old friend of Mrs Fletcher’s or the external

12 I anticipate two objections to this way of formulating the reader’s effect expectation. The term “information” cannot be applied to fiction, and a more accurate phrasing of the second part of the sentences would be “therefore the expects to be informed that X is released.” To the first objection I say: use “information” metaphorically with respect to fiction. And to the second: the reformulation is acceptable, but I prefer the more direct way of putting it because it stresses the similarity between what happens during reading and direct, non-representational, experience.

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clue that that the murder victim is a highly unsympathetic person may be internally relevant. The hallmark of external stimulus information is that it includes references to the narrative work, the audience, etc., or that it is motivated by information including such references. The last mentioned case may be motivated by the fact that Murder, She Wrote is a cosy crime series, far from evoking pity and fear, and that its audience doesn’t mind much when unsympathetic characters pass away. But both cases may be reinterpreted as internal clues. The immediate trigger is external and non-causal, but the afterthought constructs a causal link. We may judge Mrs Fletcher to be such an expert on human character that she would probably not choose a potential murderer as a friend, and we may regard unsympathetic persons as more likely to be killed because they probably have made more enemies. There are also cases in which internal stimuli promote expectations with disputable causal status. For instance, the reader may expect x to happen because the character s/he is reading about expects it. The trigger is not external: there is no code that claims that everything the character expects will come true. The reader may consider this a non-causal expectation, but s/he may also interpret it as causal. In the latter case we have an example of what Gendler (2010, passim) calls “contagion”: the character’s expectation infects the reader. Like externally based expectations, it does not present any rational ground for a causal inference, but it can be given a causal reinterpretation: “The character expects this to happen; most probably she has some good reason to do so.” Does this mean that internal stimulus information is information that plays the same role in our real life? No, for there are certainly instances of highly unrealistic internal stimuli. When someone puts on a specific ring in Tolkien’s trilogy, we expect that this person will be invisible. We have learned from the fictional narrative that this is what happens when you put this ring on your finger: it is a piece of internal information that triggers a causal assumption.

6 The Causal Expectation Model and Counter Examples There is much more to be said about causality in crime narratives in general and Murder, She Wrote in particular, but I stop here. I have used this material to illustrate how our causal expectations are evoked when we are reading or watching a narrative, not as an argument for the causal expectation model. Crime stories, most of them at least, are probably extreme examples of discourses by which our causal expectations are both amply evoked and generously met. The weak



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causality model would work well here, too. What we have to demonstrate is the virtues of the causal expectation model in the counter examples mentioned and see how our model works in relation to other candidates for narrativity. First, Currie’s example, the death in the car accident: “[A] story of man who successfully battles a life-threatening disease but who is killed in an unrelated car crash the day after his discharge from the hospital.” This is not a narrative but a synopsis of a narrative. The fact that the protagonist dies immediately after being successfully treated in the hospital makes it probable that the reader will experience the information of his violent death with a shock or, at least, surprise. And surprise is an indication of the presence of a belief, in this case a belief of what will come to pass and what will not, that is, an expectation. After having successfully survived a life threatening disease, the patient is not expected to abruptly die. So eluded expectation results in surprise, an effect that could not have been accomplished without a causal expectation. Surprise results in turn in intensifying the reader’s attention to the narrative, thus making him or her more alert to what the theme of the story might be and also to its point: fortune comes, fortune goes, the weights of good and evil will in the end be balanced. Causal expectation has done its job by being eluded.13 In this context I would like to rectify a number of details in the account of Murder, She Wrote. It is not true that all the external “laws” are without exceptions. Sometimes the victim is sympathetic, and sometimes the murderer is one of Jessica’s friends, and so on. The intention is probably to surprise the habituated audience. Internal stimuli may also misfire: for instance, when the spectator of Murder, She Wrote watches a raised arm holding an adjustable spanner behind the back of an unsympathetic character in a dark alley, s/he expects a mortal/ fatal blow to the head of that character; but as matter of fictional fact, waving with the spanner may just be a salutation. The Murder, She Wrote connoisseur is well aware of all this, and consequently both expects that the effect will occur and that it won’t. Both options are, to use Currie’s phrase, salient possibilities. In other words, the fact that we expect both the probable effects and the frustration of this expectation is no argument against the Causal Expectation Model. The cognitive and emotional effect on us depends on our anticipations.

13 It should be noted that this synopsis is organized in accordance with the requirements of the weak causal model: if the man hadn’t fallen seriously ill, he would probably not have been taken to the hospital and treated as he was; and if he hadn’t been treated as he was, he probably wouldn’t have got well when he did; and if hadn’t got well at that time, he probably wouldn’t have left the hospital at the time he did; and if he hadn’t done so, he would not have been killed in an auto accident at the time he did. The process is an unbroken chain of factual necessary conditions.

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The story of Mitys’ statue also being only a synopsis, it is not clear what role causal expectation would play. However, we might imagine movie versions in which the murderer approaches the statue. He might be ignorant of the presence of the image of his victim, or he might look scornfully or with anguish at the sculpture. In all three cases the spectator would probably form some kind of expectation of punishment, even when s/he has no idea of how this punishment would be carried out; what seems to be (but is known not to be) an encounter between offender and offended would probably give rise to some such anticipation. At the same time, the knowledge that the statue is nothing but a piece of dead material, incapable of intentional action, would tell the spectator that it could not reasonably do the murderer any harm by itself. But it does. One reaction is certainly surprise, but as sketched here, another reaction is the satisfaction of having one’s expectation fulfilled. Again: causal expectation has done its job by meeting one expectation and creating one surprise by eluding another—a negative expectation of what could not happen.14

7 The Causal Expectation Model and Narrativity In both examples surprise is accomplished as a consequence of frustrated causal expectation. In the first case we assumed that narrative point, or tellability, is exhibited. William Labov introduced narrative point in the narratological arena in the following way: Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, “So what?” Every good narrator is continually warding off this question; when his narrative is over, it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say, “So what?” Instead, the appropriate remark would be, “He did?” or similar means of registering the reportable character of the narrative. (Labov 1972, 366)

The question “He did?” in contrast to “So what?” usually indicates surprise in a causal context: “He did? I wouldn’t have expected that!” According to many theorists, narrative point and surprise are two of the factors that make a discourse narrative. I mentioned more such candidates earlier: characters, chronology (the order of the telling mirrors the order of the told), narrative

14 Werner Wolf applies a similar approach to literary interpretation, demonstrating how chance in narratives operates as “privileged ‘doors’ that permit access to hidden depths of implied world views.” (2008, 167)



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closure, conflict, complications, suspense, experentiality and, following Prince, disnarration (Prince 2005, 2008). All of these terms, except chronology, refer more often than not to causal relations. When disnarration presents plausible but false clues that seemingly, but only seemingly, contribute to the causal web, it plays the role of prompting causal expectation without fulfilling those clues. Currie (2010, ch. 10) has stressed the ambiguity of the term “character,” and both senses apply to literary characters. Briefly put: characters have character. The second meaning of the word has a clear causal and anticipatory role in most narratives: we explain and predict the doings of a character (in the first sense, i. e., a person) by judging his or her character (in the second sense, i. e., moral and psychological properties and dispositions). Narrative closure is usually an effect that is the terminus of a causal process: conflict is normally presented as both an effect and the dynamo of further causal actions; complications, in Aristotle’s sense, are causal turns of fortune or misfortune; suspense, as the tension felt in facing the future, often involves weighing the probabilities of different outcomes of the present situation and thus is a clear case of causal expectation; and experientiality, interpreted as implying the fact that narratives typically represent the character’s experiences, is usually a causal affair.15 Chronology, finally, does not by itself belong to the category of causation. But in order for internal effect expectation to function during reading, chronological representation is presupposed. And it functions extremely well: the reader’s inclination to project causal links between events chronologically rendered is well known. Several commentators have noted that Forster’s illustration of a story (“The king died. Then the queen died.”) is easily given a causal interpretation.16 The example of a non-causal piece of information from “Little Red Riding Hood” presented above may prompt a causal interpretation: the hood, given by the grandmother “who loved her most,” is most probably made of a more exclusive and expensive material than wool or cotton. Much of what Velleman says about the emotional cadence and its felt links fits in here, too. The narrative motif of improbable reunions is an example of a surprising event, at odds with rational expectation, and joke-telling is often built upon something in conflict with ordinary causal anticipation that often ends in resolution.17 The feelings of “anxiety relieved” and “hopes dashed” are

15 The term “experientality” refers to Monika Fludernik’s (1996) idea about what constitutes narrativity. My formulation is no effort to catch the essence of the complex notion. I wish only to point to one important corollary of her thesis. For a discussion of experientiality, see Caracciolo (2014). 16 John Pier has written an essay about this topic with the telling title “After this, therefore because of this” (Pier 2008). 17 See Hurley et al. (2011) on the IR Model of humor.

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usually connected with causal expectations, and the cadence of Oedipus Rex is a sequence of emotions motivated by the causal process in the fictive process, not only appearing in the emphatic audience. (More about this in the final section below!)

8 Cadence and Expectation Causal expectation is a promising candidate for a narrative universal: it explains why causality is so prominent, but not ubiquitous, in narratives, and it also provides common ground for other narrative factors such as those mentioned in the previous section. The most general background of the role of causal expectation in the reading of narratives is the fact that humans are, to quote Hurley et al. (2011, 251), “anticipation machines.” We are in a constant state of expectation, as set out in the broad sense stipulated above. The narrator’s instrument is not words (narratives can be non-verbal), but the reader’s readiness to form expectations and the evaluation and interpretation of what happens relative to these expectations, be they causal or otherwise. As already mentioned, some stimuli of events to come in the course of the story are purely external, and the relation is thus not causal. Some other noncausal expectations have nothing to do with oncoming story events but are of other kinds, for example, externally triggered expectations of what feelings are awaiting us. But very often the outcomes of external expectations are interwoven with the causal structure accomplished by causal expectation. It strikes me as likely that the substance of Velleman’s observations about the emotive uptake of (many) narratives has to do with this: combinations of causal and non-causal expectations. The emotions favoured in Velleman’s cadences are all clearly related to the psychology of expectation. When we become puzzled we usually expect clarification, but when we experience grief—one of his examples of final feelings—we are less prone to entertain expectations about what may come to pass. The very idea of emotional cadences is an idea about anticipation and anticipated endings with no further emotive strings attached. So described, cadential expectations have nothing to do with expectations of causally connected events in the story. There is a causal connection between the representation of story events and the reader’s emotions, but no presumption that the reader’s emotive expectations will be accompanied by any expectations about the unfolding of a



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causal plot.18 But this doesn’t seem right: the reader’s expectation is probably much more complex. When the spectator of Murder, She Wrote expects that the adjustable spanner will crush the skull of the presumed victim, s/he also expects to experience a minor shock as well as a feeling of curiosity about who is holding the spanner and why. In a longer perspective s/he expects that Mrs Fletcher will present a convincing description of how and why all this has happened, and s/ he also foresees that the guilty party will be brought to justice as a consequence of this and that, ultimately, these last two moments will induce the satisfying feeling of closure. The expectations of the cadential and the emotional parts are usually inseparable from causal expectations, and they are knit together by the expectation that the causal events that are expected to occur will give rise to the expected feelings. Such composite expectations may also be part of the anticipatory repertoire of the story of Mitys (“may”: keep in mind taht we don’t have the story, just a synopsis). In addition to what I have suggested in the previous section, the murder of Mitys may make the reader expect that the murderer will be punished by someone other than Mitys himself: more exactly, that the killer will be, using Flesch’s (2007) key phrase, altruistically punished because of the murder he has committed. The reader also expects that, because of the realisation of this causal expectation, she will experience relief, satisfaction and resolution, an emotion that will foster no further emotional expectations. However, what happens is that an event occurs which, even though (quoting Aristotle) “having the appearance of design,” is not a punishment in the proper sense. The similarity to the consequence of an intentional punishment evokes the expected feeling of resolution (according to Velleman) even though the expected event never or only partly occurs, a fact that modifies the final feeling so as to also include surprise. We have, then, a split outcome: the causal component of the punishment is eluded, but the physical effect is realised.19 Splits can be causal, and they can temporal (the effect may be delayed or it may turn up too soon), and perhaps also otherwise. Causal splits can be as in the story of Mitys (physical event right, causality wrong), or they can be the other way around. When Aristotle praises surprising yet causally integrated events (“Such incidents have the greatest effect on the

18 Regarding the causal link between event and emotion, Velleman says “a description of events qualifies as a story in virtue of its power to initiate and resolve an emotional cadence in the audience.” (2003, 18) 19 I don’t regard any expectation that is partly met and partly eluded as “split”: most outcomes come true only in part. The example of the student in pyjamas given earlier may serve as an illustration. The state of dress of the student is contrary to expectation, but not the fact that he turned up. Still, this is no “split.”

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mind when they appear unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another”), he points to this latter category: events that meet the expectation of causality, but not the expectation of the right event.

9 An Illustration Equipped with this toolbox and with additional supplementary instruments of his or her own making, the reader of this essay can set to work on a real narrative, not a synopsis, so as to lay bare the anticipatory dynamics of narrative reading. Just as the story about Mitys, this one can be read as being about divine intervention, even though the final event may also be interpreted as pure happenstance. The text below is taken from Mo Yan’s Nobel Lecture on 7 December 2012.20 Mo Yan stressed that his profession was to tell stories, and he ended the lecture by the following little story. I leave it, as Mo Yan did, without any further comment. Bear with me, please, for one last story, one my grandfather told me many years ago: A group of eight out-of-town bricklayers took refuge from a storm in a rundown temple. Thunder rumbled outside, sending fireballs their way. They even heard what sounded like dragon shrieks. The men were terrified, their faces ashen. “Among the eight of us,” one of them said, “is someone who must have offended the heavens with a terrible deed. The guilty person ought to volunteer to step outside to accept his punishment and spare the innocent from suffering. Naturally, there were no volunteers. So one of the others came up with a proposal: Since no one is willing to go outside, let’s all fling our straw hats toward the door. Whoever’s hat flies out through the temple door is the guilty party, and we’ll ask him to go out and accept his punishment.” So they flung their hats toward the door. Seven hats were blown back inside; one went out the door. They pressured the eighth man to go out and accept his punishment, and when he balked, they picked him up and flung him out the door. I’ll bet you all know how the story ends: They had no sooner flung him out the door than the temple collapsed around them.

20 The text is quoted from a link on the home page of the Swedish Academy. http://www.svenskaakademien.se/nobelpriset_i_litteratur/pristagarna/mo_yan/nobel_lecture_ sv_2012/nobel_lecture_2012_sv (Accessed 24 January 2014)



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10 The Pleasure of Surprise—A Physiological Postscript Negative outcomes of causal effect expectations and the emotion accompanying these outcomes, that is, surprise, have dominated this exposé of the Causal Expectation Model. Why do expectations that are not realised play such a prominent role in narratives, particularly in fictional narratives? Why does Aristotle rank unexpected causally integrated events higher than expected causally integrated events? Many answers will emphasize the importance of training one’s sensitivity to apprehend causal structures, particularly intentional structures of the reader’s co-species. To calibrate our intention-tracing nose, we should take account not only of successful findings but also of mistakes. I have no trouble with this way of reasoning. But in David Huron’s book Sweet Anticipations: Music and the Psychology of Expectation there is a complement to this that cuts deeper. Huron analyses musical anticipation, but he also explores expectation in general in a biological and evolutionary perspective. In the first two chapters he discerns two kinds of reactions to surprise, or misdirected expectation, and they are both negative. One is the “response reaction” which rewards successful anticipations and punishes unsuccessful ones with pleasant and unpleasant feelings, respectively. The function is to encourage the formation of accurate expectations. Simultaneously, a first evaluation of the outcome (unrelated to expectation) takes form: “the reaction response.” This very quick neurological reaction, which is later supplemented and may be overridden by a slow “appraisal response,” is basically pessimistic. It always assumes the worst and thus detests surprises, all surprises. The function is obvious: when you are in a dangerous environment you don’t have the time to make nuanced evaluations. The most negative assumption is the best one if you want to stay alive. So fundamentally, surprises are bad for us and for all other animals. Still, in narratives and in music, as in many other circumstances (e. g., playing peek-a-boo), we love them. Why? Huron’s solution is physiological. In situations of stress, we release endogenous opiates, which help us endure pain. The immediate negative attitude towards any kind of surprise triggers such a defence reaction. A moment later, the next instance, “the appraisal response,” informs us that what’s happening is harmless or even intrinsically valuable. Huron calls this increase of pleasure felt “contrastive valence”: the contrast between the initial negative response makes the subsequent positive emotion stronger.21 Being under the influence of our

21 In Hurley et al. (2011, 253) this mechanism is called ”Huron’s backstage trampoline.”

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self-produced drug, we appreciate the situation more than we would without its anticipatory pre-history. Surprise becomes enjoyable, and this is not necessarily an instance of evolutionary adaption. It could just as well be seen as one of the ways Homo sapiens has exploited its innate cognitive equipment—“the anticipation machine”—for new and joyful purposes.

Works Cited Aristotle. 1952. “On Poetics.” Translated by Ingram Bywater. In The Works of Aristotle, vol. II, 681–699. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Carroll, Noël. 2001. “On the Narrative Connection.” In N. C. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, 118–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge. Currie, Gregory. 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flesch, William. 2007. Comeuppance: Costly Signalling: Altruistic Punishment and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge. Forster, E. M. 1962 [1927]. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2010. Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1997 [1982]. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Foreword by Gerald Prince. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Hurley, Matthew M., Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr. 2011. Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press. Huron, David. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1990. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1991. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982 [1977]. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Introduction by Paul de Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lewis, David. 1986. “Causal Explanation.” Philosophical Papers II, 214–240. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackie, John Leslie. 1965. “Causes and Conditions.” American Philosophical Quarterly 2: 245–265. Mackie, John Leslie. 1980. The Cement of the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marc-Wogau, Konrad. 1962. “On Historical Explanation.” Theoria xxviii: 213–233.



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Pier, John. 2008. “After this, therefore because of this.” In Pier and García Landa, eds., 109–104. Pier, John, and José Ángel García Landa, eds. 2008. Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Prince, Gerald. 2005. “Disnarrated, The.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 118. London and New York: Routledge. Prince, Gerald. 2008. “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratability.” In Pier and García Landa, eds., 19–27. Rossholm, Göran. 2007. “Story (first order predicate) logic.” Special issue: Semiotics of literature. Semiotica 165 (1/4): 149–172. Rossholm, Göran. 2012. “Narrative as Story Representation.” In Disputable Core Concepts of Narrative Theory, edited by Göran Rossholm and Christer Johansson, 183–200. Bern: Peter Lang. Sternberg, Meir. 1978. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Toolan, Michael. 2014 [2009]. “Coherence.” In Handbook of Narratology, 2nd edition, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1: 64–83. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Velleman, J. David. 2003. “Narrative Explanation.” The Philosophical Review 112 (1): 1–25. White, Morton. 1965. Foundations of Historical Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Wolf, Werner. 2008. “Chance in Fiction as a Privileged Index of Implied Worldview: A Contribution to the World-Modelling Function of Narrative Fiction.” In Pier and García Landa, eds., 165–210.

Wolf Schmid (Hamburg)

Eventfulness and Repetitiveness: Two Aesthetics of Storytelling 1 Jurij Lotman’s Concept of Event

The concepts of event and eventfulness open up a new area of inquiry in narratology.1 However, these concepts are not peculiar to one of the many “new” or “hyphenated narratologies” such as postcolonial, feminist, postmodern, transgeneric narratology and others, but are rather at the core of “old” narratology. At the same time, being culture-specific and historically changing phenomena of narrative representations, event and eventfulness bridge the gap between “hardcore” narratology and the “soft” history of culture and mentalities. Central to this new dimension in narratology is the concept of event. What is an event? As in the English word event, Ereignis in German, événement in French and sobytie in Russian all denote an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence, something which is not part of everyday routine. Narratology employs a concept that has been used since the literature of the early Italian Renaissance, when the novelty of a change of state began to be regarded as a positive value. The leading genre of this novelty-based value was the novella, and the leading author in this genre was Giovanni Boccaccio with the Decameron. In this collection of novellas, the plot frequently involves the violation of a prohibition or the crossing of a boundary imposed by moral norms or by the social order (Hühn 2014 [2009], 161). Such violations or boundary crossings are characteristic of an event. The first to speak of event as the defining property of the novella was Goethe. In his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe asks, “What is a novella if not an unheard-of occurrence that has taken place?”2 This question brings out both the extraordinariness of the story told and its reality-based content.

1 Cf. Schmid (1992, 107–109; 2003; 2007; 2009a; 2010, 8–18; 2014, 12–30) and Hühn (2008; 2014 [2009]). 2 In German, as addressed to Eckermann, 25 January 1827: “Was ist eine Novelle anders als eine ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit?” DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-012

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However, no theory of event was developed either in the Renaissance or by Goethe. The first to formulate a theory of events in literature3 was the Russian literary scholar, semiotician, and cultural historian Jurij Lotman who was the founder and head of the Moscow-Tartu school. In his book The Structure of the Artistic Text (1977 [1970]), Lotman formulated a theory of the sujet and of event that was inspired by the comparatist Aleksandr Veselovskij and the formalist Viktor Šklovskij, but that is based more particularly on Vladimir Propp’s functional approach in his Morphology of the Folktale (1968 [1928]; cf. Hauschild 2009). The Russian term “sjužet” (sujet), which has manifold meanings in the writings of the three Russian proto-narratologists (cf. Schmid 2009b), is most often translated as plot. However, plot here must not be understood in the sense of E. M. Forster’s (1927) famous story-plot dichotomy. By “plot,” Lotman means an eventful action sequence with three components: 1) 2)

3)

some semantic field divided into two mutually complementary subsets; the border between these subsets, which under normal circumstances is impenetrable, though in a given instance (a text with a plot always deals with a given instance) it proves to be penetrable for the hero-agent; the hero-agent. (1977 [1970], 240; original emphasis)

Lotman speaks of semantics in categories of space.4 His concept of space is dichotomous and thus corresponds to binary semantic oppositions: [As] a rule the principle of binary semantic opposition lies at the foundation of the internal organization of textual elements: the world is divided up into rich and poor, natives and strangers, orthodox and heretical, enlightened and unenlightened, people of Nature and people of Society, enemies and friends. In the text, these worlds […] almost always receive spatial realization: the world of the poor is realized in the form of a poor suburb, the slums or attics, while the world of the rich is realized as Main Street, a palace, or the dress circle of a theatre. Such notions arise as just and unjust lands, the antithesis of city and country, of civilized Europe and uninhabited islands, of the Bohemian forest and paternal castle. The classificatory border between opposing worlds assumes spatial features. (1977 [1970], 237)

3 The literary category of event is to be distinguished from the philosophical concept. For an overview of the philosophical discussion on “events” as an ontological category, see Schneider (2005), Casati and Varzi (2010) and Kaldis (2013). 4 Renner (1983) explains the concept of space, used metaphorically by Lotman, in terms of set theory. For a critique of Lotman’s hermeneutic model and of Renner’s attempted inductive application, see Meister (2003, 91–95). Lotman’s event categories are taken up and further developed, in the sense of a formalization, by Krah (1999), Titzmann (2003) and Renner (2004). For a concise overview of these approaches, see Hühn (2014 [2009], 172–173).



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Lotman’s central definition of an event reads as follows: An event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field. (1977 [1970], 282)

A seminal role in this definition is played by the concept of “border”: As a rule […] all kinds of barriers in the text are concentrated at the border and structurally always represent a part of the border. It is immaterial whether it be the ‘adversaries’ in a fairy tale, the waves and winds and currents hostile to Odysseus, the false friends in a picaresque novel or the false clues in a detective novel, for in a structural sense they all have an identical function: they make the movement from one semantic field to another extremely difficult, and altogether impossible for everyone except the agent in a single given instance […]. (1977 [1970], 240–241)

The border can be topographical, but it can also be pragmatic, ethical, psychological or cognitive. Lotman uses topological terms as the basis for his definition but at the same time stresses the normative relevance of the definition by pointing out that normative values tend to be described using spatial images and oppositions. Thus, Lotman’s spatial semantics should be understood as a metaphor for non-spatial, normative values. The normative character of the border is implied in an alternative definition of the event in a plot: […] an event always involves the violation of some prohibition and is always a fact which takes place, though it need not have taken place. (1977 [1970], 236)

On the basis of the presence or absence of an event, Lotman differentiates between “plot texts” (sjužetnye teksty) and “plotless texts” (bessjužetnye teksty): Texts without plots have a distinctly classificatory character; they establish a certain world and its mode of construction. (1977 [1970], 236) A second important trait of the plotless text is the fact that it insists on a definite order of internal organization of this world. The text is constructed in a particular manner and it does not permit its elements to move in such a way as to violate the established order. (237)

In contrast to plotless texts, which make borders fast, texts with a plot have a “revolutionary” character insofar as they oppose established order. On the basis of the opposition of texts with a plot and plotless texts, Lotman gives an alternative definition of event:

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The movement of the plot, the event, is the crossing of that forbidden border which the plotless structure establishes. It is not an event when the hero moves within the space assigned to him. (1977 [1970], 238; original emphasis)

Corresponding to the dichotomy of plot texts and plotless texts, two groups of personae can be distinguished: the immobile and the mobile. Immobile characters are not permitted to cross the border whereas mobile characters are free to do so. For the latter, Lotman gives four examples: Rastignac, a character from Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine making his way from the bottom of the social hierarchy to the top; Romeo and Juliet crossing the border that divides their warring houses; the hero breaking away from the home of his fathers to take his vows at a monastery and become a saint; a hero breaking away from his social milieu and going to the people to foment a revolution. Lotman’s examples of plotless texts are calendars and telephone directories. But all kinds of descriptive texts also come within the type of plotless texts. Another type of texts without a plot are mythological texts. Mythological texts do not relate new developments in a changing world but represent the cyclical iterations and isomorphisms of a closed cosmos, the order of which is fundamentally affirmed by the text. What opposes them to narrative texts is that although they represent changes of state, those changes are merely reiterated and thus do not offer something really new.5 For Lotman, the plotless system is primary and can be embodied in an independent text. The system with plot is secondary and always represents a layer superimposed on a basic plotless structure. In a later article Lotman (1979 [1973]) argues that the modern “plot text” is the result of the interaction of the two basic text types. Lotman’s concept of event comprises one important point that we will have to consider when it comes to historical or typological questions: what is regarded as an event depends on context, world picture and point of view. As Lotman notes, A plot is organically related to a world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event and what constitutes a variant of that event communicating nothing new to us. (1977 [1970], 234)

5 For the structure of mythical thought, cf. Cassirer (1955 [1925]), Lotman and Uspenskij (1973 [1970]) and Meletinskij (1976). For the manifestations of mythical thought in modern literature, cf. Schmid (1987).



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In support of this idea, Lotman gives an example: the case of a husband and a wife who have quarreled about the value of abstract art and go to the police station to have a report drawn up. The police inspector, having ascertained that no assault, battery or any other transgression of civil or criminal law has taken place, refuses to write up a report because from his point of view nothing happened. For a psychologist, moralist, social scientist or art historian, however, the disputed fact constitutes an event. The numerous arguments in the history of art concerning the comparative merits of various plots arise because the same event represents something essential from one point of view, something meaningless from another, and from yet another it does not exist. (1977 [1970], 234)

Discussing an example from Old Russian literature, where it is demonstrated that even the death of a hero does not constitute an event in some texts, Lotman touches on an important trait of events: An event is that which did occur, though it could also not have occurred. The less probability that a given event will take place (i. e., the greater the information conveyed by the message concerning the event), the higher the rank of that event on the plot scale. (1977 [1970], 236)

In this somewhat incidental way, Lotman acknowledges the fact that events can be characterized by different degrees along the scale of plot. By developing Lotman’s approach further, we can say that decisive factors for the plot-ranking of an event are context and the ideological point of view of the beholder (be it a character involved in the action, the real author or the real reader). Context sensitivity and dependence of the event on the perceiving subject are Lotman’s main points for future discussions of the event as a hermeneutic phenomenon.

2 Event and Eventfulness The concept of event should actually be somewhat broader than Lotman’s. An event is not necessarily a violation of a norm. In the same way, the border need not imply a prohibition. In place of border crossing, one should prefer the term change of state.6

6 On the conditions constituting a change of state—1) a temporal structure with at least two states; 2) an equivalence (similarity and contrast) between the states; 3) reference of the states to one and the same acting or suffering subject)—cf. Schmid (2010 [2005], 2–5.

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Every event is a change of state, but not every change of state constitutes an event. Event must be defined as a change of state that fulfills certain conditions.7 The first requirement of the event is that its associated change of state must be factual or real (real, that is, in the framework of the fictional world). It follows that changes of state that are wished for, imagined, or dreamed are not events although the acts of wishing, imagining, or dreaming can qualify as events. The second requirement of the event is resultativity, a correlate of the event’s facticity. A change of state that constitutes an event must be resultative in that it reaches completion in the narrative world. This means that a change of state that constitutes an event is not inchoative (begun), conative (attempted), or durative (confined to an ongoing process) but rather is resultative in that it reaches completion in the narrative world. This completion need not manifest itself in concrete physical actions. For a mental event, it may suffice that a revision of earlier opinions has taken place or that insight into certain circumstances has been gained or lost. Of course, the act of imagining, planning or similar acts can signal a mere beginning or a faltering change in a character (Hühn 2014 [2009], 170). But in each case the mental processes must conclude with a certain result. Reality and resultativity are necessary conditions of an event. However, it is clear that these requirements alone are not sufficient to turn a change of state into an event, for they can both be fulfilled by trivial changes of state in a narrated world. If a hero raises his hand, the change of state is both factual and resultative. But as a rule this change will be inconsequential. In certain circumstances, however, the raising of a hand can be immensely meaningful. Imagine a historical novel about ancient Rome. In the Colosseum a slight movement of the emperor’s hand will decide the fate of many lives. Events are more or less eventful. For this reason, eventfulness is a scalable property of events. There are five features determining the degree of eventfulness: 1. Relevance. Eventfulness increases to the degree to which the change of state is felt to be an essential part of the narrated world in which it occurs. Changes that are trivial (in terms of the narrated world) rank low on the scale of eventfulness. 2. Unpredictability. Eventfulness increases in proportion to the extent to which a change of state deviates from the doxa of the narrative (doxa corresponds to what is generally expected in a narrated world). This does not mean that the

7 This is why Hühn’s (2014 [2009], 159) differentiation between “events I” (changes of state) and “events II” (changes of a special kind) is not really helpful. The difference lies in the point of view of the beholder taking a linguistic or hermeneutic stance rather than in the object itself. In the narrated world, there are no borders delimiting events I from events II.



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event must rest, as Lotman suggests, on the breaching of a norm or on the violation of a prohibition. Rather, the essence of the event can lie in the fact that it breaks with expectations. A highly eventful change is paradoxical in the literal sense of the word, for it goes “against expectation.”8 Doxa pertains to the story and its protagonists and their expectations and is thus not equivalent to the reader’s script. A script or behavioral script (Schank and Abelson 1977; Emmott and Alexander 2014 [2009]) is a sequence of expected behaviors for a given situation. The classic script example is dining at a restaurant. The sequence of expected actions for this script begins with a hungry customer entering the restaurant, ordering, eating, paying and then ends with the customer leaving. Doxa is what the protagonists expect from their lives, whereas script is what the reader expects will occur in the action on the basis of certain patterns in literature or in the real world. A change of state that comes as a surprise to the protagonists in a particular narrative world can be perfectly predictable for an expert reader. The wedding of the senior nurse with the chief physician of a hospital may be a completely unforeseen event for both protagonists. But for the experienced reader of doctor novels and hospital romances this happy ending is predictable from the beginning. It follows that the reader’s script concerning the course of a work and the protagonists’ expectations concerning the course of their lives must be treated as distinct. A change of state that can be seen to follow the normal rules of a narrated world is predictable and thus will have a low level of eventfulness, even if it is of great importance to the individual protagonists involved in it. 3. Persistence. The eventfulness of a change of state is in direct proportion to its consequences for the thought and action of the affected subject within the framework of the narrated world. 4. Irreversibility. Eventfulness increases with the irreversibility of the new condition which arises from a change of state. That is to say, the more improbable it is that the original condition can be restored, the greater the level of eventfulness. 5. Non-Iterativity. Repeated changes of the same kind, especially if they involve the same characters, represent a low level of eventfulness, even if they are both relevant and unpredictable with respect to these characters. These five features are gradational and can be realized to varying degrees (unlike binary features, which are unambiguously either present or absent).

8 Aristotle defines paradox as that which contradicts general expectation (Rhetoric 1412a 27).

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This means that events can have varying levels of eventfulness. There is no fixed universal threshold of eventfulness that a change of state must cross in order to become an event; conversely, no minimum level of eventfulness can be specified below which events cannot exist. At least two of the five features listed above, namely relevance and unpredictability, are not objective, but rather depend on interpretation. In a narrated world each of the protagonists can evaluate the relevance of a change of state in different ways. But it is not only the protagonists in a narrated world who can evaluate the relevance and unpredictability of a change of state in different ways. The narrator and implied semantic instances such as the abstract or implied author and the abstract or implied reader can also be perceived or construed as evaluating the relevance of a narrated change of state in different ways. Moreover, we need to take account of the fact that real readers may have their own concepts of relevance and unpredictability that do not conform with those of the fictive and implied instances. It can be concluded that relevance and unpredictability are heavily dependent on evaluation of the change of state by perceiving subjects. Each of the depicted, narrating and reading instances is a subject in his or her own right within a particular social and axiological context that determines that individual’s norms and expectations.9

3 Analyzing Eventfulness How can eventfulness be analyzed? With every story, the reader will concentrate primarily on the temporal links and their logic. This is why, in the interpretation of a narrative text, the first thing to know is how the initial and final states of the narrated world differ. The ascription of meaning in the reading of narrative texts aims to identify changes to the initial situation as well as the logic that underpins these changes. However, not only the determining causes but also the changes themselves are only rarely described explicitly and reliably and must therefore usually be reconstructed. In order to reconstruct causes and changes, the reader is called on to identify equivalences. Equivalence occurs with the presence of similarity and contrast between two items. A change of state implies an equivalence between the initial and final state of a story. In many cases, it is only non-temporal linking

9 Concerning the dependence of event on subject and context, cf. Schmid (2009a).



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that brings temporal changes and their logic to the surface. For this reason finding equivalences between episodes is a helpful tool for analyzing eventfulness (cf. Schmid 2014). Examples of events or temporal links being identified through the interplay of non-temporal links are provided by the late stories of Čexov, which model the life stories of their titular heroes as a chain of equivalent episodes: “The Grasshopper” (Poprygun’ja, 1892), “Ionych” (1898), “Darling” (Dušečka, 1899), “The Lady with the Dog” (Dama s sobačkoj, 1899), and “The Betrothed” (Nevesta, 1903). The question in these stories is to know whether a full-fledged event—a far-reaching change to someone’s situation—occurs or whether the same thing merely repeats itself. In this regard “The Lady with the Dog” is the story most disputed among interpreters. Does Gurov, the hero of this tale, really change, converting from a notorious womanizer who sees women as an “inferior race” to a sincerely loving man? This alternative can only be decided by confronting the concealed similarities and contrasts between the episodes and the inner states of the heroes. Temporal links therefore remain fundamental in a narrative work. They are the aim of the reconstructive ascription of meaning, but it is often only as a result of non-temporal links or equivalences that they reach a form accessible to reconstruction. It is not seldom that a change of state underlying a whole novel can be tracked only in many small and seemingly inconspicuous steps. An example is Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1901), in which the “decline of a family” is portrayed, as stated in the subtitle of the German original. The changes between the many steps, however inconsiderable they may seem, manifest themselves in symptoms appearing not only in the characters and their behavior but also in small details of the setting. In Mann’s Buddenbrooks such symptomatic details form pairs of similarity and contrast that make the changes observable. Another example of equivalence as a tool for reconstructing changes of state is Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813). At the heart of the novel are Elizabeth Bennet—the second of the five unmarried Bennet daughters, twenty years old, intelligent, lively, attractive—and Fitzwilliam Darcy, the wealthy owner of a famous family estate. The course of Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s relationship is ultimately decided when Darcy, who belongs to a higher social class than the Bennets, overcomes his pride and Elizabeth her prejudice, leading them to surrender to the love they feel for each other. Thus the novel’s central event is the twofold mental change of state, the overcoming of an initial weakness of the heroes, namely pride and prejudice. This drawn-out process can be conceived of on both sides of the couple only by retracing the slightest changes in the heroes’ conversations and reactions. But there is still another area where changes become manifest. This can be seen in the portrayal of Elizabeth’s perceptions and reflections,

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marking Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as the beginning of the European novel of consciousness. The focus of the plot is mental actions, and the central reflector of these mental actions is Elizabeth, so that the reader sees the unfolding plot and the other characters mostly from her position. Elizabeth’s perceptions are tinged with her evaluative and linguistic point of view. Consequently, the mental events forming the plot become accessible only by reconstructing Elizabeth’s changing inner states. To do this, it is necessary to compare the forms and contents of Elizabeth’s external and inner speech, perceptions and shifting states of mind. Once again, we can state that for analyzing event structures and forms of eventfulness, it is helpful to draw on equivalences. There is one simple guideline for reconstructing events: pay attention to the beginning and the end of a story, and then look for all expressly stated or implied similarities and contrasts between the initial and final states. For an illustration of this analytical approach, we shall consider Aleksandr Puškin’s tale “The Undertaker” (Grobovščik, 1831). At the beginning of the story, the hero, an undertaker, is moving to a new house. But strangely enough, As he approached the little yellow house that had enthralled his imagination for so long, and that he had at last bought for a considerable sum, the old undertaker noticed with surprise that his heart was not rejoicing. (Pushkin 1983 [1831], 87)

When the undertaker, waking up from his nightmare, learns that the merchant’s widow, for whose death he could hardly wait, had not died the day before (i. e., on the day of his nightmare), he is, again unexpectedly, “much gladdened” (89). Any interpretation of this tale must take account of the contrast between the paradoxical lack of joy at the beginning and the no less paradoxical presence of joy at the end of the tale. The contrast between beginning and end gives the lie to those interpreters (e. g., Ėjxenbaum 1987 [1919], 346) who maintain that in this tale nothing happens and that nothing changes. In fact, something does happen, but it is up to the reader to decide what.

4 Eventfulness in the History of Culture Eventfulness began to be regarded favorably only in the literature of the Renaissance when philosophical and social thinking were freed from the bonds of a closed doctrine. Under the reign of thinking in terms of salvation, it was considered that historical occurrences in the world were preordained, the need for newness not being supported by doctrine.



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The low esteem for newness in medieval thinking can be seen in Old Russian literature (i. e., Russian literature up to the seventeenth century), which was strongly influenced by religious thought. In Old Russian literature eventfulness does not come forth as a positive quality. There is no unpredictability in hagiography, the leading genre of the time. Of course, hagiographical texts do as a rule represent changes of state, often culminating in miracles. Miracles, however, are not genuinely surprising or unforeseeable in this textual world, for they follow holy patterns modeled after the sacred, thus reaffirming the Christian world order. In hagiography, miracles are a “plot need” (Lichačev 1987, 76) forming a part of the script. Only miracles bring movement and development in the biography of the saint compensating for the lack of psychological motivation (Lichačev 1987). Martyrdom, another subject of hagiography, or the conversion of a pagan ruler, recounted in the Lives of the Princes, are formed according to beliefs in the sacred and do not reflect genuine eventfulness. Essentially, Old Russian literature contents itself with small, relative, doxical changes of state or, when major reversals are to be reported, it follows models that do not question the truth of revelation, thus leaving little room for surprises. A similar rejection or suppression of eventfulness can be observed under the rule of more recent doctrines of salvation history or historical soteriology. Socialist realism appears at first glance to have been a development in which eventfulness thrived. The conversion of the doubter or the miscreant into a liberator of the people who supports the right side in the struggle was one of the most popular scripts in this kind of literature. On closer examination, however, this way of thinking, with its similarities to salvation history, turned out to limit the possibility of border crossings just as much as the church literature of the Middle Ages. Newness, unpredictability and surprise gained a positive value in the Tuscan novella of the fourteenth century, a genre that highlighted a central event, a turning point (cf. Pabst 1967, Polheim 1970, Thomé and Wehle 2000). Eventfulness in this sense appears in Russia in some secular tales of the seventeenth century that were influenced by western European novellas of the Renaissance. These secular tales tell of morally dubious heroes and their border crossings that are no longer punished at the end, as they were in religious tales. The hero in The Tale of Frol Skobeev (between 1680 and the 1720s), for example, is a poor nobleman who contrives to marry the daughter of a wealthy courtier. He dresses as a woman in order to seduce the girl, marries her secretly and then tricks her irate father into forgiving both of them. He is able to rise in society and to become wealthy, all without any prospect of worldly retribution. For Lotman this is an example of a mobile persona:

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The mobile persona is distinguished from the immobile persona because he is permitted to act in certain ways forbidden to others. Thus Frol Skobeev’s norm of behavior is different from that of those around him: they are bound to certain norms of morality which do not restrict Frol Skobeev. From their point of view, Frol is a knave and a thief, and his behavior “knavery” and “thievery.” From Frol’s point of view (and that of the seventeenth-century reader of this tale) the behavior of his victims reveals their stupidity, and this justifies his swindling them. The active hero conducts himself differently from the other personae, and he alone possesses this right. (1977 [1970], 243)

The conditions for the rise of eventfulness in European literatures are anthropocentrism, freedom from thinking in categories of pre-ordained history, openness to the new and joy of discovery.10

5 Repetitiveness Now an uncomfortable question arises: if eventfulness and newness are so important for narrative literature, is there only a negative role for familiar and repeated things in stories? In other words, what part is played by the identical or the uneventful implemented in stories? How does recognition, Viktor Šklovskij’s antonym for defamiliarization,11 participate in aesthetic pleasure or, more precisely, in the pleasure of story reading? Parents know that children never tire of listening to the same story again and again and that they do not allow the slightest deviation in the sequence of actions. Listening to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Mother Hulda,” children insist that first the bread must be taken out of the oven and that only then can the apple tree be shaken. Children tend to reject deviation or defamiliarization in the telling of stories. Is that not a reason to assume a certain amount of pleasure from familiarity and repetition? Here is another example, this time from the world of adults. What fascinates an experienced reader of hospital romances who knows in advance that the heroine will marry the head physician?

10 For a short overview of the further history of eventfulness in Russian literature, cf. Schmid (2010 [2005], 17–18. Hühn (2010) has submitted a study on eventfulness in British fiction. 11 “The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ sight [videnie] instead of recognition [uznavanie]. […] The life of a poem (and of an artifact) proceeds from vision [videnie] to recognition [uznavanie], from poetry to prose […]” Šklovskij (1990 [1917], 6). For the various aspects of Šklovskij’s multifaceted concept of defamiliarization, cf. Schmid (2005).



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The same question can be asked about crime series on television. What surprise can arise here if, following the design of the series, it is clear from the beginning that the criminal is played by the most prominent actor? If narration exhausted itself in the satisfaction of the desire for the new and the unheard-of, then what can explain the pleasure drawn from the familiar and the repeated? Does the reader or spectator wind the clock back, so to speak, pretending not to know the stereotype? Does he forget the script every time? Or does he concentrate on other components of the work, for example “form”? This is perhaps true for experienced readers rereading a piece of “high” literature, but it is hardly the case for readers of hospital romances and viewers of serial thrillers. With regard to the literature of the Middle Ages, one can ask what moved readers within this ideological, closed system of thought that looked at the whole of world history through the prism of the history of salvation and excluded all paradoxical or unpredictable changes. On the one hand, the general human need for surprise was satisfied by doxical changes that did not challenge or shake the Christian world order while on the other hand, the aesthetics of repetition and the pleasure derived from recognition dominated. Obviously we have to take into consideration a particular kind of pleasure that arises from the unfolding of an event even if its result is highly predictable or if the same story is read or seen several times. We might even speak here of a certain rituality, a mode that lets us perceive and appreciate the unfolding event in all its stages and phases and in all its detail. In any case, the ritualistic perception of repeated occurrences is connected with immersion in the emotional reactions of the characters exposed to positive or negative peripety. In this immersion, the recipient can identify with the characters, plunging into their inner world to experience the represented change of state as if it were his own. What this means is that in addition to the aesthetics of deviation proclaimed by the Russian formalists, we have to acknowledge an aesthetics of identification and recognition. Of course, the two aesthetics have varying degrees of efficacy in different spheres and epochs of culture and are experienced by recipients in differing degrees. This distinction can be compared to a distinction drawn by Jurij Lotman12 between an “aesthetics of opposition” (protivopostavlenie) and an “aesthetics of identity” (toždestvo). To the latter belong works of art “whose structures are given beforehand” and where “the audience’s expectations are met by the entire

12 First in his Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964, 171–181). Not translated into English, an overview of this work is available in Shukman (1977, 65–68). German translation: Lotman (1972, 188–198), then in Lotman (1970, 349–359; 1977, 289–296).

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construction of the work” (Lotman 1970, 349; 1977, 289). Examples, according to Lotman, can be found in the folklore of all nations, in medieval art, in commedia dell’arte and in classicism. In all those genres and periods, works are constructed according to certain scripts (as we would say today). In them, eventfulness, that is, a relevant deviation from the script, would be regarded as a violation of the rules: If the author were to choose a situation that was “impossible” from the viewpoint of the code rules within a given system of artistic perception, the structure expected by the audience would be destroyed, and as a result they would regard the work as inferior and the author as unskilled and ignorant, or even a blasphemer of sinful audacity. (Lotman 1977 [1970], 289)

To the aesthetics of opposition belong works whose code is unknown to the audience even before the act of artistic perception begins. The audience is called on to reconstruct the code from the text. Whereas the aesthetics of identity involves simplification and generalization, the aesthetics of opposition tends toward “complication” (usložnenie). Although this second type is typologically and chronologically younger (it received its greatest expression in realism), it is not superior to the first type axiologically. Both types have their virtues. Lotman underlines the historical relativity of both types: The observation of canons, norms, and clichés characteristic of the aesthetic of identity does not annoy us or strike us as an artistic fault in the text of a folk epic or fairy tale. On the other hand when we come across these same structural features in a modern social novel we feel that we are dealing with an artistic failure, a falsification of the living truth. The formula: “I predicted the whole structure” is deadly for a work of the second type [the aesthetic of opposition], but has no effect on our evaluation of the first type [the aesthetic of identity]. (1977 [1970], 294)

In our culture, works whose structure is predictable, such as hospital romances or TV serial thrillers, tend to be regarded as having low aesthetic value. Nevertheless, such works may well provide consumers with a certain satisfaction that relies not solely on entertainment. Art tends to undermine the aesthetics of identity, not least by introducing deviations from a script that seems to rule a work. This is one of the main devices in Aleksandr Puškin’s Belkin Tales (1831). At first sight, these tales read like repetitions of well-known sujets of sentimentalist or Romantic origin. Regarded as imitations not worthy of their author, they were dismissed by the earliest critics. But on closer examination, it appears that the stories deliberately sought to undermine and refute the very scripts they appear to realize.



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Nevertheless, we must admit that a certain portion of identity is contained in every narrative, even in a sophisticated modern novel. There is no strict contradiction between the two aesthetics but rather a gliding scale or spectrum of forms with different and frequently varying proportions of the two poles. Needless to say, the relations between the two aesthetics will differ over epochs, cultures, genres and types of readers. And clearly there are different kinds of pleasure to be drawn from the two aesthetics. The aesthetics of opposition, which is associated with a high degree of eventfulness, produces a pleasure from newness, novelty, deviation and complexity, thus challenging established schemata and stereotypes. The aesthetics of identity, which enables easy recognition and prompts a ritualistic form of reception, imparts a feeling of comprehensibility, straightforwardness and security.

Works Cited Casati, Roberto, and Achille Varzi. 2010. “Events.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/events/ (Accessed 14 December 2015) Cassirer, Ernst. 1955 [1925]. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 2: Mythical Thought. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Ėjchenbaum (Eikhenbaum), Boris M. 1987 [1919]. “Boldinskie pobasenki Puškina.” In B. M. Ė. O literature: Raboty raznyx let, 343–347. Moskva: Sovetskij pisatel’. Emmott, Catherine, and Marc Alexander. 2014 [2009]. “Schemata.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 756–764. Also available at: living handbook of narratology: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg. de/article/schemata (Revised 22 April 2014) Forster, Edward Morgan. 1927. Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold. Hauschild, Christiane. 2009. “Jurij Lotmans semiotischer Ereignisbegriff. Versuch einer Neubewertung.” In Schmid, ed., 2009, 141–186. Hühn, Peter. 2008. “Functions and Forms of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 141–163. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Hühn, Peter. 2010. Eventfulness in British Fiction. With contributions by Markus Kempf, Katrin Kroll and Jette K. Wulf. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Hühn, Peter. 2014 [2009]. “Event and Eventfulness.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 1: 159–178. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/event-and-eventfulness (Revised 13 September 2013) Hühn, Peter, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, eds. 2014 [2009]. Handbook of Narratology. 2nd edition, 2 volumes. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Available online as the living handbook of narratology at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ Kaldis, Byron. 2013. “Events.” In Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, edited by B. K. http://www.academia.edu/4017688/events (Accessed 18 February 2014).

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Krah, Hans. 1999. “Räume, Grenzen, Grenzüberschreitungen. Einführende Überlegungen.” Kodikas/Code 22 (1/2): 3–12. Lichačev, Dmitrij. 1987. “Čelovek v literature Drevnej Rusi.” Izbrannye raboty v 3 tomax. T. 3, 4–147. Leningrad: Xudožestvennaja literatura. Lotman, Jurij. 1964. Lekcii po struktural’noj poėtike.Vvedenie, teorija stixa (Trudy po znakovym sistemam 1). Tartu: Tartuskij gosudarstvennyj universitet. Reprint: Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1968. Lotman, Jurij. 1972 [1964]. Vorlesungen zu einer strukturalen Poetik. Einführung, Theorie des Verses. Edited by Karl Eimermacher. Translated by Waltraud Jachnow. München: Fink. Lotman, Jurij. 1977 [1970]. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Lotman, Jurij. 1979 [1973]. “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.” Poetics Today 1 (1): 161–184. Lotman, Jurij, and Boris Uspenskij. 1973. “Mif – imja – kul’tura.” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 6: 282–303. Meister, Jan Christoph. 2003. Computing Action. A Narratological Approach. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Meletinskij, Ėleazar. 1976. Poėtika mifa. Moskva: Nauka. Pabst, Walter 1967 [1953]. Novellentheorie und Novellendichtung: Zur Geschichte ihrer Antinomie in den romanischen Literaturen. 2. Auflage. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter. Polheim, Karl Konrad, ed. 1970. Theorie und Kritik der deutschen Novelle von Wieland bis Musil. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Propp, Vladimir. 1968 [1928]. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott, revised by Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press. Puškin (Pushkin), Alekandr. 1983 [1831]. “The Undertaker.” In A. P. Complete Prose Fiction, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Paul Debreczeny, 87–93. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Renner, Karl Nikolaus. 1983. Der Findling. Eine Erzählung von H. v. Kleist und ein Film von G. Moorse. Prinzipien einer adäquaten Wiedergabe narrativer Strukturen. München: Fink. Renner, Karl Nikolaus. 2004. “Grenze und Ereignis. Weiterführende Überlegungen zum Ereigniskonzept von J. M. Lotman.” In Norm – Grenze – Abweichung. Kultursemiotische Studien zu Literatur, Medien und Wirtschaft. Michael Titzmann zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Gustav Frank and Wolfgang Lukas, 357–381. Passau: Karl Stutz. Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schmid, Wolf. 1992. “Ereignishaftigkeit und ihre Einklammerung.” In W. S. Ornamentales Erzählen in der russischen Moderne. Čechov – Babel’ – Zamjatin, 107–117. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Schmid, Wolf. 2003. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” In What is Narratology. Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 17–33. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2005. “Defamiliarisation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 98. London: Routledge. Schmid, Wolf. 2007. “Eventfulness as a Narratological Category.” In Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology 4. http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a07_ schmid.htm (Accessed 23 July 2013)



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Schmid, Wolf. 2009a. “Eventfulness and Context.” In Structuralism(s) Today. Paris, Prague, Tartu, edited by Veronika Ambros, Roland Le Huenen, Adil D’Sousa and Andres Pérez-Simón, 101–110. New York: Legas. Schmid, Wolf. 2009b. “‘Fabel’ und ‘Sujet’.” In Schmid, ed., 2009, 1–45. Schmid, Wolf. 2010 [2005]. Narratology. An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2014. “Non-temporal Linking in Narration.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 667–676. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/non-temporal-linking-narration (Revised 4 October 2013) Schmid, Wolf, ed. 1987. Mythos in der slawischen Moderne (Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. Sonderband 20). Wien: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien. Schmid, Wolf, ed. 2009. Slavische Erzähltheorie. Russische und tschechische Ansätze. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Schneider, Susan. 2005. “Events.” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm. edu/events (Accessed 14 December 2015) Shukman, Ann. 1977. Literature and Semiotics. A Study of the Writings of Yu. M. Lotman. Amsterdam: North Holland. Šklovskij (Shklovsky), Viktor. 1990 [1917]. “Art as Device.” In V. S. Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1–14. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Thomé, Horst, and Winfried Wehle. 2000. “Novelle.” In Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, Neubearbeitung, edited by Harald Fricke et al., Bd. II: 725–731. Berlin: De Gruyter. Titzmann, Michael. 2003. “Semiotische Aspekte der Literaturwissenschaft: Literatursemiotik.” In Semiotik/Semiotics. Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur. A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture, edited by Roland Posner, Klaus Robering and Thomas A. Sebeok, vol. 3: 3028–3103. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Raphaël Baroni (Lausanne)

The Garden of Forking Paths: Virtualities and Challenges for Contemporary Narratology 1 A Forking Path for “Classical” and “Postclassical” Narratologies Nowadays, it has become almost impossible to deal with central issues in narrative theory such as narrative sequence, plot, tellability, narrative interest, or even narrativity without investigating how the story is embedded in a complex network of virtual fabulas. By contrast, these questions were largely neglected in formalist and structuralist theories. As stated by David Herman: “[Propp’s] approach gave an overly deterministic coloration to narrative sequences […]. Part of the interest and complexity of narrative depends on the merely probabilistic, not deterministic, links between some actions and events” (2002, 94). Along the same line, Hilary Dannenberg adds: “An analysis of narrative’s story tells us very little about the true dynamics of plot and about the fascination of fictional worlds for the reader; this stems from the fact that narrative does not simply tell one story, but weaves a rich, ontologically multidimensional fabric of alternate possible worlds” (2004, 160). With the emergence of the analysis of “alternate possible worlds” as a central field of investigation, narratology has departed from its original formalist paradigm and overcome its methodological limitations. As pointed out by Emma Kafalenos in an attempt to describe the evolution of contemporary narratology, recent studies tend to highlight more the role of the reader and the indeterminations of narrative: “What I see as new […] is the specificity of the analysis of how readers’ decisions contribute to the construction of the narrative world. […] Further developments along this path, if it occurs, will bring us an increasingly precise account of sites where indeterminacy can enter a narrative representation, and of conditions that heighten the interactivity between representation and reader in constructing narrative worlds” (2001, 114). If this evolution can be seen as a general trend in narrative theory, and if the analysis of “alternate possible worlds” appears, at first sight, to be a coherent field of investigation for contemporary narratology, the unity of this field, as well as the complementary or convergent nature of the theories dealing with these questions, cannot be taken for granted. Reviewing the various ways narDOI 10.1515/9783110555158-013

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rative virtualities have been examined offers a good opportunity to describe the current state of narrative theory. By doing so, I shall try to highlight the forces at play, those encouraging the consolidation of the discipline or, conversely, those pushing towards diversification.

2 Ts’ui Pên’s and Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths A short story by Borges entitled “The Garden of Forking Paths” will be used in order to illustrate the various ways we can deal with the virtualities of narrative. This fiction can be considered both a metanarrative and a spy story, and both aspects will be useful for the following discussion. On the metanarrative side, Borges refers to the work of Ts’ui Pên, a Chinese ancestor of the protagonist who has supposedly written a book titled The Garden of Forking Paths, a book described as a “maze” and as a “labyrinth of time.” One character, Professor Stephen Albert, explains that “In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible to disentangle Ts’ui Pên, the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures’, several times, which themselves proliferate and fork” (Borges 1999 [1941], 125). Ts’ui Pên’s book has often been associated with interactive storytelling, especially hypertext fictions and digital media.1 Indeed, in these kinds of narratives, all alternatives have been programmed or written and fully belong to the structure of the work itself, even though the reader (or the player) actualizes only one path, leaving the other paths unexplored. Still, we can notice that Ts’ui Pên’s book, weird as this fiction is, is defined as a “novel.” Borges further highlights the fact that “alternatives” belong to “all fictions.” Even though these alternatives are not textualized, they can be imagined, both for the character, who is planning his next move, and for the reader, who is wondering how the narrative is going to develop. More generally, it is entirely possible to state that all narratives, since they are representations of actions carried out by characters and addressed to audiences, are interactive and comprise alternative “paths.” On the spy story side of the tale, the narration recounts a fictional event that occurred during the First World War. The story is in homodiegetic narration, purportedly the fragment of a deposition, “dictated, reread, and signed by

1 See for example Moulthrop (1991) and Ryan (2006a).



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Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English in the Hochschule at Tsingtao” (119). At the same time, Yu Tsun is a Chinese spy working for the Germans, and when the story begins, he is about to be arrested by Captain Richard Madden, an Irishman working for the British Government. After discovering that the identity of his accomplice, Viktor Runeberg, has been exposed, Yu Tsun loses all hope of saving his life. Nevertheless, he decides to accomplish a final mission. He succeeds in communicating the name of a place where the English artillery is located, a city called Albert. In order to carry out his mission, Yu Tsun kills a man whose name is Dr. Stephen Albert. The assassination of Dr. Albert is reported by the newspapers and thus comes to the attention of the German authorities. Unfortunately for Yu Tsun, his victim turns out to be a friendly man and a sinologist doing research on the work of Ts’ui Pên, one of his ancestors. So the Chinese spy concludes his confession by stressing that he has “abhorrently triumphed” (127) and he expresses his “endless contrition” and “weariness” (128).

3 Possible World(s) Asserted by the Author Borges’s story not only reflects on narrative virtualities, but it also actualizes all kinds of virtual worlds that we can find in narrative. We begin our survey with the kind of virtualities focused on by Thomas Pavel (1975) in his work on possible worlds and modal logic. At this stage, we can consider the narrative world as a whole, and not in its progressive actualization. Umberto Eco (1984, 235) insists on the fact that, even if possible worlds are actualized through a series of stages, all these moments ultimately belong to the same possible world as the author planned it: a possible world in an assertive mode that must be contrasted with other possible worlds imagined by the characters in the story or by the readers. Here, modal logic provides useful tools for explaining how fictional worlds are shaped, based on information we possess concerning the real world. Thus, from the perspective of a phenomenology of reading, the “possible” must be considered a “parasite” of the “actual.” As Ryan puts it: “when readers construct fictional worlds, they fill in the gaps in the text by assuming the similarity of the fictional world to their own experiential reality. This model can only be overruled by the text itself; thus if a text mentions a blue deer, the reader will imagine an animal that resembles her idea of real deer in all respects other than the colour” (2005a, 447). Of course, we know that the fictional characters of the story by Borges are human beings endowed with attributes that don’t have to be mentioned such as the fact that people normally have two arms and two legs. But we also receive

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relevant information about the characters. For example, we learn that the antagonists are Chinese and Irish and thus that they are working for enemies, i. e., the Germans and the English. We can infer further information from the first lines of the story: On page 242 of The History of the World War, Liddell Hart tells us that an Allied offensive against the Serre-Montauban line (to be mounted by thirteen British divisions backed by one thousand four hundred artillery pieces) had been planned for July 24, 1916, but had to be put off until the morning of the twenty-ninth. Torrential rains (notes Capt. Liddell Hart) were the cause of that delay—a delay that entailed no great consequences, as it turned out. The statement which follows—dictated, reread, and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English in the Hochschule at Tsingtao—throws unsuspected light on the case. (119)

There is no reason to wonder whether the book by Liddell Hart truly exists or to question what is truly written on page 242 of this book. What does matter here is what we should infer from the mention of a history book, based on what we know concerning the real world. Indeed, by mentioning a well-known historical context, the incipit provides valuable information we need in order to fill in the gaps of the storyworld. For example, we know that the story begins in the middle of a war that broke out in Europe in 1914 and that Captain Liddell Hart’s book (a controversial book that truly exists, by the way, published in 1930) represents a version of the winners. We also know that in time of war stories are often told by unreliable narrators or that they are based on unreliable sources such as propaganda, for example. All of this information is important in order to understand the fictional text, correctly infer some of its implicit elements and interpret the text in a productive way. It is interesting to notice that Borges suggests that we should call Captain Liddell Hart’s version into question on the grounds that history books can never be considered to constitute an exhaustive, completely reliable and definitive version of what happened. Yu Tsun’s deposition might be a fictional document, but in real life too, the way we understand history constantly changes. Borges adds a further level of complication between two versions of the same fact. In his deposition, Yu Tsun states that “Runeberg had been arrested, or murdered” (119). However, an editor’s note comments on this hypothesis as follows: “A bizarre and despicable supposition. The Prussian spy Hans Rabener, alias Viktor Runeberg, had turned an automatic pistol on his arresting officer, Capt. Richard Madden. Madden, in self-defense, inflicted the wounds on Rabener that caused his subsequent death” (119). In this case, obviously, the editor seems to possess more information than the narrator, a fact that he proves by revealing the real name of his accomplice. So we must admit that Runeberg was probably killed, and not arrested. But for the reader, how Runeberg was killed remains undeter-



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mined. Yu Tsun’s hypothetical version might be partial, but the editor’s version may have been manipulated by official sources in order to enable the agent to plead self-defense. I think that the fabula allows us to choose between the two versions—self-defense and murder—with the result that no assertion, fictional or factual, can be left undisputed, even though some assertions seem to be more credible than others. This last point illustrates a property of possible worlds semantics: the fact that, in some cases, it is possible to establish a hierarchy between opposing statements concerning the fabula, while in other cases we must accept the existence of multiple alternative worlds, since they cannot be reduced to mutually exclusive versions. This plurality of worlds can also be related to the history of narrative forms. As stated by Françoise Lavocat: “if the work stipulates the existence of many possible worlds, their modalities of engendering and configuration differ according to historical periods” (2010, 8; translation mine). Hilary Dannenberg also suggests that “An analysis of the historical development of plot shows how, with the rise of the novel, more sophisticated plots develop involving the temporal orchestration of alternate world versions: more than one version of the past or future is suggested as a possibility by the text” (2004, 161).2 In this case, we could state that the indeterminate elements in Borges’s story partly result from the fact that it was written in the middle of the twentieth century and that it is a parody of the paranoid genre of spy stories. Indeed, Dannenberg adds that “Fictional genres across the board, whether realist, semi-realist (fantasy, science fiction) or anti-realist (metafictional), all use alternate possible worlds, but with differing forms of ontological hierarchy” (2004, 161). Here again, we can stress that, at this level, we are concerned with “possible worlds” asserted by the fiction: worlds that can be multiple or single, indeterminate or finite, indecisive or hierarchical. Either we compare the fiction with an external referent—with infinite possibilities but at the same the uncountable constraints of the real world—or we aim to contrast different versions of the same fact inside the possible world of the fiction. And in the whole process, either we find a clear hierarchy between the alternatives or we don’t. Now, I shall try to be more specific on the nature of other kinds of virtualities that can be actualized, implicitly or explicitly, by narrative fictions.

2 Here, we can historicize what Brian Richardson defines as “unnatural narratives”: those “representations that contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic conventions and the practices of realism” (2015, 3).

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4 Virtualities Expressed by the Discourse The first kind I shall comment on, and probably the most obvious one from a formalist perspective, is explicit description by the narrative of events that don’t belong to the fabula. In 1988, Gerald Prince introduced the category of the “disnarrated” in order to deal with this narrative modality that departs from mere assertions. Prince’s definition runs as follows: “the category of the disnarrated covers all the events that did not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text” (1988, 2). Here, we see that we are dealing with virtualities that fully belong to the text. The fundamental criteria are based on the explicit nature of the virtuality and non-assertive tone of the discourse. The disnarrated can be either: (a) an unrealized possibility imagined by a character; (b) a forking path in the realm of the possible outlined by the narrator; or (c) a narrative possibility not chosen by the creator of the textual universe but which is mentioned by an authorial voice. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” we can find examples of such disnarration actualized by the main character. The first example expresses a false guess about the antagonist, the other a hope about the future: For one instant, I feared that Richard Madden had somehow seen through my desperate plan, but I soon realized that that was impossible. (Borges 1999 [1941], 122) I told myself that my duel had begun, and that in dodging my adversary’s thrust—even by forty minutes, even thanks to the slightest smile from fate—the first round had gone to me. I argued that this small win prefigured total victory. I argued that the win was not really even so small, since without the precious hour that the trains had given me, I’d be in goal, or dead. I argued (no less sophistically) that my cowardly cheerfulness proved that I was a man capable of following this adventure to its successful end. (121)

In both cases, we see a sharp discrepancy between the hope of the character and the knowledge expressed by the narrator, since the latter knows retrospectively that things will end up tragically. But the narrator can also express his opinion about alternatives in the past, as in the following statement: “Madden’s presence in Viktor Runeberg’s flat meant the end of our efforts and (though this seemed to me quite secondary, or should have seemed) our lives as well” (119).



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5 Virtualities Shaped by the Characters and Belonging to the Fabula Marie-Laure Ryan has proposed a different way of dealing with virtualities. She is not concerned with the problem of describing all kinds of virtualities expressed by narrative discourse, but rather with analyzing the links between the “tellability” of the fabula and its logical complexity: [T]ellability is rooted in conceptual and logical complexity, and […] the complexity of a plot depends on an underlying system of purely virtual embedded narratives. Embedded narratives […] are the story-like constructs contained in the private worlds of characters. These constructs include not only the dreams, fictions, and fantasies conceived or told by characters, but any kind of representation concerning past or future states or events: plans, passive projections, desires, beliefs […]. Among these embedded narratives, some reflect the events of the factual domain, while others delineate unactualized possibilities. (Ryan 1991, 156)

As summarized by Dannenberg, Ryan (in contrast to Prince) “admits counterfactual worlds into this category only if they are a product of the speculative activity of a character” (Dannenberg 2004, 172). Indeed, Ryan argues that “the disnarrated [produced by the narrator] could be deleted from the text without consequence for the logical coherence of the narrative events” (1991, 169). Additionally, she also includes implicit virtualities that must be reconstructed by the reader, as for example when a character’s intention is not specified. In the example already mentioned, Yu Tsun makes a supposition concerning the past based on information that he has just received: “Madden’s presence in Viktor Runeberg’s flat […] meant that Runeberg had been arrested, or murdered” (Borges 1999 [1941], 119). These suppositions (even though some of them are proven to be false) are extremely important in order to understand the course of the narration, since the future actions of the protagonist are based on this diagnosis concerning the past. The second example shows an explicit intention of the protagonist, the narrator explaining that it won’t be followed by action: Something—perhaps the mere show of proving that my resources were non-existent—made me look through my pockets. I found what I knew I would find: the American watch, the nickel-platted chain and the quadrangular coin, the key ring with the compromising and useless keys to Runeberg’s flat, the notebook, a letter which I resolved to destroy at once (and never did). (120, emphasis added)

The last example refers to a “plan” that is mentioned, though not explicitly, since, to preserve narrative interest, it is not yet revealed how the goal will be achieved:

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If only my throat, before a bullet crushed it, could cry out that name so that it might be heard in Germany. But my human voice was terribly inadequate. […] I vaguely reflected that a pistol shot can be heard at a considerable distance. In ten minutes my plan was ripe. The telephone book gave me the name of the only person able to communicate the information: he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than a half hour away by train. (120)

In distinguishing “tellability” from “strategic point,” Ryan highlights the difference between narrative interest that relies on the complexity of the plan devised by the character and interest that relies on discourse strategies, for example the fact that the plan is momentarily unclear for the reader: Narrative suspense derives, for instance, from the confrontation of characters of limited foresight and a reader who anticipates—correctly or not—the situations into which they should run. The reverse strategy is also an efficient way to capture the reader’s interest: delaying the reader’s understanding of a sequence of actions by preventing access to the set of embedded narratives that motivate the agent. While the plot sets up a field of possibilities, the strategies of narrative discourse may guide the reader along certain paths. (Ryan 1991, 174)

Ryan stresses the differences between virtualities shaped by the characters and those shaped by readers. This brings us to the next stage of our investigation. Here, the focus will be on gaps in the narrative that elicit active participation on the part of the interpreter by making inferential walks into the woods of the fiction.

6 Virtualities Shaped by the Reader and their Esthetic Effects Several narratologists have distinguished between two types of narrative interest according to the temporal orientation of the virtual scenarios shaped by the readers. The first was Tzvetan Todorov, who made this distinction with regard to detective fiction: The first can be called curiosity, it works from effects to causes: starting from a certain effect (a corpse and some clues), we must find its cause (the culprit and what drove him to the crime). The second form is suspense, and it works from causes to effects: first we are introduced with the causes, initial data (some gangsters who prepare a mischief), and our interest is elicited by the expectation of what will happen, in other words, the effects (corpses, crimes, clashes). (Todorov 1971, 60; translation mine)



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Of course, this distinction can be generalized far beyond the scope of detective stories; accordingly, Dannenberg argues that “complex novels involve the interweaving of possible versions of both past and future world” (2004, 160). Along the same lines, authors such as Meir Sternberg (1978), Peter Brooks (1984) and James Phelan (1989) have investigated the links between the affective engagements of the reader and progression in the text, including analysis of the strategies used to “generate, sustain, develop, and resolve readers’ interests in narratives” (Phelan 1989, 15). Among these strategies, Sternberg focuses especially on “expositional modes and temporal ordering” that can be linked to suspense, curiosity and surprise, considered as universal functions of narratives. I won’t discuss here the differences between these authors, but I want to stress that, overall, their theories are limited to considering the relations between certain narrative techniques and the two major kinds of interpretive procedures that they elicit in the reading process: prospection and retrospection. Other studies have taken a more adventurous path by trying to provide a description of how prospection and retrospection are transformed into concrete hypothetical scenarios in the reader’s mind. Umberto Eco (1984) opened this field of investigation up by linking the inferential walks of readers with modal logic, possible worlds semantics, Peircean semiotics and the more general notion of encyclopedia. Eco was building on the pioneering works of Thomas Pavel (1975) and Lucia Vaina (1977), but his model already comprised three levels: 1) the possible worlds asserted by the author; 2) the possible worlds shaped by the characters; and 3) the possible worlds inferred by readers based on “common” and “intertextual frames” (Eco 1984, 32). Since then, Bertrand Gervais (1990) and David Herman (1997), among others, have adopted cognitive models developed in AI studies to describe how our knowledge about the logic of actions can shape how we interpret narratives. Among these frames we find notions like “scripts” and the schematization of intentional actions. According to these studies, narrative interest results from destabilizing a stereotyped situation,3 and its development generally involves the realization of a more or less complex series of planned actions leading to a specific goal. Emma Kafalenos (2006) has also used an abstract model, inspired by Propp’s functions, in order to define the causal configurations that readers build progressively while they progress through the text. Building on Sternberg’s model, Kafalenos especially highlights the effect of deferred or suppressed information on this ever-changing reconstruction of the story logic. In other models, authors have stressed the intertextual knowledge that orients the inferential walks of the

3 On stereotypes, see also Dufays (2010).

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readers. Among them, John Pier has shown that “intertextual frames” (2004, 240) contribute to narrative configurations on the basis of abductions concerning the past, present and future of the fabula. In La Tension narrative, I have combined these different perspectives: the rhetorical investigation of textual devices arousing narrative interest together with a description of the anticipations entertained by interpreters in the process of narrative configuration, including the full range of “endo-narrative skills”4 (semantics of action) and “transtextual knowledge” (Baroni 2007, chap. 3 and 4). Let us see now how this approach can be applied to our case. From the perspective of Yu Tsun, his spying activity is a routine regulated by scripts. The revelation of his identity opens a less predictable development and thus increases the interest of the narrative progression. From this point on, the story revolves around two parallel goals which involve the planning of a series of actions: the first, seemingly impossible, is to escape the deadly chase by Captain Richard Madden; the second, that will be successful, is to convey secret information to a distant recipient.5 The difficulty of the task builds suspense in the chronological unfolding of the narration. In addition, the strategic delay of the revelation of the plan devised by the protagonist, as already mentioned, helps to increase narrative tension (in this case curiosity) by urging the reader to make hypotheses concerning how the goal might be achieved. The genre of “spy stories” also provides useful configurations which help the reader to explore the virtualities of the narrative. For example, we recognize that the “transmission of a secret” and the “chase” are stereotypes usually found in this narrative genre, enabling us to refer to previous fictions in order to formulate hypotheses as to how the conflict may develop or how it may be resolved. The genre also induces indeterminacies in the virtual scenarios of the reader, since stereotypical spy stories involve the paranoid assumption that no one should be trusted and that the final resolution must be unexpected. Ryan mentions yet another important aspect concerning the virtualities shaped by readers, namely, their resistance to reiteration: “Even after the possible has been exhausted by the actualization of a certain course of action, the interpreter revisits mentally the paths that have fallen into the domain of the counterfactual, so as to assess the ethical or strategic decisions of the character, as well as the aesthetic decisions of the author” (Ryan 2005b, 628). In an involun-

4 For my use of AI studies, see Baroni (2002). For the relation between intertextual and actional frames, see Baroni (2005, 2016). 5 It can be noted that the “quest” of the hero is both successful and unsuccessful, adding coextensive virtualities to the story.



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tarily ironical statement, Doctor Albert says: “Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy” (Borges 1999 [1941], 127). And Yu Tsun replies, just before killing his interlocutor: “But I am your friend” (127). I think that the reader will have to admit that in the possible worlds of the fiction, Stephen Albert and his guest were both friends and enemies at the same time and also that, even if the crime has been committed (and the future is already written), Yu Tsun could or should have spared his friend. This is precisely this alternative that makes the crime of Yu Tsun an “abhorrent” triumph, causing “endless contrition” and “weariness.” So an ethical judgment is always combined with the comparison between what happened in the fabula and what else could have happened.

7 The Theory of Possible Texts A study of all forms of virtualities that can be associated with stories would be incomplete if we only considered virtual paths that are intentionally incorporated into the text by the author. Marc Escola sees the possibility for a new kind of critic, called the “interfering critic” (critique interventionniste), inspired by the works of Pierre Bayard, a scholar who wrote academic bestsellers such as Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and How to Improve Failed Literary Works. The contributors to this Theory of Possible Texts have learned from P. Bayard that a reader is under no obligation to adopt the conclusions which the author claims to be the final ones, that literary criticism can be a continuation of the creation by other means, and that ultimately there is not a big gap between the reading of a work and its reinvention or its refection. (Escola 2012, 10; translation mine)

We can apply this “theory of possible texts” to Borges’s story in various ways. For example, when we read that the first two pages of Yu Tsun’s deposition are missing, we can suppose that this hidden part of the story might shed an unexpected light on the events. Some creative readers may even try to write or comment on these missing pages, and by doing so, invent an alternative version of the facts. We might also focus on apparent inconsistencies in the story. For example, we can cast doubt on the truthfulness of Yu Tsun’s confession by pointing out the unlikely coincidence that the victim, chosen at random in a telephone book, turns out to be linked to his killer in a surprising way. The story would then have to be rewritten according to a more credible scenario. After all, the whole deposition of the narrator could be a lie, a complete invention in order to

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protect some darker secrets (maybe Doctor Albert was an accomplice who had to be killed for some other reason). Here, we are still talking about the virtualities of the narrative, but the initiative has been transferred from the text (and the hypothetical intention of an implied author) to an empirical reader, who can exploit or comment on the text and make it take unexpected directions.

8 Is Contemporary Narratology a Garden of Forking Paths? Of course, the virtualities of narratives represent only one issue among many others for contemporary narratology. At the same time, I think that the epistemological problems raised by the various ways that virtualities have been dealt with casts light on a number of important issues faced by the discipline in its recent history. As I have shown, research on narrative virtualities is itself a kind of garden of forking paths. What looked, at first sight, like a simple problem, has produced a number of distinct, and sometimes opposed, theories. Tensions may occur when different paradigms describe similar phenomena, for example when a disnarrated event is also an embedded narrative in the form of character discourse and a virtuality that the reader might ponder in the course of reading. In some works, we can observe a kind of continuity in the history of narratology. By expanding on the formalist notion of fabula, Ryan has only added to its complexity by exploring the virtualities shaped by the characters. We can also consider Prince’s concept of disnarration as a mere expansion of the taxonomy of narrative “figures” developed by classical narratology (especially in Genette’s works). In both cases, we find once again the old distinction between story and discourse reinterpreted in the light of the virtualities of narration. On the other hand, many works dealing with virtualities, including Ryan’s, have crossed an additional threshold by linking narrative structures to the function they play in discursive interaction. Despite a proliferation of epistemologies (functionalism, constructivism, rhetoric, cognitive science, etc.) in their midst, postclassical narratologies converge by stating that in order to understand the dynamics of plots, we must take into account the “dialectical interplay between narrative and consciousness” (Herman 2007, 257). Here, two attitudes are possible: the first, advocated by James Phelan, is to admit that, from a rhetorical perspective, we are dealing with some kind of “authorial audience,” one that realizes the intention of an “implied author.” In this case, there is no reason to turn our back on earlier perspectives because the virtualities that belong to the logic of the fabula, and those expressed by the narrative discourse, must in some way



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shape the inferences of this ideal audience. To these perspectives must be added the extratextual knowledge that comes into play when a reader fills the gaps of the narrative, or when s/he tries to predict its unfolding by resorting to scripts, the logic of intentional actions, stereotypes, intertextuality, generic knowledge and so on. It must also be admitted that all readers are not equal when it comes to mobilizing extratextual knowledge in an attempt to explore the virtualities of a text. The second attitude would be to focus on empirical audiences. Here, the clash with old paradigms appears to be more obvious. As stated by Michael Toolan, “The difficult and interesting question is not whether readers experience surprise, evasion, predictability, etc., but pinpointing the conditions, generalizable beyond a case-by-case annotation, conducive to those conditions. Are the conditions specifiable in formal terms at all?” (2004, 220). This question is still an open one, I think. Some, like Umberto Eco (1984) or Wolfgang Iser (1978 [1976]), believe that the “model reader” or the “implied reader” is mostly a construction of the text and also that this abstraction is a good approximation of statistically homogenous empirical readers.6 Others have stressed the initiative of the empirical reader and the unpredictability of his or her interpretations. Herman has stated that “In 1983, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan […] expressed hope that deconstruction, at that time a comparatively new development on the theoretical scene, might enrich narrative theory rather than render it obsolete” (1999, 1). My opinion is that, thirty years later, while postclassical studies have embraced new perspectives far beyond the mere description of formal attributes of narratives, the trench between two major currents of narrative theories still depends on how we deal with the “challenge” of deconstruction. Is contemporary narratology entering in a period of consolidation or diversification? It all depends on the way we look at the garden of forking paths, what might be called one’s “narratological posture.” In the first case, we can have a global look at the garden as a whole and consider every path as an interesting heuristic way to enlighten the innumerable virtualities of narration. Of course, in each part of the garden the kind of virtualities we are dealing with looks quite different. But it is possible to admit that these different paths are complementary perspectives on a complex issue. From this standpoint, we need to take a long walk to explore every corner of the garden, drawing a map to see where we’ve come from and where we stand and to get an idea of the regions that still need to be explored. This is the posture adopted by Hilary Dannenberg when she expresses the hope for “a comprehensive model of the counterfactual in fiction” (2004, 172). I think Herman shares

6 Eco (1984, 261–262) contains an example of such a statistical verification of “model reading.”

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the same view when he says “Rethinking the problem of narrative sequences can promote the development of a postclassical narratology that is not necessarily poststructuralist, an enriched theory that draws on concepts and methods to which the classical narratologists did not have access” (1997, 1048–1049). Others, however, prefer to stress the conflicting nature of the different perspectives. Sternberg has formulated radical criticisms concerning formalism and cognitivism.7 According to him, these approaches are unable to reflect the true complexity of narrative structures and the multiplicity of their possible effects on empirical readers. He also considers that the functionalist paradigm is not simply a new layer in a continuous narratological history, but a completely different way of approaching narrative phenomena: “I do not want to overdramatize matters, but it comes to an either/or choice. Indeed, the trouble with some people who have taken up my approach, to this day, is that they want to hold on somehow to the bad good old formalism, to the old French structuralism” (Sternberg 2011, 43). For Emma Kafalenos, when we distance ourselves from a formalist description, we inevitably have to deal with the complexity of empirical interpretations: “I emphasize the instability of a fabula as it grows and expands during the process of reading, and I propose that contradictions […] permit readers of narratives to participate in an endless play of signification. Such a view supports a theoretical position that narrative is not a univocal mode of communication” (1999, 60). We can also point to the fact that the “possible texts” theory developed by French critics such as Pierre Bayard or Marc Escola clearly exceeds the scope of both formal and functionalist narratologies, since it is clearly oriented toward the infinite production of commentaries and alternative stories. When dealing with non-literary texts, things might look quite different. It is clear that in digital media, especially in videogames where the player has the choice of several alternatives for continuing the story, the status of what belongs to the fabula, and of what is counterfactual, changes completely. Moreover, transfictional worlds (cf. Saint-Gelais 2011) such as the world of Starwars, created by George Lucas and now proliferating in a wide variety of products including cartoons, comics, novels, videogames, fanfictions, etc., open up new perspectives by integrating into a single storyworld a potentially infinite range of “possible narratives.” Whether the form and functioning of these storyworlds constitute something which is radically new or whether they perpetuate traditional forms

7 For a critique of formalism, see Sternberg (2011, 43), and for a critique of cognitivism, see Sternberg (2003).



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of narrative in a new guise is still an open question.8 Here are clearly a few new challenges for contemporary narratology. In conclusion, I think that the richness of narrative theory can be attributed to the coexistence of contradictory pathways, thus providing the discipline with the right balance between forays into previously unexplored landscapes and the possibility of capitalizing on a long tradition in narrative studies and theory as well as with the continual necessity of engaging in discussion concerning the modalities of exploration, the validity of epistemological perspectives and methodologies. In any case, Thomas Pavel captures one of the common principles that all contemporary narratologists would probably agree with, whatever their differences: To fully account for our relationship with fiction, it is not enough to identify what is, but it is also particularly important to consider the inferences caused by fiction. These inferences, like those of everyday life, unfold in a space of values, norms, and possible actions. (2010, 312; translation mine)

Works Cited Baroni, Raphaël. 2002. “Le rôle des scripts dans le récit.” Poétique 129: 93–114. Baroni, Raphaël. 2005. “Compétences des lecteurs et schèmes séquentiels.” Littérature 137: 111–128. Baroni, Raphaël. 2007. La Tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris: Seuil. Baroni, Raphaël. 2016. “Virtualities of Plot and the dynamics of Rereading.” In Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, edited by Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz, 87–103. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Bayard, Pierre. 2000. Comment améliorer les œuvres ratées? Paris: Minuit. Bayard, Pierre. 2008 (2008). Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong. Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskerville. Translated by Charlotte Mandel. New York: Bloomsbury. Borges, Jorge. 1999 “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In J. B. Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, 119–128. London: Penguin. Brooks, Peter. 1992. Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Dannenberg, Hilary P. 2004. “Ontological Plotting: Narrative as a Multiplicity of Temporal Dimensions.” In Pier, ed., 159–189. Dannenberg, Hilary P. 2008. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Dufays, Jean-Louis. 2010. Stéréotype et lecture. Bruxelles, etc.: Peter Lang. Eco, Umberto. 1984. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

8 For Ryan (2006a), such fictions are a continuation of the traditional forms.

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Escola, Marc, ed. 2012. Théorie des textes possibles. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Gervais, Bertrand. 1990. Récits et actions. Longueuil: Le Préambule. Herman, David. 1997. “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology.” PMLA 112 (5): 1046–1059. Herman, David. 1999. “Introduction.” In Herman, ed., 1–30. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David. 2007. “Cognition, emotion, and consciousness.” In D. H. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 245–259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman, David, ed. 1999. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978 [1976]. Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Reception. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kafalenos, Emma. 1999. “Not (Yet) Knowing: Epistemological Effects of Deferred and Suppressed Information in Narrative.” In Herman, ed., 33–65. Kafalenos, Emma. 2001. “Editor’s Column.” Narrative 9: 113–114. Kafalenos, Emma. 2006. Narrative Causalities. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Lavocat, Françoise. 2010. “Avant-propos.” In Lavocat, ed., 5–11. Lavocat, Françoise, ed. 2010. La Théorie littéraire des mondes possibles. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Moulthrop, Stuart. 1991. “Reading From the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of ‘Forking Paths’.” In Hypermedia and Literary Studies, edited by Paul Delany et al., 119–132. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Pavel, Thomas. 1975. “Possible Worlds in Literary Semantics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (6): 165–176. Pavel, Thomas. 2010. “Univers de fiction: un parcours personnel.” In Lavocat, ed., 307–313. Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pier, John. 2004. “Narrative Configurations.” In Pier, ed., 239–265. Pier, John, ed. 2004. The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Prince, Gerald. 1988. “The Disnarrated.” Style 22: 1–8. Richardson, Brian. 2015. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005a. “Possible-Worlds Theory.” In Herman et al. eds., 446–450. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005b. “Virtuality.” In Herman et al. eds., 627–629. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2006a. “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27 (4): 633–674. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2006b. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Saint-Gelais, Richard. 2011. Fictions Transfuges. Paris: Seuil. Sternberg, Meir. 1993. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sternberg, Meir. 2003. “Universals of Narrative and their Cognitivist Fortunes (II).” Poetics Today 24 (3): 517–638.



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Sternberg, Meir. 2011. “Reconceptualizing Narratology. Arguments for a Functionalist and Constructivist Approach to Narrative.” Enthymema 4: 35–50. http://riviste.unimi.it/index. php/enthymema/article/view/1186 (Accessed 25 November 2015) Todorov, Tzvetan. 1971. Poétique de la Prose. Paris: Seuil. Toolan, Michael. 2004. “Graded Expectations: On the Textual and Structural Shaping of Readers’ Narrative Experience.” In Pier, ed., 215–235. Vaina, Lucia. 1977. “Les mondes possibles du texte.” Versus 17: 3–13.

Jan Alber (Aachen)

The Representation of Character Interiority in Film: Cinematic Versions of Psychonarration, Free Indirect Discourse and Direct Thought For decades, film theorists and narratologists have claimed that the medium film is deficient with regard to the representation of character interiority. The argument is usually that movies cannot depict fantasies, thoughts and feelings as adequately or as convincingly as novels and short stories can. George Bluestone, for example, argues that “the rendition of mental states—memory, dream, imagination—cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language” (1973 [1957], 47). Geoffrey Wagner even postulates that in film, “we cannot see what we cannot see; in fiction we can” (1975, 183). Jakob Lothe also implies a hierarchy between prose and film when he points out that “a film cannot convey a character’s thoughts, feelings, and so forth in the way fictional literature can” (2000, 86). By contrast, the more recent analyses by film scholars such as Leah Anderst, Edward Branigan, Matthias Brütsch, Gilles Deleuze, Jens Eder, Markus Kuhn, Maike Sarah Reinerth, Jan-Noël Thon and George Wilson, among others, have shown that various ways exist in which movies can represent the inner lives of their characters. My paper seeks to contribute to this new direction of research by inductively developing a list of the numerous different ways in which movies depict the mental states of storyworld inhabitants. In addition, I will show that these cinematic types of consciousness representation bear significant structural resemblances to novelistic techniques such as psychonarration, free indirect discourse and interior monologue, and that these similarities have hitherto been overlooked. Finally, I will also comment on the ideological underpinnings of filmic representations of character interiority. This article builds on Alan Palmer’s argument that “the constructions of the minds of fictional characters by narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novels work because, in essence, narrative is the description of fictional mental functioning” (2004, 12). From my perspective, Palmer’s statement applies to films as well: we as recipients primarily understand cinematic narratives by trying to grasp the intentions and motivations of the represented minds. In addition, his distinction between an internalist and an externalist per-

DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-014

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spective on the mind plays a crucial role in my analyses. Palmer describes this distinction as follows: 1. 2.

An internalist perspective […] stresses those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached. An externalist perspective […] stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged. (2010, 39)

In this paper, I first assume an externalist perspective on the minds represented in film. More specifically, I discuss external simulations of internal states (through facial expressions, bodily positions, voice qualities, the metaphorical association of a character with a different entity, and the use of music) which are structurally similar to instances of psychonarration in prose narratives. In a second step, I deal with dual-perspective shots which fuse Palmer’s externalist and his internalist perspective. As I will show, in cases of quasi-perceptual overlays, the camera does not only confront us with the subjective vision of a character, but it also merges the figure’s point of view with an ‘objective’ one, thus creating dual-perspective shots. This technique is reminiscent of passages of free indirect discourse in novels and short stories. In a third step, I follow Palmer’s internalist perspective on minds represented in film, and refer to more immediate cinematic ways of rendering inner lives (through subtitles, captions, enacted mindscreens and interior monologues at the auditory level) which are structurally similar to stretches of direct thought in prose texts.1

1 The External Simulation of Internal States Even though many theoreticians claim that films are deficient with regard to the representation of character interiority, one can find many obvious examples in which a cinematic narrative suggests or represents the internal state of a storyworld inhabitant. To begin with, films frequently allude to character interiority

1 I have excluded POV shots in which the camera assumes the spatial position of a character to show the entities he or she sees because such shots typically only concern the figure’s vision and not so much his or her thoughts or feelings. An exception might be the POV shots in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) which simulate the acrophobia of John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) through vertiginous shifts in perspective: in this film, dolly-zoom shots of staircases convey a sense of the character’s dizziness and fear. Thon also refers to POV shots in terms of “the least subjective of the pictorial strategies of subjective representation” (2014, 73). For detailed analyses of POV shots, see Branigan (1984) and Choi (2005).



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through facial expressions, bodily positions or the tone of his or her voice. In The Shawshank Redemption (1994), for example, the middle-class banker Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is convicted of murdering his wife and her lover (even though he did not kill them) and descends into the hell of the Shawshank State Prison. When he walks into the prison at the beginning of the movie (see figure 1), his facial expression, his insecure bodily position, and the context within which they are used suggest that he is terrified by the screaming inmates who shake the fence of the arrival area and also because he does not know what to expect inside the prison (see also Alber 2007, 135).

Figure 1: Dufresne’s face and bodily position convey the internal states of fear and insecurity

Toward the end of the film, Dufresne does not only manage to escape from the prison. He also exposes the injustices of Warden Norton’s (Bob Gunton) brutal regime, and even becomes rich by taking money from the warden’s corrupt scams. At this point in the film, his facial expression and his upright bodily position (see figure 2) convey a sense of triumph and self-satisfaction.

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Figure 2: Dufresne’s face and bodily position convey the internal states of triumph and self satisfaction

The film The Bourne Identity (2002) also offers us external clues to the inner life of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a former CIA special agent who suffers from amnesia and does not remember who he is. During a car ride to Paris, for instance, Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente) repeatedly asks him what kind of music he likes until he yells at her, “I don’t know!” The aggressive tone of his voice conveys that he is in a state of despair because of his identity crisis: he does not know who he is and he does not even remember his personal preferences or tastes, which is of course extremely disconcerting. Movies use not only facial expressions, bodily positions, or the tone of a character’s voice to allude to the internal states of storyworld inhabitants; they also often convey thoughts or feelings by (metaphorically) associating figures with different entities (see also Alber 2011, 219–220). Toward the end of David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man (1980), for instance, the deformed Englishman John Merrick (John Hurt) is chased by a bullying crowd until he collapses near a urinal. The juxtaposition of John Merrick with a urinal alludes to this character’s emotional state: since the central protagonist has a deformed face and looks different from everyone else, he feels like a despicable ‘abject’ society wants to rid itself of. The sensitive John Merrick feels like an outcast who is excluded from society. David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) uses a similar strategy to convey the feelings of one of its characters. In this film, the car mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) is infatuated with his lover Alice Wakefield (Patricia Arquette), his obsession bordering on self-destruction. At one point, she tells him that she won’t



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be able to see him, and in the scene which follows, Pete is full of despair. In this sequence, the film cuts from a close-up of Pete’s face to a shot of moths inside a ceiling light, where they die in their attempt to fly into a light bulb. Furthermore, the film juxtaposes Alice’s face with a close-up of a black-widow spider. These two associations convey Pete’s impression that he is gradually destroying himself through his relationship with Alice. On the one hand, he perceives himself in terms of a moth in his desperate attempts to reach, have, or possess Alice. On the other hand, he perceives Alice in terms of a black-widow spider, an insect which, according to popular belief, kills its partner after mating. Moreover, films may convey internal states through the use of particular types of music or sound effects. Nobody’s Fault, the first part of Christine Edzard’s 1987 film adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit, for example, uses romantic music to highlight the emotional state of the character of Arthur Clennam (Derek Jacobi). When Clennam watches Amy Dorrit (Sarah Pickering) in a restaurant, the film deploys Verdi music which drowns all the other sounds (see also March 1993, 251). The slow and romantic string tunes illustrate that Clennam loves the girl and, since all the other sounds of the represented world are drowned by the string music, that he considers Amy Dorrit to be much more important or valuable than everyone (and everything) else. A similar strategy is used in Lost Highway in the scene in which the saxophone player Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) has sexual intercourse with his wife Renée (Patricia Arquette). In this sequence, the film deploys numerous sound effects to convey Fred’s feelings. More specifically, the sex scene between the two characters is accompanied by lugubrious string sounds which suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong between the two figures. We can then hear a gong which is followed by a distant choir: it is almost as though angels were singing somewhere in the background. At this point, Fred feels that the lost unity between him and his wife is restored—at least for a brief moment. However, Fred experiences a premature ejaculation and is quite obviously unable to satisfy Renée. When her hand then touches his back, we are confronted with a disconcerting sound effect which is reminiscent of screeching tires and alludes to Fred’s predominant impression that there are serious problems in their relationship. While Nobody’s Fault uses romantic string tunes to convey Arthur Clennam’s love, Lost Highway employs disconcerting music and sound effects to give us a sense of Fred’s uneasiness. In the examples discussed in this section, we as recipients do not get immediate access to the characters’ thoughts or feelings. In some cases, external signs (such as facial expressions, bodily positions, and voice qualities), which are “outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged” (Palmer 2004, 39), in combination with the context in which they occur, enable us to determine the mental states of the characters. In other cases, the cinematic

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discourse provides information about the characters’ private feelings by metaphorically associating them with specific entities or through the use of particular types of music or sound effects. This kind of representation also operates on the basis of external simulations, i. e., without directly looking into the minds of the characters.2

2 Dual-Perspective Shots: Quasi-Perceptual Overlays In this section, I look at dual-perspective shots which, as I will show, fuse the point of view of one of the characters with an objective one.3 Following Jan-Noël Thon (2014, 75), I use the term “quasi-perceptual overlay” to refer to shots in which a film “simulates (quasi-) perceptual aspects of character’s consciousness without […] assuming his or her spatial position.” In other words, we see a character from an external (third-person) perspective while the images we see simultaneously replicate this character’s world view.4 Christine Edzard’s 1987 film version of Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit (1855–57), for instance, consists of two parts (Nobody’s Fault and Little Dorrit’s Story) which present us with the quasi-perceptual overlays of two different characters. More specifically, Nobody’s Fault focuses on the world view of Arthur Clennam, while Little Dorrit’s Story deals with Amy Dorrit’s world view. Most of the individual shots of these two films involve two perspectives because we see the characters from an external point of view (i. e., as a third-person observer would see them) while the worlds through which they move are tinged with their subjective

2 Thon would refer to these examples, which concern the external simulation of internal states, in terms of “intersubjective strategies of representation” that contribute to the “representation of subjectivity” (2014, 69–71). 3 In this context, Edward Branigan points out that “objectivity and subjectivity interact in a narrative film by being alternated, overlapped, or otherwise mixed, producing complex descriptions of space, time, and causality” (1992, 160). Similarly, Celestino Deleyto argues that “subjectivity is often expressed in a film without the complete disappearance of the external focalizer as a distinct agent from the character whose vision or mind we are made to share” (1996 [1991], 224). Indeed, in this section, I try to show how objective and subjective perspectives can be intertwined or combined in dual-perspective shots. 4 Both Leo Spitzer (1961 [1922]) and Per Krogh Hansen (2009) refer to quasi-perceptual overlays as being “pseudo-objective.” Furthermore, as Thon (2014, 75) explains, they correspond to Edward Branigan’s “projection[s]” (1984, 90), George Wilson’s “subjectively inflected impersonal shots” (2006, 81) and Jens Eder’s “subjectivized external views” (2008, 613).



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impressions. That is to say, even though we see the characters from the outside, the shots simultaneously imitate their respective perceptions of the world. James Monaco speaks of a “‘third-person’ point of view” in the numerous instances in film where we look at the characters from an external perspective and contrasts it with POV shots that represent the perspective of one of the characters (2000 [1977], 211). The examples I discuss fuse Monaco’s third-person point of view with the character’s subjective world view. For instance, in Little Dorrit’s Story, the room at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison is bigger and brighter than the room we see in Nobody’s Fault. According to Joss March, […] the walls of the set have been bodily moved out by several feet; the set has been repainted, redressed in slightly brighter colors; potted plants blossom […]; [William] Dorrit’s bare chair grows a cover, and his dressing gown sprouts tendrils of embroidery. (1993, 255)

These two markedly perspectives on the prison and, by extension, the world in general, recreate Arthur Clennam’s and Amy Dorrit’s subjective perceptions. While Arthur Clennam has a pessimistic world view and feels oppressed in prison, Amy Dorrit has become accustomed to the Marshalsea and has a more optimistic world view. What Edzard’s film adaptation does is to blend the respective world views of the characters with a third-person perspective: in both Nobody’s Fault and Little Dorrit’s Story, we see the characters from the outside, i. e., as a third-person observer would see them, but they move through worlds which look like the world as they experience it. Another example of a quasi-perceptual overlay can be found in Danny Boyle’s film The Beach (2000), which is about backpackers who set up a beach community on an island somewhere in Thailand. Toward the end of the film, the American Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) decides to live in the island’s forest in order to defend the community against potential intruders. At this point, Richard, who is rather fond of computer games, feels like being part of such a game, and the film shows us Richard from an external perspective while the world through which he moves imitates his subjective impression of the world (see figure 3). To put this point somewhat differently, we see him as a third-person observer would see him, but he moves through the world as he experiences it (namely as a computer game) (see also Kuhn 153).

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Figure 3: We see Richard from a third-person perspective as he moves through a world which he imagines to be a computer game

A particular type of quasi-perceptual overlay can be found in films in which a character suffers from delusions or other psychophysical disturbances and the filmic discourse then presents us with this character’s deranged world view as though it were real. In other words, we as viewers are led into believing that we are presented with an objective perspective on the film’s world, and it takes us quite a while to realize that we are actually sharing the character’s deranged vision or hallucination. In David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), for example, the nameless protagonist and voice-over narrator (Edward Norton) meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on a plane, and the two set up a fight club for men as well as an anti-materialist and anti-corporate organization called “Project Mayhem.” It takes us as viewers until the end of the film to find out that Tyler Durden does not actually exist, and that the nameless protagonist is merely imagining him as some kind of alter ego. Most parts of the film involve two perspectives because we see the unnamed protagonist from the outside as he interacts with Tyler Durden as though he were an actual person. However, the latter turns out to be nothing but a figment of the former’s imagination. Similarly, in A Beautiful Mind (2001), John Nash (Russell Crowe), a student of mathematics at Princeton University, begins to work for the US Department of Defense. He is supposed to discover secret patterns in magazines and newspaper articles to prevent a Soviet attack. However, toward the end of the film, we learn that the people from the Defense Department do not actually exist and that Nash is merely imagining them as a result of his schizophrenic episodes. Many scenes in A Beautiful Mind involve two distinct points of view because we see Nash from



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an external perspective, even though the world through which he moves is actually a hallucinated one.5

3 More Immediate Cinematic Ways of Rendering Inner Lives Finally, there are many more direct or more immediate cinematic ways of simulating mental states. For instance, movies may use captions or subtitles to show us what a character thinks or feels. In the famous balcony scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), for example, we are presented with subtitles that render the actual thoughts of Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) as they are having a conversation (see figure 4). This scene is hilarious because it exposes the discrepancy between what people say and what they think—which is presumably something we are all familiar with. For example, at one point during this conversation, Singer says to Hall, who tries to become a professional photographer, that “photography’s interesting ’cause you know it’s a new art form, and a set of aesthetic criteria has not emerged yet” while the subtitles inform us that he is actually wondering what she looks like naked:

5 Markus Kuhn discusses such forms of dual-perspective as types of “mental metalepsis” (2011, 156) while Per Krogh Hansen (2009) refers to them as cinematic examples of unreliable narration. From my perspective, both of these classifications are ill-advised. To begin with, there is no actual crossing of narrative levels to be observed: the ‘jumping’ of fantasy figures into the primary world of the film only takes place in the (deranged) mind of characters like Nash. Strictly speaking, we are not confronted with metaleptic jumps. Furthermore, Nash is a focalizer who misperceives the world he inhabits; he is not the primary narrator of the film. According to Volker Ferenz, focalizers like Nash cannot be unreliable: they “cannot be held accountable for distorting the fictional world simply because they do not narrate it” (2005, 140). Nash does not misrepresent the world of A Beautiful Mind because he does not even try to narrate or represent it in the first place; he only inhabits it. Similarly, it would be odd to call the third-person narrator of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) unreliable because she represents the deranged world view of Septimus Warren Smith: he is a reflector-character who suffers from schizophrenia following World War I, and his consciousness dominates large stretches of the novel. Woolf’s narrator represents his deranged world view, but this hardly makes her unreliable.

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Figure 4: Subtitles give away Alvy Singer’s actual thoughts about Annie Hall

Similarly, A Study in Pink (2010), the first episode of the new television series Sherlock, presents its viewers with captions which inform them about the consulting detective’s deductions concerning a murder victim. At first, Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) assumes that the murdered woman scratched the German word “Rache” (revenge) into the wooden floor (see figure 5). As in Annie Hall, we as viewers can read a character’s thoughts:

Figure 5: Sherlock Holmes’s thoughts about the murder victim



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Later on, however, he realizes that she actually tried to write “Rachel,” the name of her daughter, but died before finishing the scrawl. As he continues to investigate the victim, Sherlock Holmes also finds out that the victim repeatedly removed her wedding ring, and he concludes that she must have been unhappily married for over ten years (see figure 6).

Figure 6: Further deductions by Sherlock Holmes

In A Study in Pink, the terse, dictionary-like captions provide access to Sherlock Holmes’s thought processes: the style conforms to the detective’s logical train of thought. The enacted mindscreen constitutes yet another cinematic way of simulating internal processes. The term was first used by Bruce Kawin, who argues that mindscreens “belong to, or manifest the workings of specific minds” (1978, 12). Moreover, the originator of the mindscreen exists at the intradiegetic level, and the enactment of his or her thoughts constitutes a hypodiegetic level: the enacted mindscreen is a type of interior monologue in which a character remembers something or has a daydream, and we are then presented with a visual slice of this character’s cogitating mind (Fleishman 1992, 27). In other words, we witness the thoughts of this reminiscing character in terms of “mental images,” i. e., as

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“a dramatic rendering of narration [i. e., the character’s thoughts, J. A.] that has itself been dramatized” (78, 15).6

Figure 7: The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in a mindscreen/memory sequence

In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill I (2003) and Kill Bill II (2004), for example, Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) engages in a number of revenge killings. Before each killing, the movie presents us with a mindscreen/memory sequence that informs us about what the particular person she is about to slaughter had done to her. The brutality and violence with which the other characters treated Beatrix Kiddo give us a sense of the fury or anger she must feel. The following photograph (figure 7) is part of such a memory sequence. The shot presents the four characters Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Budd (Michael Madsen),

6 With regard to such sequences, Markus Kuhn speaks of cases of “mental metadiegesis” (or hypodiegesis): they constitute a character’s dreams, memories or hallucinations and do not represent anything that happens in the film’s primary storyworld (2011, 152). Thon, on the other hand, speaks of “full-fledged ‘representation[s] of internal worlds’” (2014, 67) while Branigan refers to such shots in terms of “mental processes” (1984, 90) and Wilson as “subjectively saturated shots” (2006, 81). For further ways of simulating memory in film, see Reinerth (2009).



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O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), who are all former members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and had all helped Beatrix Kiddo’s former lover Bill (David Carradine), an elite assassin, in the attempt to kill her. Films can also use interior monologues that convey a character’s thoughts, feelings or motivations at the auditory level. In such cases, we can hear what a character is thinking or feeling. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), for example, is about Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who had murdered his mother and her new partner. Bates now dresses up as his mother when he kills women (such as Marion Crane [Janet Leigh]) he is sexually attracted by. When Bates is finally arrested, the camera moves closer and closer to the prisoner until we are confronted with an extreme close-up of his grinning face. As the camera moves toward him, his interior monologue sets in. Shockingly, we do not hear Bates’s voice but rather the voice of his mother: It’s sad when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son. I couldn’t allow them to believe I would commit murder. They’ll put him away now as I should have years ago. He was always bad and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man, as if I could do anything except just sit and stare—like one of his stuffed birds. Oh, they know I can’t even move a finger and I won’t. I’ll just sit here and be quiet just in case they do… suspect me. They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching… they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.’

This disconcerting technique illustrates what happens inside Bates’s mind: his personality is entirely dominated by his dead mother who inhabits the body of her ‘lost’ son. Furthermore, we learn that Bates assumes the identity of his mother, and as his mother, he exculpates her from all responsibilities and instead puts the blame on himself. A similar technique can be found in the eighth season of the television series Two and a Half Men (2009) when Chelsea (Jennifer Bini Taylor), Charlie Harper’s (Charlie Sheen) girlfriend, tries to comfort her friend Gail (Tricia Helfer) whose boyfriend Brian had left her. The chauvinist Charlie, on the other hand, does not follow the conversation in the restaurant at all and instead muses about things that interest him. His thoughts are represented in terms of stretches of direct thought at the auditory level: Hard to believe somebody got tired of doing her [Gail, J. A.]. [A waiter passes carrying French fries, J. A.] Oh, French fries look good. Why did I order the baked potato? […] Now is this the one who’s the old college roommate? I should really listen more. […] Boy, I bet when they were roommates, they did some experimenting. Why is it that girls can experiment with other girls and not be gay, but if a guy so as much kisses another guy … whoop, bad memory! Drink! Drink, drink, drink! […] [Chelsea tells Charlie that “Brian (Gail’s ex-boyfriend, J. A.)

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took Rufus (the dog, J. A.)”]. Who’s Rufus? For that matter, who’s Brian? Life of Brian—that was pretty funny. Brian’s song not so much. James Caan was great in it, though. That’s ‘cause he’s a great actor. Godfather, Rollerball … Yeah, I can so see these two kissing in a dorm.

The point of this interior monologue is to demonstrate that the egocentric and sexist Charlie lives in his own sphere, which is cut off from the rest of the world. He does not care about other people’s problems at all and instead concerns himself with what matters to him, i. e., things such as Gail’s attractiveness, French fries, sexual experimentation, movies, actors and so forth. It is also interesting to note that he tries to drown the memory of his homoerotic episode in alcohol. Charlie presumably does this because homoeroticism contradicts his idea of what it means to be a ‘real’ man.7 As I have shown in this section, subtitles, captions, enacted mindscreen sequences and interior monologues at the auditory level do allow us direct access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters in film: in the first case, we can read them (as in Annie Hall and A Study in Pink); in the second case, we can see enactments of them (as in Kill Bill I and II); and in the third case, we can literally hear them (as in Psycho and Two and a Half Men).

4 Conclusions: Cinematic and Novelistic Types of Consciousness Representation While Dorrit Cohn in Transparent Minds illustrates that prose texts frequently use psychonarration, free indirect discourse (what she calls “narrated monologue”) and interior monologues (what she calls “quoted monologue”) to represent the minds of their characters, it is my goal to demonstrate that despite claims to the contrary, films actually have numerous ways of simulating character interiority at their disposal. The medium film is clearly not deficient with regard to the representation of the thoughts and feelings of storyworld inhabitants. Let me con-

7 Some critics argue that interior monologues at the auditory level were first used by Alain Resnais in Hiroshima mon amour (1959). However, I am familiar with an even earlier example. The British prison film Yield to the Night (1956) uses interior monologues at the auditory level to familiarize us as viewers with the thoughts and feelings of the inmate Mary Price Hilton (Diana Dors). The technique is also used in more recent television series such as the British Peep Show (2003) and the American House of Cards (2013), where the plot comes to a halt whenever the central protagonist Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), a Democrat from South Carolina, speaks his thoughts into the camera.



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clude by addressing the question of how the novelistic types of consciousness representation discussed by Cohn are related to the cinematic techniques that I have presented in this paper. To begin with, as regards prose texts, the term “psychonarration” denotes a narrator’s report of a character’s mental states in the narrator’s own words (Fludernik 1993, 297). Dorrit Cohn (1978, 49) uses the following example of psychonarration from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920): “All this Gudrun knew in her subconsciousness, not in her mind.” Here the narrator informs us about the mind of the character Gudrun, and he does so in his own way of expressing himself. Similarly, the cinematic discourse (or hypothetical filmmaker)8 may inform us about character interiority by using certain cinematic strategies (such as closeups of facial expressions; specific bodily positions; particular types of voice; the [metaphorical] association of a figure with a specific entity; or certain types of music or sound effects). In such cases, the filmic discourse does not provide direct access to character interiority; rather, it describes or alludes to the thoughts or feelings of a character through external features. Second, in relation to novels and short stories, the term “free indirect discourse” refers to a third-person rendering of thoughts, which remains close to the character’s own oral syntax and diction. In the words of Monika Fludernik, “free indirect discourse preserves some of the expressive elements of direct discourse as well as its syntactic independence, but shares with indirect discourse the temporal and referential consonance with the quoting instance” (1993, 74). Grammatically speaking, free indirect discourse is reported speech or thought without introductory verb: “he thought that he should go now” is reported thought, while “he should go now” is free indirect thought. Examples of free indirect discourse can be found in the following quotation from D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, which moves from Tom Brangwen’s impressions (in free indirect thought) to the implied speech of the girl (in free indirect speech): Afterwards he glowed with pleasure. By Jove, but that was something like! He stayed the afternoon with the girl, and wanted to stay the night. She however, told him that this was impossible: her own man would be back by dark, and she must be with him. He, Brangwen, must not let on that there had been anything between them. (1988 [1915], 23; emphasis added)

8 The term “hypothetical filmmaker” denotes “the viewer’s speculations about the conscious or unconscious motivations actuating the group of professionals that were responsible for the making of the film in question” (Alber 2010, 167). From my perspective, it does not matter whether we speak of cinematic discourse or of the hypothetical filmmaker so long as we acknowledge the fact that we speculate about the intentions behind the making of the film.

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To my knowledge, Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Vološinov were the first theoreticians to describe free indirect discourse in terms of a “dual voice” (see McHale 2014 [2009], 815, and Schmid 2010 [2005], 137–139). Roy Pascal likewise argues that free indirect discourse “embeds the character’s statement or thought in the narrative flow, and even more importantly in the narrator’s interpretation, communicating also his way of seeing and feeling” (1977, 75). Free indirect discourse is thus typically seen as “a dialogue, a contest, between figural and narratorial idiom, a merging or juxtaposition of voices, of the narrator and the character respectively” (Fludernik 1993, 323). Quasi-perceptual overlays (as in Edzard’s film version of Little Dorrit, The Beach, Fight Club or A Beautiful Mind) may be seen as cinematic versions of free indirect discourse because they are—in a specific sense—also dual-voiced: in such cases, we see the characters from a third-person perspective while the images we are confronted with remain close to these characters’ subjective perception of the world.9 With reference to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilles Deleuze also classifies such shots as “free indirect subjective.” He explains that in such instances, “the camera does not simply give us the vision of the character and of his world; it imposes another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected” (2009 [1983], 74). Leah Anderst describes such dual-perspective shots in a similar way: “the viewer simultaneously sees what the character sees and sees the character in the act of seeing” (2011, 363). Finally, with regard to prose texts, the term “interior monologue” denotes longer passages of uninterrupted direct thought—usually without any narratorial mediation, as in the “Penelope” chapter from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Generally speaking, interior monologues try to represent the chaotic, irregular and associative character of human thought processes (such as those by Molly Bloom in Ulysses). The use of subtitles, captions, enacted mindscreens or interior monologues on the auditory level in film function analogously: such cinematic strategies also present us with the random thoughts of characters, and depending on which technique we are confronted with, we can either read them, see them, or hear them. One does obviously not have to use the terminology of literary studies to describe film techniques that concern the representation of character interiority. Nevertheless, the overlaps between novelistic and cinematic strategies of consciousness representation are interesting and striking, and they have hitherto been overlooked. From my perspective, these overlaps are as fascinating and

9 In the case of film, the equivalent of direct discourse would be a purely subjective POV-shot, i. e., a shot from the perspective of the character in which we see the world from his or her spatial perspective. In addition, we would have to see the world exactly as he or she sees it.



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remarkable as the transparent brain of Homer Simpson, where we can see the workings of his mind in the shape of a monkey that tries to get Homer to finally listen to his wife (see figure 8).

Figure 8: Homer Simpson’s transparent brain

This figure is interesting not only because we can directly look into Homer Simpson’s brain. It is also worth noting that the monkey, which represents Homer’s thought processes (or perhaps the lack thereof), urges the male Homer to listen to the female Marge. One might argue that most of the films I have discussed in this paper could use such a monkey as well: as far as their ideological underpinnings are concerned, they clearly have a masculinist bias because they focus on the inner lives of their male characters and pay significantly less attention to the interiority of their female characters. With the exception of Amy Dorrit and Beatrix Kiddo, all of my sample films and television series concentrate on the ‘standard’ heterosexual male, and I believe that this is a general tendency in mainstream films and television series. In addition to the striking similarities between novelistic and cinematic types of consciousness representation, I would therefore also like to highlight that when it comes to the representation of character interiority, most films foreground a masculinist subject position.

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Works Cited Primary sources Annie Hall. Dir. Woody Allen. United Artists, 1977. A Beautiful Mind. Dir. Ron Howard. Universal, 2001. The Beach. Dir. Danny Boyle. Figment Films, 2000. The Elephant Man. Dir. David Lynch. Brooksfilms, 1980. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Twentieth-Century-Fox, 1999. Kill Bill I and II. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax, 2003–2004. Lawrence, D. H. 1988 [1915]. The Rainbow. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Little Dorrit. Part I: Nobody’s Fault. Dir. Christine Edzard. Sands Film, 1987. Little Dorrit. Part II: Little Dorrit’s Story. Dir. Christine Edzard. Sands Film, 1987. Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. Asymmetrical Productions/Ciby 2000 [1997]. Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount, 1960. The Shawshank Redemption. Dir. Frank Darabont. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994. Two and a Half Men: Season 8. Dir. James Widdoes. Chuck Lorre Productions, 2009. Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Pink. Dir. Paul McGuigan. BBC, 2010. Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount, 1958.

Secondary sources Alber, Jan. 2007. Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens’ Novels, Twentieth-Century Fiction, and Film. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press. Alber, Jan. 2010. “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Cinematic Narration Reconsidered.” In Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, 163–185. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Alber, Jan. 2011. “Cinematic Carcerality: Prison Metaphors in Film.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44 (2): 217–232. Anderst, Leah. 2011. “Cinematic Free Indirect Style: Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour.” Narrative 19 (3): 358–382. Bluestone, George. 1973 [1957]. Novels into Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2008. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw Hill. Branigan, Edward. 1984. Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film. Berlin: Mouton. Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London and New York: Routledge. Brütsch, Matthias. 2011. Traumbühne Kino: Der Traum als filmtheoretische Metapher und narratives Motiv. Marburg: Schüren. Choi, Jinhee. 2005. “Leaving It Up to the Imagination: POV Shots and Imagining from the Inside.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (1): 17–25. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2009 [1983]. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.



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Deleyto, Celestino. 1996 [1991]. “Focalisation in Film Narrative.” In Narratology, edited by Susana Onega and José Ángel García Landa, 217–233. London: Longman. Eder, Jens. 2008. Die Figur im Film: Grundlagen der Figurenanalyse. Marburg: Schüren. Ferenz, Volker. 2005. “Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mementos: The Scope of Unreliable Narration in Film.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 3 (2): 133–159. Fleishman, Avrom. 1992. Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1993. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London and New York: Routledge. Hansen, Per Krogh. 2009. “Unreliable Narration in Cinema: Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies.” Amsterdam International Electronic Journal of Cultural Narratology 5. www.cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/ (Accessed 1 September 2014) Kawin, Bruce. 1978. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Lothe, Jakob. 2000. Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McHale, Brian. 2014 [2009]. “Speech Representation.” In Handbook of Narratology, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, vol. 2: 812–824. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ article/speech-representation (Revised 8 April 2014) March, Joss. 1993. “Inimitable Double Vision: Dickens, Little Dorrit, Photography, Film.” Dickens Studies Annual 22: 239–282. Monaco, James. 2000 [1977]. How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia. Language, History, Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Palmer, Alan. 2010. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Pascal, Roy. 1977. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the NineteenthCentury American Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reinerth, Maike Sarah. 2009. “Spulen, Speichern, Überspielen: Zur Darstellung von Erinnerung im Spielfilm.” In Probleme filmischen Erzählens, edited by Hannah Birr, Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon, 33–58. Münster: Lit. Schmid, Wolf 2010 [2005]. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Leo Spitzer. 1961 [1922]. “Pseudoobjektive Motivierung bei Charles Louis Philippe.” In L. S. Stilstudien II: Stilsprachen, 166–207. Munich: Hueber. Thon, Jan-Noël. 2014. “Subjectivity across Media: On Transmedial Strategies of Subjective Representation in Contemporary Feature Films, Graphic Novels, and Computer Games.” In Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 67–102. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wagner, Geoffrey. 1975. The Novel and the Cinema. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Wilson, George. 2006. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 81–95.

Małgorzata Pawłowska (Cracow)

Intermedial Transposition: From Verbal Story to Music. Narrative in Musical Works Based on Romeo and Juliet 1 Music, Narrative, Intermedial Transposition: Opening Remarks There is an ongoing lively discussion, both in general narratology and in musicological writings to date, as to whether music can be narrative.1 Among the various media in which the concept of narrative is usually referred to, music seems the most controversial. Nevertheless, narrative theory is being applied increasingly in music analysis (e. g., by Tarasti, Grabócz, Hatten, Monelle, Micznik, Almén and others). Musical narratology is currently undergoing a phase of dynamic development but at the same time is still in the process of defining itself, taking elements of theory from both classical and post-classical narratology and seeking to “bridge the gap between them,” to borrow an expression from Nora Berning’s contribution to this volume. Apart from adopting various tools from literary theory, musical narratology is also developing its own concepts and methods of analysis. In this paper, I focus on a case of “intermedial transposition” (cf. Wolf 2008a [2005] and Rajewsky 2005), in which the story of Romeo and Juliet is transposed from literature to music, or at least serves as a source of inspiration for composers. Claude Bremond wrote: Story is independent of the techniques that bear it along. It may be transposed from one to another medium without losing its essential properties. (1964, 4; quoted in Chatman 1978, 20)

1 I present an account of this discussion, as well as of musical narratology in general, in my article “Musical Narratology: An Outline” (Pawłowska 2014). For the debate as to whether musical works can be considered as narratives, see Ryan (2004, Part 4) and Wolf (2005, 2008b [2005]). For the discussion in musicology, see: Abbate (1991); Agawu (1991); Almén (2003, 2008); Berger (2000); Cone (1974, 1982, 1985); Grabócz (1999, 2008, 2009); Kerman (1992); Maus (1988, 1991, 1997, 2001, 2005); Micznik (2000, 2001); Newcomb (1984, 1988, 1994, 1997); Ratner (1980); Tarasti (1991, 1994, 1995, 2004, 2008). DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-015

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Intermediality in its broadest sense applies “to any transgression of boundaries between media” (Wolf 2008a [2005], 252). However, there are many approaches and categories related to the term. As Irina O. Rajewsky writes, medial transposition is the subcategory of intermediality in which “the intermedial quality has to do with the way in which a media product comes into being, i. e., with the transformation of a given media product (a text, a film, etc.) or of its substratum into another medium” (2005, 51). William Shakespeare’s drama Romeo and Juliet has long served as a point of departure for composers taking up the subject of Romeo and Juliet, and it thus provides many examples of intermedial transposition. With this in mind, I will consider the following questions in this chapter: What elements of Shakespeare’s literary narrative can be transposed to music, and in what ways? What has been changed in order to express the theme in music? In what ways does the choice of musical genre affect the narrative? And what are the purely musical means of suggesting narrative? Surely some of these questions go beyond a “case study” of the Romeo and Juliet story, for they concern more than the content and structure of the story, touching upon a special case of intermedial transposition, namely, the transposition of certain formal devices from one medium to another—from literature to music. In Wolf’s typology, intermedial transposition belongs to “extracompositional intermediality.” The author explains: “as is typical of extracompositional intermediality in general, in all of these cases the intermedial quality is primarily located in the space between the two works: in the process of gestation, but not in the end product” (2015, 462; cf. Wolf 2008a [2005], 254). However, it seems the musical works based on Romeo and Juliet legend are also characterised by some degree of “intracompositional intermediality.” Adopting Steven Paul Scher’s triadic distinction between “literature in music,” “music and literature” and “music in literature” (cf. Wolf 2015), we can classify Tchaikovsky’s instrumental programmatic piece Romeo and Juliet as “literature in music” while Bellini’s and Gounod’s operas, consisting of text and music, are examples of “literature and music.” No doubt most of the musical compositions inspired by an extramusical subject touch or transgress in one way or another the boundaries of the musical medium, as happens not only with programme music, opera, musical and Singspiel, but also in ballet or film music. To make things more complex, we are dealing here with plurimedial phenomena, leading us to trace narrative devices specific to individual media as well as to transmedial devices. From this perspective, it is worth considering the presence of transmedial elements—i. e., non-media-specific elements—in both literary sources and music compositions. As I attempted to explain in my article on musical narratology (Pawłowska 2014), backed up with a number of authors working on the question



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(Berger 2000, Micznik 2001, Almén 2008, etc.), it is possible to view narrative as a concept established before the means are specified. If we accept a broad definition of narrative, we can say that narrative is possible in music as well as in language and that it is not a secondary or derivative phenomenon taken from literature, since narrative can manifest itself through the interaction of musical elements. Byron Almén indicates that the definition of narrative is the source of confusion: Because narrative was first conceptualized in relation to literature, we have largely failed to recognize the distinction between narrative proper and narrative as manifested in literature. (2008, 12)

Among the existing definitions, he distinguishes between those based on descendant models and those based on sibling models. Almén writes: To use a genealogical metaphor, I prefer a sibling model rather than a descendant model for articulating the relationship between musical and literary narrative. The descendant model presupposes a conceptual priority for literary narrative, while the sibling model distinguishes between a set of foundational principles common to all narrative media and principles unique to each medium. (2008, 18)

Although transposing a story from literature to music explicitly fits the descendant model, I will also take a step away from the story proper and reflect on the narrative affordances of music as compared with those of literature.

2 The Career of the Romeo and Juliet Theme in Music Before examining specific narrative aspects of intermedial transpositions in the corpus involved, it is useful to take a look at the scope and dimensions of Romeo and Juliet theme in music. Shakespeare’s drama Romeo and Juliet2 has inspired many composers (for a list detailing the most important musical works inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet, see the annex). Many composers have felt deeply touched by Shake-

2 The story of Romeo and Juliet has existed in Europe in several epic versions dating back to antiquity (Xenophon of Ephesus, Masuccio da Salerno, Luigi da Porto, Matteo Bandello, Arthur Brooke). Shakespeare was the first to put the story into a dramatic genre (1596), and his play has inspired countless works in theatre, literature, music, ballet, the fine arts, film, etc.

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speare’s art and considered this play especially prone to musicalisation. For instance, Tchaikovsky observed that “this great work of the arch-genius is well adapted to inspire a musician” (to N. F. von Meck, M. Tchaikovsky 1924 [1905], 304) and Berlioz wrote: “What a subject! How well made for music!” (quoted by Rushton 1994, 10). Musical works inspired by the Romeo and Juliet myth3 consist either of text and music (as in opera and Singspiel) or simply of music (programme music such as symphonic poems or ballets). Thus, works with text include a vocal element (solo voices and/or chorus), while those without text are purely instrumental (although they may include plurimedial elements such as dance in the case of ballet). The dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette by Berlioz is a unique case, including sections written with the use of text and vocal parts alongside purely instrumental segments. The range of genres is vast, including operas (e. g., Bellini, Gounod, Dusapin), a symphonic poem (Tchaikovsky), an orchestral suite (Kabalevsky), a symphonie dramatique (Berlioz), a ballet (Prokofiev), a Singspiel (Benda), a musical (e. g., Bernstein) and even a chamber oratorio (Blacher). Moreover, the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1, Adagio affettuoso et appassionato, was inspired by the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet (cf. Micznik 2000, 51–54). Nor must film music be forgotten (e. g., the music composed by Rota for Zeffirelli’s film also functions separately from the film). However, the majority of works inspired by the Romeo and Juliet myth are operas, representing the genre most naturally suited to the transposition of drama into the sphere of music. The first known musical interpretations of the story date from 1776. In the course of the nearly two centuries that had passed since Shakespeare wrote his play, the shape and character of the myth of Romeo and Juliet had varied significantly. In its first musical interpretations, the composers and librettists used altered versions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s play which were sentimental and melodramatic in character, deprived of the Shakespearian sense of the comedic and of anything “trivial, exaggerated and redundant to the action,” as the author of such an adaptation, Felix Weiße, is reported to have said (cf. Komorowski 1990, 58). These adaptations, however, contain an extensive scene

3 The Romeo and Juliet story, because of its scope, meaning, content and structure, has all the features of a modern myth, one which was present in Europe, in various versions, since before Shakespeare. Since his drama, the myth has spread through the collective consciousness of European culture. Alongside the myths of Faust, Orpheus and Eurydice and Tristan and Isolde, it has become one of the most frequently used themes—a story which “has been told over and over again with variations”—one of the basic qualities of a myth (Walker 2008 [2005], 239–330; cf. Weinrich 2004 [1973]).



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depicting Juliet’s burial (and funeral procession) which was added to Shakespeare’s original play. In accordance with the tendency of the Classical era, some of the earliest-known musical works based on the myth introduce a happy ending4 (e. g., an opera by Schwanberger from 1776, a Singspiel by Benda from 1776 and an opera by Steibelt from 1793). In the first three mutually interrelated Italian operas5 (Zingarelli 1796, Vaccai 1825, Bellini 1830), one can find, in addition to Shakespeare’s drama, pre-Shakespearean sources6 (Luigi da Porto, Bandello) as well as later ones (e. g., the adaptation of Shakespeare’s drama in French pseudo-classical style by Jean-François Ducis in 1772). In the early days of the drama’s theatrical life, Juliet’s role was played, following the acting practices of the time, by men (until the 1660s), whereas in the early stagings of the opera the role of Romeo was given to women. In Zingarelli’s opera, Romeo’s role was initially written for a castrato, but by the 1820s it was being sung by prima donnas whereas in the works of Vaccai and Bellini, the role was written for a female performer from the outset. The nineteenth century brought a breakthrough in the reception of Shakespeare, who had effectively reached cult status, as proven by the fascination which Romantic-era composers had with Shakespeare and his works—particularly Berlioz or d’Ivry, who travelled to Verona and England to better understand the context of Romeo and Juliet (Dollinger 2007). It must be added that Romantic composers often discovered Shakespeare through other sources. For example, the production of Romeo and Juliet seen by Berlioz in 1827, when “sudden […] revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed” him (Berlioz 1966, 66), was based on Garrick’s adaptation. It was only Tchaikovsky who was directly affected by Shakespeare’s drama, resulting in his observation that in the existing operas by Bellini and Gounod “Shakespeare is mutilated and distorted until he is hardly recognizable” (Tchaikovsky 1924 [1905], 304). In various nineteenth-century musical interpretations, which move closer to or farther from the original, there is no room for the Shakespearean polarisation of romanticism and anti-romanticism, tragic and comic elements; romantic and tragic elements dominate.

4 For instance, in the famous opera Orfeo ed Euridice by Christoph Willibald Gluck from 1762, there is a happy ending; hence the conclusion of the myth is changed. 5 Felice Romani, who wrote the librettos to Vaccai’s and Bellini’s operas, based them on the libretto written by Giuseppe Maria Foppa for Zingarelli. Bellini was Zingarelli’s student. One of the scenes from Vaccai’s opera is often included in productions of Bellini’s opera. 6 The works of da Porto and Bandello may have been known in Italy; there are probably echoes of them in Zingarelli’s opera, and thus in Vaccai’s and Bellini’s. Only Zandonai’s opera (1922) is based entirely on these pre-Shakespearean sources.

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It was only twentieth-century musical interpretations that restored Shakespeare’s polarisation of romanticism and anti-romanticism, on the one hand, and tragedy and comedy, on the other, in new musical idioms (e. g., in Prokofiev and Bernstein). Prokofiev, through his “masculine” reserved lyricism and “sharply contoured” melodies, introduced the antidote to the early and late sentimentality that the plot had acquired in the course of the nineteenth century . Simultaneously, in the twentieth century we observe the gradual movement of the myth towards the sphere of popular music, beginning with Bernstein’s musical West Side Story (1957). This, along with several popular musicals, show how conducive to modernisation this narrative is. Following the appearance of the plot in the cinematic medium, the topic became popular in film music (primarily films by Zeffirelli and Luhrmann). Many popular music artists also refer to the myth, among them Radiohead, Dire Straits, the Supremes, Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Tom Waits and Lou Reed. Even a brief glance at the titles of compositions inspired by the myth indicates a shift of accent relative to Shakespeare’s work. Often, Juliet is made the principal subject of the narrative, which can be suggested by inverting the title (Zingarelli, Vaccai, Torriani, Matuszczak). It is significant that the latest known interpretation of the myth in (non-popular) music dates from 1988 (Dusapin’s opera). One might assume that contemporary composers avoid the overly specified semantics and potential banality of the subject, perhaps thinking that the topic has already been thoroughly exploited. Contemporary opera—to mention one genre only—often explores the complexities of a particular character’s psyche; hence its favourite characters from Shakespeare’s repertoire are Hamlet, Ophelia and King Lear. And now: exactly what elements from Shakespeare’s play can be transposed to music, and (since “what music lacks is vocabulary”) (Rosen 1971, 38) how? I shall consider the issue of this intermedial transposition on three levels successively: structure, content and formal narrative devices. I shall then consider transmedial features shared by literary narratives and musical narratives based on Romeo and Juliet.



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3 Structure When constructing his five-act drama Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare relied on existing literary sources. Nevertheless, it was he who constructed a narrative which amazes the reader with its use of antithesis on every level and in which the action has been intensified in relation to both time and quality by embedding it in a goal-oriented structure using a dramatic crescendo. Shakespeare’s most direct source was Arthur Brooke’s epic poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which was based on earlier Italian epic versions of the legend. As Geoffrey Bullough writes: Brooke’s poem is a leaden work which Shakespeare transmuted to gold. […] In Brooke Shakespeare found his subject well laid out and ready for quick dramatization, but told with a turgid emotionalism and pedestrian repetitiveness […]. The surprising thing is that Shakespeare preserved so much of his source in vitalizing its dead stuff […] (1957, 278)

Primarily, Shakespeare changed the indirect epic mode, with its long descriptions, into direct drama (although with some epic interpolations, such as the Prologue and Epilogue or Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech). The presentation of events is also intensified in Shakespeare’s drama: in Brooke’s poem, “a week or two” passes between the ball and the lovers’ meeting; in Shakespeare’s drama, they meet on the same night. Brooke puts “a month or two” between the wedding and the duel; Shakespeare makes them happen consecutively. Through the direct “collision” of love and hate scenes, Shakespeare maximized the contrast between them. Shakespeare was also the first to introduce comic aspects into the myth by using puns and wordplay, especially in the scenes featuring the Nurse and Mercutio. The plot of Shakespeare’s play, “divided” into five acts (which are in turn divided into scenes) can be considered from the angle of Freytag’s Pyramid, which leads the action “upwards” through the exposition, complication and climax in the third act (the double apogee of hate and love), whence things take a tragic turn and the “fall” of the main characters begins: reversal of the action and catastrophe (see figure 1).

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Figure 1: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet according to Freytag’s Pyramid

As illustrated by this figure, the narrative gradually thickens throughout the syntagmatic axis, and the tragic misunderstandings make it tighten like a Gordian knot leading to the inevitable and repeatedly anticipated catastrophe. The protagonists of the drama often speak with a sense of foreboding.7 As early as in the first act, for instance, Romeo says to his fellow revellers: I fear too early, for my mind misgives Some consequence yet hanging in the stars (Romeo and Juliet, I.iv. 107–108)8

7 Todorov distinguishes transformation of supposition in narration: when certain suppositions or when certain assumptions or premonitions of the protagonists presented in the course of narration come true later in its course (1990 [1978], 32). 8 All quotations from Romeo and Juliet are taken from the Penguin Books edition edited by G. B. Harrison (London 1994). His edition is based on the Second Quarto (with certain recommendations in brackets from the First Quarto).



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The misgivings in the statements of various characters accumulate when the plot speeds up in the second half of the play. For example, Juliet says, while bidding farewell to Romeo after their wedding night: O God, I have an ill-divining soul, Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low, As one dead in the bottom of a tomb (III. v. 53–55)

The turn of fate “from happiness to misfortune” (the Aristotelian metabole) inherent in tragedy, shown in the pyramid as a climax, is the moment at which the lovers, who have until now consciously shaped their fate, become powerless, entangled in the actions of others and in a web of coincidences. The comedic quality, so important in the two first acts, disappears almost completely; this also emphasizes the change initiated by Tybalt’s death. In this phase of the narration appear—in a way characteristic, according to Aristotle, of the reversal of circumstances of the fateful phase—the following: peripeteia (dramatic shock), anagnorisis (recognition) and pathos (violent impression). How can the structure of Shakespeare’s play be transposed to music? Music itself possesses, to some extent, the potential for evoking certain extramusical ideas (I will explore this in the next section). As for the text or programme, music can try to illustrate it or complement it or it can to serve merely as a medium “carrying” the text. We can consider the question of intermedial transposition of the structure of Shakespeare’s play into music through the prism of the following aspects: the chronological structure of events (plot), the deeper structure (Freytag’s Pyramid), the presence of strong direct antitheses and the goal-oriented composition (connected with causality). Some musical works, especially dramatic genres such as opera, Singspiel and musicals, are to some degree constructed like drama. They are made up of acts and scenes, although they are even further broken down into musical numbers (aria, recitative, chorus, instrumental). In the case of these genres, the libretto gives us a very clear clue as to which scenes from Shakespeare correspond to individual fragments. Nor is there any doubt as to which scenes are assigned to the numbers in Prokofiev’s ballet. Despite its not possessing a layer of verbal text, each of this ballet’s 52 consecutive numbers are titled by the composer. In some instrumental music, especially music composed in a single movement without clear-cut sections, as in Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem, the chronological structure of “events” cannot correspond to Shakespeare’s drama. At first glance, it is mainly the “emotional content,” general atmosphere or general ideas of the theme of Romeo and Juliet that is transposed to Tchaikovsky’s piece, rather than

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the structural elements. However, we can still determine whether or not there is some degree of correspondence to other structural features. Having analysed many of the musical works inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet (Pawłowska 2013a), I can say that most of them seem, on a general level, to follow the Freytag’s Pyramid structure, as Shakespeare’s drama does. At some point around the middle there is a metabole, after which the musical language also changes. There is an increasing number of ostinato motifs (often played on gran cassa) and a stretto towards the end, constituting a accumulation and juxtaposition of musical themes.9 Music can evoke more than one phenomenon simultaneously, superimposing multiple layers of meaning at various moments during the performance. In the works of music inspired by Romeo and Juliet, one can observe a tendency to accumulate musical themes not only consecutively but also vertically, in the second half of the composition. As in Shakespeare’s narrative, these musical narratives inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet correspond to the dramaturgic crescendo. The organic development and transformations of musical themes make music more of an abstract process, directly experienced and felt, rather than a tale with precise conceptual meanings. In musical works based on Romeo and Juliet, there is a tendency to apply anticipation, as well as to surprise the listener with explosions of sounds. This seems to reflect the spirit of Shakespeare’s drama (“bad feelings” and the final catastrophe). In the narrative trajectory of Shakespeare’s play, we observe the transformation of the protagonists, especially the deep transformation of Juliet from a naïve young girl to a suffering mature woman. Music can express these changes through development and transformational techniques of the musical material, as associated, for instance, with characters. Thus, Prokofiev, in his ballet, uses musical motifs and themes representing Juliet, Romeo and Mercutio. Juliet’s themes are profoundly transformed in the course of the narrative trajectory; they occur at the end in a completely different musical context than at their first presentation. In musical interpretations, the antitheses and contrasts present in Shakespeare’s narrative are usually emphasized, since musical structures make use of contrasts in a very distinctive way. The semic opposition of love (Romeo and Juliet) and hatred (the feud) seems to have suggested the idea to Tchaikovsky of composing his work in sonata form—a form for which the contrast of two main themes is a crucial factor.

9 A musical theme is understood as recognizable and coherent musical material (especially a recognizable melody).



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If we were to compare the chronology of events in Shakespeare’s play with that in the most representative musical works inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet, we would find that the closest to Shakespeare’s can be found in Prokofiev’s ballet and Gounod’s opera, even though in the case of the latter, different elements of the plot are emphasized. Interestingly, Bernstein’s musical West Side Story is very close to Shakespeare’s chronology, merely transferring the place and time to Manhattan (New York) of the 1950s. Bernstein’s musical mirrors the Shakespearean plot, finding contemporary equivalents for the situations and characters. Benda, in his Singspiel Romeo und Julie, and Bellini, in his opera I Capuleti e i Montecchi, both begin the action after the key duel, that is, after the first half of Shakespeare’s narrative. In the works of Berlioz and Tchaikovsky, the structure of Shakespeare’s drama is deconstructed. Berlioz narrates some events twice, first using literary words, then by purely instrumental means. Tchaikovsky extracts and abstracts basic narrative units, primarily in the juxtaposition of love and hatred, but also with the character Friar Laurence;10 in the course of the narrative, we can also hear evocations of death, fate and tragedy. Surprisingly, only Berlioz and Gounod included the episode with Mercutio’s story about Queen Mab, presenting the peculiar metaphysics of Shakespeare’s unreal worlds in scherzo-like music. Farthest from Shakespeare, however, is the structure of works of so-called contemporary classical music, from the second half of the twentieth century. Interestingly, while popular musicals (or those on the border of popular and classical music) taking up the subject of Romeo and Juliet present the plot of the myth more or less faithfully (even if transposed into different realities), “highbrow” music has gradually come to evade the linear presentation of Romeo and Juliet’s story. In the operas of Blacher (1950), Matuszczak (1970) and Dusapin (1988), one can find references to an archetype: the first two use fragments of Romeo and Juliet’s dialogue while the latter no longer has anything in common with Shakespeare’s drama. Grisey in 1984 evokes the names of mythical lovers (Romeo, Juliet, Tristan) in Chants de l’amour, a work based entirely on the phrase “I love you” pronounced in 22 languages by computer-modified voices. Here, the loving pair are subject to the madness of multiplication, which seems to be symptomatic

10 Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet is a composition devoid of verbal text or titles of sections, but it includes certain musical themes corresponding to elements of the play’s plot, such as the musical theme of love, the musical theme of hatred and the musical theme of Friar Laurence. We find evidence concerning these meanings in Tchaikovsky’s correspondence with Mily Balakirev.

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of its time: both Matuszczak and Dusapin multiply the number of main characters; in Matuszczak’s work there are three Romeos and Juliets; in Dusapin’s the characters are doubled.

4 Content Can the content of any story be transposed to music? How do we know what is being told through music? The problem of the musical signifié is extensive (cf. Pawłowska 2014). Certainly music cannot express meanings in the way that literature does. The affordances of these two media differ in significant ways. Not only does music lack a vocabulary (Rosen 1971, 38), but it is also incapable of making propositions (Micznik 2001, 218); moreover, there is no link between subject and predicate in music. Hence, the nuanced Shakespearean plays on words and puns cannot be transposed to music. Nevertheless, music can suggest certain extramusical phenomena, especially those connected with emotional content. It can convey emotions in a direct way. As Piotr Podlipniak writes: Music omits the process of a conscious and costly (in terms of time and energy) process of information decoding and uses a shorter, direct way, circumventing consciousness—the impression. (2007, 186; my translation)

In his analyses of music, the musicologist Eero Tarasti applies Greimasian modalities: Modalities are general human ways of evaluation […]. As a series of emotional states, modalities account for the way the listener unites a musical text with human values. (Tarasti, 1991, 136) The prevalent modalities of music are ‘being’ and ‘doing’, in addition to the normal temporal process of music, which I call ‘becoming’. Being means a state of rest, stability, and consonance; doing is synonymous with musical action: event, dynamism, and dissonance […] The basic modalities of being and doing are sur-modalized by several others: will, the so-called kinetic energy of music, its general direction, its tendency to move toward a goal; know, the information conveyed by music, its cognitive moment; can, the power and efficiency of music […]; must, the control exercised by the rules of genres and formal types […]; believe, the epistemic values of music […] (Tarasti 2004, 295‒296)

According to Susan Langer, musical forms bear a close logical resemblance to the forms of human feelings. Music is a “presentational symbol” of a psychic process and its tonal structures bear a close logical similarity to the forms of feeling,



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“forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses” (Langer 1953, 27). This is why musical works inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet can present emotions and actions, enact them, imitate them. In the love scenes of Berlioz’s and Tchaikovsky’s works we hear the dynamic of amorous passion; in the fragments corresponding to duels we hear the iconic signs of the sounds of swords. In Berlioz’s symphony and in Prokofiev’s ballet we can hear the imitation of Romeo’s steps approaching Juliet’s tomb, including all his halts and hesitations, conveying the morphology of the character’s psychic processes. The problem of the affordances of instrumental music in conveying meanings and of text-music relations has often been the subject of composers’ reflections. Berlioz was especially preoccupied with the question of how he should compose Roméo et Juliette: with a text (singing parts) or without? In the end, he chose to include the vocal-text element only in certain parts of his symphony; most of it, though, is expressed through instrumental music without text. In his introduction to the score, Berlioz wrote he believed that instrumental music, “richer, more varied, less restricted” than words, is a better means of conveying the sublime feelings of love and despair (Rushton 1994, 87–88). The powerful capacity of music to convey emotional content and its limited ability (or inability) to express the nuances and plays on words results in “distorting” the content of Shakespeare’s drama when it is transposed to music. In many musical interpretations, love and despair are emphasized while leaving out details of the plot, especially its comic elements. However, it is not only the emotional content or presentation of psychic processes that can be conveyed by music. Musical narratologists agree there are structures of signification even in so-called absolute music (music without text or programme). Some musical motifs and themes possess a denotational quality. In musicology musical themes are termed “topics.” As Kofi Agawu writes: Topics are musical signs. They consist of a signifier (a certain disposition of musical dimensions) and a signified (a conventional stylistic unit, often but not always referential in quality). Signifiers are identified as a relational unit within the dimension of melody, harmony, meter, rhythm, and so on, while the signified is designated by conventional labels. (Agawu 1991, 49)

The indexical, iconic and symbolic nature of musical topics has been discussed in musicology (on topic theory, see Ratner 1980, Agawu 1991, Hatten 1994, Tarasti 1994 and Monelle 2000). Certain ways of presenting extramusical themes have become conventional in the course of music history.

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Comparison of musical compositions on Romeo and Juliet that differ in genre and historic style confirms that there are similarities between fragments of works conveying such narrative units as love, hatred, battle, or death. The topics of court dances, representing a certain stylization and referring to Renaissance Verona, are among the easiest to grasp. They appear in many musical works inspired by the legend, exploited especially in Prokofiev’s ballet and in Rota’s film music. Funeral topics, characterised mainly by a minor key, slow tempo and marchlike rhythm, are also recurrent. In certain musical interpretations (Benda, Bellini, Gounod, Prokofiev), there appears an extensive scene of Juliet’s funeral which has no equivalent in Shakespeare’s drama (this being rather a result of Garrick’s adaptation): its characteristic quality is the use of chiaroscuro, ombra and alla breve topics. In both Benda’s and Gounod’s works (as well as in Gluck’s Orpheus), these scenes are expressed in C minor.11 In the majority of musical works inspired by the Romeo and Juliet story, the course of narration contains short, obsessive, mainly narrow-frequency, “acute” motifs which can be read as semes12 of death. The “last gasps” of the lovers in the tomb, or of the dying Mercutio, are usually set to music with defragmented phrases, motifs and sighing gestures, often in the pianto topic. A non-Shakespearean version,13 with the inclusion of a final dialogue before Romeo and Juliet’s death in the tomb (Juliet awakens while Romeo is still alive), has found its way into many musical interpretations. After all, this made it possible to include the final operatic duet (Bellini and Gounod), while in Berlioz’s work it was a presentation of the instrumental “idea of a dialogue” (Micznik 2000) in music. The tomb dialogue also appears in Benda’s work, where the lovers are rescued from the oppression of death, changing the ending completely. Prokofiev, too, nearly fell prey to the temptation of a happy ending. As he wrote in his Autobiography: “The reasons for this bit of barbarism were purely choreographic: living people can dance, the dying cannot” (Prokofiev 2000

11 According to Ferdinand Hand’s catalogue (dating from 1837, quoted after Golianek 1998, 12), C minor connotes sadness, mourning and lament; according to Paul Ertel’s catalogue (dating from 1896, quoted after Golianek 1998, 12), C minor is the key of the funeral march (128). What needs to be emphasized is that this key (no matter if it has a “natural,” acoustic explanation) became conventionally and symbolically associated with the aforementioned meanings, and therefore it was the choice of many composers to write the funeral scenes in the key of C minor. 12 On semes and classemes in music, cf. Grabócz (1996). 13 This version was popularised by Garrick. It is not known to what extent such a finale was influenced by the previous renderings of the myth by da Porto and Bandello, in which the dialogue between the lovers before their death also appears.



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[1960], 86). Eventually the composer changed his mind and remained faithful to Shakespeare, because a happy ending did not sound true to him. In any case, rewriting the literary source in some musical works is connected with the affordances of the medium, as can be seen in the funeral topic, the final singing duet of Romeo and Juliet in the tomb, or the happy ending. The elements from the Romeo and Juliet myth that seem to be most consistently transposed to music are simply the general ideas of love and hatred around which the story is centred. Shakespeare’s love dialogues, naturally prone to musicalisation, gain an expressive reinforcement in all the works discussed here, either as sung duet or as purely instrumental music. It is no wonder that music is the appropriate medium for this, when we find such words in the dialogues as: How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears!14 […] … Let the rich music’s tongue Unfold the imagin’d happiness15

As previously mentioned, Berlioz in his dramatic symphony consciously chose to deprive the most significant love scenes of any words because he believed that pure music was a more versatile and sensitive tool for expressing feelings than music combined with text. Likewise, Dusapin decided not to use words in the central part of his opera. When comparing pieces based on Romeo and Juliet (of various styles, times and genres), it is possible to discern similarities in the way they convey the idea of love and of hatred. These had become conventional through music history, although there may be a natural explanation for their characteristics. Hence, we can also speak about the topics of love and hatred in music. However, it needs to be emphasized that the qualities used by composers to convey the ideas of love and hatred are not restricted to this signification. There can be absolute music without an extramusical programme having the qualities described below, but a composer aiming at giving a musical representation of love and hatred would probably choose these topical qualities. We can find evidence of this in the text layer (if the composition includes text), in the title, in the titles of respective movements and in composers’ personal reflections.

14 Romeo’s words, balcony scene (II.ii.166‒67). 15 Romeo’s words, wedding scene (II.vi.26‒27).

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Therefore, hatred in these musical works is usually expressed through dissonant harmony; short, abruptly ending motifs with dense structures and dotted rhythms; repeated notes or rapid scale passages; sharp articulation; loud dynamics; ensemble and instrumentation—tutti, with emphasis on sharp instrumental timbres and sudden percussion strokes. This type of musical arrangement in the works on Romeo and Juliet usually applies to the sections recalling the Capulet and Montague families. Conversely, love in music is most commonly expressed through cantilena-like melodies, consonant harmonies, legato articulation, and the use of soft, warm instrumental timbres. Love as a musical topic has been culturally (conventionally) grounded at least since the medieval troubadours. It is quite natural that hatred is usually conveyed as disharmony, detachment (short and sharp articulation), and movement “away from,” and love as harmony, connection (legato articulation) and movement “towards.” Philosophically, love and hate are often combined as similar phenomena with opposing spatial vectors. Ortega y Gasset (1941 [1939], 4–5) describes them as streams of feelings or energy: love unites us with the object, whereas hate is a metaphysical dissonance. Similarly, Descartes, in The Passions of the Soul, a study considering feelings from the biological and psychological perspective, writes that whereas love incites the soul “to join itself in volition to the objects,” hatred “incites the soul to […] be separated from the objects” (1989 [1649], 62). While hatred in musical expression is always a struggle for separation, in the musical expression of love we can observe two modalities (cf. Pawłowska 2013b). One is connected with the lovers’ unity or symbiosis and is shown by means of symbiotic symbols (such as singing in unison) and by creating a general atmosphere of intimacy: a slow tempo, pp dynamics, the use of “soft” muted instrumental timbres—con sordino strings, woodwind instruments, harp. Among the expressive specifications given by composers we find amoroso, misterioso, dolce and sensibile. The other modality is connected with desire, with an aspiration towards and temporary achievement of ecstasy. Musically, it is manifested through the use of a full range of means within a given style including melos ascendens, ff dynamics and accelerando as well as directions such as appassionato and espressivo. The protagonists of Shakespeare’s play (especially Romeo and Juliet) are symbolized in many works by recurring musical themes or motifs, easy to identify and remember (for instance, in Prokofiev’s ballet). Such musical themes, adopting individual features and being subject to modifications and transformations throughout the composition, but still preserving their identity, make it easy for a listener to follow the “plot” of the musical narrative. While listening, one synthesizes its consecutive phases so that it emerges as an integrated entity in which something has “happened.” Given the title Romeo and Juliet, one is invited to



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follow this particular plot in one’s imagination; however, the narrative qualities of music do not require imagining a specific extramusical story (cf. Berger 2000, Pawłowska 2013a, 2014).

5 Formal Narrative Devices Wolf, in his article devoted to intermediality, mentions “formal intermedia imitation,” a characteristic feature of which is “the attempt to shape the material of the semiotic complex in question […] in such a manner that it acquires a formal resemblance to typical features or structures of another medium” (2008a [2005], 255). “Literalisation” of music (as in programme music) is an example. Indeed, in the musicological debate mentioned at the beginning of this article, even those who are sceptical about regarding musical works as narratives (e. g., Nattiez or Abbate) admit that music can resemble a narrative style or imitate a narrative mode from literature. It has been claimed that music bears more similarity to drama than it does to epic and thus that it represents or enacts actions rather than relate them (see, for instance, Maus 1988). In narratological musical interpretations, actants (or agents) are often identified as, for example, two opposing forces represented by musical themes or groups of instruments. This can be most readily observed in the concerto genre. As Joseph Kerman explains: While plenty of exceptions exist […] in general one knows exactly who is who in a concerto and who is doing what. There is a soloist and an orchestra, and there is usually quite a sharp sense of character, of “the powerful and multicolored orchestra and its weak but high-spirited adversary,” as Tchaikovsky once put it. The agents exist in some kind of relationship, and what is traced in a concerto is the course of a relationship. (Kerman 1992, 97‒98)

In a certain type of classical music—mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—musical themes acquire individual, personal features. The work of music, integrated by the main theme that maintains its identity throughout the transformations, can be understood as an expression of an enduring individual moral “character” (Berger 2000, 200). The use of contrast and disruptions in the musical “discourse” invites further comparisons with drama or with plays performed on stage. In his narratological analysis of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, Tarasti makes the following observation: A basic hypothesis of the present analysis […] is that a musical actor does not disappear “from the stage” even though it is not “saying” something, just as theater performers in dialogue do not disappear when the speaker changes. On the contrary, the actors remain

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present throughout the discourse, but in absentia, as destinatees who immediately interpret and respond to the utterance of their interlocutor. What happens in music corresponds to theatrical communication: a musical theme-actant might disappear from the score, say at the moments when its opponent’s theme occurs in another register; but it does not disappear from the listener’s mind. (Tarasti 1991, 100‒101)

Tarasti asserts that music can be an “arena” of simultaneously presented musical actions (at different levels), such that Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphony of the novel can also be applied to it. In any case, in Tarasti’s understanding of a musical “event” results not only from the interaction between actors but also from sharp contrasts of the spatio-temporal dimension such as slowing down/acceleration, sudden changes of register, etc. Direct presentation, showing and enacting of events (as in drama), has traditionally been identified with the mimetic mode of narration, as opposed to the diegetic mode, which (as in an epic) corresponds to indirect storytelling, telling and recounting of events (cf. Prince 2003 [1987], 52‒53; Schaeffer and Vultur 2008 [2005]; Shen, 2008 [2005]).16 The comparison of music with drama or plays, together with the mimetic affordances of music discussed earlier in this article, suggests that music has a potential for coming within the mimetic mode of narration. Even so, differentiating between the two modes with reference to musical narratives can still prove useful. Some musical works, or their fragments, by seeming to resemble literary epics, invite comparison with the literary diegetic mode. In musicological writings, it is not only the concept of actants-agents-actors that is applied to music, but also the concept of a narrator who tells the “story.” The subject of musical narration is, in Tarasti’s opinion, “a kind of an inner narrator of music, the ‘I’ who experiences various phases and changes between ‘being’ and ‘doing,’ but who cannot be identified with any real subject” (1995, 60). This diegetic quality can manifest itself, for example, in narrative frames such as the beginning and ending of certain works, where archaic-sounding themes function as the opening and closing of a mythical world (cf. Tarasti 1979, 67), as occurs in the slow introduction to Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem (chorale topic). We can compare this type of introduction in a musical story to the voice of a narrator saying “once upon a time…” and, actually, to Shakespeare’s Prologue in Romeo and Juliet, with the narrator’s voice saying:

16 The terms mimesis and diegesis also have other meanings and uses. Mimesis refers to the more general imitation of reality in the arts, whereas diegesis may also refer to a fictional world in which certain events and situations occur. Here I use these terms in a more narrow narratological sense.



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Two households both alike in dignity, (In fair Verona where we lay our scene) From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny […]

In Zeffirelli’s film it is Rota’s archaic-sounding music (menuet), heard in the first seconds, which transports the viewer into “mythical time.” The mimetic mode of narration is apparent, for example, in the opening Allegro fugato from the dramatic symphony by Berlioz, which places the listener in medias res of the narrative. This purely instrumental passage illustrates the initial street brawl from Shakespeare’s drama. At some point the fugue is interrupted by a recitative of brass instruments (the composer provides the indication “in the character of a recitative”); in terms of the programme, this passage corresponds to the Prince’s intervention in Verona’s square. We can thus recognize distinct actants, even though no words are actually spoken. In the love or “balcony” scene by Berlioz, expressed only through instrumental means, the idea of the lovers’ dialogue, shown in the changeability of instruments or of melodic material (cf. Micznik 2000), is presented. The “idea of dialogue” musically achieved in this love scene has proven so convincing that it encourages some interpreters to match specific words from Shakespeare to Berlioz’s musical phrases (Kemp 1998). In musical narratology, the concept of a narrative “unsung voice” appears (cf. Abbate 1991). This voice is defined by Abbate as “not literally vocal performance, but rather as a sense of certain isolated and rare gestures in music, whether vocal or non-vocal, that may be perceived as modes of subjects’ enunciations” (1991, ix). Robert Hatten, in reference to such sections, talks about a narrative agent (2004, 225–226). Sometimes such a role is performed by instrumental recitatives which interrupt the musical plot in order to “comment” on it. This happens often in Berlioz’s symphony as well as in Dusapin’s opera. We may even say that in Dusapin’s work the solo clarinet becomes a significant actant. Its constant presence—closing phrases and movements, accompanying vocalists in sections where the entire orchestra remains silent—contributes to its integrative and controlling function, similar to that of a narrator. The composer himself admits in the introduction to his score that: The clarinet player is a character in his own right, and could perhaps be seen as a “wild card.” He is watching, listening to and telling the tale, and also accompanying it. He is a “healthy” character, with no psychological baggage. Words do not impinge on his musicality. He sings, but through his instrument only. He has no doubts. (Dusapin 1988)

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The diegetic quality of music also lies in its ability to convey an illusion of temporal distance. Tarasti, in his book Myth and Music (1979), claims that this can be achieved not only via archaic topics or timbres but also through the apposite use of musical motifs that are repeated in the course of the work so that the listener can compare later passages with earlier ones. According to Tarasti, if a composition begins with a distinct main theme and develops dramaturgically, and if a number of musical events occur afterwards, then a recurrence of the theme at the end can suggest that a great deal of time has passed in the musical story (1979, 67–68). The listener, comparing passages, may have the impression that “a lot has happened” since the theme’s first presentation, especially since such repetitions of a theme at the end of a story have a special significance (different augmentation, instrumentation, etc.). An example of this can be found in Prokofiev’s ballet. Here, several basic themes are assigned to particular characters and situations (e. g., the fate theme, Juliet’s theme, the family theme). At the conclusion, after a number of musical disruptions, the fate theme returns, exposed and augmented. Juliet’s theme also returns, strongly processed, in a higher register and is repeated up to five times in different keys. One may have the impression that a certain stretch of time in the story has modified these themes. In Dusapin’s opera there is a distinct tension between the diegetic and the mimetic mode. There is a narrator (Bill), who is sometimes placed outside the presented world and sometimes in the middle of it. The use of metalepsis17 in this work leads us to the next section of the article: transmediality (and plurimediality).

6 Transmedial Features As we have observed, there are a number of features of Shakespeare’s drama Romeo and Juliet that can be transposed to music. However, in many cases the differences between the affordances of literature and music result in drastic changes to the original narrative. Musical works, compared to verbal narratives, are more abstract processes. As Walter Pater writes: All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression […] (1986 [1873], 135)

17 On metalepsis as a transmedial phenomenon, see Pier (2014 [2009], § 3.2.2) and Wolf (2005).



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However, many scholars agree that, taking into consideration the broad definition of a narrative as a transmedial phenomenon, some musical works can be narratives. What transmedial features are shared by the literary narrative of the Romeo and Juliet story, and what musical narratives are inspired by the story? Most of these features seem to lie at a very general, deep narrative level. In order to see these transmedial features at this level, we need to pass through many other levels of the text (i. e., to skip them somehow). It is not my intention to simplify Shakespeare’s complex and multifaceted narrative, but simply to show that it is at this general level that we can see most transmedially shared features. As already mentioned, Shakespeare’s narrative is full of antitheses, oxymorons and contrasts. This was one of the aspects that made Romeo and Juliet myth so ripe for musicalisation, since the use of contrast and antitheses are indeed features that cross media. A narrative can be understood as a process in which the subject, characters, situations or values undergo change. According to Tzvetan Todorov, narrative is governed by two leading principles: succession and transformation (1990 [1978], 28‒30). The principle of transformation is related to the processual aspect of narrative. Almén (2008) claims that even if musical narrative does not present specific characters or situations, the arrangement of qualities or values undergoes change. He particularly draws on James Jakób Liszka’s work The Semiotic of Myth, where the concept of transvaluation appears as crucial to narrative. Transvaluation occurs as a result of changes in hierarchy and in the arrangement of values presented in narrative. Almén’s definition is as follows: “Musical narrative is the process through which the listener perceives and tracks culturally significant transvaluation of hierarchical relationships within a temporal span” (2003, 12). Conceived in this way, transvaluation seems to be applicable both to Shakespeare’s narrative and to the musical works based on it. On a very general level, at the end of a narrative we find qualities opposed to the original. The starting point of the drama, namely, the feud between the families, is transformed into a state of reconciliation. The birth of love (or, to use Dante’s metaphor, “the birth of new life”)18 turns into death. Likewise, Friar Laurence’s willingness to help becomes, through tragic misunderstanding, a cause of calamity; hence an actant helper

18 In Dante’s Vita nova, we read: In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life.’ (Dante 2012 [1295]).

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(in the actantial system of Greimas) turns into an actant opponent, and a reshuffling occurs in the actantial system.19 The culmination of the tragedy is a double climax: one of hatred and of love. In the course of the day, the two most militant representatives of both families die in duels. The night joins two others, mad with love. All of these could be termed “transformations through negations” (Todorov) in which the original seme turns into its opposite, more of which we can find in the pages of the drama. In the text itself, Capulet states: All things that we ordained festival, Turn from their office to black funeral; Our instruments to melancholy bells, Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast, Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change, Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, And all things change them to the contrary. (Romeo and Juliet, IV. v. 84‒90; emphasis added)

The musical pieces on Romeo and Juliet often achieve expressive qualities contrary to those they began with. From the expression of the topical fields of tragedy, funeral and court dances through many transformations of musical themes, changes in the harmonic context and ways of using instrumental colours, the narrative trajectory frequently culminates in a final apotheosis. Very often at the end of the pieces the harmony brightens and the minor mode changes to major. Certainly this kind of organization of narrative is not restricted to works on the theme of Romeo and Juliet. There may be more narratives fitting this paradigm, but our “case study” can be taken as an example of possible transmedial features. We can also look at the narrative of Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of a model described by classical narratologists, according to which the course of the story can be described as a path from an initial order which is disturbed (with the main intrigue occurring as a consequence of the disturbance) so as to reach a new

19 The actantial system in the Romeo and Juliet narrative, according to my interpretation, would be as follows: the Subject of the narrative is the two Lovers, seeking an Object, which is their Unity, their chance to be together. Their Helper initially is Father Laurence, and their Opponent the feuding families. The Sender of the action, paradoxically, would be Montague, Benvolio and the two families in general, pushing Romeo and Juliet to change their status quo (it is because of them that Romeo and Juliet appear at the ball and thus meet). The Receiver of the narrative action is the two families that benefit, because as a result they change the status quo from feuding to reconciliation.



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order in the end. It seems that, on a general level, this narrative trajectory is often realised in music as well (cf. Grabócz 1999, 2008, 2009) and hence is transmedial. Shakespeare’s drama can be viewed from the perspective of Greimas’ narrative scheme20 (Greimas 1966; see also figure 1): I. Initial order/equilibrium: the existing feud between the two families (the scene of the quarrel); the main characters are in a state of “lack,” which accelerates the function of “the quest.” Romeo is lovesick, struck by melancholy in his love for Rosaline, and Juliet, who “has not seen the change of fourteen years,” is prompted by her mother to get ready to marry. II. Disruption of the equilibrium: the meeting between Romeo and Juliet at the ball, falling in love, overcoming the “lack.” The moment they meet alters the characters of Romeo and Juliet powerfully, and from that very moment everything must change its course. III. The main intrigue, a series of three trials: 1. The “qualifying” trial: fighting the circumstances and getting married in secret. In Greimas’ terminology this means that the Subject is now “qualified” to get the “Object,” i. e., to be conjoined. 2. The “decisive” trial: after the duel in which Mercutio and Tybalt are killed, which is also the moment at which the lovers lose their chance; after the Prince’s verdict, they are joined together again on their wedding night and promise each other to meet again. 3. Greimas calls this “the glorifying trial”; yet in this case all of the actions performed to help the lovers to be together lead to tragic consequences because of a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, i. e., Juliet’s “escape” from marrying Paris with the help of Friar Laurence and the use of the potion simulating death. IV. A new order/equilibrium: the death of the lovers, which can still be interpreted as their union, brings reconciliation to the two families.21 This scheme, in general terms, is often realised as well in musical works drawing on Romeo and Juliet, and not only in those with lyrics (vocal-instrumental). For instance, in Tchaikovsky’s purely instrumental symphonic poem we can find: 1)

20 There are some similarities between Todorov’s sequence and Greimas’ narrative scheme. In Todorov’s view, the sequence of ideal narrative is as follows: 1) initial equilibrium, 2) disruption of the order, 3) recognition that the order has been disrupted, 4) attempt to repair the damage 5) new state of equilibrium (Todorov 1990 [1978], 29; cf. Branigan 1992, 4). 21 Fitting of the narrative of Romeo and Juliet into Freytag’s Pyramid (as explained in the section on structure) and at the same time to Greimas’ narrative scheme, in my view, are not mutually exclusive procedures.

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“the initial order” represented by an introduction with a choral theme; 2) “disruption” of the initial order by the clash of the hatred and love themes in the exposition; 3) the “main intrigue” in development and recapitulation comprising a series of musical events that transform the meanings presented in the first two stages; 4) “a new order” in the coda, full of apotheosis, in which the harmony is “brightened” by switching from a minor to a major key, as in the works by Berlioz and Prokofiev. It has been explained that music can imitate the “narrator’s voice” from the epic mode or actants from the drama mode. However, the concept of a presenting or storytelling “voice,” characterised by the human expression of the world being experienced, seems to be one of the constituents of a narrative as such at the transmedial level. We do not necessarily have to call this voice a narrator (a term rooted in literature). In musicological studies, the subject of mental processes as presented in a piece of music is often mentioned. Edward Cone, in his 1974 work The Composer’s Voice, was the first to use the term “virtual persona” in relation to music. Among the transmedial narrative devices used in many of the musical works under scrutiny (plurimedial works, especially operas) is metalepsis. For instance, in Dusapin’s contemporary opera, we observe changes in the narrative mode from intradiegetic, where the sender addresses the listeners within the text, to extradiegetic, where the sender addresses the audience directly. At one point, the narrator interrupts the musical discourse by exclaiming: “Stop! Stop! I know the end of the story!” Dusapin’s work is actually a meta-opera, because in one of the plot threads the characters learn how to sing and are supposed to stage an opera. Voices shift from mechanized speech to cantilena singing: sometimes they stutter “up to aphasia” (performance guideline by the composer), while at certain moments they scream, wail or use onomatopoeic natural sounds. The lyrical layer itself is musicalized in a poetic way: we observe a particular sensual closeness between the music and lyrics, sound and word. Beyond semantics, the text performs rhythmic and sonoric functions. The use of various languages (French, English, Latin, Native American) diversifies the discourse. In some works based on Romeo and Juliet, there are interesting examples of so-called music within music which the characters themselves hear, as in Bellini’s work, for instance. In Zeffirelli’s film the leading musical theme, which usually appears on the extradiegetic level (it can be heard by the audience but not by the characters), is included once on the intradiegetic level at a key moment of Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting at the ball: the guests gather round to listen to a song based on this theme.



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7 Closing Remarks Musical works based on Shakespeare’s play preserve a great deal of the original narrative, but at the same time each work creates its own musical narrative, which is not necessarily about the star-crossed lovers. Analyses and interpretations of musical compositions certainly should never be too focused on the level of verbal text or the programme suggested in the title. Narrativity manifests itself in all the musical works mentioned, regardless of style, idiom and genre. Genre, while exerting no influence on certain aspects, does condition the shape of the narrative on some levels to a certain extent. The genre determines, for example, whether events are adopted from the archetypal literary narrative (Shakespeare’s drama) as told in chronological order, or rather as abstracted ideas; it also governs the choice of whether the theme is adopted with or without lyrics. It has been mentioned several times in this article that the affordances of the two media—music and literature—are different. On the other hand, the very concept of narrative as a broad transmedial category invites us to look at the features shared by different media. Intermedial transposition of a story from literature to music is possible because of the transmedial affordances of narrative and because of music’s capacity to imitate some literary devices (“literalisation” of music). In its specificity, music may indeed fail to convey many literal meanings from Romeo and Juliet, but it remains an excellent means of expressing the feelings which constitute the basic topics of the narrative. As W. H. Auden observed in his essay on Shakespeare’s plays, a character “stops speaking and breaks into song, not because anyone else has asked him to sing or is listening, but to relieve his feelings in a way that speech cannot do or to help him in some action” (Auden 1962, 522).

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Annex: List of the most important works inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet 1776 1776 1784 1792 1793 1796 1800 1810 1825 1828 1830 1839 1862 1865 1867 1869 1873 1878 1901 1901 1916 1916 1922 1936 1940 1949 1950 1955 1956 1956 1957 1968 1970 1970 1984 1984 1988 2001 2004

G. Benda J. G. Schwanberger S. von Rumling N. M. Dalayrac D. Steibelt N. A. Zingarelli L. van Beethoven P. C. Guglielmi N. Vaccai E. Torriani V. Bellini H. Berlioz L. Damrosch F. Marchetti Ch. Gounod P. Tchaikovsky P. X. d’Ivry A. Mercadal y Pons F. Delius H. R. Shelley C. del Campo J. Barkworth R. Zandonai S. Prokofiev H. Sutermeister B. Blacher G. F. Malipiero K. Fribec T. Baird D. Kabalevsky L. Bernstein N. Rota W. Harper B. Matuszczak W. E. Black G. Grisey P. Dusapin G. Presgurvic J. Stokłosa/ J. Józefowicz

Romeo und Julie Romeo e Giulia Roméo et Juliette Tout pour l’amour, ou Roméo et Juliette Roméo et Juliette Giulietta e Romeo Adagio from String Quartet op. 18 no. 1 Romeo e Giulietta Giulietta e Romeo Giulietta e Romeo I Capuleti e i Montecchi Roméo et Juliette (rev. 1846) Romeo und Julie Romeo e Giulietta Roméo et Juliette Romeo and Juliet (rev. 1880) Les amants de Vérone Romeo e Giulietta A Village Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet Les amants de Verona Romeo and Juliet Giulietta e Romeo Romeo and Juliet Romeo und Julia Romeo und Julia Mondi celesti a infernali Romeo i Julija 4 sonety miłosne do słów Szekspira Romeo and Juliet West Side Story Film music to F. Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet Sensations (pop musical) Julia i Romeo Romeo & Juliet Chants de l’amour (allusion) Roméo & Juliette Romeo & Juliet (pop musical) Romeo i Julia czyli sny w Weronie (pop musical)



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Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 1991. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Agawu, Victor Kofi. 1991. Playing with Signs: a Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Almén, Byron. 2003. “Narrative Archetypes: A Critique, Theory, and Method of Narrative Analysis.” Journal of Music Theory 47 (1): 1–39. Almén, Byron. 2008. A Theory of Musical Narrative. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Auden, Wystan H. 1962. “Music in Shakespeare.” In W. H. A. The Dyer’s Hand, 500–527. London: Random House. Baird, Tadeusz, and Izabella Grzenkowicz. 1982. Rozmowy, szkice, refleksje. Kraków: PWM. Berger, Karol. 2000. A Theory of Art. Oxford, etc.: Oxford University Press. Berlioz, Hector. 1966. Memoirs of Hector Berlioz 1803 to 1865 Comprising his Travels to Germany, Italy, Russia and England. Translated by Rachel (Scott Russell) Holmes and Eleanor Holmes. Annotated, translation revised by Ernest Newman. New York: Dover Publications. Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. New York: Routledge. Bremond, Claude. 1964. “Le message narratif.” Communications 4: 4–32. Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. 1957. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. I. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cone, Edward T. 1974. The Composer’s Voice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cone, Edward T. 1982. “Schubert’s Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics.” 19th Century Music 55 (3): 233–241. Cone, Edward T. 1985. “Beethoven’s Orpheus—or Jander’s?” 19th Century Music 8 (3): 283–286. Dante Alighieri. 2012 [1295]. La Vita Nuova/The New Life. Translated from the Italian by Emanuel di Pasquale and Bruno Alemanni. Las Cruces, NM: Xenos Books. Descartes, René. 1989 (1649). The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen Voss. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company. Dollinger, Sonia. 2007. “Les Amants de Vérone: le difficile combat du Marquis d’Ivry.” In Hera’s Peacock no 3: Roméo et Juliette, edited by Laurence le Diagon-Jacquin, 99–110. Auxonne: Les éditions du Murmure. Dusapin, Pascal, and Olivier Cadiot. 1988. On Romeo and Juliet. Foreword to the scores of “Roméo et Juliette.” Paris: Éditions Salabert. Golianek, Ryszard Daniel. 1998. Muzyka programowa XIX wieku. Idea i interpretacja. Poznań: Wydawnictwo naukowe UAM. Grabócz, Márta. 1996. “Semiotical Terminology in Musical Analysis.” In Musical Semiotics in Growth, edited by Eero Tarasti, 195–212. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grabócz, Márta. 1999. “Paul Ricoeur’s Theories of Narrative and Their Relevance for Musical Narrativity.” Indiana Theory Review 20 (2): 19–39. Grabócz, Márta. 2008. “Classical Narratology and Narrative Analyses in Music.” In A Sounding of Signs: Modalities and Moments in Music, Culture, and Philosophy. Essays in Honor of Eero Tarasti on his 60th Anniversary, edited by Robert S. Hatten et al. Acta Semiotica

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Fennica XXX, 19–42. Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute at Imatra & Semiotic Society of Finland. Grabócz, Márta. 2009. Musique, narrativité, signification. Paris: L’Harmattan. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1966. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse. Hatten Robert S. 1991. “On Narrativity in Music: Expressive Genres and Levels of Discourse in Beethoven.” Indiana Theory Review 12: 75–98. Hatten Robert S. 1994. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hatten Robert S. 2004. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. 2008 [2005]. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Kemp, Ian. 1998. Radical Fusion of Dramatic and Symphonic. Booklet in the CD recording. Conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Philips Classics. Kerman, Joseph. 1992. “Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Concerto.” Representations 39: 80–101. Komorowski, Jarosław. 1990. „Romeo i Julia” Williama Shakespeare’a. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Szkolne i Pedagogiczne. Langer, Susan. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Maus, Fred. 1988. “Music as Drama.” Music Theory Spectrum 10: 56–73. Maus, Fred. 1991. “Music as Narrative.” Indiana Theory Review 12: 1–34. Maus, Fred. 1997. “Narrative, Drama, and Emotion in Instrumental Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism lv: 293–303. Maus, Fred. 2001. “Narratology, narrativity.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, vol. 17: 641–643. London and New York: Macmillan Press. Maus, Fred. 2005. “Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 466–483. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing. Micznik, Vera. 2000. “Of Ways of Telling, Intertextuality, and Historical Evidence in Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette.” 19th-Century Music 24 (1): 21–61. Micznik, Vera. 2001. “Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler.” Journal of the Royal Music Association 126: 126–249. Monelle, Raymond. 2000. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Newcomb, Anthony. 1984. “Once More Between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann’s Second Symphony.” 19th-Century Music 7: 233–250. Newcomb, Anthony. 1988. “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies.” 19th-Century Music 16: 164–174. Newcomb, Anthony. 1994. “The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative.” In Chopin Studies II, edited by John Rink and Jim Samson, 84–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newcomb, Anthony. 1997. “Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement.” In Music and Meaning, edited by Jenefer Robinson, 131–153. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1941 [1939]. Estudios sobre el amor. Madrid: Revista de Occidente.



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Pater, Walter Horatio. 1986 [1873]. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Pawłowska, Małgorzata. 2013a. Mit Romea i Julii w muzyce w perspektywie narratologicznej. Doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Prof. Mieczysław Tomaszewski. Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie. Pawłowska, Małgorzata. 2013b. “The Story of Romeo and Juliet Liberated From Words. A Narratological Analysis of the Works by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev.” In Histories and Narratives of Music Analysis, edited by Miloš Zatkalik, Milena Medić and Denis Collins, 160–194. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pawłowska, Małgorzata. 2014. “Musical Narratology: An Outline.” In Beyond Classical Narration. Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges, edited by Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen, 196–220. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Pier, John. 2014 [2009]. “Metalepsis.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1: 326–343. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Available online in living handbook of narratology at: http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/metalepsis-revised-version-uploaded-13-july-2016 (Revised 14 July 2016) Podlipniak, Piotr. 2007. Uniwersalia muzyczne. Poznań: PTPN. Polony, Leszek. 2004. Czas opowieści muzycznej. Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie. Prince, Gerald. 2003 [1987]. Dictionary of Narratology. Revised edition. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Prokofiev, Sergei. 2000 [1960]. Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences. Edited by Seymon Shlifstein, translated by Rose Prokofieva. Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6: 43–64. Ratner, Leonard G. 1980. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer. Rosen, Charles. 1971. “Art Has its Reasons.” In New York Review of Books, June 17, 32–38. Rushton, Julian. 1994. Berlioz: “Roméo et Juliette.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. 2004. Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, and Ioana Vultur. 2008 [2005]. “Mimesis.” In Herman et al., eds., 309–310. Shakespeare, William. 1994 [1595]. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by George B. Harrison, version based on the Second Quarto (with certain recommendations in brackets from the First Quarto). London: Penguin Books. Shen, Dan. 2008 [2005]. “Diegesis.” In Herman et al., eds., 107–108. Tarasti, Eero. 1979. Myth and Music. A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, especially that of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Tarasti, Eero. 1991. “Beethoven’s Waldstein and the Generative Course.” In Indiana Theory Review 12: 99–140. Tarasti, Eero. 1994. A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Tarasti, Eero. 1995. “A narrative grammar of Chopin’s G minor Ballade.” Chopin Studies 5: 38–62. Tarasti, Eero. 2004. “Music as Narrative Art.” In Ryan, ed., 283–304. Tarasti, Eero. 2008. “Mozart, Or, The Idea of a Continuous Avantgarde.” In Music, Senses, Body: Proceedings from the 9th International Congress on Musical Signification, edited by

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Dario Martinelli, 111–127. Rome: University of Roma Tor Vergata, International Semiotics Institute, Umweb Publications, Università Popolare di MusicAr Terapia. Tchaikovsky, Modeste. 1924 [1905]. The Life and Letters of Peter Illich Tchaikovsky. London: John Lane. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1990 [1978]. Genres in Discourse. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomaszewski, Mieczysław. 2003. Muzyka w dialogu ze słowem. Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie. Walker, Steven F. 2008 [2005]. “Myth: Thematic Approaches.” In Herman et al., eds., 329–330. Weinrich, Harald. 2004 [1973]. “Struktury narracyjne mitu.” In Narratologia, translated by Maria Dramińska-Joczowa, edited by Michał Głowiński, 176–193. Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria. Wolf, Werner. 2005. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Voncepts.” In Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, 83–107. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Wolf, Werner. 2008a [2005]. “Intermediality.” In Herman et al., eds., 252–256. Wolf, Werner. 2008b [2005]. “Narrative and Music.” In Herman et al., eds., 324–329. Wolf, Werner. 2015. “Literature and Music: Theory.” In Handbook Intermediality: Literature— Image—Sound—Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, 459–474. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

Matthias Brütsch (Zurich)

How to Measure Narrativity? Notes on Some Problems with Comparing Degrees of Narrativity Across Different Media 1 Introduction Besides analysing structural principles of narrative works, narratologists such as Gerald Prince (1982, 1996, 1999, 2008), Seymour Chatman (1978, 1990) and MarieLaure Ryan (2004, 2007) have repeatedly tried to grasp the essential characteristics of narration, either by sketching prototypes or by defining its basic elements (narremes).1 Their methodologies include distinguishing narrative from non-narrative text types (description, argument, etc.) and, for the former, the postulation of varying degrees of narrativity. The growing trend within narratology to apply itself to different kinds of media has in recent years once again raised the question of how to define and qualify narration. Comparing the narrativity of different texts within the same medium implies a focus on the narrated and how the story is structured by the discourse. In this context, verbal narratives are the privileged field of investigation and factors such as eventfulness, tellability or coherence of the story world become important criteria for measuring narrativity. On the other hand, comparing the manifestation of narrativity in different media—the central topic of this paper—implies a focus on the way the story is presented and on questions of mediacy and narrative agency. In what follows I will first try to classify different transmedial comparisons according to their criteria for evaluating narrativity and according to the results yielded by such comparison. My second step will be to scrutinize the arguments put forward and to question those views which in my mind are problematic. I shall focus solely on literature, film and drama, although other media such as comics or pantomime, which use pictures or live-performances as well, might

1 A German version of this article appeared in Diegesis (Brütsch 2013a). I would like to thank Michael Scheffel, Guido Kirsten and the participants of the workshop “film narratology” at the University of Zurich in March 2013 for comments and suggestions as well as Henry M. Taylor for the revision of the English version. DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-016

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also be included in the discussion. In order to illustrate and substantiate my critical assessment, I will on several occasions refer to the specific (and exceptional) case of backward narration, which will serve as a test case for some of my claims. As a theoretical framework, I will use Wolf Schmid’s model of narrative constitution, which is also a useful starting point for redefining the concept of narration.

2 Telling versus Showing The term narrativity only started to gain prominence in the mid-1960s.2 But the question as to which media can be used to tell stories and which cannot (or only to a lesser degree) was posed well before this, particularly in the German “Romantheorie” (theory of the novel) during the first half of the twentieth century.3 In this tradition, literary theorists such as Käte Friedemann, Käte Hamburger or Franz Stanzel emphasized differences between the novel and the play. The crucial factor for denying drama the status of a narrative art (and thus separating it from the novel) was its ostensible absence of mediacy: [W]henever something is reported or narrated, there is a mediator—the voice of a narrator is audible. Earlier theories of the novel have already recognized this fact as a criterion to distinguish narrative from dramatic forms of art. (Stanzel 1995 [1979], 15; emphasis added, translation mine)4

Stanzel’s or Friedemann’s foregrounding of the mediacy of the novel must be viewed against the backdrop of normative claims by scholars such as Friedrich Spielhagen (1967 [1883]) or Percy Lubbock (1924 [1921]) who stipulated objective forms of narration with a minimal or invisible presence of the narrator. In its most radical variant, this position claims that stories can be presented or “shown” without any mediation at all:

2 Interestingly enough, it was film theorist Christian Metz who introduced and first discussed the concept of narrativity in the mid-1960s in three texts (1968a [1964], 1968b [1966], 1968c [1966]) in which he already advocated a decidedly transmedial approach (cf. Gaudreault 1990). Surprisingly, these articles seem to be little known among narratologists with a background in literary theory, as Porter Abbott’s entry “Narrativity” in the Handbook of Narratology (2014 [2009]) reveals, which despite covering the history of the concept does not mention any of them. 3 Cf. Schmid (2010 [2005], 1–2). 4 In the translation by Charlotte Goedsche the explicit reference to the play (which is important in our context) is omitted by rendering “dramatische Dichtung” as “other forms of literary art” (Stanzel 1986 [1979], 4).



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I speak of his “telling” the story, but of course he [the author] has no idea of doing that and no more; the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself. (Lubbock 1924 [1921], 62; original emphasis)

The concern of Friedemann, Stanzel, Booth and others was to show that the alleged absence of the narrator in novels as championed by Lubbock is an illusion and that all novels are necessarily mediated by a narrator. In this context, the distinction between the mediated novel and the unmediated play appears as a by-product of an argument stressing a common feature of all novels, namely that whoever claims that novels can “show” or present their stories without mediation should, in order to become aware of the impossibility of this claim, consider the theatre, where stories really are presented in this fashion. This approach can be found not only in the pre-structuralist theory of the novel, but also among representatives of the classical or structuralist phase of narratology, most prominently in the writings of Gérard Genette.5 His exclusion of drama from the realm of narrative adheres to the same reasoning: [T]he very idea of showing, like that of imitation or narrative representation (and even more so, because of its naively visual character), is completely illusory: in contrast to dramatic representation, no narrative can “show” or “imitate” the story it tells. (Genette 1980 [1972], 163–164; original emphasis)

Additionally, Genette defines narration as a “representation by the means of language” or “verbal transmission” (1966, 152; original emphasis, translation mine; cf. 1988 [1983], 16), thus explicitly limiting the narrative domain to stories conveyed by verbal language. Accordingly, he claims that not only drama, but also film, comic strips and romans-photo transmit their stories by an “extranarrative medium” (1988 [1983], 16).

5 Other scholars propounding this view are Prince (in the first edition of his Dictionary of Narratology, 1987) and Mahler (2001).

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Schematically, this position can be represented as follows: Position 1

mediacy

narrator / narrative instance

mimesis / imitation / showing

> narrativity

literature

yes

yes

no

> yes

film

no

no

yes

> no

drama

no

no

yes

> no

In this view, the different issues are closely related: mediacy and verbal discourse imply each other, just as mimesis/imitation/showing and visual/scenic representation. Conversely, verbal discourse and mimesis/imitation/showing (with the exception of the representation of dialogue) exclude each other, just as do visual/scenic representation and mediacy. Consequently, only a verbal narrator is qualified as a mediating (and thus narrative) instance or agency.6

3 Narrow and Broad Definitions of Narrativity In more recent narratological publications by literary scholars, a second position emerges which adheres to the former except for one important point. Authors such as Ansgar and Vera Nünning (2002, 6–7), Wolf Schmid (2010 [2005], 1–7, 216– 217), Werner Wolf (2002) or Irina Rajewsky (2007) distinguish between narrativity in a narrow and in a broad sense. The criteria for the narrow definition are the same as the first position had established for narrativity as such: verbal transmission of the story, mediacy and presence of a narrator or narrative instance. Contrary to the former approach, film, drama or comic strips are considered as being narrative, albeit only in a broad sense. And there is still the assumption that in these media stories are presented without mediation by a narrative instance, as the following quotations show: Media: Here a distinction has to be made between media which convey narrative content through the mediation of a narrative instance and are thus able to produce narrations, i. e., basically verbal, oral or written communication, and media which (as a general rule)

6 The positions of Claude Bremond (1964) and Roland Barthes (1966), who both consider nonverbal media as fully narrative, were exceptions at this time and have, as Ryan (2004, 1) puts it, “remained in theoretical hibernation for over forty years.”



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present stories without such a narrative instance, i. e., plays, pictorial media, film, etc. (Wolf 2002, 39; translation mine) Mediated narrative texts (= narrative texts in the narrower sense): The story is told by a narrator. Mimetic narrative texts [plays, films, comic strips, ballets, pantomimes, narrative paintings]: The story is portrayed without a mediating narrative authority. (Schmid 2010 [2005], 7)

The ostensible absence of mediation is the reason why film, theatre, comic strips, etc. are only accepted as narrative media with some reservations, or are granted lesser narrative potential (as in Wolf 2002, who assumes a downward gradient of narrativity from literature to the drama, film/comic strip and picture series).7 A schematic outline of the second position shows that its assumptions as to how film and drama “represent” their stories are the same as those of the first, the only difference being that the seemingly unmediated mimetic presentation is regarded as narrative in a broader sense. Position 2

mediacy

narrator / narrative instance

mimesis / imitation / showing

> narrativity

literature

yes

yes

no (only dialogue)

> yes (narrow definition)

film

no

no

yes

> yes (broad definition)

drama

no

no

yes

> yes (broad definition)

4 Differing Views on Film and Drama Theatre scholar Manfred Pfister and film scholars Markus Kuhn and Nina Heiß advocate a third position, which adheres to crucial points of the second approach (such as the distinction between narrow and broad definitions of narrativity, with literature assigned to the former and drama to the latter). These proponents, however, differ with respect to film, which is not seen as a purely mimetic medium without mediating agency, but as a narrative medium in the narrower sense outlined above:

7 In a more recent contribution to the question of narrativity in different media (2011), Wolf is more cautious on this issue than in his article from 2002, in which he explicitly proposes a “scalar between maximal and minimal narrativity of the works in question” (96).

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The flexibility and mobility of the camera makes it possible to disrupt the chronology of the story (as in the flashback technique), to stretch or concentrate time […] and to change the perspective of the presentation. All these are features familiar to us from narrative texts. For, unlike dramatic texts, both film and narrative texts possess a “mediating communication system”—which is what makes such manipulations of time and space possible in the first place. Thus, the flexible and mobile camera functions as a mediating communication system, fulfilling a narrative function that corresponds to the fictional narrator […] in narrative texts. The film audience, like the readers of a narrative text, is not confronted directly with the material presented, as is the audience in the theatre, but indirectly, via the selective, accentuating and structuring medium of the camera or narrator. (Pfister 1991 [1977], 24–25)

Represented in our table, this position appears as follows: Position 3a

mediacy

narrator / narrative instance

mimesis / imitation / showing

> narrativity

literature

yes

yes

no (only dialogue)

> yes (narrow def.)

film

yes

yes

no / only partly

> yes (narrow def.)

drama

no / only partly no / only partly

yes

> yes (broad def.)

Seymour Chatman goes one step further than position 3a in assigning narrativity to nonverbal (or more precisely: not exclusively verbal) media by asserting that all stories are necessarily mediated by a narrative instance, not only those conveyed by literary or filmic means, but also those performed on stage, the only difference being that in the latter two cases this instance is not personal, but impersonal: Once we decide to define Narrative as the composite of story and discourse (on the basis of its unique double chronology), then logically, at least, narratives can be said to be actualizable on the stage or in other iconic media. […] I would argue that every narrative is by definition narrated—that is, narratively presented—and that narration, narrative presentation, entails an agent even when the agent bears no signs of human personality. (Chatman 1990, 114–115; original emphasis)8

8 In Story and Discourse (1978), Chatman still argued for the existence of “nonnarrated stories” (or, as he himself contends, “minimally narrated stories”; 146–147). However, the opposition between nonnarrated (or minimally narrated) and narrated stories is not related to the medium of transmission, but to the perceptibility of the narrative agency, which may be more or less overt in any narrative medium. To claim that Chatman excludes nonverbal presentations from the realm of narrative, as Ryan (2005, 2) does, is a misinterpretation which disregards that already in Story



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Nevertheless, and contrary to Kuhn and Pfister, Chatman sticks to the idea that not only drama but also film belongs to the mimetic mode, and that both media can only be regarded as narrative in a broad sense (1990, 111, 115).9 Position 3b

mediacy

narrator / narrative instance

mimesis / imitation / showing

> narrativity

literature

yes

yes

no

> yes (narrow def.)

film

yes

yes

yes

> yes (broad def.)

drama

yes

yes

yes

> yes (broad def.)

A fifth position (which is number 4 in my counting, since 3a and b appear roughly equal) assumes a narrative instance for literature, film and drama and questions the exclusive assignment to the mimetic mode not only of film, but also of drama. In this view, put forward with minor variations by authors such as Albert Laffay (1948, 1964), Christian Metz (1968a [1964], 1968b [1966], 1968c [1966]), André Gaudreault (1988), A. Gaudreault and Francois Jost (1990), Manfred Jahn (2001), Brian Richardson (2007), Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (2014 [2009]), there is no difference between literature, film and drama as regards their degree of narrativity. Position 4

mediacy

narrator / narrative instance

mimesis / imitation / showing

> narrativity

literature

yes

yes

no

> yes (narrow def.)

film

yes

yes

no / only partly

> yes (narrow def.)

drama

yes

yes

no / only partly

> yes (narrow def.)

and Discourse “narrator” is conceptualised as an instance which can be both personal (as in literature) and impersonal (as in film). 9 However, the opposition “diegetic” versus “mimetic texts” does not correspond to the opposition “recounting […] with the mediation of a narrator” versus “without a mediation,” as Schmid (2010 [2005], 7) claims, since for Chatman (1990, 115) the latter are no less mediated by narrative agency than the former.

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5 Discourse- and Story-Oriented Definitions So far I have only taken into consideration positions which define narrativity with respect to characteristics of the narrative communication or the mode of representation. Such discourse-oriented definitions can be distinguished from story-oriented definitions which focus on aspects of the narrated and not the narrating (cf. Gaudreault 1988, 33–36; Schmid 2010 [2005], 1–2; Kuhn 2012, 64–70). Story-oriented definitions, especially of the minimalist kind such as “representation of a single event” (proposed by Genette 1966, 1; 1988 [1983], 18–20) or of two connected events (proposed by Prince 1982, 4), even if not totally media-unspecific, usually conceive of narrativity as a transmedial phenomenon. Nevertheless, authors using story-oriented definitions cannot simply be assigned to position 4, since a closer inspection of their writings quickly reveals that in their definitions the transmedial openness at the level of story is usually constrained by additions pertaining to discourse. We have already seen that for Genette the representation of events is narrative only if verbal transmission is involved, and for Prince solely if a personal narrator is present (at any rate in his dictionary entry of 1987). Even Marie-Laure Ryan, who explicitly promotes a media-independent definition of narrativity, brings the mode of representation back into play as soon as the question arises as to which medium has the greatest narrative potential. And despite beginning with the premise that language-centred approaches have to be overcome, she concludes with reference to the “overwhelming storytelling superiority of language” (Ryan 2014 [2009], 483) that literature is the “unmarked, standard manifestation” and “the fullest form of narrativity” (Ryan 2004, 13, 35). This view is closer to positions 2 and 3 (which distinguish between narrativity in a narrow and a broad sense) than to position 4 (which does not make this distinction). Before I evaluate the different positions, let me add a few words on the historical dimension of my overview. It seems to me that within literary and theatre studies, a shift from position 1 to positions 2, 3 and 4 has taken place. Position 1 was strongly held in the phase of pre-structuralist and early structuralist narratology but has then been largely (though not completely) replaced by positions 2 and 3, which in turn have come under some pressure in recent years from position 4. Concerning the three media in question, it seems that film has been granted the status of a narrative art form (in a broad and partly also narrow sense) earlier than drama, which only recently has become the serious object of narratological study. This historical outline is of course very much simplified and only applies to literary and theatre studies. In film theory, positions 3 and 4 have been promoted by authors such as Albert Laffay, Christian Metz and André Gaudreault as early as the 1940s, 1960s and 1980s, respectively. In the following I will analyse the



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different positions not in terms of their historical context, but with respect to their logical consistency and rigour of argument.

6 Mediacy As shown in the outline above, there is a broad consensus among theorists as to what is crucial for establishing narrativity in the narrow sense: mediacy, the existence of a narrator or narrative instance and the absence (or minor presence) of the mimetic mode. Positions 1 to 4 only differ as to whether film and drama fulfil these conditions wholly, in part or not at all. I shall therefore focus on these three issues which, as already noted, are closely related. Let us begin with mediacy and related quotations from advocates of positions 1 and 2: An event is “real,” in a dramatic sense, if it happens right now, if we are witnessing it and experiencing its progress into the future. In an epic sense, on the other hand, the narrated event is not “real” at all, but only the telling itself. (Friedemann 1910, 25; translation mine) A dramatic performance representing events does not constitute a narrative since these events, rather than being recounted, occur directly on stage. (Prince 1987, 58) [I]n drama, the story is not told, it unfolds in front of our eyes. (Todorov 1966, 144; translation mine)

According to these statements, in the theatre we are directly confronted with the fictional events and characters of the story, whereas when reading a novel, these same elements are conveyed to us indirectly, mediated by the verbal telling of a narrator. Against this account, I would argue that the story (and all fictional characters and events comprised in it) merely exist as a mental representation. The story only comes to life in the imagination of the readers or spectators, no matter whether the work prompting this imagination is a book, a play or a movie. There are neither fictional characters nor fictional locations on stage, but actors and a stage scenery. In the cinema, there is even a double mediation, since all we are confronted with is images and sounds—again not of fictional characters and objects, but of actors, costumes and props. What is displayed on stage and screen are representations and not their fictional referents. Against this objection, it has been argued that the absence of mediation in film and drama, as called into play by proponents of positions 1 and 2, does not refer to this very basic mediacy or mediality, but to a higher level that Irina Rajewsky calls “gestaltete Mittelbarkeit” and which implies an organizing or arranging

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principle beyond the simple fact of all media contents being necessarily mediated. Even if one agrees with this, positions 1 and 2 remain problematic, since they assume that this higher level mediacy may only be accomplished through personal mediators using verbal language. That this is not the case can easily be demonstrated—for instance, by considering backward narrations. There are a few novels, but also some plays and films, that reverse the order in which the episodes of the story are presented. Christopher Homm by C. H. Sisson (1965) is a literary example, whereas Betrayal by Harold Pinter (1978) and its adaptation by David Jones (GB 1983) are theatrical and filmic examples.10 In all three instances, the story is conveyed backwards and thus mediated in a special way. However, this kind of mediation is not directly related to the basic mediality in the sense mentioned above (which is to say the verbal, audiovisual or live-performance nature of the representation) but depends on compositional techniques of a higher order which are quite similar in the three media, even if only in one case a verbal narrator is responsible for the effect. As to mediacy, backward narrations are no exception, providing instead good examples that film and drama in general mediate their stories no less than does literature, even if one takes mediacy to involve more than just the shaping force of each medium’s means of expression.

7 Diegesis and Mimesis Let us turn to the issue of the narrator or narrating instance. All the positions I have outlined begin with the premise that mediacy and narrative instance imply one another. However, position 1 assumes that there can be stories without corresponding narrations, and positions 2 and 3a that there are narrations (in the broad sense) without corresponding narrative instances. What are the arguments of the respective authors? This question cannot be answered without also taking into account the third aspect outlined at the very beginning, namely the distinction between mimetic and diegetic modes of representation, since the argument effectively boils down to the claim that stories cannot only be narrated but also “shown” or “imitated.” Position 1 contends that in these cases there is no narration, while positions 2 and 3a still speak of narration in a broad sense, but not of mediation by a narrative instance.

10 On backward narration in film, television series and literature, see Brütsch (2013b).



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Against position 1 I would argue that already the terms used to distinguish verbal narration and audiovisual representation are problematic, since, according to dictionaries and to common understanding, verbal accounts of events can just as well be called representations as audio-visual renderings can (especially in German and French). Speaking of fictional events, it is preferable to use the word presentation instead of representation anyway, which is even less suited to distinguish between the two. The opposition between narration and imitation or between narration and showing is no less problematic. In this context, the terms usually referred to are diegesis and mimesis, as introduced by Plato in The Republic (ca. 370 BC). According to Plato, we must distinguish between those occasions where the poet speaks in his own voice and those instances where he speaks through the voices of his characters. However, as André Gaudreault has shown in a detailed analysis (1988, 53–70), these two ways of speaking are not equated by the ancient philosopher with diegesis and mimesis. Plato does not oppose these two concepts, but rather three forms of diegesis, one without any mimetic elements (lyrical poetry), one with some mimetic elements (epos) and one based completely on the mimetic mode (drama and comedy). In Plato’s view, the latter, though heavily dependent on imitation, is no less a form of diegesis and thus narration than the former two. Moreover, Plato does not assume that the characters speak directly to us, since even when the poet tries to give this impression, it is of course still he who speaks. And to speak is to be taken quite literally here, since in Plato’s time, not only drama and comedy, but also the epos and lyrical poetry were performed in front of live audiences.11 Thus Plato’s conception does not substantiate the claim that the mimetic mode and narrativity exclude each other. But even if we put the non-existent base in ancient philosophy aside,12 the opposition between telling and showing or narration and imitation appears problematic as soon as one takes a closer look at how discussions of narrativity make use of it. Genette, for instance, explained in a letter to Gaudreault his view that plays and movies do not narrate their stories as follows:

11 These circumstances taken into account, Genette’s (1966) objection to Plato that the representation of direct speech is not an imitation but merely a “quotation” appears unjustified, since in oral presentations (which Plato had in mind) the poet can very well imitate the pitch of the voice, intonation, gestures and facial expressions of the characters (cf. Gaudreault 1988, 53–70). 12 For Aristotle, who in his Poetics (335 BC) conceptualises diegesis—contrary to Plato—as a subcategory of mimesis, the two notions are also not in opposition.

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[T]here is, for me, no such thing as theatrical or film narrative. The theatre does not recount, it “reconstitutes” a story upon the stage, and cinema likewise shows on the screen a story which it has “reconstituted” (in fact constituted, of course) on the set. (Genette quoted in Gaudreault 2009 [1988], 170)13

Taken literally, this assertion implies that the story already exists on the stage or movie set, and simply has to be shown to the audience either by way of a live performance or an audio-visual recording. As I have mentioned earlier, it does not make sense to assume that the story has any physical existence before and outside the perception and imagination of the spectators. If by showing we mean to present en bloc something existing independently from the spectators, the term can definitely not be applied to stories. On the level of single actions, objects or characters, the term might be used, but only figuratively if we are dealing with fictional stories. Strictly speaking, theatre performances and films only show what really happens on stage and what really happened in front of the camera. The notion that stories can be “imitated” is even more problematic. Actors can imitate the gestures, mimicry and speech of other persons. In a metaphorical sense, we might say that they imitate fictional characters. But how can a play or film imitate a story? Interestingly enough, speaking of the filmic mode of presentation, Genette not only claims that the story already exists on the screen, but even before that on the film set. If the whole postproduction with processes such as editing and sound design is reduced to showing a story that fundamentally already exists, crucial aspects of film composition are simply ignored.

8 Schmid’s Model of Narrative Constitution In order to substantiate my claim that the filmic and theatrical modes of presenting stories are only marginally related to the activities of showing or imitating, I would like to introduce Wolf Schmid’s ideal-type genetic model of narrative constitution (2010 [2005], 190–215). Schmid’s model proposes to expand the common opposition between story and narrative to four levels: happenings, story, narrative and the presentation of the narrative. The story is the result of a selection of specific characters and actions from an infinite number of possible happenings, and the attribution of specific qualities to these elements. The narrative is the result of the composition of the selected elements (for instance, the re-ordering of

13 I have slightly altered the translation given in Gaudreault (2009), since in the present context it is essential to translate “histoire” as “story” and not as “narrative.”



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their time sequence). And the presentation of the narrative implies transmission by verbal language in literature, by audio-visual means in film and by way of live performance in the theatre. Thus media-specific operations only come into play on this “last” level of the model (“last” being used metaphorically here, since Schmid’s model is an ideal type). On which level are activities of showing or imitating to be located? Neither the selection of specific actions and qualities nor the composition of these elements into a specific arrangement are operations having anything to do with these activities. Only in the “last” step of presenting the narrative do they play a certain part, but even here a minor one since, as I have argued earlier, the filmand theatre-specific discourses and modes of presentation involve much more than imitating persons and showing single actions or objects. Betrayal is again a good example to illustrate this. The reversal of the order in which the events are presented is a procedure pertaining to the transition from story to narrative, and not to the media-specific transition from the narrative to the presentation of the narrative. And this procedure is of course based on a “prior” selection of events from the amorphous mass of happenings. Talking about works of literary fiction, Schmid presupposes a narrator for these kinds of procedures, even in cases of heterodiegetic, extradiegetic and what Chatman has called “covert” narration. Thus an asymmetry appears in Schmid’s reasoning. Discussing narrativity, he claims that only literary narration is characterized by mediacy and the presence of a narrative instance, while film and drama directly show their stories. In his model of narrative constitution, on the other hand, media-specific modes of presentation (such as the mimetic mode) only play a part in the “last” of three steps of transformation. And Schmid does not explain why, in the case of film and drama, the procedures on the “first” two levels should not establish mediacy and a narrative instance, while in literature they do so even in cases of covert narration. Metaphorically speaking, “between” story and recipient not only the conversion of “raw” elements (actions and qualities) into the specific “language” of the given medium has to be accounted for, but also the composition of selected actions, such as the reversal of chronological order in Betrayal. This shows that a story simply cannot exist without narrative mediation. Concerning drama and film, positions 1 and 2 usually ascribe procedures pertaining to the composition of selected actions simply to real authors, while for literary works a fictional narrator is given the same credit even in cases where he acts

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“covertly” (in Chatman’s sense) and therefore can only be inferred.14 Resistance against acknowledging a narrative instance in film or drama is thus neither sufficiently explained by its compositional function or force (which on two of three levels is equivalent to that in literature) nor by its manifest perceptibility (which in literature may be just as implicit as in film and drama). Rather, a widespread refusal to accept impersonal, non-human instances of narrative agency seems to be decisive. This view explains the irritating fact that authors like Schmid (2010 [2005], 1–7) or Wolf (2002, 47) use “narrator” and “narrative instance” as interchangeable synonyms, without giving any justification for restricting the latter term to verbal narration (which one would expect from position-2 theorists who allow for nonverbal forms of narration). To call upon real authors at this level of narratological abstraction is inadvisable, or else it would also have to be done for literary texts, which would amount to equating narrators who are both hetero- and extradiegetic with the real authors. Still, the problem would not be solved but only relocated, since the consequence would be to simply shift the function of narrative agent to real authors.15 There are further inconsistencies that positions 1 and 2 suffer from. For instance, that theorists like Genette speak of “récit” and “histoire” as the semiological pair signifier/signified (1980 [1972], 27) while at the same time assuming that there can be stories without narration is tantamount to claiming that there can be represented objects without a corresponding representation. Or the poor reasoning of position 2 which concedes that film and theatre narrate their stories but refuses to call the instance responsible for this activity “narrative instance.” Apart from mediacy, presence of a narrative instance and absence of mimesis, writers inclined to position 2 occasionally bring up other aspects. Wolf (2002, 52–53, 95) and Ryan (2004, 10–11, 15), for instance, both maintain that literature possesses a higher degree of narrativity than film and drama because it is able to convey causal relations and temporal connections more explicitly. The higher degree of narrativity is justified by the “lower degree of narrativisation necessary on the part of the recipient” (Wolf 2002, 95; translation mine). It may be true that novels and short stories, by means of their verbal narrators, often make use of

14 Genette is the only theorist mentioned here for whom the literary narrator in these cases coincides with the author (1980 [1972], 249). 15 In this context it is important not to confound the following two questions: 1) does it make sense in the case of narrations without explicit narrators to assume a virtual narrative agency distinct from real authors?; 2) are nonverbal presentations of stories to be considered as narrative (and if so, in a broad or narrow sense)? David Bordwell’s stance (1993 [1985], 61–62; 2008, 121–133) shows that it is possible to answer the first question in the negative and the second in the affirmative.



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more explicit propositions. But first of all, they do not have to do so, and second, film and drama, besides also being able to use verbal narrators, have their own (conventionalised) means of making temporal and causal relations explicit. Moreover, why should a higher degree of (mostly schematic) implication on the part of the recipient determine a lower degree of narrativity in the first place?16

9 Narrator Figures and the Basic Narrativity of Drama After this general criticism of positions 1 and 2,17 I would now like to focus on positions 3a/b and 4. Concerning 3a and b, I can be brief, since insofar as these conceptions correspond to 2, I have already stated my objections; and to the extent that they correspond to 4, they will be discussed shortly. The remaining questions are: if one accepts that mimesis and diegesis are not simple oppositions and that mediacy and narrative agency are not appropriate criteria for distinguishing between literary and filmic/dramatic narration, does it still make sense to differentiate between a narrow and a broad definition of narrativity? And should film, with its many expressive possibilities (editing, camera movements, sound design, etc.), not be attributed a higher degree of narrativity than drama? My answer to the first question is: I do not think so. Concerning the second question, I agree that film narration can much more easily “disrupt the chronology of the story […] stretch or concentrate time […] and change the perspective of the presentation” (Pfister 1991 [1977], 24; cf. section 4 above) than theatrical narration, which appears more restricted in these respects. However, that a drama should not at all be capable of these procedures can easily be disproved, for instance by the already mentioned play Betrayal, a perfect example of the disruption of linear chronology. That the conventional unities of time, place and action have traditionally prevented this potential from being exploited more fully does not alter the fact that it has always been available (cf. Diezel 1999, 55–56).

16 If the cognitive effort on the recipient’s part should really be decisive here, then, conversely, the ostensible immediacy of filmic and dramatic presentations would have to raise their narrativity. 17 My criticism of theorists such as Genette, Schmid, Prince, Wolf or Ryan only pertains to the issues explicitly referred to, especially considering that the latter two have contributed substantially to the transmedial extension of literary narratology.

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This leads me to conclude that only position 4 stands the test of rigour of argument and logical consistency. There is one point, though, that still needs to be clarified. Literary and theatre scholars opposing the notion that plays are less narrative than novels often point to a trend in modern drama to include more and more narrative elements in their performances, such as prologues and epilogues or comments by stage managers and other overt narrator figures (cf. Nünning and Sommer 2008).18 However, if we really want to attribute full narrativity to drama, we have to be careful to put these elements in their proper places, since the basic narrativity of drama does not in the least depend on them. A dramatic narrative instance responsible for selection, arrangement and focalisation can and should be construed without direct recourse to these narrative elements. Rajewsky (who advocates position 2) rightly finds fault with Jahn who confounds this basic kind of narrative instance with the position occupied by narrator figures who appear on stage. In his analysis of Shakespeare’s Pericles, Jahn writes: Introducing himself as a narrator figure on the communicative level of fictional mediation, Gower exerts an uncommon amount of […] “conative solicitude”: he addresses the audience, […] advertises the story’s didactic purpose […], adds some verbal decor which establishes story-HERE and story-NOW, and finally asks the spectators to see and judge for themselves. Later in the play, Gower reappears as a perceptive moderator who introduces each of the remaining acts and eventually speaks the epilogue, closing the play’s mediating frame. As long as he is physically present, he is an overt narrator, and in the scenes in which he is physically absent, he is the behind-the-scene shower-agency in control of selection, arrangement, and presentation. Basically, then, an “absolute drama” (Pfister’s default type of play) is like […] Pericles without the figure of Gower but not without the function of Gower. (Jahn 2001, 671; original emphasis)

According to this analysis, a narrator figure may wholly incorporate the function of the basic narrative instance responsible for the overall design of the play, even if the presence of this narrator figure alternates between an explicit and implicit presence on stage. This opinion is even more clearly stated in the following passage: All narrative genres are structurally mediated by a first-degree narrative agency which, in a performance, may either take the totally unmetaphorical shape of a vocally and bodily present narrator figure […] or remain an anonymous and impersonal narrative function in charge of selection, arrangement, and focalization. (Jahn 2001, 674)

18 Kuhn (position 3a), despite considering drama as narrative in a broad sense only, also points to epic components of this kind and concedes that “Drama […] may contain elements and segments which can also be classified as narrative in a narrow sense” (2012, 74; translation mine).



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I would object to this view that we are not facing an either-or alternative here. The vocally and bodily present narrator figure—an optional ingredient—can never occupy the position of the impersonal narrative instance, which is always there and which is also responsible for presenting the narrator figure to us in the first place.19 And while narrator figures (as fictional counterparts of human beings) use verbal language, the “language” of theatre and film is not (only) verbal.

10 A New Definition of Narration I would like to conclude my discussion of comparisons between different media with a new definition of narration which makes the transformations in Schmid’s model more explicit than existing definitions do. To narrate is an activity which necessarily involves the following processes (which are ideal-type in nature): selection of characters, actions and corresponding qualities from an infinite number of events; composition (temporal reordering and possibly linearization) of this selection; and presentation of this artificial array in a specific medium. Even minimalist definitions such as “representation of two events” imply all of these procedures, since without selection there are no events, without composition there is no sequence in which the events can be presented, and without presentation in the “language” of a specific medium there is no narrative to be perceived by the recipients. This indicates that stories (which in Schmid’s model correspond to the selected actions and their qualities) never reach recipients directly; that to narrate in any medium entails activities of selection, arrangement and mediation which for practical reasons should be attributed to a narrative instance, be it personal (as in literature) or impersonal (as in film and theatre). To account for realisations in the different media, it suffices to distinguish between “verbal” (or “literary”), “audio-visual” (or “filmic”) and “dramatic” narration, a terminology which, for its simplicity and comprehensibility, is preferable to distinctions such as “narrative” versus “mediated” (Schmid 2010 [2005], 7) or to “convey” versus to “realise” stories (Wolf 2002, 42; translation mine) or to “telling” versus “showing.” Rajewsky has complained about a trend in narratology to overstress common features of different media at the cost of ignoring their specificity. To assume a

19 In film theory, this difference in hierarchy between the basic narrative instance and narrator figures or character narrators, no matter how remarkable their contribution and how much they themselves pretend to be responsible, has long been established (cf. Gaudreault and Jost 1990, 49–56).

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narrative instance for nonverbal media is, for Rajewsky, an example of this trend and highly problematic, since it means raising traditional definitions of verbal storytelling to foundational categories of a transmedial narratology (2007, 30 and 50). From what I have presented in this paper, it can easily be guessed that my position is diametrically opposed to Rajewsky’s. The problem is not that differences between media are ignored, but rather that universal principles of narrativity (such as narration necessarily and always implying mediacy) are claimed by some authors to be distinctive features of verbal narration only (while the same authors leave unexplained how exactly narration in nonverbal media should work without mediation). To conclude, a short note to prevent misunderstandings is in place. In my opinion, the differences between verbal, audio-visual and dramatic forms of narration are significant. It is the task of a transmedial narratology to analyse them in detail. But I also think that the real differences can only be examined against the background of an unbiased assessment of basic similarities, some of which I have tried to clarify in this paper.

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Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning, eds. 2002. Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Pfister, Manfred. 1993 [1977]. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Translated by John Halliday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pier, John, and José Ángel García Landa, eds. 2008. Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Plato. 2008 [ca. 370 BC]. Republic. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton. Prince, Gerald. 1987. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Prince, Gerald. 1996. “Remarks on Narrativity.” In Perspectives on Narratology: Papers from the Stockholm Symposium on Narratology, edited by Claes Wahlin, 95–106. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. Prince, Gerald. 1999. “Revisiting Narrativity.” In: Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, 43–51. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Prince, Gerald. 2008. “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratability.” In Pier and García Landa, eds., 19–27. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2007. “Von Erzählern, die (nichts) vermitteln: Überlegungen zu grundlegenden Annahmen der Dramentheorie im Kontext einer transmedialen Narratologie.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 117 (1): 25–68. Richardson, Brian. 2007. “Drama and Narrative.” In Herman, ed., 142–155. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004. “Introduction.” In Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by M. L.-R., 1–40. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.” In Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, 1–23. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2007. “Toward a Definition of Narrative.” In Herman, ed., 22–35. Ryan, Marie-Laure.2014 [2009]. “Narration in Various Media.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 1: 468–488. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrationvarious-media (Revised 7 October 2014) Schmid, Wolf. 2010 [2005]. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Spielhagen, Friedrich. 1967 [1883]. Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans. Reprint. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Stanzel, Franz K. 1995 [1979]. Theorie des Erzählens. 6th ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Stanzel, Franz K. 1986 [1979]. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1966. “Les catégories du récit littéraire.” Communications 8: 125–151. Wolf, Werner. 2002. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie.” In Nünning and Nünning, eds., 23–104. Wolf, Werner. 2011. “Narratology and Media(lity): The Transmedial Expansion of a Literary Discipline and Possible Consequences.” In Current Trends in Narratology, edited by Greta Olson, 145–180. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

Claude Calame (Paris)

From Structural Narratology to Enunciative Pragmatics: Greek Poetic Forms between Mythical Narrative and Ritual Act If, as early as the 1960s, the question of “narrative” came to play a determining role in the study of literary texts, it has now, on the cusp of the present century, been replaced by that of “narrativity.” Can this transition be reduced to the opposition between “classical” and “postclassical narratology”? Our answer is emphatically no, especially as “narrative” and “narrativity” refer to two qualities identified in different types of (initially, literary) texts, whereas “narratology” comprises those approaches that make it possible to identify these dimensions and analyse their development. Below we shall see a number of the misinterpretations brought about by an opposition, admittedly of a diachronic order, but in fact inspired by the synchronic and binary perspective of structuralism. Looking at a literature that is not a literature per se but that corresponds to poetic forms in action makes it possible to flush out the misunderstandings that underlie this opposition. In the second edition of the Handbook of Narratology, the entry entitled “Narratology” lists the various narratological approaches that have been proposed on the basis of the French-speaking founders, which are then briefly discussed. The paradigms of current-day methodology are broken down into three tendencies: “contextualist narratology” (narratives in relation to their cultural, historical, thematic and ideological contexts); “cognitive narratology” (intellectual, emotional and neuronal processing that makes it possible to produce and receive narratives); and “transgeneric and intermedial approaches” (a narratology that explores various forms of discourse that are not necessarily linguistic such as music and video games) (Meister 2014 [2009], vol. 2: 634–635). Now, when confronted with forms of poetic expression which are highly ritualised speech acts (such as the “lyrical” poems and tragedies of ancient Greece), not only must the cultural and religious context of the performance of dramatized forms of narrative be taken into account, but attention must also be focused on a textual and discursive dimension that narratology in nearly all its forms wilfully overlooks: enunciation (énonciation)—a notion with no clear equivalent in English. All enunciates (énoncés), narrative or otherwise, are brought forth in an act of verbal enunciation. Arising out of an intra-discursive act, the enunciative dynamics of each enunciate in a discourse serves as an index of its pragmatics: DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-017

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this dynamics unfolds in the course of verbal action in an extra-discursive enunciation (and reception). Particularly in ancient Greece, enunciation corresponds to a ritualised practice of the body, to a performance which is attached to the culturally marked social and religious conditions of enunciation. It should thus be borne in mind that, in the wake of the developments in the human sciences during the 1960s, the “linguistic turn” had a decisive impact on the reading and interpretation of texts considered to be literary. No longer was it a matter of relating the literary work to the genius and biography of the author or of situating texts considered to be original and unique works in a chronological history of literature. Rather, literary texts came to be viewed as linguistic manifestations—manifestations of language (langue) actualised as words or speech (parole) whose poeticity and “literariness” were objects of study. Countless attempts have been made to define, first, the narrative structures of the textual object identified as narrative, and then the parameters of a narrativity presented as universal, despite the fact that these criteria are generally founded on a corpus of Western literary texts. Against this backdrop, profoundly marked by Saussurianism and structuralism, taking a different culture and a different corpus of narratives as a reference may well represent a salutary alternative. The shift in focus brought about by studying a distant culture allows for a critical re-examination of our own operational concepts. This is the case particularly with modern readings of narratives that have been constructed over many years in the field of Greek mythology, while at the same time reducing these narratives to the state of mythographical texts. In the course of this process, inspired by structuralism, these texts have been isolated not only from the poetical (not literary) forms that actualise them but also from their conditions of enunciation. Recounting the actions of extraordinary men in close relationship with the gods and situated in the heroic past of the Greek cities, the narratives we include in the anthropological category of (Greek) “myth” have become the privileged objects of readings inspired by a narratology that still remains extremely structural.1 It is by studying the mode of enunciation of these myths and relating them to their various forms of narrative (and poetic) performance, without which they would never have existed, that we are able to reflect on their narrativity. Furthermore, the distance of Greek myths in performance from our own modes of narration and contextualization will enable us to examine critically not only the structural analysis of myths and narratology in the original sense of the term but also the contemporary, essentially Anglo-Saxon, concept of narrativity.

1 On Greek mythology, the reader may wish to refer to the two first chapters of my 2015 study Qu’est-ce que la mythologie grecque?



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With the various approaches taken into consideration below, we shall see that the concept of narrativity arising out of the classical/postclassical distinction frequently reduces to nought the enunciative dimension present in any narrative enunciation along with its pragmatic implications, thereby rendering this artificial distinction irrelevant. As far as the “literature” of traditional societies is concerned, this calls for a narratological approach based on discourse analysis combined with the anthropological perspective required, for song cultures such as that of ancient Greek, by ethnopoetics.

1 Structuralist Perspectives Before exploring these issues in Greek narrative more fully, let us return briefly to some of the foundations of narratology from the French point of view. In French-speaking countries, two principal operational and instrumental models were set out, one by Gérard Genette, the other by Algirdas J. Greimas. The distinctions put forward by Genette are applicable, on the one hand, to the different narrative levels of the diegesis in relation to the position of the narrator and, on the other, to the distinction Who speaks? and Who sees?, the latter reformulated as modes of focalization: zero, internal or external.2 As regards narrative modes in ancient Greece, the study of the relations, from the viewpoint of focalization, between narrator and protagonist has unfortunately been transformed into an extended analysis of focalization by the narrator or the protagonist, essentially in terms of focalized objects and information conveyed.3 However, the combination of distinctions of a structural type between “extra-” and “intradiegetic” and between “hetero-” and “homodiegetic” has met with considerable success with regard to identifying narrative instances.4 Genette himself has clearly demonstrated the operational fecundity of this approach in his analysis of the position of the narrator, particularly in Ulysses’ narratives, integral as they are to the nar-

2 See in particular the two chapters entitled “Mood” and “Voice” in Genette (1980 [1972]). 3 This line of reasoning was initiated by Mieke Bal (1977, 36–46) and has since been widely adopted by mainstream narratology in the field of Graeco-Roman culture. 4 Concerning the misinterpretations perpetuated by the notion of “focalization,” which came to replace that of “point of view,” see the useful clarifications offered by Niederhoff (2014 [2009]). For ancient Greek narrative, the analytical instrument has been reformulated in a more technical way by de Jong, Nünlist and Bowie (2004; cf. note 18 below) in a mechanistic systemization inspired by structuralism, as proposed by Bal (1997 [1985], 143–149).

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rative unfolding of the Odyssey.5 Despite this conceptual clarification, however, it is necessary to focus on the linguistic markers of enunciation. These enunciative markers lead us to draw an important distinction between, for instance, the beginning of the Odyssey taken over by the external, anonymous and omniscient narrator and the beginning of the narrative by Odysseus himself, relating as an internal narrator his adventurous travel back to Ithaca in a lengthy inserted direct speech: on the one hand, an anonymous narrative placed in the mouth of the Muse (“Tell me, Muse, the man with so many tricks who wandered so much […]”; Odyssey 1, 1–2; my translation); on the other hand, an account by a narrator who identifies himself as Ulysses, the son of Laertes (“Now I will tell you about the journey Zeus forced on me on my way back from Troy”; 9, 37–38). Ulysses had just recognized that the narratives sung by Demodocos at the court of the Phaeacians are inspired (contrary to his own) either by the Muse or by Apollo (8, 487–490). As we can see from this example, the pragmatics of a narrative depends both on its discursive form and on its enunciative dynamics. The other model, hinging on the immanence of the text, as worked out in detail by Greimas, sets out a grammar of narration. On the one hand is the canonical narrative schema, a logic consisting of a chain starting from a situation of initial lack (and hence of disequilibrium) composed of four successive phases: manipulation, competence, performance and sanction, the latter three corresponding, from the point of view of the narrative’s subject-hero, to a qualifying trial, a final trial and a glorifying trial. On the other hand is the actantial schema, a series of positions forming the syntax of narrative: sender/receiver, subject/anti-subject (or object), helper/opponent.6 Here lies an essential distinction between actants, corresponding to syntactic functions and places, and actors who, with their particular figures and semantic depth, occupy these positions. Actantial positions, which nullify the traditional, ontologizing notion of character, make it possible to disentangle the syntactic dimension from the semantic depth of the narrative. As for the semantic values expressed by the actors, they are organised not only into thematic isotopies but also, at a deeper level, into the semiotic square, a grid of opposing pairs of contraries and contradictories.7

5 Genette (1980 [1972], 248–252). See also the developments proposed for archaic Greek poetry by Steinrück (1992, 5–34). 6 See in particular Greimas and Courtés (1979, 3–5, 242–247 and 363–364) as well as the useful synthesis offered by Adam (1996 [1984], chap. 4: “La sémiotique narrative”) and the reformulation of the basic scheme of narration proposed by Adam (2011, 73–79 and 101). 7 On the semiotic square and on the elementary structure of signification, see Greimas and Courtés (1979, 29–33 and 360–364). For a commentary, see Adam (1996 [1984], chap. 4).



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In Genette, then, we have the indispensable attention to narrative positions and voices as well as to levels of narration as strikingly revealed, for instance, through metalepsis, while in Greimas can be found an attempt to integrate the semantic dimension of the text into a narrative syntax forming a modal syntax. The Greimasian model (less often followed than the operational concepts of Genette’s system of cross-tabulations as a means of classifying narrative devices through narrative layering and interlacing) has the merit of focussing attention, thanks to its grounding in Vladimir Propp’s research on the morphology of the Russian folk-tale, on the syntactic and semantic logic of narrative. Interestingly, Paul Ricœur was not unaware of these points when he wrote about the empirical and representational understanding of time. He was in fact drawing on the Greimasian model when he stated that the configurations of time offered by history and literature correspond to discursivisations of a narrative order, namely temporal configurations of human actions based on prefigurations of time grounded in the “prenarrative resources of human acting,” culminating, through refiguration, in narrative models of human activity itself.8 At this juncture, the explicit influence, in Ricœur, of the principles of the “prenarratology” outlined by Aristotle in the Poetics becomes decisive: mímesis as discursive representation through narrativization and emplotment; mûthos as (narrative) plot and “organisation of the events” (sústasis tôn pragmáton); and complication (désis) of the (tragic) plot, understood in the sense of transformation and reversal (metabolé or metábasis).9 The last-mentioned notion anticipates one of the criteria of the minimal definition of narrative as a transformation and change of state, to which must be added a temporal order, corresponding to a causal chain. Without going so far as the canonical schema proposed by Greimas, we know that a “minimal narrative” can be defined with reference to five distinctive features of a syntactic order: an initial state, a temporal connector, an event, a causal connector (of the “in consequence” type) and a final state (often the inverse of the initial state).10 This definition of minimal narrative (and thus of

8 See in particular Ricœur (1984 [1983], chap. 3) on the three forms of “mimesis” as well as the commentary and critique in Calame (2009 [2006], 18–40) with reference to Greek historiopoiesis. 9 Aristotle Poetics, 6, 1449b 36–1450a 23, 10, 1452a 12–21 and 11, 1452a 22–9. Cf. Ricœur (1984 [1983], 31–39). 10 On the various definitions of minimal narrative and structural narrativity formulated on a generally Aristotelian basis, whether explicit or not, see the excellent chapter on narrativity in Revaz (2009, 69–100). A (structural) definition proposed by Prince (2003, 5–6) runs as follows: “For any entity to be a narrative, it must be analysable as the representation of one (or more than one non-randomly connected, non-simultaneous, and non-contradictory) transformation of one (or more than one) state of affairs, one (or more than one) event which is not logically presup-

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a formal basis of narrativity) is entirely textual and syntactic: it ignores a feature that had already implicitly been assumed in Aristotle’s Poetics, namely the tensive dimension, conceptualized in the context of narrative in terms of “tying” and “untying the knot” (désis and lúsis). This tension can be observed particularly in the emotions experienced and expressed by the protagonists of the narrative action in conjunction with the affective tension it arouses in the audience.11 It is important that Aristotle’s awareness of narrative tension be borne in mind. We shall return to these questions in the conclusion where, as an alternative to the various narrative schemas and models that have been proposed, it will be seen that the notion of “script” prompts us to go from the production of narrative, as indexically inscribed in the development of the text with its pragmatics, to its reception and interpretation.

2 From Narrative to Discourse: The Enunciative Instance With the considerations presented above, we are still in the area of narrative, not in that of discourse—in langue, not in parole. But what, now, of narrative once it is enunciated, of narration as act? While Genette, for instance, has returned to the classic distinction between Erzählzeit and erzählte Zeit to describe the chronology of narrated time and its causal logic, the rhythm of narration, with its contractions, expansions, analepses and prolepses (so well illustrated in the narrative realisation of the Odyssey), must also be taken into account.12 While attention to these features does give a sense of the tensions and expectations induced by the time of narration, what is not sufficiently brought into focus in this system is the enunciative and practical dimension of narration: the need to move from “narrative” to “discourse” and to the pragmatic considerations this entails. Now, it is in this area in particular that the Greek myths, narrated in their various forms, are particularly instructive.

posed by the transformed state and/or does not logically entail its transform.” (Cf. footnote 30 below) 11 Eco discreetly anticipates this dimension when he writes that in narration understood as a description of actions, all narrative action involves “an intention, a person (agent), a state or possible world, a change, its cause, and a purpose—to which one can also add mental state, emotions, and circumstances” (1979, 30; original emphasis). Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 18, 1455b 24–32. 12 Cf. Genette (1980 [1972], 25–32, 86–95) and Calame (2009 [2006], 32–40).



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It is revealing that, in English, the concept of énonciation (“enunciation”) has very rarely found an equivalent or a satisfactory translation (the same observation applies, by the way, to discours, nearly always translated as “discourse”13). Often, énonciation is translated (misleadingly) as “utterance,” the term employed in speech act theory that originated in Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy. It is also significant that no entries are to be found in the index to the Cambridge Companion to Narrative (Herman, ed. 2007) for either “enunciation” or “utterance.” As for the term “pragmatics,” the index contains a single reference, and this is to a passage on the semiotic status of narrative in a chapter devoted to the definition of narrative (Ryan 2007, 24–26), where a further reference to the formal and pragmatic dimension of narrative can be found (28–31; cf. footnote 17 below). In this article, however, only the uses of narrative in different media are dealt with without, apparently, the slightest impact on a possible definition of narrativity. In the first edition of the Handbook of Narratology, enunciation is discussed in only a single entry, “Narrative Levels” (Coste and Pier 2009, 297–302), as is the case in the corresponding entry in the second edition (Pier 2014, vol. 2: 555–556). Adopted as a means for describing the spatiotemporal relations between the different narrative acts integrated into a narrative, the notion of narrative levels, according to these commentaries, is conceptualized in terms of “narration levels” or “narrating levels.” Underlying these constitutive levels of narration is the primary narrative, attributed to an author/narrator who may be heterodiegetic, homodiegetic or autodiegetic. This distinction, as proposed by Genette, between the different positions of the narrator is made somewhat obscure, however, by a structuralist desire to place the different types of narrator in a cross-tabulation table following the binary criteria of extra-/intradiegetic and hetero-/homodiegetic oppositions (cf. Genette 1980 [1972], 212–215 and 247–249). It is only when Wolf Schmid (2010 [2005], 76–78) revisits Genette’s criteria so as to characterise the different figures of the narrator that a clear distinction reappears between the erzählendes Ich and the erzähltes Ich: “narrating I” (or “narrating self”) and “narrated I” (“or narrated self”).14 Ultimately, the various proposals for structural systematisation of the widely adopted distinction proposed by Émile Benveniste between “story/narrative” (histoire/récit, characterised linguistically in French by the forms il/elle, the deictic là-bas and use of the preterit tense) and “discourse” (discours, marked

13 For a commentary, see Pier (2003, 78–83; 2011, 351–353). 14 On the basis of Coste (1989, 166), see Coste and Pier (2009, 300–301 and 303), who give as English equivalents “subject of enunciation” for sujet de l’énonciation and “subject of the enunciated” for sujet de l’énoncé.

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by the forms je/tu, the deictics ici and maintenant and non-preterit verb forms) have been underestimated and somewhat neglected. This is the case even though Genette, in the early pages of the chapter of Narrative Discourse devoted to voice, introduced this distinction into narrative theory. In an excessively textual narratological perspective, on the other hand, focus on “narrative instance” to the detriment of “literary instance” has resulted in a twofold consequence: on the one hand, failing to take account of the linguistic markers of a narrative instance which, at the same time, is an enunciative instance (“instance d’énonciation”) with its spatiotemporal coordinates (I/you, here, now); and on the other, neutralising the referential impact of the formal apparatus of enunciation in the act of narration.15 These matters are clarified by Greimas and Courtès in an article devoted to enunciation (1982 [1979], 125–128). Here, Benveniste’s notion of mise en discours (putting into discourse) is adopted so as to differentiate between what is narrated and enunciated (“story/narrative”) and the enunciation of what is narrated and enunciated (“discourse”)—a distinct departure from the what and how of narrative frequently invoked by narrative theoreticians. From the pragmatic point of view, this distinction leads to a second one: between the verbal simulacrum of the narrative act as linguistic I (“instance of enunciation”) and the historical subject of the narrative performance in its space and time.16 With these principles in mind, we can now see that the “I” of the narrator-enunciator with its spatiotemporal coordinates, forming an instance of a textual, discursive order, refers more or less directly not only to an author but also to the circumstances of the enunciation in the narrative act. Ultimately, it is to pragmatics that we are referred back to by any text when viewed as discourse channelled through text by the enunciative instance. From the perspective of an interpretative narratology—that is, a narratology centred on the verbal processes of signification—this enunciative relation of a referential order is essential: as a vehicle of narrativity, the enunciative relation inscribes narrative, together with

15 For the distinction between “story/narrative” vs. “discourse” (acknowledged by Genette 1980 [1972], 212), cf. Benveniste (1973 [1966], 205–216); on the formal apparatus of enunciation, see Benveniste (2014 [1974]). Pier (2003, 78–84) comments on the misleading tendency to superimpose story/discourse and fabula/sjuzhet. 16 Greimas and Courtés (1979, 125–128 and 119–121) also introduce the notions of “shifting out” (débrayage) and “shifting in” (embrayage) in order to separate what is enunciated (l’énoncif) and the procedures of enunciation (l’énonciatif). These principles are discussed in the introduction to Calame (1995 [1986], 3–12) with regard to the pragmatics of various forms of Greek narrative poetry.



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the possible worlds constructed by a logic of narrative action and tension, in the category of efficacious discourses. Let us turn now to two definitions of narrative proposed by Marie-Laure Ryan. In an early definition, “story” is understood as a “cognitive construct.” Accordingly, narrative, considered to be a mental representation, consists in a world inhabited by individual agents (characters) and objects which undergo changes of state that are not entirely predictable (caused either by deliberate actions on the part of agents or by accident). In this world, physical events are associated with mental states in a network of relations which confers upon events the coherence, motivation, closure and intelligibility which make them into a “plot” (Ryan 2004, 8–9).17 And out goes pragmatics! The pragmatic dimension is introduced in a more recent definition. According to this view, in any text (notice here the absence of discourse) of a narrative type, narrativity requires the presence of eight conditions: it must present a world populated with individuals having the property of existence; this world must be located in a temporal dimension so that it can undergo radical transformations; these transformations are caused by non-habitual physical events; some of the protagonists of events will be agents possessing mental life who react emotionally to the states of the world; some of their actions are intentional; the sequence of events is organised in a causal chain leading to a conclusion; the occurrence of certain narrated events is stated to be a fact; last, the narrative must communicate something significant to its public (Ryan 2007, 28–30; cf. Ryan 2005, 347). As can we see, the last parameter alone is of a pragmatic order. An extremely formal definition such as this can but lead us from the definition of narrative and narrativity to inquire into the act of narration in enunciation and in performance.

3 Ancient Greece: Syntactic Narratologies In Greek antiquity, which is particularly rich in forms of narrative and dramatized poetry, scholars have generally been content to borrow from Genette a technical, narratological apparatus of an extremely structural type.18 Moreover, they have undertaken to apply this system, in a fairly mechanical manner, to various

17 “The text must allow the reconstruction of a n interpretive network of goal, plans, causal relationships, and psychological motivations around the narrated events. This implicit network gives coherence and intelligibility to the physical events and turns them into plot.” (Ryan 2004, 9) 18 See the studies gathered together in three collective volumes edited by de Jong, Nünlist and Bowie (2004), particularly the conclusions drawn with regard to narrators, narratees and nar-

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forms of narrative discourse ranging from the epic poets (Homer and Hesiod) to the novelists of the imperial era (Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodorus) and including the “lyric” poets (Pindar and Bacchylides); from the three great tragic poets (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) to historiographers such as Herodotus and Thucydides and the orators (Lysias, Demosthenes, Aeschines, etc.); and from Hellenistic poets such as Theocritus or Callimachus to the biographers (Xenophon, Plutarch, Philostratus). The figures of the narrator and narratee are seen as complementary, but in general there is no questioning of either the discursive depth of the instance of enunciation or of the pragmatics implied by the enunciative strategies of a narrator (or speaker) and an interlocutor (allocutee) whose figures refer only indirectly to the protagonists of the communication in its context. Nor, generally speaking, do these studies offer any observations on the essential articulation between the narrated (“story” or “narrative”) and enunciation of the narrated (“discourse”), as mentioned above following Benveniste. What this mechanical treatment of narratological categories shows is that the numerous procedures of enunciative intervention found in the various forms of Greek narrative rarely translate into the interpretative question of the relation established by the enunciative strategies integral to all forms of discourse between the world of the text, on the one hand, and the institutional and cultural world to which it refers, on the other. Discussion of the figure of the narrator (and of the narratee) boils down to issues of “narratorial repertoire” and narrative technique in the interplay of external and internal narrators, implicit (or covert) and external narrators as well as primary and secondary narrators in combinations that are claimed to run through the different discursive genres. As regards the temporal dimension of the narrative, based upon a distinction between fabula (the narrative actions in their chronological order), story (corresponding to the order of narration, close to the notion of plot) and text (narrative realisation, roughly equivalent to sjuzhet), we find an interplay of internal and external analepses and prolepses, either narratorial or actorial, sometimes proceeding (in the case of analepses) by repetition or as a complement. While doubtless suitable for a study of the temporal articulation of narrative, this technical apparatus is not operational as far as the spatial dimension is concerned. The analysis of space in the more fully developed Homeric Hymns, a collection of essentially narrative poems, tells us nothing about the coincidence of the cultic and cultural geographies mapped by the narrative and the double spatial movement of its enunciation. Yet, in a song as ritual prelude to other

ratives (545–553); by de Jong and Nünlist (2007) on narrative time; and by de Jong (2012) on the space of narration. See the excellent review article on the latter volume by Grethlein (2012).



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poetic and narrative recitations such as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the dual narrative and enunciative focus, first on Delos, then on Delphi, is essential for an understanding of the function of musical recitation of a poem of this type.19 In the three volumes in question, covering a broad range of authors and genres, the scholarly reader is invited to peruse a collection of studies in the field of narrative syntax, articulated according to the parameters of narrator, time and space. Nowhere, however, are the semantic and pragmatic issues at stake made explicit. What we have, then, are three galleries of narrative analyses that dissociate the enunciative, temporal and spatial dimensions of the narratives in question. Actually, it is the very interlacing of these features that produces, between narrative and discourse, the pragmatics of the discursive form. As a consequence, these technical essays turn out to be of relatively limited hermeneutic interest. In fact, it is only with the introduction of metalepsis (whose narratological formulation dates from Genette) that analysis of the Greek heroic narratives which we refer to as myths is finally released from the structuralist principle of immanence.20 The use of metalepsis to identify the modes of direct-speech interventions in the narrative parts of what are ritual action poems par excellence, namely the victory odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, inevitably reveals a convergence with the enunciative voices of the narrator in a poem sung and performed by a group of choristers. Once again, the pragmatic effects are in need of elucidation: a tension and a dynamic that are not only narrative but also enunciative—and pragmatic! The very idea of the narrator (standing before a narratee) in the act of narration tends, in the perspective of an enunciative dynamic, to merge the plane of narrative, along with its linguistic parameters of third-person pronoun, past tense and differentiated space, into that of the discourse that encompasses it via the parameters of the “I” enunciating here and now. We might add that Greek poetic and discursive forms offer countless possible ways in which the voice of the enunciator can overlap with that of the protagonists of the narrative expressing themselves in direct speech, for instance. The persona loquens is in a polyphonic dialogue with the protagonists of the narrative; he is thus situated between the

19 In the volume edited by de Jong (2012) on the space (of narration) in ancient Greek literature, the chapters on the Homeric Hymns (by Irene J. F. de Jong: 39–54) and on Theocritus (by J. H. H. Klooster: 99–118) are indicative of the limits of a structuralist narratological apparatus, the technical scope of which is amply illustrated by the List of Contents, pages xi–xiv: fabula/story/text, overt/covert narrator, etc. 20 Cf. de Jong (2013). In the narratological study of classical texts, and of historiography in particular, we observe that a remarkable leap forward in the linguistic analysis of utterances is achieved, from a temporal perspective, by examining how these utterances are articulated in relation to narrative structure. On this matter, see Allan (2007, 111–119).

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time of the (narrative) utterance (or “enunciate”) and that of its enunciated enunciation, and also between the space of what is spoken and that in which the enunciation is made. The gestures of enunciative, temporal and spatial deixis play a crucial role in establishing these convergences and coincidences. Especially through self-referential enunciates or utterances which can be considered as speech acts, they refer more or less directly to the circumstances of enunciation at a given historical and cultural situation.21 In a narratological-pragmatic perspective of this sort, the often delicate delimitation between narrative and discourse extends to the operational distinction (already mentioned) between enunciate or utterance (énoncé) and enunciated enunciation (énonciation énoncée). The focal point is an instance of enunciation which may be present in the discourse as linguistic first-person forms: no longer a narrator, but an “I”-speaker whose discursive figure refers only indirectly to whoever is singing the narrative poem or reciting the discourse in a specific ritual performance and subject to specific enunciative circumstances, historically and culturally marked in space and time.

4 Greek Myths and Generic Forms From the pragmatic narratological viewpoint, Greek myths offer a wealth of illustrations. Indeed, these narratives, presenting protagonists from the heroic past of Hellenistic cities who are in close contact with the Gods, display a narrative logic which often results in the practical logic of ritual. Progressing from a foundational starting-point (arkhé), their temporal logic is generally turned, in a narrative tension, towards the present. Furthermore, these narratives which, for the indigenous audience portrayed the palaiá and the arkhaîa of the community (i. e., the story of the founding fathers), have only come down to us in a number poetic, historiographic and rhetorical forms: Homeric poems, melic poetry, tragedies, genealogical narratives, oratorical speeches. They exist only in forms which all demonstrate, to varying degrees, a strong pragmatic dimension. These forms, traditionally considered as (poetic) genres, play a central, constitutive role in the production of a narrative whose internal logic and semantic configuration are

21 For an appraisal of several earlier studies on the narration of the myths transmitted in the form of sung ritualised poetry known as melos (wrongly called “lyric poetry”), cf. Calame (2013, 157–165). On the “built-in indexicality” found in numerous Greek poetical forms in connection with their performance, see the studies collected by Felson (2004) as well as, for instance, Bakker (2009).



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dependent at all times upon the circumstances of its enunciation: the ritual situation of enunciation such as the Great Panathenaea and its contests in the rhapsodic recitation of Homeric poetry, or the Great Dionysia with its mousikòs agón for tragedy in the case of fifth-century Athens, for example. There is nothing codified about the discursive forms that we, from a distance of more than two millennia, have identified as genres: these forms were open to the creativity of poets who applied to them what, to us, a postiori, appear to be generic—unwritten and eminently open-ended—rules. In traditional cultures, moreover, generic forms are understood and classified in partial, non-systematic ways which, in general, do not correspond to ours. Nevertheless, as a language form intimately linked to institutionally-integrated turns of phrase based on aesthetically inspired linguistic regularities, genres have an indispensable role to play in the verbal and ritual actualisation of mythological narrative.22 Indeed, given its aesthetic nature, the generic form lies at the intersection of a series of linguistic, poetic forms and usages inscribed in a tradition on the one hand and, on the other, certain institutionalized or ritualized conditions of production and reception. Thanks to the creative practices of poets acting in their author-function, these generic forms and usages demonstrate their pertinence in poetic practice—at once semantic, social and cultural. Thus the role of the generic, poetic form is to ensure that the mythical narrative is discursivised in such a way as to confer upon it its practical effects of meaning: those of its internal pragmatics, insofar as the heroic narrative often assumes the function of a (narrative) argument in the discursive form in question; and those of its external pragmatics, through which the (to our eyes) mythical narrative has effects of an aesthetic, emotional and representational order—all of this in connection with a particular performance conditions in a defined historical, social and religious situation. I have more than once had the opportunity to point out the role of poetic form, and of the pragmatics attached to it, in the discursivisation of mythical episodes in classical Greece taken from the great heroic saga of the Trojan War.23 This is the case, for instance, with the narrative evocation by the melic poet Bacchylides (a contemporary of Pindar) of the exploits of Ajax and Achilles before the walls of

22 Todorov (1990 [1978], 10) observed that “the genres of discourse […] depend quite as much on a society’s linguistic raw material as on its historically circumscribed ideology.” For their part, Adam and Heidmann (2009, 11–23) prefer to speak of “genericity” insofar as all discourse belongs to several genres. This is particularly true of Attic tragedy. See also the decisive earlier study on genre by Schaeffer (1989, 164–185). On Greek poetic forms displaying strong pragmatic effects, see Calame (2006). 23 See in particular the study of the Greek myths as narrative poetic acts offered in Calame (2010a).

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Troy. The two great Homeric heroes are the grandsons of Aeacus, who is himself, as son of Zeus and the nymph Aegina, the founder of the eponymous island. Now, Aegina is none other than the city of the athlete whose victory at the Panhellenic Nemean games is celebrated in this eulogistic chant as well as the place where musical performance of the poem takes place in a ritual, choral performance. The same coincidence between the heroic narrative action, the enunciated act of singing and performance of musical ritual is to be found in a fragmentary poem by Sappho: in a local version, the narrative allusion to a “return” of the Atridae from the battlefield of Troy is centred on the enunciation of the chant addressed to the goddess Hera in the very sanctuary in which, in the centre of the island of Lesbos, the ritual melic poem composed by Sappho was sung. In each of these two cases, the poet’s pragmatic discursivisation reshapes the traditional narrative with its heroic action; the discourse re-directs it, according to its own narrative logic and in its own possible world, towards utterances in “I” and “we” in the present instant. This poetic present coincides with the hic et nunc of the ritualized performance of the poem in particular circumstances of enunciation and in a particular historico-cultural situation. Notably, it is through the generic form which it adopts that the heroic poetic narrative finds its pertinence here. Thus the orientation of action in the narrated “myth” towards the present time and place, effectuated through the generic form, is achieved by a series of discursivisation strategies which are of the order both of narrative logic and of performative enunciation. Narrative action, the act of poetic singing, ritual musical performance of the poem in a narrativity arising partly out of “mythic” narrative and partly out of ritual action—such “performative” narrativity must be examined in the light of an enthnopoetics and, more generally, an anthropology of language practices.24 But there are further considerations. Indeed, what is striking in the area of Attic tragedy is the staging of episodes from the foundational heroic history of the city of Athens which result in the establishment of a cult by the will of a divinity intervening ex machina. Such is the case, for instance, in the second tragedy by Euripides based on the “myth” of Hippolytus. Through his exclusive worship of the goddess Artemis, the youthful hero sets in play a narrative disequilibrium in the form of Aphrodite’s jealousy. The love, aroused by the goddess in the manipulation stage, that Phaedra, his step-mother, feels for the young Hippolytus and her ensuing suicide lead to confrontation between the latter, who behaves like

24 Elements for a new ethnopoetics have been outlined in the studies assembled in Calame et al. (2010). For an anthropology of the performative dimension of forms of discourse, cf. Bornand and Leguy (2013, 147–169).



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a girl refusing marriage, and his father Theseus, the founding hero of Athenian democracy. Through the intervention of Poseidon, Theseus’s curse upon his son results in Hippolytus’s exile and later death, when he is thrown from his own chariot. At this point, Artemis intervenes and decides that the young hero will henceforward be worshipped by maidens preparing for marriage in a heroic cult established in Troezen, but which is also to be found in the vicinity of the Acropolis in Athens. In Attic tragedy, the heroic space of the dramatised action and the ritual space of the performance of the tragedy are constantly intermingled. As regards the plot dramatised by Euripides, the narrative competence and performance that turn Hippolytus into a tragic hero and which, by leading to his death, result in a resolution and sanction phase that corresponds to a ritual act. There is a similar situation when Euripides, again, presents the war waged by Erechtheus, the legendary king of Athens, against Eumolpus, a Thracian and son of Poseidon. While Erechtheus manages to defeat Eumolpus and his army, thanks to the sacrifice of his daughters demanded by the oracle, the god Poseidon, with one thrust of his trident, buries the hero in the bowels of the earth from which, moreover, he was born. When we reach the narrative and dramatic resolution, it is Athena, the tutelary goddess of the city, who implements the final sanction phase of a plot which, again, ends with the death of the hero. While the wife of the heroic sovereign of Athens becomes the first priestess of Athena, Erechtheus, the autochthonous king who is attached to the idea of annexing the Mysteries of Eleusis to Athens, is ultimately honoured side by side with Poseidon, the city’s other tutelary god, in the Erechtheon, which is then under construction.25 In other terms: a dramatisation in the cultural memory, by a tragic poet, of the religious and ideological foundations of the classical city. Through its dramatised discursivisation, the narrative is informed in three convergent ways. First, as regards its narrative logic, the conclusive “sanction” phase corresponds to the establishment of a cult worshipping one or the other of the protagonists of the narrated action; in an etiological perspective, the outcome of a single heroic (narrative) act is the foundation of a periodically renewed ritual action. Furthermore, the poem (or in our case the text) displays the enunciative markers of this process appertaining to the pragmatic logic of the narrative. These markers can be found not only in the pronominal usage which Benveniste subsumes under the concept of the formal apparatus of enunciation (consider, in this connection, the choir’s chants in the melic mode) but also in different gestures of verbal deixis designating the parameters of the performance situation and in the innumerable possible modalisations of the (narrative) utterance: “this city”

25 For further detail on this etiological conclusion of the tragedy, see Calame (2010b).

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is not just the city of Athens where the heroic action takes place, but it is also the city hic et nunc of the enunciation and ultimately of the ritual performance of the dramatic poem. Last, the narrative, obeying a logic of a pragmatic order, is effectively shaped by the generic form, thus reinforcing its unfailing pragmatic dimension between linguistic regularities and cultural conventions of acceptance and efficacy. Moreover, in its dramatic tension, the narrative is punctuated by enunciative procedures which present it to a particular public—in the “here“ and “now” of the poetic, musical and ritual performance as a cultic act that is part of the festival of the Great Dionysia, as far as Attic tragedy is concerned. The distinction between story/narrative and discourse proves to be particularly permeable to this interplay of generic form and enunciative performative, grounding the present in all types of narrative.26 The value of this distinction, which can but be operational, lies in the fact that this makes it possible to historicise, in an anthropological and ethnopoetic perspective, the cultural values expressed and dramatised by classical tragedy in its ritual form, for instance. Moreover, from the perspective of the etiological process mentioned above, the transition from spoken dramatised narrativity to the narrativity of ritual action itself is made possible.

5 Neither “Classical” nor “Postclassical” but Pragmatic Together with the “discursive turn,” the “pragmatic turn” has had a decisive influence on opening up the methodological horizon and the diversification of francophone structural narratology. It is from this point of view that, as suggested in the opening pages of this essay, the distinction proposed by David Herman, and widely adopted by other researchers, between “classical” and “postclassical” narratology loses all pertinence.27 It is beyond dispute that, beginning in the early 1980s, and particularly in international research conducted largely in English, there occurred an extraordinary diversification among the approaches to narrative that laid claim to the field of narratology. Diversification in the fields of investigation and application: drama and theatre, history, cinema, the visual arts, musical practices, media (includ-

26 On this distinction, see above note 15. 27 According to the distinction reiterated and formalised by Herman (1999, 1–2; cf. Herman 1997). Among the numerous commentaries, see for instance Prince (2006) and (2008).



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ing the pale “storytelling,” generally without great methodological rigour, etc.), blogs, etc. Diversification of the approaches invoking epistemologies belonging to other research fields: comparative narratology (comparative literature), feminist narratology, postmodern and poststructuralist narratology (inspired from deconstructionism), pragmatic narratology (an outgrowth of speech act theory), rhetorical narratology, unnatural narratology, cognitive narratology, etc. Diversification, finally, of the methodological perspectives and analytical tools: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, historiography, the philosophy of action, possible worlds theories, text world theories, theories of fiction, etc. 28 By contrast, the inevitable interaction between theories of narrative providing epistemological perspectives and analytical concepts, on the one hand, and the narratological interpretations of enacted narratives, on the other, has contributed, and continues to do so, to updating the available approaches to narrativity. From this perspective, it has been possible to make a distinction between “extensional” and “immanentist” approaches to narrativity coupled with “intensional” or “scalar” approaches: in the former, narrativity is the organising principle of certain discourses; in the latter, it is context and pragmatics that determine the narrative quality of a discourse, in the dialectic and tension between represented time (a return to erzählte Zeit?) and the time of communication (Erzählzeit?)—not the “what” but the “how” of the narrative.29 From the perspective of narrativity, this leads Gerald Prince, in particular, to make a distinction between “narrativehood” and “narrativeness.” As far as narrativehood is concerned, there is narrative (considered as a class) if the latter is seen as “the logically consistent representation of two asynchronous events that do not presuppose or imply one other” (Prince 2008, 19; cf. Prince 2003, 5–6). According to this view, perceiving a discourse as being more or less narrative is dependent on an extensional criterion of this sort. As for narrativeness, this is of an intensional order, corresponding to various qualitative features characterised by the adjective “narrative” (20).30 Still, it would be helpful to know what exactly is being designated here by the term “narrative.” Whatever the case may be with this narrativeness that corresponds to

28 An ambitious attempt to provide a global synthesis of this diversification of narratology into narratologies can be found in Nünning (2003). For a thoughtful appraisal of these developments, see Prince (2003, 2006), and for a retrospective view, Alber and Fludernik (2010). 29 Abbott’s (2014 [2009]) overview of theories of narrative can be usefully compared with the position defended by Sternberg (2010), who is highly critical of objectivist conceptions of narrative and narrativity. On the subject of narrativity, see the excellent synthesis offered by Pier (2013). 30 See also the similar distinction drawn by Ryan (2005, 347) between “being a narrative” and “possessing narrativity.” On the related question of minimal narrative, see footnote 10 above.

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quality of narrativity, as opposed to the narrativehood of class membership, the distinction is so finely drawn that Prince finds himself constrained to introduce a third concept: “narratability” (or “tellability”31), a principle that bears on how the attention of the narrative audience is maintained. Akin to the notion of pertinence employed in cognitive anthropology, narratability (or tellability) may well correspond to one dimension of pragmatics. Whatever the case, as a result of this focus on the narrative dimension, two considerations are overlooked: first, the enunciative aspect of any narration, of any discursivisation involving elements of narrative; second, the essential question of reference to the possible world constructed in narrative and thus to the distinction between the factual and the fictional. There is little doubt that the constant process of updating how narrativity is problematized and conceived results from the changing demands on reflection of an anthropological order as well as from the need to keep abreast of the successive cultural turns and epistemological paradigms that occur hic et nunc. I wish to maintain, however, that this productive interaction with the changes in the modern paradigm of the humanities has not been affected by the bifurcation, triggered by the structuralist distinction rediviva, between “classical” and “postclassical.” In the constant re-examination of the notion of narrativity, this irrelevant distinguo has shifted attention away from narratives actualised as (enacted) speech towards the (universal, natural?) procedures of narrative production as well as from the mechanisms of their reception. In effect, the classical/postclassical paradigm precludes the prefigurations, configurations and refigurations of time, as elaborated in detail by Paul Ricœur in his three-volume work Time and Narrative, with regard to the discursivisation of human actions. This is not to say, however, that narrativity can be generalized to the point where it can be considered “the organising principle of all discourse.”32 From this perspective, cognitive narratology still has some way to go if it is to fulfil the ambitions and promises that some have seen for it in the cognitive sciences. As regards the generation and production of narrative, the cerebral functions identified in the neuronal sciences by Antonio Damasio, for instance, which contribute to the formation of the “autobiographical ego” and its memorial dimension, are far too general to account not only for syntax but also, and above all, for the extremely complex semantics of enacted narrative as found in a myth,

31 For an informative historical overview of this concept, first proposed by sociolinguist William Labov, see Baroni (2014 [2009]). 32 Cf. Greimas and Courtés, who observe that “narrative structures may be defined as constitutive of a deep* [sic] level of the semiotic process” (1979, 248). On Ricœur, see section 1 above.



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be it Greek or otherwise. Identifying the functional areas of the brain related to the human being’s narrative competence has told us nothing so far about narrative-production procedures, which are too often reduced to a plot or to a mere sequence of utterances. This perspective then converges with that of the most structural narratology imaginable: the procedures of narration and its enunciation, with their pragmatics, are treated with total disregard.33 Furthermore, the descriptions of the neuronal foundations of narrative offered by cognitive psychology are in the main, for the time being, at least, focused on narrative dysfunction and the corresponding cerebral lesions. Such descriptions are less concerned with the neuronal capacities of narrative generation (and thus of discursivisation) than they are with the mental processing of narrative. The key factors here are the attempts by cognitivists to describe the procedures which allow us to ascribe mental states to others and to imagine the motivations that drive them to act.34 From a narratological point of view, the task, therefore, is to elucidate the way the reader produces, through mental or psycho-cognitive operations, a representation of the content recounted by the text. To do this is, in both cases, to overlook, inter alia, the anthropopoietic interaction of narrative generation and reception not only within the developmental context of the neuronal narrative faculties (if, indeed, they exist as such) but also within the context of the creation and reception of enacted narratives and the practical action they are able to orientate.35 From this point of view, the proposed switch to a “softer” version of cognitive narratology, and thus of the structures of narrative production such as it has long been thought could be identified in texts with the procedures of reception and comprehension of narratives, may very well be more promising in the short term. Here again there is no rupture since, as research conducted by Wolfgang Iser and Umberto Eco has shown, it is possible to identify the various scenarios and sequential schemes that enable a reader to decipher and understand a narrative. Whatever cognitive status they are assigned, these schemes make it possible to postulate the existence of a readerly narrative competence which can in no

33 Cf. Damasio (1999, 195–233). For some insightful observations on this subject, see Schaeffer (2010, 219–229). 34 This is a particular focus of the so-called Theory of Mind in narrative analysis as advocated, for instance, by Lisa Zunshine (2006). A related approach is that of representation of consciousness studied through cognitive parameters by Alan Palmer (2004). There is a growing body of literature devoted to these questions. 35 Ralf Schneider, in his contribution to this volume, reflects on the possible future of a neuro-narratology, expressing reservations as to the ability of the neuro-sciences to explain in neural terms the production and reception of narratives.

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way be conceived without an analogous competence on the part of he or she who conceives a narrative, whether related orally or in writing. Alongside the intertextual scenarios, among which are the canonical schema of narration, common or endo-narrative scenarios can be interpreted in terms of “scripts” or “frames” which set out an encyclopaedic universe of presuppositions and prefigurations bearing on the reception of narrative action.36 Scripts (and schemata) as mental representations or interpretative instruments? Of what order? Now, if the notion of script, once extended to fictive intertextual scripts, has the merit of restating the problem of the complex (and interactive) relations between narrative actions (stereotyped and generally entailing emplotment) and “routine” actions (everyday actions in the world), then two questions arise as to discourses of a narrative order. On the one hand, the study of scripts does not appear to take account of the enunciative dimension and dynamic that informs a sequence of narrative utterances (or enunciates) in conjunction with the pragmatics that this implies; once again, the perspective is structural. On the other hand, Herman’s attempt, grounded in the postulate of the existence of (mental? genetic? neuronal?) scripts that identify the markers and criteria allowing us to recognise a narrative as narrative, also places us in the area of the cognitive faculties that enable us to identify a narrative as such and thus engage in the process of narrative reception. But insofar as the identifying scripts are constructs produced by the narratologist himself (on a neuronal basis?), the undertaking appears to be largely circular in nature (cf. Herman 1999, 24–27; see the critical commentary by Schaeffer 2010, 229–230). In any case, and whatever their nature, scripts as understood by narratologists are generally drawn from different forms of narrative discourse. The complex and interactive relations that narrative scripts, which are linguistic in nature, entertain with the schemes of daily action would require study in close collaboration with sociologists and anthropologists. In sum, it is as if there were a revival of the ambition formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss to uncover certain “operational modes,” if not the very structures of the human mind, building upon a structural, transformational analysis of myth.37 According to this point of view, those constructions identified as narrative structures form an integral part of our mental operations. Always ready to indulge in naturalisation, the ambitious cognitive sciences still have some way to go before they can identify and describe as mental faculties the neuronal dispo-

36 On sequential schemes and scripts, see in particular Baroni (2005, 2007); for an overview of schemata, see Emmott and Alexander (2014 [2009]). 37 See the concluding pages of Lévi-Strauss’s vast comparative undertaking in Mythologiques (1981 [1971], 639).



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sitions and psycho-cognitive processes of narrative and, more generally, of poetic creation (and reception) in terms other than those of general “narrative models of understanding” (cf. Abbott 2003), of “narrative as a basic and general resource of thought” (e. g., Herman 2003) or of the “mind-narrative nexus” (e. g., Herman 2014 [2009]). The question, then, still remains: can these processes be described and understood independently of the differentiated historical and cultural contexts in which they occur, in distinct belief communities? Thus, beyond the reductive distinction between classical narratology and postclassical narratologies, beyond the (in themselves) legitimate questions into the neuronal processes resulting in narration and those enabling the latter’s reception in a shared narrative competence, and beyond the explorations of cognitive science, which may one day yield an account of the interactive relationship between the production of narratives and the effective direction given to our actions in society, narratology, with its plurality of approaches, can be defined as a set of interpretative procedures; it is focused upon different forms of narrative realised discursively in different media adopting different generic forms and deploying numerous enunciative strategies. Starting from an anthropological perspective on the creation/production and performance of narratives, the narratological study of (Greek) myths can legitimately claim to belong to a linguistic narratology grounded in verbal and textual indices. It is an approach to narrative action, to the logic that articulates it with its potential for development, to its protagonists with the content vested in actions and actors; an approach to its temporal articulation in the complex, multidimensional progress of narration and construction of its spatial reference-frame; an approach to its spaces of deployment; an approach to the semantics of any narrative developed in a semio-narratology; an approach to the referential indices between factual narrative and fictional narrative; an approach to the enunciative indices which refer not only to a rhythm of narration and its tensive pulsation rich in potentialities but also to a powerful pragmatics. Above all, however, we must never forget that narrative performance itself is an action! In an act of ritual communication, and even in the act of reading, narrative performance plays an essential role in the interactive dialectic between (narrated) fictional acts and practical actions. In its use of conceptual analytical operators, the (semio-)narratological analysis of Greek heroic narrative we call myths corresponds, then, to the interpretative undertaking of intercultural translation demanded by cultural and social anthropology. The generic enunciative poeticity of narrative, with its action organised into plot (which remains essential!), together with its aesthetic and emotional effects, makes narration a form of practical knowledge; it emerges out of enunciative procedures and forms of discourse that ensure the pragmatic scope of its effects of sense. This requires of us a narratological approach of a

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semio-narrative, hermeneutic and pragmatic order; it belongs within the ambit of a cultural anthropology and, more specifically, of an ethnopoetics. In conclusion, we can return now to the handbook entry “Narratology” referred to at the beginning of this chapter in which three tendencies in the attempt to define the field are identified: narratology as a theory, a method or a discipline (Meister 2014 [2009], 623). The author continues his commentary by advocating that theory and method be subsumed under narratology as a discipline. In contrast to this view, an interpretative encounter with a “literature” centred on narratives that we perceive as myths, but that are narrated in poetic performances, leads us to see in narratology a set of interpretative methods. Historically, these methods are inspired by structuralism, which tends to bracket out the pragmatic dimension from all forms of discourse. Granting narratology the status of a discipline risks enclosing it in internal debates over theory such as the one that has resulted in the “classical” vs “postclassical” distinction.38 This can only deprive narratology of one of its main epistemological merits, which is to provide conceptual tools making it possible to increase the intelligibility of objects experienced as narrative; in this way, narratology allows us to surmount the limits assigned to disciplines by broadening narratological analysis so as to include an anthropological and, when appropriate, ethnopoetic perspective. 

Translated by Rodney Coward and John Pier

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. 2003. “Unnarratable Knowledge: The Difficulty of Understanding Evolution by Natural Selection.” In Herman, ed., 143–162. Abbott, H. Porter. 2014 [2009]. “Narrativity.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 587–607. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrativity (Revised 20 January 2014) Adam, Jean-Michel. 1996 [1984]. Le récit. 6th edition. Paris: PUF. Adam, Jean-Michel. 2011. Genres de récits: Narrativité et généricité des textes. Louvainla-Neuve: Harmattan Academia. Adam, Jean-Michel, and Ute Heidmann. 2009. Le texte littéraire. Pour une approche interdisciplinaire. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia Bruylant. Alber, Jan, and Monica Fludernik. 2010. “Introduction.” In Postclassical Narratogy: Approaches and Analyses, edited by J. A. and M. F., 1–31. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

38 Indeed, it might even be wondered whether this distinction has been introduced so as to promote a cognitive narratology which, in the end, is a continuation of structural narratology.



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Allan, Rutger. 2007. “Sense and sentence complexity: Sentence structure, sentence connection, and tense-aspect as indicators of narrative mode in Thucydides’ Histories.” In The Language of Literature. Linguistic Approaches to Classical Texts, edited by A. R. and Michel Buijs, 93–121. Leiden: Brill. Aristotle. 1968. Poetics. Translated with a commentary by D. W. Lucas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bakker, Egbert J. 2009. “Homer, Odysseus, and the narratology of performance.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by Jonas Grethlein and Antonio Rengakos, 117–136. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Bal, Mieke. 1977. Narratologie (Essais sur la signification narrative dans quatre romans modernes). Paris: Klincksieck. Bal, Mieke. 1997 [1985]. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd edition. Toronto, etc.: University of Toronto Press. Baroni, Raphaël. 2005. “Compétences des lecteurs et schèmes séquentiels.” Littérature 137: 111–126. Baroni, Raphaël. 2007. “Le rôle des scripts dans le récit.” In R. B. La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise, 167–224. Paris: Seuil. Baroni, Raphaël. 2014 [2009]. “Tellability.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 836–845. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/tellability (Revised 18 April 2014) Benveniste, Émile. 1973 [1966]. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary E. Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Benveniste, Émile. 2014 [1974]. “The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation.” In The Discourse Studies Reader: Main Currents in Theory and Analysis, edited by Johannes Angermuller, Dominique Maingueneau and Ruth Wodak, 140–145. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bornand, Sandra, and Cécile Leguy. 2013. Anthropologie des pratiques langagières. Paris: Armand Colin. Calame, Claude. 1995 [1986]. The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janice Orion. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Calame, Claude. 2006. “Identifications génériques entre marques discursives et pratiques énonciatives: Pragmatique des genres ‘lyriques.’” In Le savoir des genres, edited by Raphaël Baroni and Marielle Macé, 35–55. Rennes: La Licorne. Calame, Claude. 2009 [2006]. Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece. Heroic Reference and Ritual Gestures in Time and Space. Translated by Harlan Patton. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Calame, Claude. 2010a. “Fiction référentielle et poétique rituelle: Pour une pragmatique du mythe (Sappho 17 et Bacchylide 13).” In Mythe et Fiction, edited by Danièle Auger and Charles Delattre, 117–135. Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Ouest. Calame, Claude. 2010b. “La pragmatique poétique des mythes grecs: Fiction référentielle et performance rituelle.” In Fiction et cultures, edited by Françoise Lavocat and Anne Duprat, 33–56. Paris: SFLGC. Calame, Claude. 2013. “Pour une anthropologie historique des récits héroïques grecs: Analyse structurale et pragmatique poétique des ‘mythes.’” Europe 91: 147–169. Calame, Claude. 2015. Qu’est-ce que la mythologie grecque? Paris: Gallimard. Calame, Claude, Florence Dupont, Bernard Lortat-Jacob and Maria Manca, eds. 2010. La voix actée. Pour une nouvelle ethnopoétique. Paris: Kimé. Coste, Didier. 1989. Narrative as Communication. Foreword by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Coste, Didier, and John Pier. 2009. “Narrative Levels.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert, 295–308. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. de Jong, Irene J. F. 2013. “Metalepsis and Embedded Speech in Pindaric and Bacchylidean Myth.” In Über die Grenze: Metalepsis in Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums, edited by Ute E. Eisen and Peter von Möllendorf, 97–118. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. de Jong, Irene J. F., René Nünlist and Angus Bowie, eds. 2004. Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative I. Leiden and Boston: Brill. de Jong, Irene J. F., and René Nünlist, eds. 2007. Time in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative II. Leiden and Boston: Brill. de Jong, Irene J. F., ed. 2012. Space in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative III. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Eco, Umberto. 1984. “Narrative Structures in Fleming.” In U. E. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 144–172. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Emmott, Catherine, and Marc Alexander. 2014 [2009]. “Schemata.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 547–563. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/schemata (Revised 22 April 2014) Felson, Nancy, ed. 2004, The Poetics of Deixis in Alcman, Pindar, and Other Lyric. Arethusa 37. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1980 [1972]. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Joseph Courtés. 1979. Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette. Grethlein, Jonas. 2012. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, September 18. http://bmcr.brynmawr. edu/2012/2012-09-18.html (Accessed 7 February 2015) Herman, David. 1997. “Scripts, Sequences and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology.” PMLA 112: 1046–1059. Herman, David. 1999. “Introduction.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by D. H., 1–30. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Herman, David. 2003. “Stories as a Tool for Thinking.” In Herman, ed., 163–192. Herman, David. 2014 [2009]. “Cognitive Narratology.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 1: 46–64. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/cognitive-narratology-revisedversion-uploaded-22-september-2013 (Revised 24 December 2013) Herman, David, ed. 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Herman, David, ed. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hühn, Peter, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, eds. 2014. Handbook of Narratology. 2nd edition, 2 volumes. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Available online as the living handbook of narratology at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller, eds. 2003. What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1981 [1971]. The Naked Man: Mythologiques, Volume Four. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: Chicago University Press.



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Meister, Jan Christoph. 2014 [2009]. “Narratology.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 623–645. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narratology (Revised 18 January 2014) Niederhoff, Burkhard. 2014 [2009]. “Focalization.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 1: 197–205. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/focalization (Revised 24 September 2013 Nünning, Ansgar. 2003. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Uses of the Term.” In Kindt and Müller, eds., 239–275. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Pier, John. 2003. “On the Semiotic Parameters of Narrative: A Critique of Story and Discourse.” In Kindt and Müller, eds., 73–97. Pier, John. 2013. “Les enjeux de la narrativité.” Paper presented at the inaugural meeting of the Recherches Contemporaines en Narratologie Seminar, CRAL, EHESS, Paris. November 19. Pier, John. 2014. “Narrative Levels.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 547–563. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-levels-revised-version-uploaded23-april-2014 (Revised 10 October 2014) Prince, Gerald. 2003. “Surveying Narratology.” In Kindt and Müller, eds., 1–16. Prince, Gerald. 2006. “Narratologie classique et narratologie post-classique.” Vox Poetica http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/articles/prince.html (Accessed 7 February 2015) Prince, Gerald. 2008. “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratability.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 19–27. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Revaz, Françoise. 2009. Introduction à la narratologie. Action et narration. Bruxelles: De Boeck/Duculot. Ricœur, Paul. 1984 [1983]. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004. “Introduction.” In Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by M.-L. R., 1–40. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Narrative.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 344–348. London and New York: Routledge. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2007. “Toward a definition of narrative.” In Herman, ed., 23–35. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2010. “Le traitement cognitif de la narration.” In Narratologies contemporaines: Approches nouvelles pour la théorie et l’analyse du récit, edited by John Pier and Francis Berthelot, 215–231. Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1989. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil. Schmid, Wolf. 2010 [2005]. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Steinrück, Martin. 1992. Rede und Kontext: zum Verhältnis von Person und Erzähler in frühgriechischen Texten. Bonn: Rudolf Habelt. Sternberg, Meir. 2010. “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm.” Poetics Today 31 (3): 507–659. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1990 [1978]. Genres in Discourse. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Huaiyu Luo (Beijing)

Comparison of Chinese-Western Narrative Poetics: State of the Art Chinese narrative poetics has attracted considerable scholarly enquiry over the past several decades.1 In the world of literary theory and criticism, this surge in interest might be explained by two major factors. First, the quantity and quality of Chinese narrative literature, both pre-modern and contemporary, have been remarkable enough to make a continuum of Chinese narrative poetics self-justifiable. Many scholars have therefore begun to survey, in the light of contemporary narrative theory, the Chinese narrative repository for “gems”—both lustrous and hidden. Second, Western structural narratology, with all its intricate systematicity, has been questioned from a growing diversity of perspectives amid new theoretical trends. In this sense, it might be said that comparative studies have taken vantage points rightly upon the inadequacies of the structuralist approach, which Terry Eagleton critiqued as “the ironic act of shutting out the material world in order the better to illuminate our consciousness of it” (1996, 95). A polemical view as such would be unfair in the sense that the foundation of any theory always presupposes and entails a certain form of “anatomy.” Nevertheless, Eagleton’s critique is still meaningful for an impartial reflection upon the possible limitations of structuralist narratology. As is widely agreed, the structuralist approach to narrative can become biased by analyzing structural elements and principles independently of a larger socio-cultural context. Narratologists have now generally agreed on the decisive role of context in narratological criticism as well as in narratological theorizing. In an effort to harmonize classical and post-classical approaches to narrative, Dan Shen,2 for example, has argued that “contextual narratologies and formal narrative poetics have nourished each other over the past twenty years or so” (2005, 142).3 Moreover, through the struc-

1 Aware of the fact that there is already a well-developed narrative theory, or narratology, in the West and that there was only a scattered distribution of narrative thought in a vast body of critical discourse in pre-modern China, this article uses the word “poetics” in a general sense to accommodate the two sides in comparison. It should also be clarified that what is meant by narrative in the present context is primarily narrative in its literary and verbal form, particularly the novel. 2 This article presents Chinese personal names in two forms: a) for names prior to the 1980s when China began to reopen, family names precede given names, as in the case of Jin Shengtan; b) for names known after the 1980s, family names follow given names, as in the case of Longxi Zhang. 3 For more on this topic, see Shen’s contribution to this volume. DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-018

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turalist lens, which focuses exclusively on the deep structure and surface level of texts, certain subtle transactions essential to the processes of narrative creation and interpretation might not have been addressed with due attention or importance. For instance, how do we view the death and/or “return” of the author? How do we think of the author who has “fathered” a piece of work through his choices, design, values and intentions? How do we understand the affective force of a narrative? To what extent can the author, or even an intrusive critic, make use of his “license” for generic or stylistic experimentation? Can there be permutations that defy or deviate from structuralist narrative categorization? Might there be a message beyond what is implied in narrative structuring? The list could go on. Traditional Chinese narrative poetics, for its part, has explored in its own right the issues of authority, literary mind, narrative craftsmanship, moral and philosophical underpinnings, superstructure and macrostructure, psychological sophistication, unity in miscellaneousness, the real in the unreal, etc. In clear contradistinction to Western structural narrative theory, however, traditional Chinese narrative poetics highlights the following three aspects. First, instead of being “apt to beat over matters,”4 it places particular emphasis on literary intuition, pleasure from punctilious (sometimes repetitive) critical reading and fluidity of the aesthetic-appreciative process. It is interesting to note that these factors are also important for the interpretation of many other forms of Chinese art. Second, there seems to be a perennial interest in the socio-historical meanings of narratives which has led to the common use of meta-narratives by the author and an assiduous quest for, and construction of, authorial intentions and images by the reader-critic. Needless to say, representative masterpieces of Chinese fiction such as Dream of the Red Chamber, The Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are all structured and narrated around certain Chinese philosophical hypotheses about social reality or human existence.5 Generations of critics have been obsessed with revealing the personality of the author not only through the

4 In his essay Of Studies, Sir Francis Bacon wrote “If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers’ cases” (2006 [1597], 226). 5 There are hypotheses in such works about social life and human destiny at different levels. For example, in terms of “power and order,” there are those who believe that “The Empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide,” as in Romance of the Three Kingdoms and in The Water Margin. In terms of “ethical codes,” there are those that either proclaim “Within the Four Seas, all men are brothers,” as in The Water Margin, or warn that “Karmic retribution is swift and certain,” or speak of “The four evils of wine, women, wealth and wrath” (disputable as this may be by today’s standards), as in The Water Margin and in The Plum in the Golden Vase. In terms of the “ultimate truth or vanity of human life,” there is the well-known epigram in the Dream of



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niceties and nuances of what’s been said but also through what might have been unsaid by the author and what is implied by the macro-structure as well as in the style,6 that is, the ineffable. Third, instead of establishing a critical terminology, traditional Chinese narrative poetics shows only a conservative interest in theoretical innovation and complication. The method was simply to enlist and invigorate those pre-existing notions which are essentially transgeneric and mostly metaphorical. There seems to have been a well-measured though paradoxical scheme to both bring out the generic particularities of narrative fiction and blur its boundaries with the other genres of literature and art. This feature is manifested in both narrative discourse and narrative criticism. In terms of narrative discourse, Chinese fiction, through the prominence of storytelling, also serves as a “melting pot” or “symbiotic site” for the fine features of many other genres such as historiography, mythology, street storytelling, drama, poetry and belles-lettres. Such a hybridity of genres has shaped not only the unique Chinese experience of novel reading but also its taste for “masterworks”7 or “books of genius.”8 In terms of narrative criticism, one easily finds that Chinese fiction has assimilated the same set of critical vocabulary that was originally intended for drama, poetry, painting and calligraphy, embroidery or even garden architecture and “wind and water” geomancy. Based on the above understanding, it can further be observed that Chinese narrative poetics, while giving due importance to narrativity and literariness, has prioritized the importance of “heart” or “literary mind”9 which, in principle, is communicable among the ideal author, the ideal critic and the ideal reader and is capable of mediating and adapting critical notions and appreciation across different artistic genres. In addition, Chinese narrative poetics has developed from and reinforced a reading habit in which narratives become something more in that the interest of the reader-critic is quite naturally split between the

the Red Chamber which states that “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.” 6 This unique tradition of authoring—and, correspondingly, interpreting—literary and historiographical works is famously known as the “technique of the Chunqiu” or the “diction of the Chunqiu.” It is generally believed that, when compiling the Chunqiu, translated as the Spring and Autumn Annals, Confucius was very deliberate and skillful in his marshalling of language as well as its proportions in order to transmit subtly his moral message and historical evaluations. 7 An equivalent for qishu (奇書, in Chinese). 8 An equivalent for caizi shu (才子書, in Chinese). 9 The notion of “literary mind” (wenxin, 文心) was first put forth by Chinese literary theorist Liu Xie (465–520) in his 50-chapter theoretical masterpiece, Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons [Wenxin diaolong, 文心雕龍].

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enigma of the author and the specific socio-historical situations that his narrative may fit into.10 With its unique features, categories and experience, Chinese narrative poetics may shed some new light on today’s narrative research, both classical and post-classical. The complementarity between Chinese and Western narrative poetics makes it necessary for comparative studies to be conducted so that not only a fuller picture of narrative theorizing can be revealed but also in order for a cross-culturally intelligible theory to be constructed so as to meet the growing global awareness and evolving landscape of world narrative practice. Over the past decades, this impervious domain has been penetrated by a growing cohort of Western scholars.11 However, as the field remains largely underexplored, especially by narratologists, and since it precludes synchronic comparisons,12 delineating major research phases and orientations becomes quite challenging. In pondering a solution, I was inspired by the lexical morphology of the Chinese verb jiejian (借鑒) which, being pragmatically equivalent to “learning from” or “drawing on,” comprises the character jie (借), meaning either “to borrow” or “to lend,” and jian (鑒), meaning “the mirror.” This led me further to an association with M. H. Abrams’s well-known metaphors of the “mirror” and the “lamp.”13 I thus decided to build on these two metaphors to bring out three different but interrelated approaches in the field, namely, “borrowing a foreign mirror,” “polishing one’s own mirror” and “lighting a lamp for inter-illumination.”

10 While bringing with it the benefits of literary imagination, such bifurcation also risks running amok under special circumstances. Chinese literary history has a series of heavy lessons to offer, from the intellectual disaster in the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC), when “books were burnt and Confucian scholars were buried alive,” to the height of the “literary inquisition” during the Manchurian-ruled Qing Dynasty (1636–1912) and to unchecked literary censorship and persecution during the “Cultural Revolution” (1966–76). 11 Western scholars whose works I have referred to for this study include, among others, Birch (1977), Bishop (1966), Cai (2000, 2002), Gu (2006), Hanan (1981, 1988), Hegel (1981, 1998, 1985, ed.), Hsia (1968, 1998, 2004), Liu (1975), Lu (1990, 2004), Mair (1983, 1994, ed.; 2001, ed.), Owen (1992), Plaks (1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c, ed.; 1995), Rolston (1997, 1990, ed.), Roy (1990) and Yu (1988, 1997). 12 Indigenous Chinese narrative poetics reached its peak during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1840). 13 M. H. Abrams used the two metaphors for the title of his seminal work The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), alluding to William Butler Yeats’s line “the mirror turn lamp.” In Chinese Buddhism, “lamp” evokes “a superb wisdom illuminating the life journey of sentient beings.”



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1 Borrowing a Foreign Mirror and Polishing One’s Own These two approaches are put under a single heading because they emerged at approximately the same time (between the 1980s and the early 2000s), with the latter being a dynamic response to the former. The need for borrowing a foreign mirror has increased dramatically since the 1980s with the end of the Cultural Revolution. Translation of Western narrative theory has become so active that “by the mid-1990s, all the major works of Western classical narratology had Chinese versions” (Yanqiu Zhao 2009, 5; translation mine). Among these translations, two deserve special mention: one is the abridged translation of works in French narratologie coordinated by Yinde Zhang (1989), the other a massive twenty-nine volume Collection of European and American Literary Theories,14 undertaken by the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Since the turn of the century, translations of Western narrative theory have kept abreast of the latest developments, one major source being the New Narrative Theory Translations15 series, coordinated by Dan Shen with the participation of leading Chinese narratologists. Apart from translations, a number of academic works introducing or interpreting Western narrative theory have been published by Chinese scholars. This mainly takes the form of various textbooks on narrative theory of the type An Introduction to Narratology. However, there are also pioneering interdisciplinary studies by Chinese scholars such as Narratology and the Stylistics of Fiction (1998) by Dan Shen; Studies on Narrative Theories in Anglo-American Novels (2005) by Dan Shen, Jiaming Han and Liya Wang; Metalinguistics: the Principle of Narratology and Understanding (2008) by Xiaoying Dong; Cyber Narratology (2008) by Qingpu Nie; and comparative studies such as When Narrator is Narrated: Introduction to Comparative Narratology (1998) by Yiheng Zhao, to name but a few. The past three decades have also produced a huge corpus of Chinese journal publications on narrative theory. Among the 40,167 CNKI-search-

14 This collection, edited by Shen Chen, Jiashen Guo, Lide Tan et al. and comprising important works in Western literary theory, poetics, aesthetics and linguistics, was jointly published by the China Social Sciences Press and Baihua Art and Literature Publishing House, 1990–2011. 15 This six-volume series is a component unit of the “Weiming Library of Translations” [未名 譯庫] published by Peking University Press in 2007. It includes the Chinese versions of Reading Narrative (2002 [1998]) by J. Hillis Miller; Narratologies (2002 [1999]) edited by David Herman; A Companion to Narrative Theory (2007 [2005]) edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz; Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (2002 [1995]) by James Phelan; Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (2002 [1992]) by Susan Lanser; and Postmodern Narrative Theory (2003 [1998]) by Mark Currie.

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able16 journal articles with titles containing the key word xushi (narrative), 1,957 have the key word xushixue (narratology) in their titles, 801 have xushi lilun (narrative theory) and 239 xushu xue (an alternative name to xushi xue, narratology). On the other hand, it merits attention that such “mirror borrowing” has been bidirectional, involving also the West’s reception of Chinese narrative poetics, although on much more a modest scale. Among the elite sinologists who specialize in introducing, interpreting and translating Chinese poetics, at least two should not be left unmentioned: Stephen Owen and David L. Rolston. Owen is a rare Western scholar, well versed and with significant achievements, in Chinese language and literature. With expertise in Tang poetry, his scholarly reach extends to almost all periods of Chinese literature. In his important work, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (1992), he compiled a rich selection of works on poetics by authors ranging from Confucius (551–479 BC) to Ye Xie (1627–1703), providing his own translations and commentaries. Of the selected pieces, some have strong explanatory power for Chinese narrative in general and hold special narratological significance even today such as, for example, A Discourse on Literature by Cao Pi,17 the emperor-scholar; The Poetic Exposition on Literature by Lu Ji;18 and Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons by Liu Xie.19 The first two pieces attempted to prescribe the general properties of literature. In A Discourse on Literature, for example, Cao Pi proposed that “In literature, qi20 is the dominant factor,”21 giving rise to normative forms (ti),22 “clear or murky.” This point has greatly shaped the Chinese spiritual pursuit in, and its overall evaluation of, literature, which prioritized the “empty” or “plastic” (such as qi) over all formal attributes (or ti). The flexible use of ti also shows that, in Chinese critical discourse, the potential for “resonance” always holds primacy over the state of “precision.” In another obser-

16 Updated on 6 June 2016. The CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) is a system of academic databases for nationwide knowledge-sharing. 17 Cao Pi (187–226), the elder son of the great statesman and strategist Cao Cao, was a leading man of letters and founding emperor of Wei in the Three Kingdoms Period (220–280). The selected essay, Discourse on Literature, is a chapter from his Authoritative Discourses [典論, dianlun]. 18 Lu Ji (261–303) was a celebrity among the literati of the Western Jin Period (266–316). 19 Liu Xie (465–520) was a renowned literary theorist of the Northern and Southern Dynasties Period (420–589). With Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, a comprehensive fifty-chapter treatise on literature, he is generally considered one of the best-accomplished literary theorists of ancient China. 20 qi (氣 ), sometimes translated as “pneuma,” is a fundamental concept in Chinese philosophy and has strongly influenced the traditional Chinese world view. 21 Owen’s rendering. The Chinese original is: “文以氣為主。氣之清濁有體。” 22 ti (體,) is a very discursive term flexibly used for the reference of “form,” “style,” “genre” or “structure,” depending on the specific context.



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vation, Cao Pi asserted that “literary works are the supreme achievements in the business of state, a splendor that does not decay” (Owen 1992, 65).23 This point explains why literature has remained a public instrument for such a long time in Chinese history. In a way, this ancient statement by Cao Pi prefigured modern theories of author subjectivity. Different from Owen’s systematic interest and versatile scholarship, Rolston’s contribution in this field is represented by his in-depth research into Chinese fiction of the Ming-Qing Dynasties, particularly through fiction commentary (pingdian, 評點), a colorful treasure house of indigenous Chinese narrative thought. Rolston’s representative works in this field include an edited volume, How to Read the Chinese Novel (1990), and a monograph, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary (1997). He described his approach as an attempt to avoid “the imposition of foreign frameworks and literary theory onto a tradition alien to them” (Rolston 1990, xvi) in the reality of the universal acceptance of the so-called “new and sharper tools for analyzing style, narrative method, and modes of structuring” (Plaks 1977, ed., Foreword) derived from Western narratology. Rolston has done a remarkable job delving into the four voluminous Ming novel masterworks24 in their commentary editions. He revisited a rich corpus of narrative poetics that resonates with Western narrative theory in terms of techniques, authorship, structuring and characterization. For example, Rolston opted to defend “the need for an author” (1990, 111) through studying the typical “commentator-narrator” (a term he coined) in Chinese fiction. This, he believed, not only serves ideological infiltration or some didactic function but, more importantly, is a justified legacy of “the simulated context of oral storytelling” (284) which, in addition to historiography, was another major source for the inception of Chinese fiction.25 Rolston highlighted the importance of macrostructure in understanding Chinese fiction, pointing out that not only the four steps of general plotting, namely, beginning (qi, 起), development (cheng, 承), turn (zhuan, 轉) and closure (he, 合), follow the change of the four seasons in the natural world. He also drew attention to the fact that the specific number of episodes in a novel may agree with rules in The Book of Changes (or I Ching). Apart from interpretations, Rolston also compiled the translations of six pieces of

23 Owen’s rendering. The Chinese original is: “蓋文章經國之大業。不朽之盛事。” 24 Namely, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, The Journey to the West and The Plum in the Golden Vase. 25 It is widely believed that, unlike Western fiction, which evolved from epic and romance stories, Chinese fiction came into being under the influence of historiography along with that of “street talk and popular gossip.”

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“reading methodology” (dufa, 讀法) for the six corresponding novels. Written by the great Ming-Qing critics, these articles are heavily laden with Chinese narrative thought. For example, in How to Read The Fifth Book of Genius,26 Jin Shengtan generalized fifteen types of “literary devices” (wenfa, 文法) frequently applied in the narration of The Water Margin. Among them are those that vividly reflect the transgeneric, esthetic and empiricist nature of Chinese narrative poetics. Examples include “snake in the grass or [discontinuous] chalk line” (caoshe huixian fa, 草蛇灰線法); “heavy strokes of ink” (daluomo fa, 大落墨法); “clouds cutting the mountains in half” (hengyun duanshan fa, 橫云斷山法); and “needles wrapped in cotton and thorns hidden in the mud” (mianzhen nici fa, 綿針泥刺法). In addition, devices can be found that bear comparison with those identified by Western narrative theory such as “advance insertion” (daocha fa, 倒插法), which is similar to “foreshadowing” or “prolepsis”; “strokes of direct duplication” (zhengfan fa, 正犯法) and “strokes of incomplete duplication (lüefan fa, 略犯法), which are comparable with the concept of “frequency”; and “strokes of extreme frugality” (jisheng fa, 極省法) and “strokes of extreme avoidance of frugality” (jibusheng fa, 極不省法), which are comparable with “duration.” The cumulative effort to “borrow a foreign mirror” has been accompanied with a growing need to “polish the Chinese mirror.” Over the past three decades or so, not only has narratology come to the fore of literary studies in China and been established as a research discipline, but it has also greatly stimulated research interest in China’s indigenous narrative poetics as well as narratological enquiries into Chinese narrative fiction. Three major focuses within the scope of this new interest can be further distinguished. One focus is on the narratological studies of traditional Chinese fiction, represented by Pingyuan Chen’s Shifts in the Narrative Mode of Chinese Fiction (1988) and Ping Wang’s Traditional Chinese Fiction: A Narratological Perspective (2001). Chen’s research marked one of the earliest attempts in China to “bridge the internal and external studies of literature and combine a purely formalist narratological study of fiction with a culture-conscious sociological one” (2; translation mine), while Wang’s research pioneered the study of Chinese fiction with a comprehensive Western narratological paradigm. Another focus is research into the Chinese narrative tradition and traditional narrative poetics, represented by Xiuyan Fu’s Studies on Pre-Qin Narrative: The Formalization of Chinese Narrative Tradition (1999) and by the three-volume series Narrative Thought in Ancient China (2010), chief-edited by Yanqiu Zhao.

26 The Ming-Qing critic Jin Shengtan designated six books of genius on which he would have liked to comment. The Fifth Book of Genius refers to The Water Margin.



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Fu’s work approaches Chinese narrative in the broad sense of “narrative” which subsumes all regulated forms of narration, and it also probes the origins and intellectual foundations of the Chinese narrative tradition during the Pre-Qin Period.27 Fu’s research has revealed some of the fundamental rules and characteristics of Chinese narrative of later eras whereas the works of Zhao et al. (2010) marked the first systematic research into traditional Chinese narrative poetics by scholars who are also trained in Western narratology. The third focus is the more specialized enquiry into traditional Chinese fiction commentary, particularly that of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, considered to be a splendid treasure house of indigenous Chinese narrative poetics. Representative research in this area includes Gang Lin’s Studies on Fiction Commentary of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1999) and Shijun Zhang’s Narrative Concepts in Ming-Qing Fiction Commentary (2007). Although highly necessary, polishing the Chinese mirror is far from being adequate for the development of narratology as an academic discipline. Evidently, research in this direction is all too easily drawn into a self-defeating vortex, for it seeks to show that this Chinese mirror is somewhat exceptional, if not superior. But at the same time, it simply cannot resist the temptation of Western narrative concepts which are so often expropriated to lend expression or validity to their Chinese opposite numbers. This brings into focus another orientation in comparative studies, one that aims for higher degrees of disciplinary openness and dialogic significance.

2 Lighting a Lamp for Inter-illumination Apart from the mirrored approaches, we may discern another ambitious effort to make a radiant projector of Chinese narrative poetics. By systematically foregrounding its heterogeneity and critical strengths against Western narrative theory, scholars of this orientation have sought to establish a distinctive branch of Chinese narratology. The most prominent research work includes Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays (1977), edited by Andrew H. Plaks, the same author’s Archetype and Allegory in Dream of the Red Chamber (1976) and Chinese Narratology (1995) as well as his essay “Conceptual Models in Chinese Narrative Theory” (1977), Yi Yang’s Chinese Narratology (2009) and Ming Dong Gu’s Chinese

27 The Pre-Qin Period is a broad reference to the long period before the First Emperor of Qin unified China in BC 221, a period of rivalling kingdoms and great thinkers.

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Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System (2006). Plaks targeted what he defined as Chinese masterworks and provided in-depth exploration of several macroscopic and pervasive aspects of Chinese narrative such as archetype and mythology in Chinese narrative tradition, structural modes of masterworks, conceptual models in Chinese narrative thought, rhetorical features, allegory and allegorical reading. Of Plaks’s pioneering research, Cyril Birch spoke highly in his Foreword to Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays: Andrew Plaks makes a gallant proposal for a critical theory of narrative derived from the specific corpus of Chinese fiction and historiography. The future framers of theories of literature that will truly be applicable on a universal scale will find it impossible to ignore the implications of some of his arguments. (Plaks 1977c, xi)

Plaks expressed in explicit terms that he would work toward “the delineation of certain fundamental issues of Chinese narrative theory” and “a comprehensive critical theory for dealing with the Chinese narrative corpus” (1977b, 309). He probed Chinese and Western cultural traditions and pointed out that the non-appearance of epic poetry (such as in the standard “epic–romance–novel” sequence in Western literary history) and the predominance of historiography in the Chinese tradition might be factors that have shaped narrativity and fictionality into its unique form. Thus, the demarcation between Chinese and Western traditions in this regard is that […] historiography replaces epic among the Chinese narrative genres, providing not only a set of complex techniques of structuralization and characterization, but also a conceptual model for the perception of significance within the outlines of human events. (Plaks 1977b, 314)

While expounding differences arising out of the different traditions, Plaks also believed that the two sides share most of the basic narrative categories essentially because they both “represent human experience in terms of a more or less continuous succession of changing situations in time” (314). However, despite this shared priority of narrating successions of events, Chinese narrative fiction places considerable emphasis on “the interstitial spaces between events” (315). For example, in traditional Chinese fiction, one always finds a thick matrix of non-events such as static description, set speeches, discursive digressions and a host of other non-narrative elements. Based on the Chinese philosophical formulation of yin and yang, Plaks tried to explain Chinese fiction writers’ taste for “non-events” by proposing a conceptual pair of narrative stasis and praxis. From this same theoretical basis, he tried to address Western queries of Chinese fiction being “loosely episodic” or lacking in “a certain degree of manifest artistic unity”



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(329) by explicating its structural principles of “complementary bipolarity” and “multiple periodicity,” which can be particularly convincing as far as the reading of “masterworks” is concerned. In terms of characterization, for example, Plaks took exception to E. M. Forster’s division between “flat character” and “round character” by pointing to the prevalent practice in Chinese fiction of presenting “composite characters” and thus of prioritizing the depiction of “groups and sets of figures, rather than concentrating on the delineation of the individual hero in isolation” (345). An ideal example would be The Water Margin, where literally each of 108 heroes makes his/her own way to the water margin as rebels against the central regime. With their journeys, stories and destinies intertwined, about thirty-six of them are foregrounded through weightier depiction. On the one hand, these foregrounded characters differ sharply from one another while on the other, as the most prominent in their respective “groups” or “composites,” they, together with the others, form “fields” of characters within each of which the tension between identity and difference contributes greatly to the literary-aesthetic effect of overall characterization. Plaks made good use of Chinese mythical tales and philosophy. For example, he re-examined tales centering on the marriage of Nü Wa28 and Fu Xi29 in a way which is conducive to analysis along the lines of Vladimir Propp’s examination of the morphology of Russian folktales. According to Plaks, these tales are archetypal, pregnant with the thought of yin-yang and the “Five Elements.” From this he further derived the Chinese pattern of conceptualization and structuring which he termed “complementary bipolarity and multiple periodicity,” a pattern he applied to the structural analysis of Dream of the Red Chamber. He also pointed out the ritualization or schematization of myth in Chinese life which, he thought, has predominantly shaped the Chinese approach to narration. In addition to archetype, Plaks also compared allegory and allegorical interpretation in the Chinese and Western literary traditions. He observed that, although there is a high degree of similarity between the two, their difference is one between practical and idealistic, this-worldly and other-worldly, moving outward and moving upward, just as he tried to describe in one concluding remark: “He [the Chinese allegorist] strives for extension where his Western counterpart seeks elevation through intension” (125).

28 The goddess in Chinese mythology who created mankind with clay and repaired heaven with many-colored stones. 29 The legendary husband of Nü Wa, first of the three sovereigns of ancient China, inventor of the bagua trigrams from which the hexagrams of the I Ching were derived.

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Plaks’s contribution to this research field has been tremendous, not only for his trail-blazing approach and in-depth understanding of the Chinese literary tradition, but, more importantly, for a vision that aspires to transcultural intelligibility through inter-illumination. As Jing Wang put it: “His venture into the Chinese critical canon points to a possible alternative—that of merging the systematic construction of a paradigm into the elusive and sensual experience of the text itself” (1989, 268). However, we may also realize that, while dealing with all such macroscopic comparative issues, Plaks’s research has shelved the agenda for comparisons at the more concrete or systematic level, thus leaving considerable room for further research. Moreover, out of the sheer expediency of theorization, some of the use he has made of the Chinese literary and philosophical tradition may still be open to question. Plaks himself was aware of this when he wrote: “we must apologize at the outset for the oversimplification necessarily involved in the enterprise” (1976, 85). On the Chinese side, the construction of a Chinese narratology is represented by Yi Yang who viewed his endeavor from the perspective of cultural strategy. Yang stated his basic thinking as “restoration–reference–assimilation–integration,” which means “returning to the original status of Chinese culture, referring to contemporary Western theories, bridging literary theories past and present, and integrating all to bring about innovation” (2009, 36; translation mine). What can be felt from this statement, aside from an ambitious undertaking, is a clear sense of eclecticism, further strengthened by his research principle of “neutralization of the two poles” (24–30; translation mine). Yang attempted to build Chinese narratology comprising five extensive aspects: structure, time, perspective, idea-image and critic-commentator.30 He approached each of these five aspects from the Chinese cultural tradition, comparing them at appropriate points with Western narrative theory. For example, in “The Aspect of Structure” (37–124), Yang started from the “verbalness” of the Chinese word for “structure” (jiegou, 結構) and proposed what he called “the dynamics of structure” (jiegou donglixue, 結構動力學) for narrative research. He justified this proposal by relating it to Liu Xie’s Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons:

30 “Critic–commentator” is my own translation for the Chinese pingdian jia (評點家.). In ancient China, it was typical for established men of letters to publish their critical commentary as meta-texts that were symbiotic with the novel itself.



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[…] but in all cases the normative form (ti, 體) is set in accordance with the affective state (qing, 情); then according to the normative form, a momentum (shi, 勢) is given. Momentum is formed by following the path of least resistance.31

With reference to Western narrative theory, he then generalized five themes in the historical development of structural form, particularly in the Chinese context: formulaic creation, composite structure for works with epic features, the naturalistic turn, movement toward diversity and the New Form featuring Chinese-Western alignment and integration, backing up each classification with corresponding narrative works as examples. In “The Aspect of Perspective” (2009, 37–124), Yang revealed the skillful use of perspective as a narrative strategy in historiographical writings as early as the Spring and Autumn Period (770 to 476 BC). He also examined the Ming critic-commentator Jin Shengtan’s vivid analyses of the manipulation of perspectives in The Water Margin and how they contribute to the achievement of aesthetic and psychological effect. Yang assimilated a series of Western terms such as omniscience, limited perspective, fluidity of perspective, focalization and blind spot, and he hewed out of them a distinction between “focalization on being” (jujiao yu you, 聚焦於有) and “focalization on non-being” (jujiao yu wu, 聚焦於無), the latter of which he observed was prominently used in traditional Chinese fiction. Yi Yang’s Chinese Narratology has become highly influential in the field of comparative narrative poetics in China because, as one commentator put it, it marks “a theoretical revelation of a Chinese narratological world quite different from the West and unfamiliar to Western academia, as well as the preliminary establishment of narratological rationales of China’s own making” (Qian 2009, 455–456; translation mine). Other important issues covered by this work cannot be taken up here due to space limitations. All in all, however, and in a way similar to Andrew Plaks’s research, Yang’s work has proved to be strategic, if not foundational, in the development of Chinese narratology. Although he delves deep into the core of Chinese narrative thought and tradition and attempts to uncover certain fundamental “cultural codes” accounting for differences with the West, he has merely scratched the surface of a complex comparative agenda. This, together with what has been discussed above regarding the other orientations and theorists, leaves us thinking about what can further be done to invigorate the growing field of “narratologies” or, put differently, what issues and values

31 Owen’s rendering (1992, 232). The Chinese original is: “… 莫不因情立體，即體成勢也。勢者，乘利而為制也。”

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remain to be addressed so as to keep this research field healthy and sustainably productive.

3 Fusion of Horizons, or concordia discors? Having examined the state of the art, we come now to considering the future, where deliberating on values that will guide research becomes unavoidable. In fact, still applicable today are the research pursuits that Haskell Block once proposed for comparative literature: “rapports de fait” and “rapports de valeur” (1970, 47). It is fair to say that comparative studies handle, transmit and reproduce values that may sometimes be discordant or even in conflict with one another. For a measured view of the comparative enterprise based on an evaluation of the history, reality and trends of theories, I would like to invoke two notions which may be relevant to the present concern: one is the “fusion of horizons” first articulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the other is the ancient Horatian notion of concordia discors (discordant harmony). Since it was first put forth by Gadamer, the idea of fusion of horizons has been advocated by numerous comparatists as a guiding principle. In the field of comparative poetics, for example, Longxi Zhang “argue[s] for the fusion of horizons in the study of literature” by “drawing on philosophical hermeneutics, contemporary literary theory and traditional Chinese poetics” (1989, “Abstract”). Other comparatists have voiced in various forms their support for the universality of theory. For example, comparative literary theorist James J. Y. Liu declared at the very beginning of his Chinese Theories of Literature that “The first and ultimate one [goal] is to contribute to an eventual universal theory of literature […]” (1975, 2). Wary of being too assertive, though, Liu not only moderated his tone with the determiners “ultimate” and “eventual,” but he also added the eclectic remark that “a comparative study of theories of literature may lead to a better understanding of all literature” (2). In fact, while dialogue or “inter-illumination” is definitely possible, “fusion of horizons” may be too lofty an ideal to attain for many cross-cultural undertakings, particularly in comparative literature and poetics, both of which rest so overwhelmingly on traditions. Indiscriminate use of this notion might also abuse the true intention of Gadamer, who invoked it in a sense that is more neutral than artificial to describe the relationship between past and present in forming a larger context of meaning for the process of understanding. As Gadamer himself explained: “In a tradition this process of fusion is continually going on, for the old and new are always combining into something of living value, without



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either being explicitly foregrounded from the other” (2004 [1975], 305). Another problem with the notion of fusion of horizons, particularly in the present context, is its huge vagueness, leaving in the dark the actual means for achieving such a fusion as well as the various cultural and political factors involved in doing so. Reflections on the future of this field of comparative studies and on the notion of fusion of horizons direct me to another value, this one encapsulated in the ancient Horatian notion of concordia discors. Originally found in Horace’s twelfth epistle “to describe Empedocles’ philosophy that the world is explained and shaped by a perpetual strife between the four elements, ordered by love into a jarring unity” (Gordon 2007), the notion has generally been understood as the state of discordant harmony or a pleasing balance of opposites. Samuel Johnson, in a reference to marriage, defined concordia discors as “that suitable disagreement which is always necessary to intellectual harmony” (1801, 43), and he extended the explanatory power of this principle specifically to the intellectual sphere. As mentioned above, the fusion of horizons involves various cultural and political factors. In other words, its idealism may bring people to overlook the possibility of cultural clashes or ideological conflict. The development of modern narratology has already contributed to the marginalization or obliteration of other narrative theories and practices. Fusion of horizons along these lines is not good for the development of narratology, especially at a time when narrative theory is being met with unprecedented challenges. By contrast, the idea of concordia discors places emphasis on harmony while recognizing the existence of discord. The word concordia has retained the positive elements or the ultimate goal of fusion of horizons but moderated its force, as implied in the word “fusion,” while discors substitutes diversity for singularity. Comparatively, concordia discors is also evocative of the Confucian idea of “harmony in diversity” (he er bu tong, 和而不同) and of “seeking commonality while reserving differences” (qiu tong cun yi, 求同存異). Given the diversity of theories and traditions and the tensions between them, the oxymoronic flavor of concordia discors might be conducive to the consolidation and diversification of narratology as an academic discipline.

4 Prospects for Future Research Looking into the future of the comparison between Chinese and Western narrative poetics, I would like to propose the following possible areas of growth. First, a properly salient “Chineseness” should be taken into account in narratological studies. What is meant by “Chineseness,” however, should remain solely in the cultural and intellectual spheres, avoiding any nationalistic over-

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tones. The reason for such “Chineseness” is that, traditionally, Chinese narrative literature stems from Confucian literati whose “intent or aspiration” (zhi, 志), “literary sentiment” (qing, 情) and “intellectual talent” (cai, 才) might be incommensurably different from features found in other traditions or civilizations. Take the so-called cult of qing,32 for example. This is something of rare cultural subtlety that has been shaped through a profound poetical tradition. Without an adequate understanding of such notions, the Western reader is sure to face formidable challenges in appreciating Chinese literature in general, as well as masterpieces such as the Dream of the Red Chamber in particular. Second, there is a need for in-depth comparison of specific narrative concepts, notions and techniques. Of all the research to date that falls into the categories adopted for this study, namely, “borrowing a foreign mirror,” “polishing the Chinese mirror” and “lighting a lamp for inter-illumination,” few have set about a specific or microscopic comparative agenda. The negative effect of this situation is that a considerable amount of narrative studies in China either reproduce Western ideas and trends or apply them mechanically to Chinese literary texts. And third, more effort is required to delve into the cultural and philosophical underpinnings accounting for both the commonality and the incommensurability between Chinese narrative poetics and Western narrative theory. Some inspiring results have already been produced in the broader school of comparative literature and poetics, notably Longxi Zhang’s The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (1989) and Hong Yu’s Chinese Literary Theory and Western Poetics (1999). But it remains for comparative narratologists to test or challenge the validity of these advances in the sphere of narrative inquiry.33

32 Scholars of Chinese literature will readily acknowledge that the Chinese character qing (情”) defies any equivalent in almost all Indo-European languages, being not quite the same as either “emotion” or “sentiment,” “affect” or “love.” 33 This research is funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) Grant for Research on Arts and Humanities. Project number: 16YJC752015. My thanks go to Professor John Pier for carefully reading through the manuscript and offering valuable suggestions and to Professor Wolf Schmid for being a kind and inspiring supervisor at the Doctoral Seminar before the 2013 ENN Conference in Paris as well as to Professor Yizhong Ning of Beijing Language and Culture University and Professor Nick Mansfield of Macquarie University.



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Openings

Philippe Roussin (Paris)

What is Your Narrative? Lessons from the Narrative Turn 1 The Return of Narrative What we used to call the ‘narrative turn’ is now nearing the end of its third decade. The advent of this turn would not have been possible without the methodological and conceptual tools previously built up by structural narratology starting in the 1960s. At the same time, the narrative turn was taken largely without structural narratology, if not against it. The narrative turn, a term first proposed by Martin Kreiswirth in 1992, seems above all to be a direct outgrowth of the return of narrative in culture: it records and witnesses the explosion of narrative in contemporary artistic practices across media since the 1970s and 80s. With the advent of high modernism during the 1920s, narrative was banished from works of high culture and relegated to mass audiences and the culture industries. The ban on narrative marked much of the reflexive, avant-garde literature and cinema that dominated the 1960s. The problem was perhaps not narrative per se, but rather that the term was taken over by dominant cultural forms. The desire to repudiate the narrative practices of the dominant literature and cinema is now giving way to a re-engagement with experimental forms of storytelling, and the imperative to destroy narrative may be long gone: the time of narrative has come in cinema and in literature, as well (cf. Balsom 2015, 115–116). For their part, social scientists had already abandoned narrative in the 1930s and 40s for being an ambiguous, particularistic and imprecise way of describing, representing and analysing the world. According to Lawrence Stone: Historians have always told stories. From Thucydides and Tacitus to Gibbon and Macaulay, the composition of narrative in lively and elegant prose have always accounted the highest ambition. […] For the last fifty years, however, this story-telling function has fallen into ill repute among those who have regarded themselves as in the vanguard of the profession, the practitioners of the so-called ‘new history’ of the Post Second-World-War Era. In France, storytelling was dismissed as ‘l’histoire événementielle’. (Stone 1979, 3)

In Time and Narrative (1984 [1983], esp. section 2), Paul Ricœur argued against Fernand Braudel’s long time span and described the Annales school’s attempt to break from narrative as both illusory and contradictory to the historian’s project. DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-019

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The common description of the narrative turn is as follows. Even though narratology has, from its very beginnings in the mid-60s, argued that narrative is a universal discursive category, it is well known that narrative theory was long restricted to the analysis of a specific type of narratives, mainly literary and fictional. Gérard Genette acknowledged that, from the outset, theorists of narrative favoured fictional narratives at the expense of other and much more common and universal narrative forms and thus ignored questions associated with, as he put it, “the practices of history, biography, diaries, newspaper stories, police reports, judicial depositions, everyday gossip” (Genette 1990, 756), thus excluding many of the narrative genres taken into account by the narrative turn. The study of narrative gradually moved away from what were then the dominant semiotic or narratological perspectives, focused primarily on literary texts, and on to examining narrative as much in non-textual as in textual forms. It was increasingly acknowledged that narrative relates not only to cultural products but also to communication theory, sociology, therapy, politics, etc. The methods for studying literary and verbal narratives gave way to methods of investigation deriving from sociolinguistics, pragmatics, developmental psychology and the more empirical and quantitative branches of the social sciences.1 To be sure, the narrative turn had in some ways been foreshadowed by poststructuralism, postmodernism, constructivism and anti-foundationalism. For as Christopher Nash put it: the preoccupation with discourse—the forms of our utterances and their functions and effects—is no longer the private province of specialists in literature and language. […] We no longer need […] to be told that the narrative mode of discourse is omnipresent in human affairs. We’re obliged to consider the ungainly fact that in our culture, where we least expect it and even most vociferously disclaim it, there may actually be storytelling going on, and that the implications may indeed be very “considerable.” Narrative, we’ve heard, is central to our essential cognitive activities (Ricœur), to historical thinking (White), to psychological analysis and practice (Lacan), to political critique and praxis (Lyotard); the “movement of language and writing across time” is “essentially narrative,” Fredric Jameson has declared in sympathy with this synthetic vision; “the all-informing process of narrative” is “the central function or instance of the human mind.” (Nash 1990, xi–xii; quote from Jameson 1981, 13)

1 For a general account, see Kreiswirth (2005) where it is observed, inter alia, that the narrative turn expanded narrative theory “beyond narratology.” Meuter (2014 [2009]) also provides an informative overview of the narrative turn in various non-literary disciplines.



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In other words, narrative “moved from the periphery to the centre, from the role of ancillary or adjunct to a position of control, even of dominance” (Kreiswirth 1992, 630).

2 From Scientific to Narrative Knowledge In this article, I would like to highlight other aspects of the narrative turn that seem to me at least as important as the recognition by the social sciences of the central role and place of narrative in culture lato sensu. My first thesis is that the narrative turn accompanied a shift of emphasis in studies that deal with narrative from poetics to rhetoric as well as from aesthetics to hermeneutics and ethics.2 My second thesis, which stems from the first one, is that in the wake of the narrative turn, and because of the instrumentalist approach to narrative it promotes, the status of narrative has dramatically changed: it is now understood less as a form or an object than as a tool. In the heyday of structuralism, narrative structure was regarded as more significant than any other aspect of narrative. Structuralists tended to focus on form, defining story largely in terms of discourse and of formal models of story structure. The narrative turn, by contrast, is concerned less with structure than it is with the functions of narrative, and in particular with how, in the various disciplines and beyond the humanities, narrative is used to construct and convey meaning. As narrative concepts migrated across disciplinary borders, conventional notions of narrative were also questioned, reformulated and expanded. During the late 70s and on into the 80s, narrative was resurrected as a means of challenging so-called positivistic, reductionist and logico-deductive modes of knowing. Story was put on an equal footing with reason and reconceptualised and analysed as a special form of knowledge. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard published La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (English translation 1984). The book’s purported subject is the contemporary status of science and technology together with the vaster problem of the legitimation of the whole social order. Lyotard differentiates between two forms of knowledge: scientific and narrative. Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narrative. […] I do not mean to say that narrative knowledge can prevail over science,

2 This development is corroborated by Liesbeth Korthals Altes’s Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction (2014).

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but its model is related to ideas of internal equilibrium and conviviality next to which contemporary scientific knowledge cuts a poor figure. (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 7)

He goes on to analyse the disappearance of the great master-narratives which secured legitimation in the West (that of the liberation of humanity in the tradition of the Enlightenment, followed by the speculative unity of all knowledge in the wake of the Hegelian tradition), and he wonders where, after the metanarratives, legitimacy can reside. Part of his work in The Postmodern Condition can be read as a defence of narrative knowledge against the increasing dominance of scientific knowledge. Although “science has always been in conflict with narratives” (xxiii), narrative is described as a central faculty of the human mind and as a mode of thinking fully as legitimate as that of abstract logic. Narration is not only “the quintessential form of customary knowledge” (19), but it is also essential for scientific knowledge: “scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge which from its point of view, is no knowledge at all” (29). As Stephen Denning, the storytelling guru of marketing, observes: “according to Lyotard, narrative is not a sub-branch of science. The truth is exactly the opposite […] science is a subset of storytelling. […] Lyotard’s view goes against the common sense view of sciences as a superior form of knowledge. It also contradicts modern science’s view of itself” (Denning 2016). Most important, however, is that narrative knowledge, contrary to scientific knowledge, does not need to be legitimated: narratives “define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of this culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do. […] Narrative knowledge does not give priority to the question of its own legitimation” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 23 and 27). Far from being a survival of pre-modern culture, then, narrative and the authority of narrative knowledge are presented as a possible response to the legitimation problem in postmodern times and to the central problem (in the context of the narrative turn) of meaning and meaning-making: “lamenting the ‘loss of meaning’ in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative” (26). During the 80s, we find in the works of the psychologist Jerome Bruner the same kind of rehabilitation and revalorization of narrative. Bruner’s focus on narrative was secondary to larger projects with more important implications for psychology. His intention was to establish meaning-making as the central concept of psychology. But at the same time, he has been highly influential in arguing that there are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary)



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are irreducible to one another […] A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. […] The paradigmatic or logico-scientific mode […] leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis” while “the imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily ‘true’) historical accounts. (Bruner 1986, 11 and 13)

Similar if not complementary developments were taking place in other fields as well. In moral philosophy, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre was the first to introduce the idea of narrative and the theory of virtue to counterbalance a tendency that he found in analytical philosophy and sociology, namely to “think atomistically about human action” (MacIntyre 1981, 204). He argued that the mainstream analytical debate on personal identity had reached an impasse and that our sense of self is bound up with our capacity to tell a coherent story about ourselves and establish our identity: “personal identity is just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of narrative requires” (218). The idea that there is no personal identity without narration has since become a topos of contemporary hermeneutics. Narrative thus presents itself as “the privileged discursive mode of personal identity, the one which, par excellence, can ward off the very modern spectres of the absence of the world, the absence of name, loss of meaning and loss of identity”; it has a virtual monopoly on “substantial questions in the theory of discourses” (Ferry 1991, 103–104; my translation). Over the past few decades, a number of philosophers—MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricœur, to mention only a few—have invoked this topos. MacIntyre maintains that there is a “narrative unity of [the] human life” (1981, 258). For Taylor, “my ‘self-understanding’ necessarily has temporal depth and incorporates narrative. […] We understand ourselves inescapably in narrative” (1989, 50–51). That our experience of our own life is “storied” has been explored by many scholars, among them Jerome Bruner, but also Erving Goffman (1974, 504). In a similar way, Ricœur sought to establish a theory of what he called “narrative identity.” For him, narrative identity is, first and foremost, the identity of narrative, and in particular narrative coherence: narrative is “the privileged means by which we reconfigure our confused, unformed and at the limit mute temporal experience” (Ricœur 1984 [1983], xi). For many scholars since Ricœur, however, narrative identity has been understood as the identity of the self. It is remarkable that, for MacIntyre and against the lessons of narratology and narrative studies, “stories are lived before they are told” (1981, 212): “a history is not a

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sequence of actions” (217).3 Moreover, he stresses the importance of dissociating narrative from literature in order to consider it in its relation to life: the cultural place of narrative has been diminished and the modes of interpretation of narrative have been transformed until it has become possible for modern theorists as different as Sartre […] and William Gass to understand the form of narrative, not as that which connects story-telling with the form of human life, but precisely as that which segregates narrative from life, which confines it to what is taken to be a separate and distinctive realm of art. The contrast, indeed the opposition, between art and life, which is often in fact the premise rather than the conclusion of such theorists, provides a way of exempting art— including narrative—from its moral tasks. And the relegation of art by modernity to the status of an essentially minority activity and interest further helps to protect us from any narrative understanding of ourselves. (MacIntyre 1981, 226–227)

At the same time, a backlash against this “narrative imperialism” (the widely held conception of personal identity as narrative-bound, the role of narrative in so many aspects of ordinary life; cf. Phelan 2005) has been developing, exemplified in works by Galen Strawson (2004), John Christman (2004) and Peter Lamarque (2014, 55–61). In “Against Narrativity” (2004), Strawson famously attacked the “psychological narrative thesis,” which holds that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, and the “ethical narrative thesis”: experiencing or conceiving one’s life as a narrative is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood. Strawson points out the important fact that, among philosophers, the narrative turn has most often proved to be an ethical turn. Indeed, Bruner has argued that all stories involve moral judgments: “to tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance” (1990, 51). Similarly, for Hayden White, there is a moral dimension to every story: “where in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure that morality or a moral impulse is present too” (1980, 26). By narrativizing our lives, we inevitably give them meaning; narrative thus almost inevitably carries with it a normative undertone, a moral stance. In MacIntyre’s work, the notion of narrative emerges and makes sense in the context of the discussion of the virtues and moral philosophy: “the account of the virtues is closely related to attitudes to the narrative form of human life” (1981, 144). The thesis is based on the Greek epics and the Icelandic sagas, that is to say the dominant types of narrative available in traditional and closed societies

3 It follows that “narrative is not the work of poets, dramatists and novelists reflecting upon events which had no narrative order before one was imposed by the singer or the writer; narrative form is neither disguise nor decoration” (MacIntyre 1981, 211).



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where narrative is always bound up with ethics: “the narrative form of epic or saga” is a form embodied “in the moral life of individuals and in the collective social structure” (129). Declared (as is the case with Ricœur) inseparable from the notion of tradition, narrative is discussed in connection with a wide-ranging inquiry into the “failure of the Enlightenment project,” the result of modern culture, which suffers from a lack of normative order, and of the “democratized self which has no social necessity and no need for social identity” (32) : “[T]o think of a human life as a narrative unity is to think in a way alien to the dominant individualistic and bureaucratic modes of modern culture” (227). Overall, then, it can be said that the narrative turn in the human and social sciences has resulted in the abandonment of the nomological, explicative, quantitative and descriptive models of the sciences of nature they had embraced during the structuralist period in favour of comprehension and interpretation, a position first advanced with the distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften.

3 Narrative and the Social Sciences The last sociological works of Pierre Bourdieu provide a good example of the shift from an anti-narrative position to a pro-narrative stance in the social sciences. In 1986 Bourdieu denounced and discredited the sociological relevance of the notion of narrative in “The Biographical Illusion.” At that time, Bourdieu’s thesis was the following: we fall into biographical illusion whenever we think of our own life or the life of another person as a logical sequence of events with an origin, understood as both a beginning and a first cause, and an end in the sense of both a termination and a purpose. This illusion is very powerful. It is supported by all the symbolic power of the state, which commands and fixes our dates of birth and death, sex, nationality—so many attributes that ascribe and inscribe our social and self-identity and define the boundaries, but also construct the meaning of our existences. It is supported by common sense (le sens commun), which speaks of life as a story, a journey or progression (a career, mobility) during which this individual ‘I’ makes a series of consistent and coherent decisions, bound by a unitary and unifying intention. And of course, it is supported by ordinary biographies, autobiographies and histories which smuggle this “common-sense” philosophy into scholarly discourse with all those apparently innocuous little phrases and expressions: “from then on,” “already,” “from their earliest years” and so on.

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“Life history” is one of those common-sense notions which has smuggled into the learned universe, first with little noise among anthropologists, then more recently, and with a lot of noise, among sociologists. To speak of ‘life history’ implies the not insignificant presupposition that life is a history. As in Maupassant’s title Une vie (A Life), a life is inseparably the sum of the events of an individual existence seen as a history and the narrative of that history. That is precisely what common sense, or everyday language, tells us: life is like a path, a road, a track, with crossroads. […] Life can also be seen as […] a voyage, a directed journey, a unidirectional and linear move (“mobility”) consisting of a beginning (“entering into life”), various stages, and an end, understood both as a termination and as a goal. […] This way of looking at a life implies tacit acceptance of the philosophy of history as a series of historical events (Geschichte) which is implied in the philosophy of history as an historical narrative (Historie) or, briefly, implied in a theory of narrative. An historian’s narrative is indiscernible from that of a novelist in this context, especially if the narration is biographical or autobiographical. (Bourdieu 2004 [1986], 299)

“The Biographical Illusion” is Bourdieu’s response to the notion of narrative identity (Ricœur) and to the idea of the “narrative unity of a human life” (MacIntyre). These two conceptions inevitably clash with Bourdieu’s notions of individual identity and with the formation of habitus as a mental structure dependent on social structures, a pure product of socialisation that is in no case produced by the sedimentation of moments of subjectivation (cf. Truc 2011). Seven years after this strong anti-narrative stance, Bourdieu’s position shifted dramatically. In 1993, he published La Misère du Monde (English translation 1999), which was soon to become both a controversial book and a bestseller. Under the direction of Bourdieu, a team of researchers devoted three years to understanding the conditions under which contemporary forms of social suffering occur—in the city, at school, in family life, at work: the book consists of stories of suffering, lost opportunity, contextual constraints, growing accustomed to degraded social environments. The book addressed criticism often made of Bourdieu’s earlier work, namely that it ignored individual agency in favour of structure and gave no place to individual voices in the analysis of the social world. As it has often been observed, The Weight of the World also marked a shift from concerns with social inclusion to the problems of exclusion. Here is the opening sentence of the book: “We are offering here the accounts that men and women have confided to us about their lives and the difficulties they have in living those lives” (Bourdieu 1999 [1993], 1). It consists of lengthy, in-depth narrated interviews labelled testimonies (témoignages) by Bourdieu and his team, some of which were later adapted for the stage. In the afterword (“Understanding”), Bourdieu quotes Wilhelm Dilthey at length on the distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences and the longstanding controversy concerning the nature of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in the social sciences. But contrary to the alleged incompatibility between these procedures, he con-



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cludes with the identity between explanation and understanding: “Against the old distinction made by Wilhelm Dilthey […] understanding and explaining are one” (613).4 Through the subjective experience of social distress and the notion of social suffering, which for almost thirty years had been playing a significant role in a number of sociological and psycho-sociological programmes, testimony and narrative make possible the articulation between agency and structure, for they capture “the painful part of the lived experience of social domination and exclusion” (Renault 2010, 225).

4 The Example of the World Bank Non-narrative investigative procedures in a number of disciplines are currently experiencing transformation under the influence of the narrative turn. Until rather recently, the methods and procedures of enquiry in the economic sciences, for example, sought to emulate scientific discourse. These methods have now been adapted so as to give narrative a more significant place. A particularly revealing example of this change from figures and statistics to qualitative data is the World Bank’s massive production of narratives and use of testimony since the end of the last century. In September 2000, the World Bank released the World Development Report 2000/2001. Attacking Poverty: Opportunity, Empowerment and Security described the policies implemented by the World Bank to promote sustainable economic growth and enable poor people to access the services they need. The report claimed to offer a new view of poverty that recognized the now widely accepted idea that the eradication of poverty cannot ignore the human beings behind the statistics. The idea is drawn from the philosophical arguments of Nobel Prize Laureate Amartya Sen for viewing poverty as

4 It is not possible to discuss this complex issue here. Note only that Bourdieu greatly simplifies a question that has caused much ink to flow since the end of the nineteenth century. Consider, for example, Ricœur’s position: At the level of epistemology, there are not two methods, the method of explanation and the method of understanding. Strictly speaking, only explanation is methodological. Understanding is rather the non-methodical moment which, in the sciences of interpretation, comes to terms with the methodical moment of explanation. This moment precedes, accompanies, closes and thus envelops explanation. In return, explanation develops understanding analytically. This dialectical link between explaining and understanding results in a very complex and paradoxical relation between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Neither duality nor monism. (Ricœur 1986, 181; translated by John Pier) I wish to thank John Pier for bringing this text to my attention.

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the deprivation of basic capabilities, rather than merely as low incomes. Combatting poverty, the argument goes, involves listening to “the voices of the poor.” Voices of The Poor was the name of a huge research programme undertaken by the World Bank during these years. It was also the title given to three volumes entitled Consultations with the Poor (published between 2000 and 2002). These volumes present and analyse data collected during field studies conducted by the World Bank starting in 1998, and they bear on more than 260 urban and village “communities” in over sixty countries. The material provided by the studies resulted in over 60,000 narratives, life histories and testimonial accounts recounted by poor people from different parts of the world. The authors of one volume, From Many Lands, justify the choices made with regard to transcribing the narrative material recorded: “We decided to forego technical, academic writing in favour of a straightforward, simple style that highlights poor people’s own voices. […] We use […] writing devices to communicate the findings. […] Their voices are more direct, vivid, powerful and authentic than ours” (Narayan and Petesch 2002, 7–8). How has the bank presented and justified its research programme? It first refers to the notion of voice and to giving voice to those whose voice has not been heard: “Poverty is more than inadequate income or human development—it is also vulnerability and a lack of voice, power, and representation” (Narayan et al. 2000, 3). The reader will have recognized the influence of the Indian subaltern social studies critical tradition. The second reason for recourse to narrative material is a methodological and epistemological one. The testimonial accounts, life histories and narratives of individuals enable, so we are told, certain fundamental questions to be raised which statistical data do not make it possible to address, for testimonies and narratives provide “valuable insights into the multiple meanings, dimensions, and experiences of poverty” (Narayan et al. 2000, 16). The importance of narrative for the World Bank needs to be approached in the broader light of economic analyses bearing on the importance of information and its social circulation. In 1945, in his seminal article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Friedrich Hayek was already criticizing application of the modes of thought of the sciences of nature to the social sciences. He insisted upon the fact that scientific knowledge, at least in the form of mathematics, is not the sole source of knowledge in the field of economics. Alongside knowledge grounded in general rules or statistical aggregates, there exists, he explained, “a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules” because “the particular circumstances of time and place, […] “local conditions [and] knowledge of people” must also be taken into account (Hayek 1945, 521–522). Knowledge of this sort, Hayek went on, cannot be accounted for by statistics: “the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but



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solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge” (519). This “local” information, “at the disposal of particular individuals” (521), was just as crucial for the efficient working of the economy as the scientific knowledge of experts. Hayek contended that all relevant information needed to be put at the disposal of decision-makers. This consideration makes it easier to understand the World Bank’s narrative-oriented research programme: narratives give the poor a voice and provide experts and decision-makers with access to local, discrete and dispersed information relative to time, place and people. The World Bank’s narratives thus perform a dual function: they make the poor alive thanks to their voices, and they are a tool for extracting and encapsulating forms of social information that inevitably lie beyond the scope of the standard quantitative methods.5

5 History and the Narrative Turn Nowhere, perhaps, has the impact of narrativist theories been felt more forcefully than in historiography (Louis O. Mink, Paul Ricœur, Hayden White), a development confirming the thesis, evoked in section 1 above, that with the narrativist turn the emphasis falls on narrative not as a form but as a tool. Up to the time of the narrative turn, there had been only one great tradition in the philosophy of history in the English-speaking world. Carl Hempel’s article, “The Function of General Laws in History” (1942), triggered a scholarly debate that later came to be known as the classic logical positivist account of historical explanation. It dominated the discussion until the emergence of narrativism in the 1970s, particularly with the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe in 1973.6 The debate that had hitherto focused on the “covering laws” and on the cognitive function of narrative (Arthur Danto, Louis O. Mink) in historiography, took a different turn when structural narratology began to focus its attention on historical narratives, the nature of history as narrative-making and the boundaries between history and fiction. While their predecessors argued that history was a science and disassociated it from literature (this was the

5 In a related development, note that in the corporate sphere storytelling, an outgrowth of corporate communication, has become current managerial practice. Here, however, the persons concerned are not so much actors and narrators as they are ‘stakeholders’: individuals, groups, organisations or systems that have an interest in the activities they take part in within various entities with which they are affiliated (see Norlyk, Lundholdt and Hansen 2014 [2013]). 6 For a recent assessment of narrativism, see Boldizsár Simon and Kuukkanen (2015).

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case most notably of the French Annales school), late twentieth-century theorists emphasized the links between history, narrative and rhetoric. The publication of White’s Metahistory ushered in the narrative turn in historical studies. White showed how major nineteenth-century historians (Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burckhardt) wrote history in the same way as fiction writers. History, which laid a claim to the truth value of the narrative reconstruction of past events, was actually a literary genre which mobilized, like the novel, the ability of language to construct referential illusions. According to White, who employed the works of Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye on root metaphors (tropes) and archetypal forms of emplotment, the discourse of history was the result of various modes of emplotment and, more profoundly, of tropology. White’s basic point was that historiography is a branch of rhetoric and that the way historians write history is governed by the same rhetorical tropes used in oratory and in fictional literature. He challenged the view that history operates in a different mode from literature. In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), he invited his reader to “consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: 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, 81); “viewed simply as verbal artefacts, histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another” (121–122). In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), this view is supported by the epigraph, a quote from Roland Barthes stating that “Le fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique” (“A fact has only a linguistic existence”). White’s famous statement that “instead of revealing the true essence of past reality, historical narrative imposes a mythic structure on the events it purports to describe” (White 1978, 113) called into question the ability of history to represent the past and its claims to deliver a scientific truth: “stories, like factual statements, are linguistic entities and belong to the order of discourse” (White 1992, 37). In White, as in MacIntyre and Ricœur (for whom the principle of emplotment confers concordance on a discordant reality), narrative is always theorized as a narrative of order. The substitution of the order of words for the disorder of events, as well as claims that history is a literary form and that narrative serves to impose coherence, continuity and closure on the messiness of life and of the historian’s sources, occurred against the backdrop of post-postmodernism, new historicism and deconstruction. Throughout the 1970s and the 80s, these theses generated continuous, lively and vigorous debate. White’s proclamation of the historical text as nothing but a “literary artefact” stirred mixed reactions from historians, particularly among those who remained critical of the use of the narrative turn in historiography. In a review of Metahistory published in 1981, Arnaldo Momigliano



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observed that White’s approach to historiography had “eliminated the search for truth as the main task of the historian” and that White considered historians, “like any other narrators, as rhetoricians to be characterized by their modes of speech” (1981, 259). Carlo Ginzburg pointed out the “extreme subjectivism implying that historiography creates its own object: history” (1992, 90), and he lamented that, from the perspective of the narrative turn, language has no cognitive function. White’s attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of drawing a rigorous distinction between fictional narratives and historical narratives ignored investigative work and philological analysis that made historical narrative possible. It did not take specific account of the operations of knowledge that were usually associated with it, but was tackled from the point of view of poetics. In retrospect, we can analyze these debates in the context of the controversies initiated by the scepticism associated with postmodernism. Narrativism is first and foremost the counterpart of naive positivism, and narrative plays the role of a sort of anti-positivist Trojan horse: a war machine against the ideas of truth and objectivity in history. The authority of empirical reference (evidence, sources or archives), intended to undergird explanation, collapses, an argument whose collateral effect is to bring down with it the distinction between the natural and the social sciences. This ‘failure’ of the conventional empirical-analytical approach, in turn, raises issues concerning reality, reference, explanation and objectivity. For the New Historicism aiming to call into question the traditional idea of historical truth, the narrative tool made it possible to blur the distinction between history and fiction on the grounds that all history is a matter of discourse. To be sure, White does not deny all differences between fiction and history (he acknowledges, for instance, that the former deals with imagined and the latter with real events). Nevertheless, Marie-Laure Ryan is certainly justified in having placed him among the proponents of what she calls “panfictionality,” the postmodern doctrine according to which all narrative and representational discourse, and therefore all historical discourse, is a form of fiction, resulting in the destabilization, if not erasure, of the borderline between fiction and nonfiction. The most significant contribution of this tendency to subject non-literary genres such as historiography to narratological investigation was, according to her, to drive the point that narrative structures are not the sort of thing that is found in the world. Every narrativization is therefore an interpretive act. But the narratological approach to historiography has also fostered the disputable claim that every meaning and form found in the textual description of presumably real events is ascribed to these events in a process of fictionalization. (Ryan 1997, 177)

One can also contemplate this sometimes, if not to say often, confusing discussion regarding the modes of emplotment at work in historiography and the blur-

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ring of the distinction between fiction and history (a position also endorsed by Ricœur in the opening lines of Time and Narrative) as a challenge and invitation to sharpen our definitions of fiction and nonfiction.7 This is the path followed by Dorrit Cohn in a chapter of The Distinction of Fiction in which she proposes “some rudiments for a historiographic narratology” (1999, 110). “Narratology,” she points out, has been largely disregarded by modern theorists in the ongoing discussion of fictionality. Far more often than not, borderlines between the fictional and the nonfictional realms of narration have been drawn, withdrawn, retraced, and re-effaced on various grounds— logical, ontological, phenomenological, pragmatic, speech-actional, deconstructive, semantic—without looking into the discipline that has dug most deeply into the ground of narration itself. (Cohn 1999, 109)

And she goes on to note that, ironically, “[t]here is a certain poetologic justice to this snub: narratologists themselves have, to a quite astonishing degree, ignored the question of demarcation between fiction and nonfiction” (109). Moreover, Cohn stresses, quite rightly, that whereas “for fictional narratology, the story-discourse separation” is central, it “has remained marginal at best for the analysis of historical (or generally nonfictional) narrative” (111). Significantly, Paul Ricœur, whose Time and Narrative has been called “the most important synthesis of literary and historical theory produced in our century,” never touches on the bi-level model at all in the part devoted to narrative fiction (vol. 1), whereas in the part of his work devoted to narrative fiction (vol. 2), he gives it its full due in a chapter entitled “Games with Time.” (Cohn 1999, 111; quote from White 1987, 170)

Commenting on White’s thesis that, “viewed simply as verbal artefacts, histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another” (121–122), Cohn remarks that he not only fails to refer to the referential level of historical narrative but that he also refers only to the structuring level of history, and never to the level of discourse, the one where “narratology can come into play to define highly differentiated formal features that do, in our daily reading practice, prevent histories from passing for novels and vice-versa” (114). Historical and fictional narratives, she maintains, work according to different rules that govern our understanding of reality: “a text-oriented poetics of fiction excludes on principle a realm that is the very center of the historiographer’s concern: the more or less reliably docu-

7 For an excellent comprehensive synthesis of this debate, see Françoise Lavocat’s Fait et fiction. Pour une frontière (2016, 59–101).



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mented evidence of past events [“the referential level”] out of which the historian fashions his story” (112).8 Even more fundamentally, though, and over and above the anti-positivist position opposed to quantitative and empirical explanation, narrativism has raised the question of the epistemology of history. Lawrence Stone is perfectly explicit on this matter: “The first cause of the current revival of narrative is a widespread disillusionment with the economic determinist model of historical explanation [signalling] a decline in the thrust of historical research to ask the big why questions” (1979, 8). This being the case, the conclusions to be drawn from narrativism translate into a potentially radical change in the status of history by cutting it off as a discipline from the other social sciences, effectively returning it to the humanities. It is this essential stake that Jürgen Habermas emphasized when he took part in the German “historians’ controversy” (Historikerstreit) that erupted in 1986. Habermas attacked postmodern neohistoricists and the critics of modernism who turn to traditional cultural sources and regard them as sui generis sources of systematic and normative thinking for which the rational demands of validation are not appropriate: “the narrating historian […] does not think much of social-scientific attempts of explanation” (1988, 32). And with regard to the neohistoricism of American and German neoconservatives: As far as science is concerned, the message is simple. If scientific progress has become “uninteresting for a politics of ideas,” if the solution of scientific problems no longer touches our life problems, then the encapsulated expert cultures have little more to offer everyday life—except technical innovations, and socio- technical recommendations. An ability to orient practice is ascribed only to historical sciences, where narrative means reactualize traditions and guarantee continuities. Hence the revaluation of narrative procedures in the humanities as well as the distrust of history as a social science and a devaluation of sociology. (Habermas 1983, 84–85)

More recently, the debate triggered by narrativism has raised political and moral issues. Applied to the Shoah, nothing, according to Carlo Ginzburg, distinguishes the relativism of Hayden White’s theses on the permeability of fiction and history (to the extent it is narrative, history makes no truth claims) from the negationist attitude of Robert Faurisson (Ginzburg 1992, 93).9 Habermas considered that the

8 Paul Dawson, in his contribution to this volume, adopts the view that the story/ discourse distinction applies across a great variety of disciplines, a position that comes within the panfictionality spoken of by Ryan (1997). 9 Robert Faurisson is a French negationist author who has gained a reputation worldwide. A professor of French at the University of Lyon starting in 1973, he surfaced as a holocaust denier in

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revisionist positions of German historians with regard to Nazism were characterized by an attempt to put themselves in the shoes of the actors of Nazi crimes and understand their actions within context of the times, with the secondary effect of justifying these actions. He saw a link between this sort of empathizing and the refocusing of the methods of the social sciences in the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften): “[Habermas] considered the rehabilitation of narrative to be the most important symptom of this return to the nineteenth-century German humanities, that is to say, a new attempt to highlight the narrative presentation of historical events rather than their theoretical explanation” (Flasch 2008 [2005], 31; my translation). Today, narrativist and postmodernist positions are on the decline, even in the American academic world, where they were most influential. These developments are traced out in the American journal History and Theory, which published a forum in 2015 entitled “After Narrativism.” “Narrativism,” according to two of the contributors to the issue, has now been the received view in the philosophy of history for decades. It is probably fair to say that as a scholarly project, it has not advanced theoretically in recent years with insights as surprising as those of the 1970s and 1980s. (Boltizsár Simon and Kuukkanen 2015, 155)

Be it as it may, narrativism has not vanished altogether. Some approaches suggest that there is still plenty in store for narrativist research. As observed by Boltizsár Simon and Kuukkenan, “A currently vivid line of argument claims that, in one way or another, narrative is the best we have to establish a connection between the discipline of history and the wider ethical, social, and political concerns of the general public or the popular representations of the past” (2015, 160).

6 Narrative, Persuasion, Identity The idea that man is “essentially a story-telling animal” (MacIntyre 1981, 201) is one of the most constant assertions of all the disciplines and fields of study active in the narrative turn. Above all, it finds its empirical justification in the psychology of development with studies concerning the child’s learning of narrative capacities and in anthropological research, which considers narrative from a phylogenetic point of view as a tool for the transmission of culture.

1974 and also questioned the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank.



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Outside these two domains, it must be admitted that the assertion has essentially a metaphorical and rhetorical value. Since Walter R. Fisher’s seminal article “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm” (1984), the narrative turn has become the alpha and omega of communications studies. What impressed Fisher in MacIntyre’s After Virtue is that “the narrative paradigm challenges the notions that human communication, if it is to be considered rhetorical, must be an argumentative form” (Fisher 1984, 2). This belief is particularly strong in two fields, marketing and politics, where the instrumentalist approach to narrative as a kind of strategy now dominates: like any strategy, it mobilises certain resources and deploys certain techniques to achieve specific goals. It should be noted that in these two fields of inquiry, narrative has changed its status in relation to temporality entirely: it is no longer a machine for recounting the past, but a tool for constructing a possible future. Storytelling, whether in communication, politics or marketing, is the grand narrative of the present. Here, narrative is conceived as a tool for the construction of community and collective consensus, a tool at the disposal of leaders, whether the entity is an organization, a company or a nation. I quote from Stephen Denning’s The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative: “Leadership is essentially a task of persuasion—of winning people’s minds and hearts […] Storytelling is […] inherently suited to the task of leadership” (2011 [2005], 10). And another author writes: “stories have a powerful social function. They manipulate the mood and expectation of an audience. They can elevate the storyteller to the position of leader. They can bind together a community to pursue a common purpose and give coherent meaning to what otherwise might degenerate into chaos” (Holmes 2009, 123). Most management texts now include one or more chapters devoted to narrative and storytelling. Anthony Holmes, who mentions the importance for management of the concept of meme introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, writes: “it is the quality of rhetoric and the coherent content of their stories that is one of the prime features that distinguish a leader from a manager” (Holmes 2009, 125). Stories are particularly useful for guides—“individuals who make the greatest use of stories and are more adept at constructing and communicating them”; their “narratives are formulated to help followers to prepare a mental model of who they are, where they come from, the problem they face and the destination” (136). More recently, both marketing scholars and managers have started to explore the mechanism of ‘narrative persuasion’—narrative strategies for brand building— and they now ask: How and why have brands become storytellers? The power of stories is not news to those whose business is persuasion, remarks Frederick W. Mayer in Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action: “Storytelling is the life blood of politics” (2014, viii). The author reminds his

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reader about Derrida and Foucault focusing attention on language and other signs as instruments of power. A story provides “a powerful and flexible tool for collective action” (4). And since “the tool of narrative enables a community to construct a common interest in a collective good and to solve the problems of collective action in pursuit of that good,” Mayer proposes to develop a “narrative theory of collective action” (4). A similar line of reasoning is taken up by the journal Daedalus in an issue devoted to “the American Narrative.” Here are the opening lines of the “Introduction”: “Some countries have a master narrative, some not. Those that do are expected to live up to its demands, or incur the shame of neglecting them […] Each member country of the European Union […] has agreed to put aside its grand narrative, if it has one” (Donoghue 2012, 11). For Homi K. Bhabha (2004 [1989]), narrative is central to the experience of history and to the construction of personal and collective identity. The nation is not only an imagined community (Benedict Anderson) but also a discursive formation and a narrative in which individuals feel they have stake. Bhabha brings together the national idea and its narrative forms, thereby seeking to contribute to the knowledge of narrative mechanisms and strategies that perform political functions. In France, Pierre Rosanvallon, a historian and Professor at the Collège de France, observing that democracy is suffering from a dangerous crisis of representation, proposed the notion of “narrative democracy.” In 2014, he launched a series, “Raconter la vie,” for the purpose of collecting testimonies, investigations carried out by sociologists and journalists and accounts by writers such as Annie Ernaux and François Bégaudeau. The open access website “raconterlavie.fr” invites people from all walks of life to share their stories online. After being read by a web editor, contributions become part of a broad “narrative democracy.” Narrative democracy is, in fact, a post-representational democracy.

7 Conclusion The most widespread and influential lesson of the narrative turn is that the analytical tools of narratology have spread beyond literature into the humanities generally and that the social sciences, too, have happily taken possession of narrative. This has led Monika Fludernik to observe that “[t]he revived concern for narrative in history, legal studies, and economics may indicate the incipient or ongoing rehumanization of the social sciences” (2010, 925). In less than forty years, Homo sapiens has also become homo narrans and homo fabulator—and this beyond the cognitive sciences alone and beyond Literary Darwinism. However,



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the more problematic dimensions of the narrative turn should not be dismissed; they deserve all our attention, even if analysis leads us to nuance this victory bulletin. With the narrative turn, narrative seems to have left the domain of poetics almost entirely for that of rhetoric, for it is true that the disciplines interested in the narrative turn have, by definition, a functional if not instrumental relation to narrative, and not a poetic or an aesthetic one. Moreover, there is now a gap between the most scientific approaches—notably, cognitive approaches (narrative not as a representation but as a primary function of the human mind)—and the most instrumentalist approaches, which reflect “[t]he general looseness of the application of narratological terms commonly used in the storytelling context” (Norlyk, Lundholt and Hansen 2014 [2013], 103). Finally, it should be noted that where narratology first emphasized structure and significance, the narrative turn considers narrative through the lenses of identity and meaning. We can only welcome the diversification of narratology and its turn outwards from literature to broader contexts, to a wider conception of narrative. The narrative turn has, in fact, reaffirmed Roland Barthes’ statement of more than fifty years ago: narrative is everywhere. But because of its heterogeneity, the narrative turn also stirs a powerful objection to the over-extension and looseness of the concept of narrative, its diverse applications and its uses. Being everywhere, it also sometimes runs the risk of being nowhere.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. 2004 [1989]. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Balsom, Erika. 2015. “Story/Discourse (A Note on Two Kinds of Narrativity).” In The Reluctant Narrator: A Survey of Narrative Practices Across Media, edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto, 115–118. Museu Coleçao Berardo. Lisbon and Berlin: Sternberg Press. Boldizsár Simon, Zoltán, and Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen. 2015. “Introduction: Assessing Narrativism.” In “Forum after Narrativism,” edited by Z. B. S. and J.-M. K. History and Theory 54 (2): 153–161. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2004 [1986]. “The Biographical Illusion.” In Identity: A Reader, edited by Paul DuGay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman, 297–303. London: Sage Publications. Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Accardo et al., eds. 1999 [1993]. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Christman, John. 2004. “Narrative Unity as a Condition of Personhood.” Metaphilosophy 35 (5): 695–713. Cohn, Dorrit. 1999. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” In D. C. The Distinction of Fiction, 109–31. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Denning, Stephen. 2011 [2005]. The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Denning, Stephen. 2016. “Storytelling and Postmodernism. Jean François Lyotard.” http://www. stevedenning.com/Business-Narrative/storytelling-and-post-modernism.aspx (Accessed 18 November 2016) Donoghue, Denis. 2012. “Introduction.” In “On the American Narrative,” edited by D. D. Special issue of Daedalus Winter: 5–10. Ferry, Jean-Marc. 1991. Les Puissances de l’expérience. 1. Le sujet et le verbe. Paris: Cerf. Fisher, Walter R. 1984. “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument.” Communication Monographs 51 (1): 1–22. Flasch, Kurt. 2008 [2005]. Prendre congé de Dilthey. Translated by Francesco Gregorio and Catherine König-Pralong. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Fludernik, Monika. 2010. “Narratology in the Twenty-First Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative.” PMLA 125 (4): 924–930. Friedlander, Saul, ed. 1992. Probing the Limits of Representation, Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1990. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11 (4): 755–774. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1992. “Just One Witness.” In Friedlander, ed., 82–96. Goffman, Erving. 1974. “The Frame Analysis of Talk.” In E. G. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Meaning, 496–559 (New York: Harper & Rowe. Hayek, Friedrich. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–530. Habermas, Jürgen. 1983. “Neoconservative Culture Criticism in the United States and West Germany: An Intellectual Movement in Two Political Cultures.” Telos 56: 75–89. Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. “A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies).” New German Critique 44: 25–39. Hempel, Carl. 1942. “The Function of General Laws in History.” Journal of Philosophy 39 (2): 35–48. Holmes, Anthony. 2009. Managing through Turbulent Times: The 7 Rules of Crisis Management. Petersfield: Harriman House Ltd. Hühn, Peter, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, eds. 2014 [2009]. Handbook of Narratology. 2nd edition, 2 volumes. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Available online as the living handbook of narratology at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Literature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Kreiswirth, Martin. 1992. “Trusting the Tale: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences.” New Literary History 23 (3): 629–657. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2005. “Narrative Turn in the Humanities.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 377–382. London and New York: Routledge. Lamarque, Peter 2014. The Opacity of Narrative. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International. Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et fiction. Pour une frontière. Paris: Seuil.



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Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mayer, Frederick W. 2014. Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Meuter, Norbert. 2014 [2009]. “Narration in Various Disciplines.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 1: 447–67. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrationvarious-media (Revised 7 October 2014) Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1981. “The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes.” In Comparative Criticism: A Year Book, edited by E. S. Shaffer, vol. 3: 259–268. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Narayan, Deepa, et al., eds. 2000. Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? New York: The World Bank and Oxford University Press. Narayan, Deepa, and Patti Petesch, eds. 2002. Voices of the Poor: From Many Lands. New York: The World Bank and Oxford University Press. Nash, Christopher. 1990. “Foreword.” In Narrative in Culture. The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature, edited by C. N., i–xv. London and New York: Routledge. Norlyk, Birgitte, Marianne Wolff Lundholt and Per Krogh Hansen. 2014 [2013]. “Corporate Storytelling.” In Hühn et al., eds., 105–114. Also available at: http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/corporate-storytelling (Revised 6 September 2013) Phelan, James. 2005. Editor’s Column: “Who’s Here? Thoughts on Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism.” Narrative 13 (3): 205–210. Renault, Emmanuel. 2010. “A Critical Theory of Social Suffering.” Critical Horizons 11 (2): 221–241. Ricœur, Paul. 1984 [1983]. Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1986. “Expliquer et comprendre.” In P. R. Du texte à l’action. Essais d’heméneutique II, 179–203. Paris: Seuil. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1997. “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality.” Narrative 5 (2): 165–187. Stone, Lawrence. 1979. “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History.” Past and Present 85 (1): 3–24. Strawson, Galen. 2004. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17: 428–452. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Truc, Gérôme. 2011. “Narrative Identity against Biographical Illusion. The Shift in Sociology from Bourdieu to Ricœur.” Etudes ricœuriennes 2 (1): 150–167. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. Special issue of Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27.

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White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1992. “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth.” In Friedlander, ed., 37–53.

Paul Dawson (Sydney)

How Many ‘Turns’ Does it Take to Change a Discipline? Narratology and the Interdisciplinary Rhetoric of the Narrative Turn “Now narrative as a concept must seem to the literature professor oddly metamorphosed when it returns from the lips or pens of the social— and sometimes even physical—scientist.” Jackson G. Barry (1990, 295)

Anyone who reads narrative theory knows there are two stories that narratologists tell about the development of their discipline. The first is about how classical narratology, which arose largely from an encounter between structuralist linguistics and the study of the novel, has been renovated by a plethora of postclassical interdisciplinary approaches to narrative across media. The second is about the emergence of a ‘narrative turn’ across the humanities and social sciences.1 It would be difficult to say how many disciplines have officially turned to narrative, but the most prominent and important seem to be history, psychology, law and sociology, and the most recent to be International Relations. Together these stories provide a history and framework for understanding research in the field today, but they are also deployed rhetorically to argue for the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration. This article will examine how such rhetoric determines the methodological choices available for collaborative research, and the ramifications of these choices both for the disciplinary identity of narratology and for the study of narrative in individual disciplines. To shift into oral conversational storytelling mode, I would paraphrase the story of narratology this way: well, we went through a tough time in the 80s, there, with post-structuralism deconstructing the transcendental signified of underlying narrative structures, and cultural studies telling us our heads were stuck in the text. But then feminist narratology helped pioneer a whole range of contextual approaches, and then cognitive theory allowed us to revive the tran-

1 David Herman coined the term ‘postclassical narratology’’ in 1999. See Sommer (2012) for a recent overview. Martin Kreiswirth introduced the phrase ‘narrativist turn’ in 1992. Kreiswirth (1992, 1995, 2000, 2005) and Matti Hyvärinen (2006, 2010) have provided the most comprehensive accounts of this phenomenon in the human and social sciences. DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-020

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scendental signified in the form of the human mind. And guess what? While we were doing that, everyone else discovered narrative, especially through the life as narrative metaphor and the narrative identity thesis of psychologists. So now we’re important again! As Monika Fludernik wrote in 2010: “The revived concern for narrative in history, legal studies, and economics may indicate the incipient or ongoing rehumanization of the social sciences. Profiting from these trends, narratology finds itself again flourishing” (925). Current debates now centre around the extent to which narratology can and should integrate knowledge across these fields and hence its function as a discipline in its own right. But this rests upon the territorialist assumption that literary narratology was the cause and inspiration of the broader narrative turn. In a brief history of the narrative turn in social studies, Barbara Czarniawska states that “[t]he interest in narrative spread beyond literary theory to the humanities and social sciences” (2004, 2), pointing to Hayden White’s theory of emplotment in history and William Labov’s structural analysis of simple narratives in sociolinguistics. This spreading interest may be chronological, but it is not necessarily causal, and Matti Hyvärinen (2010) cautions that the story of literary narratology heralding the narrative turn and providing analytic tools which have travelled across the disciplines cannot be sustained. He suggests that the rhetoric of a narrative turn is a retrospective construction which overlooks the history of multiple narrative turns in individual disciplines and points out that there is actually “limited exchange between narratology and the narrative turn literature” (2006, 35). According to Hyvärinen: ‘The narrative turn’ is arguably a concept that is primarily meant to be used after the fact, and secondarily, as a matter of identity (‘our work is now part of the narrative turn’). The rhetoric of the turn suggests some significant changes in the practice of a research field and its theorisation; on the other hand, it may also extend a gratifying feeling of belonging, of contributing to the leading edge of scholarly and intellectual change. (2010, 69)

My concern in this article is with how a sense of disciplinary identity is fostered and framed by what Hyvärinen calls the “rhetoric of the turn.” In this context, I understand ‘rhetoric’ to mean the language that disciplines employ to argue for the importance of studying narrative. There is a fairly stable set of claims for justifying and explaining current scholarship on narrative across the disciplines, and the trope of a narrative turn itself is the most significant element of this rhetoric (drawing as it does on the familiar language that enabled the linguistic turn, the ethical turn, the affective turn, etc.). This trope suggests a collective recognition of surging interest in narrative itself as evidence of the value of narrative studies and its potential to reconfigure disciplinary research. I plan to demonstrate how the appeal to interdisciplinarity that this rhetoric fosters is as much a product of



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institutional imperatives as it is of methodological innovations. For this reason I will be addressing how the rhetoric of the turn works in mission statements and promotional material alongside scholarly accounts and statements of method. In other words, this article is concerned with how and why the story of the narrative turn is told. I do not want to suggest that interdisciplinary research per se is not valid or important, but I do want to interrogate the basis on which it tends to be mooted. The story of how methods of narrative analysis or narrative inquiry developed within and across the social sciences is complicated, with many influences, and perhaps rather than claiming that individual disciplines have ‘turned’ to narrative in some kind of wholesale change, it would be more accurate to say that research within many disciplines has participated in a broader narrative turn. What binds the stories of postclassical narratology and the broader narrative turn is an interdisciplinary consensus that narrative as a cultural artefact, a mode of thought, and a social practice is the result of our evolved cognitive capacity for making sense of the world. The root metaphors of the story-telling animal proposed by Alasdair MacIntyre in 1981 to discuss conceptions of selfhood in moral philosophy, and of the homo narrans proposed by Walter Fisher in 1984 to reconsider theories of communication, have now become ‘scientific’ facts of cognitive evolution.2 As Jonathan Gottschall claims in The Storytelling Animal (2012): “the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story” (56). And in his book, On the Origins of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (2009), Brian Boyd draws upon the theory of evolution by natural selection to explain the “art of storytelling” as “a specifically human adaptation, biologically part of our species” (1). Claims such as this, that we are hard-wired for storytelling, are regularly used to explain the ubiquity and universality of narrative, and thus to justify the significance of ongoing research in the field. But it would be banal to suggest that the narrative turn was motivated by a recognition of our evolutionary heritage and that the common goal of research should be to discover more about this phenomenon. Narrative theory has gained intellectual dynamism because the concept

2 The influence of psychology is crucial here, in three seminal publications of the 1980s: 1) Bruner (1986), who makes a distinction between two modes of thinking: the logico-scientific or paradigmatic and the narrative; 2) Sarbin (1986), who proposes the root metaphor of narrative as the basis of psychology; and 3) Polkinghorne (1988), who claims that narrative is “the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful. Narrative meaning is a cognitive process that organizes human experiences into temporally meaningful episodes” (1). This becomes the justification for linking the discipline of psychology with those of history, literary studies and philosophy.

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of narrative was protean enough to address the specific problems of individual disciplines. And while the narrative turn, in conjunction with new developments in cognitive science, has emboldened literary studies, the multi-disciplinary appeal to narrative since the 1980s makes sense less as the triumphant exportation of literary analysis across the disciplines than as a product of the intellectual milieu fostered by postmodern theory.3 The most important work here is Lyotard’s seminal concept of postmodernism as an “incredulity towards meta-narratives,” and his distinction between grands récits and petits récits as modes of knowledge. In his 2003 book, Narrative After Deconstruction, Daniel Punday points to an unresolved tension in Lyotard’s work between the totalising function of narrative and its capacity to reveal its own contingency, arguing that this tension underlies the appeal to narrative in critical theory as an alternative to deconstruction. Punday’s diagnosis helps to explain contrasting directions in the narrative turn. In response to the radical scepticism of postmodernism, one of the major developments in postclassical narratology was, as David Herman (2001) explains, to turn from structuralist linguistics to cognitive science as a new “pilot science.” Many have positioned cognitive approaches in opposition to deconstruction. For instance, Alex Argyros argued in a 1992 essay, “Narrative and Chaos,” that “an interdisciplinary attitude toward narrative, one which respects the integrity of scientific knowledge while remaining cognizant of the institutional forces that help forge it, might be able to rescue narrative from constructivist cynicism” which views with ideological suspicion any recourse to the natural or social sciences (661).4 At the same time, the narrative turn in the social sciences was motivated largely by this “constructivist cynicism,” marked by an anti-positivistic trend away from empirical methods and scientific truth claims and towards analysis of the rhetorical and constructed nature of identity and social relations. The postmodern concept of knowledge as a tension between grand and counter narratives has been particularly influential in this regard because it aligns with the agenda of identity politics and the political aims of much contemporary criticism, from feminism to postcolonial studies. “The very beginnings of the narrative turn,” De Fina and Georgakopoulou write, “are unquestionably epistemological in aims. Narrative, as we have already suggested, was proposed as an antidote to ration-

3 Kreiswirth (2000) provides an account of the narrativist turn emerging out of and alongside the various challenges to knowledge offered by the linguistic, historical, interpretive and rhetorical turns in the social sciences. 4 And while alert to the positive challenges of deconstruction to narratology, offering this as the reason why she presents the term ‘natural’ in quotation marks, Monika Fludernik (1996) argues that her cognitive paradigm of a natural narratology is superior to that of post-structuralist critique.



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ality and the quantitative measures prevalent in the social sciences at the time as well as a political tool that celebrated lay experiences and lay voices and created opportunities for them to be heard and validated” (2012, 18). According to Hyvärinen, the plurality of narrative studies has long been marked by a tension between a “humanistic programme of ‘giving voice’” to marginalized identities and the poststructuralist denial of narrative as the privileged site of expression for unitary subjects (2010, 75). However, a constructivist view of narrative as a political tool is not necessarily at odds with an essentialist conception of narrative as an evolved cognitive faculty, for research into the latter is often used to lend quasi-scientific support to the political aims of the former. As an example, it is instructive to examine the rhetorical interplay of constructivist methods of narrative analysis and essentialist explanations of narrative in the field of International Relations, a discipline broadly defined as the study of politics and strategic relations between states. The turn to narrative in this discipline has largely been framed by scholars such as Roberts (2006), Suganami (2008), and Linklater (2009) as a call to engage with history. Suganami, for instance, emphasises the value of narrative for explaining causal relations between political events, while also being aware of epistemological challenges to historical knowledge. However, narrative has also been called upon to facilitate more radical feminist challenges to existing methods. In her 2011 book Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, Annick Wibben justifies the importance of narrative to International Relations by recourse both to Polkinghorne’s seminal Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences and to the following quote from Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory: “it does not seem at all exaggerated to view humans as narrative animals, as homo fabulans—the tellers and interpreters of narrative” (1998, 2; quoted in Wibben 2011, 43). Wibben’s argument that narrative is universal and inescapable is designed to challenge positivist methods in International Relations by showing that global security narratives are the product of hegemonic state interpretations of events and to offer feminist counter-narratives drawn from personal stories. This is precisely the unresolved tension of narrative that Punday refers to. Laura Shepherd, in turn, quotes Wibben’s endorsement of the ‘homo fabulans’ thesis in her 2013 book, Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories, which seeks to radically alter the discipline of International Relations from a feminist perspective by including “popular culture alongside policy documents as material worthy of analytical attention in IR” (9). Shepherd claims that “our cognitive frameworks are (re)produced in and through the stories we tell ourselves and others” (3), and on this basis argues for the methodological importance of her narrative approach in which she challenges the distinction between scientific and narrative knowledge. The “epistemological implication” of this approach for

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Shepherd is that “the dissolution of boundaries between ‘factual’ knowledge and ‘fictive’ representation challenges the truth status of all disciplinary knowledge” (10). Here we can see Shepherd employing a typical post-structuralist critique of knowledge to support her constructivist narrative approach, yet she does not challenge the „truth status“ of essentialist concepts of narrative grounded in knowledge of our “cognitive frameworks.” In what follows I will discuss how this emphasis on narrative as an essential mode of human cognition informs various approaches to the disciplinary status of narratology.

1 Narratology and Disciplinarity The passage that launched a thousand glosses on the ubiquity of narrative comes from Roland Barthes’ “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” in which Barthes claims that “narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself” (1977 [1966], 79). Of course, Barthes went on to provide a model only for the study of narrative fiction, but the grandiosity of his prose has become the touchstone for the rhetoric of the narrative turn. This rhetoric today is founded on the assumption, or at least the ideal, that multiple disciplines share the same object of study—something called ‘narrative’—and thus that we must foster genuine dialogue and exchange between the different disciplinary approaches and their conception of narrative. This rhetoric relies upon three mutually reinforcing claims: 1) narrative is a fundamental cognitive faculty for meaning-making and essential to our sense of self, so its study is of vital importance; 2) stories are everywhere (typically accompanied by a quote from Barthes), and the ‘turn’ to narrative in so many disciplines is evidence itself of the ubiquity and significance of narrative (typically accompanied by citations from previous critics asserting there has been a narrative turn in their disciplines); 3) because so many different disciplines are studying narrative, it is only by collaborating and sharing knowledge that we will come to fully understand the phenomenon of narrative. Occurrences of this rhetoric abound in books and articles across the disciplines. The first two claims tend to be common to all disciplines, but the latter more specific to narratology itself. For instance, Hyvärinen argues that handbooks of narrative in the social sciences pay no attention to postclassical narratology, whereas “contemporary literary theory seems to have a much more hegemonic and overarching approach” (2010, 79). An exemplary recent version of this rhetoric can be found in the call for papers for the fifth Computational Models of Narrative Workshop, an interdisciplinary gathering held in Quebec City, Canada in 2014:



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Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear that to truly understand and explain human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why and to what extent narrative is universal and explain (or explain away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop series is to address key questions that advance our understanding of narrative at multiple levels: from the psychological and cognitive impact of narratives to our ability to model narrative responses computationally.

This description refers specifically to computational approaches but nonetheless argues for the importance of the field by employing the familiar rhetoric of the narrative turn. Here we see the typical opening assertion of the ubiquity and universality of narrative, followed by the axiomatic link with our cognitive ability, and leading towards the need for a unified scholarly approach to understand human experience itself. While most scholars are happy to acknowledge that different disciplines work with different concepts of narrative, the desire to ‘integrate’ knowledge is powerful. As the narrative turn gained pace, narratologists have been particularly keen to integrate knowledge from other disciplines. For instance, in his 1991 essay, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” the psychologist Jerome Bruner made clear that the ‘object’ of his discussion was different from that of literary theorists of narrative: “The central concern is not how narrative as text is constructed, but rather how it operates as an instrument of mind in the construction of reality” (5–6). Yet in the ensuing decades these objects— narrative as text and narrative as instrument of mind—seem to have merged to the extent that Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer felt the need in 2009 to state that “narratology is first and foremost the study of narrative, not the mind, or the brain, or human nature” (4). Narratology thus operates with a dynamic tension between centrifugal and centripetal impulses inherent to all interdisciplinary enterprises: a desire to expand the knowledge and reach of a field countered by an attempt to retain disciplinary identity or consolidate a new one.5 The transmedial expansion of narratology beyond literary manifestations of narrative necessitated engaging with other disciplines, and the parallel development of the narrative turn in the human sciences provided the impetus for narratology to recuperate its original structuralist aspiration to cover everything from fictional artefacts to nonfictional forms, everyday conversation and personal narratives, as well as general theories of

5 Some polemical centripetal arguments are offered by Barry (1990), Lamarque (2004) and Kindt (2009).

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communication and cognition. Narratology now finds its disciplinary boundaries so stretched by the looseness of its object of study that any claim for a restricted focus on fictional narratives comes across as reactionary or exclusionary. In this light it becomes important to consider what concept of interdisciplinarity informs scholarship in the field. Interdisciplinarity is itself a burgeoning field of study, defined by Repko (2008) as “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline, and draws on the discipline with the goal of integrating their insights to construct a more comprehensive understanding” (16). Transdisciplinarity, Repko argues, builds on these processes to go “across” and “beyond” all disciplines. The rhetoric of the narrative turn invites us to see narratology as an interdisciplinary enterprise which aspires towards transdisciplinary relevance. One of the most important scholars to engage with the question of disciplinarity is David Herman, who seeks to bring narratological research into dialogue with work from a range of fields such as developmental psychology, discourse analysis, philosophy of mind, etc. He argues that narratology can do more than simply borrow from other disciplines, or even promote a transfer of terms and concepts between disciplines; instead it can effect a convergence of transdisciplinary research around the question of narrative. In an editorial for the journal StoryWorlds, Herman argues that The goal of what I’m calling transdisciplinary research is to avoid the kind of unidirectional borrowing that, though commonly conflated with interdisciplinarity, in fact undermines efforts to foster genuine dialogue and exchange across fields of study. Hence scholars of narrative need to move beyond adapting ideas incubated in other disciplines. Narrative specialists should instead aim to co-fashion, at the ground level, the concepts and methods needed to coordinate work on what can be termed transdisciplinary objects of investigation. (2010, x)

Herman wants to link the “study of stories with larger, transdisciplinary problems that narrative scholars can help articulate” (x). For me this characterises narratology as a kind of problem-solving service discipline, and “narrative specialists” as guns for hire across the disciplines: Got a problem? Dial narratology. Herman elaborates on this transdisciplinary approach in his most recent book, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (2013). The focus of this book is “the nexus of narrative and mind” by which he means narrative as a resource for sense-making through the process of “storying the world.” This concept of narrative is situated as the “target phenomena” and “field-transcending question for research” (312), and it justifies the method of “storytelling and the sciences of mind” which involves a cross-pollination of ideas and methods between nar-



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rative scholarship and the cognitive sciences. This commitment to transdisciplinary exchange and dialogue between disciplines, Herman argues, will enable new methods to “emerge in a bottom-up fashion from the interaction of the fields brought to bear on the problems at hand, rather than being predetermined and imposed, in a top-down manner, by one or the other disciplines concerned” (312). Herman’s aim is to avoid absorbing narrative studies into larger cognitive studies and to ensure an open-ended exchange of ideas and methods. Of course, one could argue that this problem only emerges if narrative is understood in terms of theories of mind in the first place. At stake here is not just the best way to study narrative, but the disciplinary identity of narratology itself. The “field-transcending” question of the nexus of narrative and mind rhetorically creates a field in which other discipline-specific questions become subordinated. Given the broader context of postmodernism out of which the narrative turn has emerged, it is worth considering the aspirations of narratology in relation to postmodern theories of interdisciplinarity. Szostak (2007) argues that postmodernism is interdisciplinary by its very nature: “the roots of postmodern scepticism lie in the inherent limitations of disciplinary approaches to understanding, and the appropriate response to these limitations is not (sceptical) postmodern despair but the constructive program of enhanced understanding advocated by scholars of interdisciplinarity” (35). In a 1997 article entitled, “At the Forefront: Postmodern Interdisciplinarity,” Roger P. Mourad Jr. also argues that in a postmodern environment of proliferating knowledges, disciplines are increasingly incoherent, blurred and unable to quarantine knowledge within their boundaries. However, Mourad distinguishes between modern concepts of interdisciplinarity, which essentially work to shore up the status of disciplines as “absolute structures,” and postmodern interdisciplinarity, which seeks to move beyond them. Modern interdisciplinarity aims to fill in the gaps between disciplines and thus, by virtue of working towards a unified totality of knowledge, “is largely an uncritical extension of the disciplines rather than a critical alternative” (136). In contrast, Mourad claims, postmodern approaches would not seek to repair the fragmentation of knowledge, instead emerging from a series of local enquiries outside any disciplinary foundation and “explicitly dependent on a context that is essentially defined by a knower or group of knowers engaged in a particular inquiry, rather than the context’s being ‘already there’ in a discipline” (132). Bearing this in mind, Herman’s book lays out a program for transdisciplinary approaches to narrative which follows the rhetoric of postmodern interdisciplinarity, but at the same time works to shore up a modern concept by virtue of moving beyond local questions and positing narrative as the pre-existing phenomenon which can bind together disparate fields of study. It is instructive that Herman asserts in his conclusion that: “My proposal for a transdisciplinary

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approach to the study of narrative and mind is part of a wider-scope argument about why research in the humanities should be viewed as foundational—rather than expendable—in these tough budgetary times” (2013, 366). This argument may be admirable, but it also displays the extent to which the rhetoric of the narrative turn is both a response to and a symptom of broader institutional forces governing the nature of humanities research.

2 Institutionality and Interdisciplinarity “[A]ll interdisciplinary activities are rooted in the ideas of unity and synthesis, evoking a common epistemology of convergence.” Julie Klein (1990, 10)

At some point in the last two decades, then, it seems to have become axiomatic that narrative theory is inherently interdisciplinary and that the only real question is how to conduct a study of narrative across disciplines. Despite the rhetoric of the narrative turn, several scholars have pointed out the lack of collaborative exchange between disciplines. Heinen and Sommer (2009) posit an “institutional reason for the scarcity of truly interdisciplinary dialogue,” arguing that most “narratologists have been academically socialized exclusively within the humanities” (2). Their point is that: “Disciplines engaged 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” (3). In this section I will address the recent emergence of university research centres devoted to the study of narrative. These centres have clearly been designed to overcome the practical barriers to interdisciplinary dialogue that Heinen and Sommer identify, and they are significant firstly because their strategic function perpetuates the rhetoric of the narrative turn, and secondly because they wield considerable influence over the direction of contemporary research through their involvement in major journals, book series, conferences and graduate courses and summer schools in the field. The Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology was founded at Hamburg University in 2004 and hosts the online open-access living handbook of narratol-



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ogy6 as well as being associated with the Narratologia book series published by De Gruyter. Founded in 2006, Project Narrative at the Ohio State University is responsible for Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and the “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” book series. The Center for Narrative Research at the University of Wuppertal was established in 2007 and hosts Diegesis: Interdisciplinary E-journal for Narrative Theory. The Narrative Research Lab at Aarhus University was also established in 2007 and its members have been driving forces in the emergence of unnatural narratology. Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies was founded at the University of Tampere in 2015, and its members are responsible for the recent collection Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds (2016) which seeks to develop a transdisciplinary narrative theory by addressing the “core” questions of storyworld construction and mental-functioning. In the social sciences, the Centre for Narrative Research was established at the University of East London in 2001, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative at St Thomas University in 2003. This centre hosts the bi-annual Narrative Matters conference and the journal Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations & Interventions. A glance at the mission statements of some of these centres reveals how they promote their dynamism through the interdisciplinary rhetoric of the narrative turn. The website for Project Narrative asserts that its “main mission is to promote state-of-the art research and teaching in the field of narrative studies.” It claims to encompass “narrative in all of its guises” from conversational storytelling to digital media and to address the counter-narratives of marginalized identities. The key phrase is this: “Further, Project Narrative highlights the importance of developing an integrative, interdisciplinary approach to narrative,” listing a range of disciplinary traditions and analytical approaches, although without explaining the importance of this approach. Despite its proclaimed aspirations, Project Narrative is nonetheless firmly established in the humanities. The Centre for Narrative Research, on the other hand, claims on its website that it “draws on narrative research from across the social sciences and beyond.” It offers as a self-evident virtue the claim to be “founded in interdisciplinarity” and points out that “it includes researchers from psychological, sociological, anthropological, cultural and media studies, humanities, arts and performance research traditions.” Despite the catholicity of its approach, the centre claims to distinguish itself (presumably from other centres) by its commitment to “narra-

6 http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ The print version of this publication is Handbook of Narratology (2014), edited by Peter Hühn et al. (2nd edition).

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tive complexity” and to “relationships between personal narratives and the social world.” The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative has the most lavish rhetoric, opening its website blurb with this neo-Darwinian cum Barthesian line: “Human beings have been storytelling creatures since the very beginning, and the narrative impulse permeates countless facets of our world.” It is careful to distinguish itself from perceptions of a link between narrative and fiction by asserting that: “Narrative is pivotal not just to literature […] but to cognition and emotion, memory and community, politics and religion, culture and identity, counselling and learning.” It then goes on to explain why the study of narrative, thus defined, must be interdisciplinary in its approach: “In the same way that any story deals with a number of subjects at once, so the study of story is the province of no one field. As a result, research on the storied complexity of human life draws from, and has an impact on, a wide range of disciplines—from psychology to sociology, history to healthcare, and ethics to education.” The ultimate aim of a unification of disciplinary knowledge can be found in this phrase: “It is both the charm and the challenge of narrative that no one discipline can define precisely what it is or does, though surely each contributes to our understanding.” The most distinctive blurb comes from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies at the University of York. The website is emblazoned with the standard justificatory claim, but phrases it as a question: “Narrative is a basic way of making sense; forms of story pervade culture, the media, everyday communication and, most fundamentally, our thinking. What is at stake in this ubiquity?” The ‘welcome’ statement from the Centre director, Richard Walsh, states that the centre brings together researchers from the humanities, sciences and social sciences, but resists the integrative, unified approach: “We approach collaborative and interdisciplinary research as dialogue rather than synthesis, so that the exchange of ideas feeds back into the specific research fields of the participants.” Interdisciplinarity is clearly the imperative and the raison d’être of these institutions and they seem to compete on the basis of the number of different disciplinary traditions, methods and international collaborations they can list. The research published by members and associates of these centres is, of course, not governed by their promotional statements, but this is my point: it is gathered under the banner of interdisciplinarity to achieve strategic critical mass within particular institutions. The rhetoric of these centres shares as much with the language of research grant applications and university promotional material as it does with the scholarly discourse of narrative studies. As Bill Readings says of university mission statements and publicity brochures: “On the one hand they all claim theirs is a unique educational institution. On the other hand, they all go on to describe this uniqueness in exactly the same way” (1996, 12). In this



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way these research centres embody not only an impulse in narrative studies, but the demands of the modern corporate university and its competitive drive for research excellence. In other words, the centrifugal force of postmodern interdisciplinarity exists in tension with the centripetal effects of university bureaucracy. Readings provides a useful diagnosis of how the intellectual energy associated with interdisciplinary research must be wary of the institutional structures of the contemporary university. In The University in Ruins (1996), he argues that universities no longer have a defined cultural mission, for they have shifted from being institutions linked to the ideology of nationhood to become “transnational bureaucratic corporations” devoted to the pursuit of excellence in the global economy. “In a general economy of excellence, the practice of research is of value only as an exchange-value within the market; it no longer has intrinsic use-value for the nation-state” (175). To protect the integrity of intellectual thought in this corporate environment, he argues, the humanities can no longer rely on traditional concepts of disciplinarity. However, rather than exchanging the “rigid and outmoded disciplines for a simply amorphous interdisciplinary space in the humanities,” he proposes restructuring universities around “shortterm collaborative projects of both teaching and research (to speak in familiar terms) which would be disbanded after a certain period, whatever their success” (176). The reason is that, despite their intellectual energy, “such collaborations have a certain half-life, after which they sink back into becoming quasi-departments with budgets to protect and little empires to build” (176). His point is that new interdisciplinary constellations—such as African-American Literature or Modern Art History—emerge for concrete historical reasons, but if they then become established as independent disciplines without continually questioning their existence they “become modes of unthinking participation in institutional-bureaucratic life” (176) alongside the existing disciplinary formations they first challenged. For Readings, “the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question” (177). Readings’ proposal for short-term collaborative projects is similar to Mourad’s ideas on how postmodern interdisciplinarity can be fostered, and both provide a model for local investigations into narrative. Research centres provide the institutional means for this sort of work to be conducted, but it seems unlikely that any would be voluntarily disbanded in the name of genuine interdisciplinarity, since their existence is governed by the discourse of excellence which has co-opted the language of interdisciplinarity itself. Is there another way to conceptualise the interdisciplinarity of narrative theory and the role of narratology in the wake of the narrative turn? In his book, Theory Matters (2003), Vincent Leitch argues that cultural studies, among others

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such as women’s and gender studies, is a “postmodern interdiscipline,” self-consciously constructed against the blind spots or prejudices of modern disciplines. The effect has been to demonstrate that each discipline contains “ineradicable elements of other disciplines” (ix). Resulting from the institutional conditions of academic research, however, is an inevitable drive for independence, for, as Leitch says, the “origin and end of all interdisciplines is the discipline” (167). In this sense, the narrative turn has explanatory value as a loose shorthand term for the constellation of a series of postmodern interdisciplines arising out of the need to address limitations in various disciplines but demonstrating how each contains elements of the other. In keeping with this idea, one way to approach the cross-disciplinary appeal of narrative is not to ask how we can bring the disciplines together, but how to keep at the forefront the question of what individual disciplines have turned away from and what they are turning towards. It is too easy to assume that the rhetoric of the narrative turn indicates the widespread acceptance of narrative analysis in individual disciplines, rather than one methodological alternative.7 To reconceptualise narratology as a core discipline servicing others, from literary studies to psychotherapy, or as a master discipline absorbing all others, is either an assertion of territoriality or a strategic imperialistic desire in the name of research ‘excellence’. If we maintain the question of disciplinarity as a permanent question, however, we might approach the concept of narrative itself as a contingent and changing product of specific research questions rather than a universal human phenomenon, enabling us to investigate whether “ineradicable” elements of other disciplines do exist in different methods of analysis.

3 Travelling Methods: Story and Discourse across the Disciplines To determine whether disciplinary methods travel as easily and as productively as root metaphors do, the core narratological distinction between story and discourse is a good place to start. According to Dorrit Cohn: “No conceptual tool has been more fundamental for the formalist-structuralist approach to narrative than

7 Kreiswirth points out that for “many in the human sciences, wherever else it is, by its very nature story is at bottom false, fictive—‘literary’, imaginative, not scientific” (2000, 312). Strawson (2004), of course, offers a well-known critique of the ethical claims made on behalf of the narrative identity thesis. See also Atkinson (1997) and Woods (2011).



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the distinction between the two levels (or aspects) of analysis” (1999, 110). Before investigating the extent to which this foundational concept has been employed by narrative analysis in other disciplines, it is important to recognize ongoing debates about its own theoretical problems. In literary studies, the methodological assumption that story precedes the discourse that reports it has long been complicated by the logic of deconstruction, and it is now commonly accepted that story is a mental construct derived from the discourse.8 Paradoxically, this has preserved the emphasis on the primacy of story. First, because it dovetails with the influence of cognitive theory and possible worlds semantics.9 And secondly because for those interested in transmedial approaches to narrative, story must be assigned some kind of independence from discourse in order to be transposable across different media. At the same time, those interested in studying narrative across media point out that discourse can take different material forms. On this basis, Chatman divides discourse into two subcomponents: “the narrative form itself—the structure of narrative transmission—and its manifestation—its appearance in a specific materializing medium”, which he calls style (1978, 10–11). In Narration and the Fiction Film (1985), David Bordwell claims that while syuzhet is the organization of the fabula, a system which cuts across all media, style is the systematic deployment of cinematic devices to achieve this organization, and together they constitute narration, which he defines 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” (53; original emphasis). Mieke Bal (1997 [1985]) seems to combine the level of style with Genette’s category of narrating when she makes a distinction between the text as the utterance of a narrator, and the story as the organization of the fabula. This leads Peter Verstraten to assert that “[i]n narratological circles, it is customary to work with the triadic set of text, story and fabula” (2009, 13). I myself thought it was customary to work with Genette’s (1980 [1972]) ternary model of story (histoire), narrative (récit) and narrating (narration). We can see here that the standard bi-level distinction between story as the ‘what’ of a narrative and discourse as the ‘how’ is in fact dispersed across at least four levels, made more confusing by the fact that the same term is often used in different ways: 1) the medium of the narrative (style, text, discourse); 2) the act of

8 Early deconstructive challenges are offered by Jonathan Culler (1981) and Barbara Herrnstein-Smith (1980). Also see Patrick O’Neill (1994), Peter Brooks (1985) from a psychoanalytic approach and Richard Walsh (2001) from a pragmatic, rhetorical perspective. 9 Herman (2002) uses the term ‘storyworld’ to designate mental models of possible worlds “built up on the basis of cues contained in narrative discourse” (20).

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narrating (narration); 3) the structural organization of the narrative (discourse, sjuzhet, story, plot); 4) the story or content of the narrative (story, fabula, narrated). When applied across disciplines such as history or sociology, there is the further question of referentiality, since the story could have a fictional or nonfictional referent. In her deconstructive critique of the “two-levelled model” of narrative and the narratological emphasis on story, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith suggests that the distinction only makes sense in relation to re-tellings, either of stories that have already been told, or of events that have actually occurred. In fact, she argues that the existence of twice-told tales and of nonfictional narratives provides the unconscious model of a recuperable story from any narrative. In relation to twicetold tales she challenges the idea that there are different ‘versions’ of a core story such as Cinderella: “For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as related to it” (1980, 221). She further argues that even for nonfictional narratives “that report not imaginary events but events which presumably occurred at some particular prior time,” our “knowledge of past events is usually not narrative in structure or given in storylike sequences,” but instead a series of scattered impressions that must be organized by the act of narration (229). Hence, while initially indicating that perhaps the story/discourse distinction might be more relevant to history than fiction, she extends her critique to this realm as well. As part of this critique, she references the work of Hayden White, and indeed White is well known for problematising the discipline of history by approaching the relationship between historiography and narrative in terms of the story/discourse distinction. In “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980), White argues that narrative “becomes a problem only when we wish to give to real events the form of a story. It is because real events do not offer themselves as stories that their narrativization is so difficult” (8). His point is that when historians claim the moral authority to write a true account of events, this indicates that “at least two versions of the same event can be imagined” (23) and thus that narrativization involves the imposition of form. For Herrnstein-Smith, the key element of fictional narrative is the rhetorical act of narrating, and for White the key element of historical narrative is the moralizing act of narrativization. In her discussion of the story/discourse distinction as a signpost of fictionality, Dorrit Cohn points out the insufficiency of applying the “bi-level model of narratology” (1999, 111) to the discipline of history on the basis that “a text-oriented poetics of fiction excludes on principle a realm that is at the very center of the historiographer’s concern: the more or less reliably documented evidence of past events out of which the historian fashions his story” (112). Hence she argues



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that studies of historical narratives require a tri-level model which includes this “referential” level (reference/story/discourse), and she takes White to task for neglecting it in his theory of emplotment as the shared formal feature of fiction and history. Her point is that a novel can be plotted but not emplotted because its events have no “ontologically independent and temporally prior database” (114). So, while “[s]tory and discourse are conceived as synchronous structural aspects of fictional texts with no presumption of priority of story over discourse,” the diachronic dimension of a reference level is required in a model of historical narrative: “For outside the realm of fiction, the synchronous interplay of story and discourse is undergirded—no matter how shakily—by the logical and chronological priority of documented or observed events” (115).10 Cohn recognizes the basic problem of transferring a concept designed for the study of narrative fiction to disciplines concerned with nonfictional phenomena. But versions of the story/discourse distinction and its attendant debates can be found throughout the social sciences, regardless of whether the distinction has been directly borrowed from narratology. In his survey of the narrativist turn, Martin Kreiswirth addresses the relationship between narrative and knowledge in history and other disciplines in the social sciences. Kreiswirth’s starting point is what he calls a bivalency or doubleness in the way we think about narrative that poses “particular and fundamental problems for storied knowledge claims in the human sciences” (2000, 301). Like Cohn, he suggests that the focus of narratology on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of narrative, and debates about this division, have operated at the abstract level in relation to fiction, and have not been designed for “those stories that have potentially more fixed and thus more problematic attachments to the world of actuality and, consequently, want to be seen as making different kinds of claims about the world” (302). Nonetheless, he argues, it is necessary to consider these debates in the human sciences because the term narrative is used to describe both a story and its telling and thus contains the distinction in itself: “‘Narrative’ by its very signification and cultural use is both presentation and presented; the narratological problematic, the basic formal relationship between the what and the how, is thus contained within the

10 Possible worlds semantics offers a different solution to this problem. Doležel (2010) claims that the “postmodern challenge to the distinction between fiction and history was formulated on the level of discourse (texts)” (41), and he seeks to counter this challenge by reference to the level of worlds. His main argument is that while both fiction and history construct possible worlds subject to questions about the truth conditions of statements made within them, fictional worlds are “imaginary alternates of the actual world” whereas historical worlds are “cognitive models of the actual past” (33).

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term itself and infects, to some degree, any attempt to define, legitimize, or criticize it” (303). For Kreiswirth, addressing “narrative’s bivalency” requires a distinction between the “spatiotemporal world of the medium” and what is being represented, as well as the relationships between these two in their transmission and reception. In the human sciences, however, usage of the term narrative often involves a slippage between the narrating and the narrated, making it unclear what the emphasis of analysis is. The distinction is important to make, he argues, because “[a]s in history, the narratives of the other human sciences want to accomplish more epistemic work than merely telling stories,” so unless “one is happy to remain at the discursive plane of the narrating, certain assumptions about the referentiality, validity, or authenticity of the narrated and the truth claims of the narrators tend to be postulated, whether tacitly or explicitly” (304). Kreiswirth’s contribution to this problem is to situate various conceptions of narrative in relation to its bivalency: “one of the most important, but previously overlooked, ways of distinguishing different disciplinary uses of narrative and narrative theory in these fields is locating where and with what authority the telling and the told are situated” (304). The least useful approach, for Kreiswirth, is that of what he calls narrative naturalists who, following Bruner, “want to see story going all the way down, beyond language and textuality, into mental activity or basic cognitive processes” (305). In this view, narrative is the discursive representation of a way of thinking, and the relationship between knowing and known is transparent. Given the intellectual history of the narrative turn, and the epistemological problems presented by “storied knowledge,” he favours narrative constructivists who see the relationship between the telling and the told in dynamic terms, focussing on different levels of temporality, on how narrative is used to construct identity and consider ethics, and on the sociopolitical deployments of storied knowledge in the context of broader social and cultural power relationships. Taking a pragmatic approach to different narrative forms (similar to John Searle’s account of fictional discourse in terms of speech act theory), Kreiswirth argues that the structure of narrative form cannot determine its status as fiction or nonfiction, and hence it depends on their function in relation to the actual world. As a result, it becomes imperative for the human sciences to engage with this function in order to address the authority of claims for storied knowledge. Kreiswirth’s account of the slipperiness of the term narrative and what it refers to anticipates several recent attempts to establish different abstract levels and methodological approaches to these levels. These attempts share two common features: the foundational distinction between a story and its telling is proposed and adapted as a means to integrate research methods across the social sciences;



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a general shift from naturalist to constructivist approaches is invoked to facilitate an emphasis on the act of telling and its relation to identity, on the uses of narrative rather than the story being told. In this way they loosely mirror the postclassical narratological focus on transmedial applications of core categories and on contextual approaches to the reception of narrative. In a 2004 article on narrative studies in the social sciences, and particularly psychology, Vilma Hanninen sets out to reconcile different approaches to narrative emerging from the narrative turn. Her claim is that “the concept of narrative has the potential to integrate the knowledge and understanding provided by separate research fields of human sciences” but that it requires sifting through the various uses of the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ and organizing them into a clear framework. To this end she proposes a “schematic model of different modes of narrativity in human life” (Hanninen 2004, 70), a model of narrative circulation which, when presented diagrammatically, strikes one as a particularly elaborate version of the many communication models offered by literary narratologists. This model involves a distinction between the told narrative, an empirical phenomenon which Hanninen defines as “the symbolic representation, most often verbal, of a chain of human events,” and the inner narrative, a hypothetical construct referring to “the narrative organization of experience, the story we tell to ourselves” (2004, 70). But she also suggests the need for another mode of narrative form: the lived narrative which refers to human actions as “enacted narratives” whereby the “narrative organization of lived life can be seen as the basis of narrative organization of experience” (71). These three modes of narrative (roughly approximating discourse, story and referent) form the basis of a model of narrative circulation to which Hanninen adds: the cultural stock of stories which is “the totality of narrative representations” that a person consumes in their life (73); the personal stock of stories which a person has stored in their memory; and the situation which is “the actual conditions” of a person’s life (74). It is significant that Hanninen claims the told narrative is an empirical phenomenon presenting no ontological problems as to its existence and no real epistemological problems about how to apprehend it, suggesting that when studied in and of itself, “it is quite justified to bracket out the questions of the truth of the told narrative—the narratologists actually study mainly fictional narratives” (72). It is significant because, as one of the narratologists, I don’t know what she means. On the other hand, there are problems with the social sciences borrowing directly from the narratologists. For instance, it is striking to see the extent to which narratology (in conjunction with feminism) has informed the narrative turn in International Relations. Annick Wibben sketches out a narrative approach to the sub-discipline of security studies in International Relations, pointing out the importance of challenging a stable referent in the field. “Although the state

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has been the main subject of traditional security narratives,” she argues, “and is still accorded special importance in security studies, most critical approaches aim to at least partly move beyond the state as the referent of security,” including “system level” referents such as the environment and “referents below the state level such as collectivities or individuals” (Wibben 2011, 80). Referring specifically to the narratological story/discourse distinction, she further argues that “although the inclusion of other referents might seem to be a major reorientation of the narrative of security, it needs to be regarded with caution because the how (the framing on text and story levels), and not only the what (the content of a fabula), make up the narrative” (80). Wibben’s method of narrative analysis is derived entirely from Bal’s distinction between text, story and fabula, and one problem with this methodological transfer is that she does not elaborate the relation between fabula as an imaginary construct and this idea of a referent. She also draws on only one other work of narrative theory, Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory, to argue the need for a post-structuralist understanding of narrative. She later invokes Lyotard in her account of the political importance of analysing competing narratives: Narratives are profoundly referential and influential in their representations. They create phenomena and have a tendency to generalize, universalize, and decontextualize the particular. At the same time, if one does not try to gloss over or iron out the inconsistencies, narratives can capture and hold on to what might otherwise be considered incommensurable differences. From the perspective of narrative theory as outlined here, disagreement and multiplicity in narrative are not only unavoidable, they should be encouraged, as they are necessary for political processes. (Wibben 2011, 100)

Here, the direct application of a method from narratology in fact opens up Wibben to criticism from the narratologists (and demonstrates the limitations of such applications) in a way that would not happen with a looser metaphorical transfer. For instance, the more general synonyms for story and discourse commonly employed in narratology—such as the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ (Chatman 1978), and the ‘telling’ and the ‘told’ (Phelan 2005)—can also be found outside the discipline without explicit reference. In a 2008 overview of models of narrative analysis for social sciences research, particularly of “oral narratives of personal experience,” Catherine Riessman establishes a basic distinction between the telling and the told and elaborates different models of analytic emphasis. The first is Thematic Analysis where “[e]mphasis is on the content of a text, ‘what’ is said more than ‘how’ it is said, the ‘told’ rather than the ‘telling’” (2). The second is Structural Analysis where “[e]mphasis shifts to the telling, the way a story is told. Although thematic content does not slip away, focus is equally on form—how a teller by selecting particular narrative devices makes a story persuasive” (3). This is the



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Labovian model focussing on the function of communication. The next is Interactional Analysis, where “the emphasis is on the dialogic process between teller and listener” (4), and finally Performative Analysis where the emphasis is on how tellers perform their sense of identity. The basic distinction between story and discourse is evident in the first two modes of analysis, with the second two emphasizing the analytic requirements for the specific object of study, although Riessman does not elaborate the theoretical relationship between these elements. These adaptations and approximations of the story/discourse distinction point to the different ontological and epistemological assumptions informing studies of narrative across the disciplines. And it is clear that this concept has far more potential relevance as the basis for a cross-pollination of methods than any other narratological category, such as focalization, free indirect discourse, unreliability, implied author, etc. David Herman (1999), for instance, proposed a socio-narratological model which integrates the narratological tradition derived from literary studies with the Labovian sociolinguistic tradition by showing how the conceptual difference between story and discourse can be used to study the temporal structure of oral narratives, while bringing a more communicative focus to the study of literary narratives. However, as I have demonstrated, the basic bi-level distinction is more complex and multi-layered than it seems. Attending to this complexity would allow scholars from different disciplines to reflect on their own uses of the distinction and its various terms without the need for integrationist rhetoric or a shared foundational definition of narrative. If we think of a cross-disciplinary approach to the story/discourse distinction involving different points of emphasis from medium to narrating to structure to story to referent, it would lead to questions such as: should the study of narrative fiction address the mode of lived experience or the referential level? or: would the human sciences benefit from engaging more explicitly with the question of medium or with the level of narrating? For me this means the narrative turn need not be constructed as a common interest in the universality of story, but as an opportunity to question assumptions about narrative which inform discipline-specific approaches to narrative discourse. In this way narratology could most productively be conceived as a meta-discipline that questions the object of study itself in different disciplines. That is, its centripetal impulse could be deployed critically to pose some simple but important questions. Why does the study of narrative have to be interdisciplinary? The shared concept of narrative as a sense-making mode of cognition may provide productive exchanges between disciplines, but does that mean each local investigation ought to be informed by or feed back into each other, as the rhetoric of the turn suggests? Will our knowledge of narrative in music, for instance, be improved by a knowledge of narrative in advertising? In terms of disciplinary

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identity, is it incumbent upon those who identify as narratologists to possess an interdisciplinary range of knowledge and research interests? In other words, narratology could perform a valuable metadisciplinary function by questioning the narrative turn itself.

4 Returning Narrative Theory to Fiction In 1990, Jackson Barry characterized the narrative turn as an expansion of narratology from a subset of literary studies to an autonomous discipline encompassing the phenomenon of narrative across a range of fields. He concluded with this question: “The centrifugal force of narratology in the 1980s might, as suggested above, need some return to and correction at its roots in literary study. In the 1990s will the invaded fields revise and return, in their own terms, a more sophisticated narratology to literature?” (Barry 1990, 305) It would be hard to argue that the narratological study of literature has not become more complex and sophisticated, although I’m not sure this is a result of revisions taken from the ‘invaded fields’. I would argue, however, that one area in which the rhetoric of the narrative turn has had a dubious influence is its contribution to perpetuating a certain evangelical fervour about the social importance of fiction which seems rooted in the perennial anxiety over the role of literary studies in the academy. The rhetoric of the narrative turn, from the root metaphor of the storytelling animal to research in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, has returned to literary scholars with ‘scientific’ evidence for long-standing claims about the ethical benefit of reading literature via the sympathetic imagination. “The constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli,” Jonathan Gottschall argues, “strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skilfull navigation of life’s problems. From this point of view, we are attracted to fiction not because of an evolutionary glitch, but because fiction is, on the whole, good for us” (2012, 67). What makes this different from traditional claims is that rather than being associated with canonical fiction, from F. R. Leavis’s Great Tradition to Martha Nussbaum’s nineteenth-century social realist novels, Gottschall is indiscriminate: any story will do. In his final chapter, Gottschall argues that fears for the death of the novel in the age of digital media are alarmist but that even if the novel does die, story never will, so we shouldn’t worry. Well, that’s okay if your interest is in stories, but not so much if it is in novels. In this view, literature is subsumed under the broader category of fiction, and fiction becomes equated with ‘story’ as the real object of study. In a taxonomic sense this may be true, but



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methodologically it flattens out the cultural and generic specificity of novelistic form. Brian Boyd, on the other hand, proposes a biocultural explanation for the existence of fiction as invented story that contains at its core a justification for a conservative, humanist understanding of canonical literature. He begins by asserting the need for literary scholars to assimilate the discoveries of science, and he explicitly situates his approach as a response to the influence of postmodern critical theory: “A biocultural approach to literature invites a return to the richness of texts and the many-sidedness of the human nature that texts evoke” (Boyd 2009, 2). The key part of his book is a section entitled “Fiction as Adaptation.” First, he draws upon evolutionary science to make the now familiar claim about fiction as a special kind of play designed to help us adapt to our social environment: “Fiction aids our rapid understanding of real-life social situations, activating and maintaining this capacity at high intensity and low cost” (193). He proceeds to explain in terms reminiscent of a lecture to reluctant students what we can learn from fiction (such as admiring Robinson Crusoe’s resourcefulness or heeding the lessons of Aesop’s fables), and then, in terms reminiscent of an overreaching grant application, its greater contributions to society: “Through appeals to the moral and social emotions, fiction can contribute to solving the problems of cooperation that become more acute the larger the population grows” (196). He goes on to assert that the value of fiction is its capacity to disseminate the core values of a social group, and that the most successful fictions appeal to and shape the moral climate of the time. At the same time he does not address the fact that it is precisely this claim which prompted critical theorists to re-read canonical fiction against the grain. Nestled amidst this flurry of assertions is the observation that a certain type of fiction provides the best way to develop empathy: Another feature of fiction—but not of fact—also encourages the development of a moral sense. Story by its nature invites us to shift from our own perspective to that of another, and perhaps then another and another. Stories come most alive when all the principal characters have their own vivid life, especially when not only their actions but also their speech and thought are fully realized. Simply in order to animate the story, fiction lets us hear characters’ speech and even access their thoughts as we cannot do in life. Merely in following its own bent, fiction cultivates our sympathetic imagination by prompting us to see from the perspective of character after character. (Boyd 2009, 197)

Do we need a bioevolutionary approach to fiction to tell us what we have heard so many times before and tried to move beyond? The language of evolutionary science becomes even more disturbing when Boyd engages with storytelling and gender differences. “Males have more reproductive variance than females,” he reminds us, and “therefore have on average a stronger drive than females to

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earn status, since it can gain them better access to females, and hence have more reason to engage in extreme behaviour in order to secure status” (195). This is presented as the reason why men are overrepresented at the extremes of success or failure, even when it comes to fiction: “Despite Murasaki, Jane Austen, and J. K. Rowling, males outnumber females as classic and even popular storytellers (including today’s leading popular storytellers, filmmakers)” (195). This bio-evolutionary explanation for the cultural field of fiction does find a place for women, though: women seek status less urgently and invest more in child rearing and hence “are the principal tellers of fictional stories, of folk tales and nursery rhymes, to their children” (195). Gottschall and Boyd are not narratologists, but David Herman lists their work as examples of one of the approaches to narrative and mind that he seeks to integrate in his book: “Recruiting from the sciences of mind to study narrative viewed as a resource for sense making” (2013, 4; original emphasis). Another scholar that Herman includes in this approach is Lisa Zunshine, whose work is more closely related to narratology, particularly in her book Why We Read Fiction (2006). Zunshine offers an even more baldly practical argument for the benefit of fiction in a 2013 article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Why Fiction Does it Better.” Here Zunshine points to research that proves children with rich vocabularies perform better in school and then draws upon cognitive science “which connects the acquisition of vocabulary to social cognition, or the development of theory of mind” to argue that fiction affords the best means of achieving results: Here cognitive science joins forces with literary theory. Peskin and Astington’s research goes to the heart of the old intuition that reading fiction is “good for you,” defining “good” now specifically in terms of stronger academic performance across the board. […] If you want nonstop high-level sociocognitive complexity, simultaneous with nonstop active reorganization of perceptions and inferences, only fiction delivers. Teach less of it, and only students whose parents encourage them to read a lot of fiction on their own will still do well. The less fortunate others will end up with poor vocabularies and grades. (Zunshine 2013, B5)

Zunshine states explicitly that the metacognitive complexity of fiction operates at a higher level than nonfiction, and it is clear from her definition of fiction as “prose fiction, drama and narrative poetry” that she is talking about narrative fiction. Here we can see that another consequence for literary studies of the rhetoric of the narrative turn is the conflation of fiction and narrative, excluding non-narrative forms such as lyric poetry.



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5 Conclusion The important question to ask about the effect of the narrative turn on individual disciplines is whether introducing new methods of narrative analysis has actually changed or at least challenged the direction and identity of that discipline, or whether it has been deployed rhetorically to confirm what already existed. For instance, in International Relations, the turn to narrative has coincided with a call to engage with history, but the more radical challenge of overt political and anti-positivist critique is a product of the conflation of feminism and post-structuralist theory, far more than the influence of narrative theory. In literary studies, on the other hand, as I have shown, it has served to shore up the anxieties of accountability at the same time as facilitating its evangelical ambitions. The rhetoric of the narrative turn is employed to serve both the interdisciplinary promise of cutting-edge research excellence and the claims of individual disciplines for the social or ethical benefits of their work: reading fiction is vital for developing social skills; training in narrative competence helps doctors diagnose patient symptoms; narrative analysis democratises therapist/patient relations and helps ease trauma or mental suffering; attending to personal narratives gives political voice to marginalized identities, etc. Where does this leave narratology? In a grumpy critique of what he calls “narratological expansionism,” and a plea for narratology to retain its original classical focus, Tom Kindt outlines two major problems with the aspiration of narratology to act as a foundational discipline in the wake of the narrative turn. One is the limitation of fundamentality, arguing that narrative is simply not everywhere, and even where it can be found it is not necessarily as important as is claimed. The other is the limitation of functionality, arguing that a definition broad enough to encompass all narratives ends up being reductive (Kindt 2009). I have tried to show that while the narrative turn is in one sense a genuine phenomenon, the phrase itself functions as a rhetorical trope to serve the modern institutional imperative for interdisciplinarity, and that it employs the argument of fundamentality to achieve this. Postclassical narratology has a coherent trajectory as a series of theoretical revisions to structuralist narratology through the introduction of transmedial and contextual approaches. Although it can be argued that structuralism contained both the aspiration and the methods for these approaches, the very rhetoric of a new plural phase has aided the ‘revival’ of narratology in the marketplace of scholarly fields. The narrative turn in the social sciences makes sense as a trope denoting the loose collocation of intra-disciplinary challenges to positivist knowledge which developed methods of narrative analysis or narrative enquiry promoting new views of self and identity. The broader interdisciplinary field

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of narrative theory or narrative studies emerging from these two developments involves a dynamic interplay between essentialist and constructivist views of narrative. Rather than seeking a common goal of unified knowledge about narrative as a fundamental cognitive faculty by which humans make sense of experience, I suggest a more local and contingent series of methodological exchanges between disciplines, one of which could be based on the different ways the story/discourse distinction, or the bivalency of narrative, informs the study of different narrative forms.

Works Cited Argyros, Alex. 1992. “Narrative and Chaos.” New Literary History 23 (3): 659–673. Atkinson, Paul. 1997. “Narrative Turn or Blind Alley?” Qualitative Health Research 7 (3): 325–344. Bal, Mieke. 1997 [1985]. Narratology. 2nd edition. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Barry, Jackson G. 1990. “Narratology’s Centrifugal Force: A Literary Perspective on the Extensions of Narrative Theory.” Poetics Today 11 (2): 295–307. Barthes, Roland. 1977 [1966]. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” In Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 79–124. London: Fontana. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press. Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Brooks, Peter. 1985. “Reading for the Plot.” In P. B. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, 3–36. New York: Vintage. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1): 1–22. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1999. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” In D. C. The Distinction of Fiction, 109–131. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1981. “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative.” In J. C. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, 168–187. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Currie, Mark. 1998. Postmodernist Narrative Theory. London: Macmillan. Czarniawska, Barbara. 2004. Narratives in Social Science Research. London: Sage. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2012. Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Doležel, Lubomír. 2010. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Fisher, Walter R. 1984. “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument.” Communication Monographs 51: 1–22. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge.



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Fludernik, Monika. 2010. “Narratology in the Twenty-First Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative.” PMLA 125 (4): 924–930. Genette, Gerard. 1980 [1972]. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Introduction by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Hanninen, Vilma. 2004. “A Model of Narrative Circulation.” Narrative Inquiry 14 (1): 69–85. Hatavara, Mari, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä and Frans Mäyrä, eds. 2016. Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds. New York and London: Routledge. Heinen, Sandra, and Roy Sommer. 2009. “Narratology and Interdisciplinarity.” In Heinen and Sommer, eds., 1–10. Heinen, Sandra, and Roy Sommer. eds. 2009. Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Herman, David. 1999. “Toward a Socionarratology: New Ways of Analyzing Natural-Language Narratives.” In Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by D. H., 218–246. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Herman, David. 2001. “Narratology as a Cognitive Science.” Image & Narrative 1 (1). http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/narratology/davidherman.htm (Accessed 23 December 2015) Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press. Herman, David. 2010. “Editor’s Column: Exploring Storyworlds across Media and Disciplines.” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 2: vii–ix. Herman, David. 2013. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara. 1980. “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 213–236. Hühn, Peter, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, eds. 2014. Handbook of Narratology 2nd edition, 2 volumes. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Available online as the living handbook of narratology at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ Hyvärinen, Matti. 2006. “Towards a Conceptual History of Narrative.” Collegium: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1: 20–41. Hyvärinen, Matti. 2010. “Revisiting the Narrative Turns.” Life Writing 7 (1): 69–82. Kindt, Tom. 2009. “Narratological Expansionism and its Discontents.” In Heinen and Sommer, eds., 35–47. Klein, Julie. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Kreiswirth, Martin. 1992. “Trusting the Tale: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences.” New Literary History 23: 629–657. Kreiswirth, Martin. 1995. “Tell Me a Story: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences.” In Constructive Criticism: The Human Sciences in the Age of Theory, edited by Martin Kreiswirth and Thomas Carmichael, 61–87. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2000. “Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences.” Poetics Today 21 (2): 293–318.

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Kreiswirth, Martin. 2005. “Narrative Turn in the Humanities.” In Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 377–382. London: Routledge. Lamarque, Peter. 2004. “On Not Expecting Too Much of Narrative.” Mind & Language 19: 393–408. Leitch, Vincent. 2003. Theory Matters. New York: Routledge. Linklater, Andrew. 2009. “Grand Narratives and International Relations.” Global Change, Peace & Security 21 (1): 3–17. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Mourad Jr., Roger P. 1997. “At the Forefront: Postmodern Interdisciplinarity.” The Review of Higher Education 20 (2): 113–140. O’Neill, Patrick. 1994. “Narrative Facts and other Fictions: Story and Discourse.” In P. O. Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory, 33–57. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Polkinghorne, Donald. 1988. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: SUNY Press. Punday, Daniel. 2003. Narrative After Deconstruction. Albany: SUNY Press. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Repko, Allen. 2008. Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Roberts, Geoffrey. 2006. “History, Theory and the Narrative Turn in IR.” Review of International Studies 32 (4): 703–714. Sarbin, Theodore, ed. 1986. Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. New York: Praeger. Shepherd, Laura J. 2013. Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories. London and New York: Routledge. Sommer, Roy. 2012. “The Merger of Classical and Postclassical Narratologies and the Consolidated Future of Narrative Theory.” Diegesis 1 (1): 143–157. https://www.diegesis. uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/96 (Accessed 24 January 2014) Strawson, Galen. 2004. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (4): 428–452. Suganami, Hidemi. 2008. “Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics.” Millenium – Journal of International Studies 37 (2): 327–356. Szostak, Rick. 2007. “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Interdisciplinarity.” Issues in Integrative Studies 25: 32–83. Verstraten, Peter. 2009. Film Narratology. Translated by Stefan van der Lecq. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Walsh, Richard. 2001. “Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory.” Style 35 (4): 592–606. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of History.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27.



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Wibben, Annick. 2011. Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. London and New York: Routledge. Woods, Angela. 2011. “The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities.” Medical Humanities 37 (2): 73–78. Zunshine, Lisa. 2013. “Why Fiction Does it Better.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 13 December: Chronicle Review B4-B5.

Marco Caracciolo (Ghent), Cécile Guédon (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Karin Kukkonen (Oslo) and Sabine Müller (Berlin)

The Promise of an Embodied Narratology: Integrating Cognition, Representation and Interpretation 1 Introduction Telling a story in everyday conversation is not a purely verbal affair: the speaker actively shapes the story through facial expressions and gestures, reinforcing or, sometimes, ironically undermining the meaning of her words through the body. In face-to-face interaction, storytelling can thus be characterized as a fully embodied performance in which the speaker shares an “embodied context” (Langellier and Peterson 2004, 8–13) with her audience, guiding their emotional responses and interpretations by way of bodily cues as well as linguistic and paralinguistic signs (e. g., intonation and pauses). Embodiment in other forms of narrative is less straightforward. In this chapter we’ll be focusing on the reading of print narrative, and particularly literary fiction, but our account can and should be extended to other narrative practices—for instance, film, comics and digital media—where the reception of narrative also occurs in the absence of the storyteller’s physical body. The practices that surround prose reading—at least in private, silent reading as we tend to perform it today—would seem to marginalize the body, relegating it to the hand that turns the page, the eyes that take in the text, and the occasional correction of an uncomfortable seating position. These are all bodily processes which neuroscientists have explored in terms of material events unfolding within the body (and the brain more specifically; see Dehaene 2009). Yet, in Western culture, reading has traditionally been seen as an incorporeal process of mapping written words onto mental representations and meanings. No wonder, then, that unlike their colleagues in the social sciences, theorists of narrative in the narratological tradition have only sporadically and unsystematically paid attention to embodiment. Exceptions exist, as we will see in a moment, but none of them has created sufficient momentum to turn embodiment into a vector of narratological investigation. Yet drawing a parallel with conversational storytelling allows us to grasp the primacy of the body as a key aspect of narrative experientiality, in Monika FludDOI 10.1515/9783110555158-021

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ernik’s term. The notion of experientiality subsumes the ways in which narrative taps into a background of cognitive-level schemas and predispositions; Fludernik herself recognizes that “the “feature that is […] most basic to experientiality is embodiment” (1996, 30). On a closer look, it seems clear that the motionlessness of the body in literary reading conceals a treasure trove of processes and modes of engagement that are, as we will see, embodied through and through. The key to uncovering these embodied features of literary narrative is provided by the recent turn towards embodiment in fields such as cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, both of which are crucial to the project of an “embodied narratology” that we will sketch out in the course of this essay. While growing out of cognitive narrative theory, an embodied account will also speak to the concerns of literary study more generally because of the body’s entanglement with socio-cultural practices and interpretive meanings: even in highly mediated narrative practices such as literature, storytelling is a performative act that involves the body of authors, readers and characters in ways that deserve to be carefully examined. The term “embodiment” in literary studies and narratology has been traditionally used in the sense of an abstract notion becoming actualized. For example, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando can be seen as an embodiment of the shifting developments in British history, John Milton’s Satan is an incarnation of the seductive hubris of evil, while Major-General Stanley in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, the “very model of a modern Major-General,” can be said to embody the perceived shortcomings of the Victorian military system. Contrary to this generic use of the term, an embodied narratology looks closely at how the body is involved in the production and reception of stories. Our approach assumes that the body is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that encompasses biological processes and cognitive-level structures as well as cultural practices (see Johnson 2008). An embodied narratology thus acknowledges the cultural and conceptual dimensions of the body and its share in meaning-making: over the last half century, philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have vigorously investigated the body’s involvement in ideological dynamics and cultural practices, paving the way for feminist and queer approaches to the body (see Hoy 1999; Lennon 2010). An embodied narratology takes these cultural aspects of embodiment into account, but considers them always in connection with the ways in which human thinking is anchored in the bioevolutionary make-up of the human body, guided by bodily experience and shaped by our physical engagement with natural and cultural environments. In recent years, the cognitive sciences have performed a shift away from abstract and computational ways of conceiving the human mind to a model of the mind that is situated in the body, its physical experience of the world and emotional responses to it (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999). These so-called “sec-



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ond-generation cognitive sciences” (in Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase) place the mind firmly in bodily processes, rejecting dualistic models that see the mind as intrinsically separate from the physicality of both our bodies and the external world. This trend in the mind sciences relates perception to the proprioceptive experience of the body (see O’Regan and Noë 2001; Gallagher 2005) and establishes feedback loops between bodily activities, the affordances of the environment and technologies such as writing (see Clark 1997). Even conceptual thinking has been presented as relatively concrete and embodied rather than purely abstract (see Barsalou 1999), often through the mediation of embodied metaphors (see Gibbs 2005). For prose narratives, it has been suggested that narrative comprehension relies on part of the same brain machinery that we use for real-world action and perception, including so-called mirror neurons, which would enable readers to perform “embodied simulations” of the events and actions they read about (see Gallese 2005). We run an embodied simulation whenever language leverages cognitive resources normally associated with perception and action: to some extent, it is as if we were internally performing the actions referenced by the text. The appeal to mirror neurons in relation to narrative comprehension is somewhat controversial,1 but the notion of embodied simulation stands on its own: many psycholinguists have used it without falling back on the neural level of analysis. For instance, they hypothesize that readers experience motor resonances of the movements described in spoken and written language (see Zwaan and Taylor 2006). Embodied simulation involves a cognitive re-enactment of the physical actions narrated by the text, regardless of how that re-enactment is realized in terms of brain structure. Crucially for our purposes, this new focus on embodiment promises to move literary study and narratology in new directions (see for example Bernaerts et al. 2013; Caracciolo and Kukkonen 2014). Drawing on the “second-generation cognitive sciences,” an embodied narratology brings to the fore the role of the body in shaping and reading narratives. Embodied narratology places an emphasis on bodily experience as the meeting place of bodily states and perceptions (both conscious and pre-conscious) and the body’s cultural reflections and images. In fact, these two aspects of the body form a feedback loop in which physical experience and bodily make-up feed into our cultural understanding of the body, and this, in turn, informs physical experience and plays a role in conceptualizing our bodily make-up (see Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014 for a more detailed discussion of this feedback loop). In the three sections that follow this introduction, the role of the body in narrative is investi-

1 Ralf Schneider’s contribution to this volume expresses a number of reservations on this question; see esp. section 2.

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gated from the point of view of an embodied narratology, detailing how it offers new perspectives on both narrative theorizing and literary texts. Each of the case studies considers a different dimension through which embodied involvements are leveraged by narratives (and their reception): 1) Cognitive. The cognitive dimension relates to the body as it is implicated in readers’ understanding of and engagement with narrative in the framework of psychology and the cognitive sciences. The embodied simulations of readers in response to the representation of characters’ bodily, perceptual and emotional experience, and bodily movements are at the centre of interest of this cognitive dimension. 2) Representational. The representational dimension concerns the body as it is thematically and stylistically rendered in narrative texts and how these representations feed into action sequences and their relation to the overall plot. 3) Interpretive. The interpretive dimension arises from the cultural and historical situatedness of bodily experience, and it refers to particular conceptualizations of the body as they are leveraged in and by narrative texts to project the space of the storyworld and its cultural and ideological meanings. Each of the case studies focuses on one of these three dimensions, discussing more particularly how different modes of embodiment interact in readers’ cognitive-level processing of narrative (based on the example of Angela Carter); how narrative progression can be disrupted by the textual representation of gestures (based on the examples of Virginia Woolf and Rainer Maria Rilke); and how familiarity with the spaces we inhabit shapes the way we interpret ourselves and our historical situation (based on the example of Herta Müller). It will become apparent rather quickly that these dimensions overlap and that embodied simulations, textual representation and cultural conceptualization support each other in the profound impact that reading narrative has on readers’ minds and bodies. Though some of these processes have equivalents in both lyric poetry and other narrative and non-narrative media (e. g., comics, films, or videogames), we will concentrate here on prose narrative because that medium has long been associated with a cerebral, and disembodied, mode of reception—and is therefore particularly in need of an embodied account. A more comprehensive treatment of embodiment and narrative across the board will have to wait for another occasion. Before launching into our case studies, however, let us consider some of the antecedents of the embodied narratology that we are outlining here. Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the grotesque in Rabelais and His World centres on the physical body as a vehicle of socio-cultural, interpretive meanings, arguing that the “grotesque conception of the body is interwoven […] with the theme of the change of epochs and the renewal of culture” (1984 [1965], 325). More recent work has



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approached the body from a poststructuralist perspective: for example, Peter Brooks’s (1985) psychoanalytic theory of narrative sees the body as an engine of narrative progression, suggesting that sexual impulses and death instincts give narrative its temporal, teleological, and axiological orientation. Daniel Punday’s Narrative Bodies expands Brooks’s project, making a case for a “corporeal hermeneutics” (2003, 15) premised on the idea that the body permeates, drives and at the same time resists narrative representation (a point that resonates with Susan Sontag’s [1978] account of illness, for instance). Other scholars have tended to conceptualize the body in phenomenological or cognitive terms, often combining these perspectives. A key figure here is Ellen Esrock (2004), who distinguishes between readers’ embodied simulations (as defined above) and other kinds of bodily responses to literature, particularly proprioceptive feelings, which may become salient in the reading experience. Along somewhat similar lines, Hannah Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese (2011) (the latter being one of the discoverers of mirror neurons) argue for the importance of embodied simulations in mediating the emotional and cognitive impact of literary texts. Despite their subtitle, “Toward an Embodied Narratology,” the literary scholar and the neuroscientist fail to discuss issues that pertain to narratology proper, such as story time and discourse time, plot or the creation of fictional worlds. Wojciehowski and Gallese present close readings of Dante and Woolf, stressing authors’ and readers’ shares in the literary text; but ultimately, their claims, while valuable, are more generally couched in the field of literary studies than they are in narratology per se. The same observation applies to Guillemette Bolens’s The Style of Gestures (2012), which focuses on the representation of gestures, intertwining embodied cognitive science with close readings of texts from various literary periods and traditions. Embodiment plays a role in the work of cognitive literary scholars such as Ellen Spolsky (2001) and Alan Richardson (2010), although the emphasis here falls more on the interpretive payoffs than on the literary-theoretical implications of embodied cognitive science. Despite this limitation, the studies by Bolens, Spolsky and Richardson show that it is possible to reconcile cognitive models with historically nuanced readings. Their approach thus paves the way for an embodied narratology which seeks to overcome simplistic dichotomies between the cultural and the cognitive through a combination of analytic methods and interpretive interests. The second-generation cognitive sciences, with their explicit theorization of the feedback loop between culture and cognition, are crucial to this endeavour.

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2 Moving, Fast and Slow Angela Carter’s retelling of the fairy tale “Puss-in-Boots” in her collection The Bloody Chamber illustrates that embodiment is not uniform and constant, but instead subject to temporal and cognitive dynamics. The short story begins with the line “Figaro here; Figaro, there I tell you! Figaro upstairs, Figaro downstairs and – oh my goodness me” (Carter 2006 [1979], 76). Evoking the aria “Largo al factotum” from Gioachino Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Carter tells the story from the point of view of the cat, who displays all the features of Figaro’s showmanship. Delivered entirely in the present tense, the cat’s narration is conversational, but it does not address a particular narratee. Instead, the cat seems to perform in front of an audience, much like Figaro stepping onto the stage and delivering his aria. He faces the audience and encourages them to relive his performance, but he does not individualize an interlocutor. We could say that the cat is showing and telling the narrative at the same time. On the one hand, the swift shifts of deixis (“Figaro here, Figaro there”) evoke a face-to-face storytelling situation where Puss is enacting these lightning moves (or at the very least pointing in different directions). On the other hand, he also draws attention to the very act of telling (as he says himself: “I tell you!”). The cat as narrator does not keep to the usual correlations of showing with detailed and slow-paced narration and telling with textual economy and fast-paced narration (see Klauk and Köppe 2014). Gérard Genette postulates an “inverse ratio” of the quantity of information” and the “presence of the informer” as well as an inverse ratio between “quantity of information” and “speed of the narrative” (1980 [1972], 166): the less detail, the more present the narrator and the greater the speed of narrative. But Carter’s cat does not heed such double inverse ratios. He is arguably a very “present” narrator who speaks quite a lot and who modulates the speed of his narrative. Genette already indicates that there are problems with a clear divide between telling and showing, while Wayne Booth describes it straightforwardly as “inadequate” ([1961] 1983, 16) and distinguishes rather between different types of narrators. For Booth, Carter’s feline narrator would fall into the category of the “dramatized narrator” and stand in the loquacious tradition of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, where telling is showing. Here, the very presence of the narrator depends exactly on the wealth of detail, that is, the constant flow of language which might even refer explicitly to the act of telling. Embodied narratology invites us to revisit this narratorial “presence”; as an emergent vector in the field, it offers new ways to categorise this “wealth of linguistic detail” as an alternative to the much-troubled showing/ telling distinction.



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Throughout Carter’s narrative, the rambunctious, risqué note of the opening line is maintained, and a tale between lust and strategizing unfolds, much like the plots of Pierre de Beaumarchais’ trilogy of Figaro plays which were adapted into opera by Rossini, Mozart and others. When the cat narrates how he scales up buildings, we read “I swing succinctly up the façade, forepaws on a curly cherub’s pate, hindpaws on a stucco wreath, bring them up to meet your forepaws while, first paw forward, hup! on to the stone nymph’s tit; left paw down a bit, the satyr’s bum should do the trick” (Carter 2006 [1979], 77). At first, Puss gives a description of his movements and how he uses the ornaments of the façade from a first-person take. Then, however, he slips into the imperative mood, instructing himself (and readers) to perform the actions (“bring them to meet your forepaws”) and encouraging them (“hup!”). Carter’s cat takes the basic assumption of embodied cognition as a given here: his readers perform “embodied simulations” (see Gallese 2005) and experience “embodied resonances” (see Zwaan 2009) of the movements and actions they read about. Yet movements, and the ways in which we experience them, are not uniform but rather complex and multi-layered. We can conceptualise this complexity through the differences between “system 1” (fast, automatic and embodied; S1) and “system 2” (slow, controlled and conceptual; S2) (see Evans 2008 for an overview; see Kahneman 2011 for a popularization of the distinction). “Thinking” refers here to the cognitive activities which the human brain and body perform in concert. The slow modes of thinking (S2) are characterized as detailed, deliberate and abstract, and movement itself can be performed in this mode when we are not sufficiently skilled (just imagine climbing up a tree after your cat if you are not used to such arboreal exercises). Fast modes of thinking (and movement) (S1) are experienced as more fluent, effortless and pre-reflexive. The distinction might help capture the dichotomies and dynamics at play in Carter’s story more precisely, because it depends on the embodied sense of speed evoked by the text, and its strategies, rather than the mere “quantity of information.” Both the cat’s movements and readers’ “embodied simulations” could be considered as part of the “fast” cognition of S1. Yet, as Puss verbalizes his inner monologue and traces the movements in descriptions and imperatives, he slows down this fast cognition. He puts his movements in sequence, strategizes about where to move next (“the satyr’s bum should do the trick”) and seems to address his readers in the process. In terms of readers’ responses, the text presents both elements of fast cognition in “embodied simulation” and elements of slow cognition through the narrating voice that controls, shapes and sequences. The details of the climb up the façade slow down the cat’s automatic movements. But at the same time, his verbal panache and the concluding statement (“Nothing to it, once you know how, rococo’s no problem”; Carter 2006 [1979],

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77) suggest that grace and effortlessness (which are associated with S1) have been achieved through S2. The two systems (S1 and S2) do not represent an irredeemable dichotomy, but a “dyad” of thinking (Collins 2013) in which one system interacts with the other. In fact, it seems that S1 and S2 are not fixed but flexible across time: when we learn a new skill, we need the explicit, detailed and conceptual mode of thinking that is associated with S2. Once we have learned the skill, however, it becomes fast, automatic and implicit as cognition in S1 (see Evans 2008). Similarly, the cat’s verbalization in his performance seems to look back at readers who still have to learn the skill of scaling façades, while for his expertise “rococo’s no problem.” The “presence” of the narrator depends here on the degree to which he communicates his embodied skill. Considering embodied simulation through fast and slow modes of thinking helps to differentiate between different levels of proficiency of movement as reflected in narrative. It also suggests that detailing bodily movement might lead to an impression of great effort and difficulty, either on the part of the reader or on that of the character’s experience, whereas economic descriptions of bodily movement suggest automaticity and expertise. In the instance of Carter’s cat, his detailed descriptions give the human audience (with their presumably slow cognition when it comes to climbing buildings) a means of following, while at the same time, his effortless fluid performance suggests his own proficiency. Not all embodied simulation is the same; on the contrary, depending on the trade-off between slow and fast cognition in the verbal description of these embodied movements, readers get a sense of what we could call “modulations of embodied skill,” as the cat ranges between rhetorical ornateness and lightning-fast instinctive moves, but because it also forms a thematic node in the narrative. The cat is a reflection of his master. Both the animal and the human being are “proud as the devil, touchy as tin-tacks, lecherous as liquorice” (Carter 2006 [1979], 78). In the comic plot of lust and strategizing, which can be considered as a particular generic constellation of S1 and S2, the animal and the human being take turns in driving the action forward, and in an ironic inversion of the conventionally instinct-driven animal and the thoughtful human being, it is mostly the animal who strategizes. Like the character type of the confidant in Molieresque comedy, Puss schemes and plans to bring together his master and his beloved. In elaborate ploys, he sets up the human master to find admittance to his lady in the guise of a rat catcher (“Signor Furioso, the living death of rats”; 86) and a doctor (92), while the human being pursues the delights of the flesh, to be commented upon by the animal (“Full marks, Master”; 89). Yet this inversion of the traditional dichotomy between human beings and animals is not entirely straightfor-



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ward: it is the human master who pines for transcendent, conceptual love, while the cat sets his sights on more pragmatic forms of wish-fulfilment. The dyadic interactions of embodied thinking in this feline narrative are reflected across the layers of the narrative’s meaning, from embodied simulations to thematic concerns and cultural contexts of the narrative. In some instances, these layers take what we could call a metaphorical relation to each other. According to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) definition, conceptual metaphor relates a concrete, embodied domain with an abstract, conceptual domain. When the cat attempts the “Palladian” façade of the palazzo where the master’s beloved lives, he comes to realize that “that chaste, tasteful, early Palladian stumped many a better cat than I in its time” (Carter 2006 [1979], 84). Indeed, “Agility’s not in it, when it comes to Palladian; daring alone will carry the day” (84). Obviously, the Palladian façade, chaste and hard to conquer, represents the difficulties of the master’s courtship. While “rococo,” the easy-going ladies about town, are “no problem,” this new lady presents a different challenge. The cat’s embodied thinking feeds into his strategizing here. It takes a leap, an unheard-of stratagem, to gain the lady. The movement of climbing the façade mirrors the moves in courtship, mapping embodied with conceptual thinking. Furthermore, Puss seems to imply that devising schemes comes as naturally to him as his scaling the Doric columns in a single bound, as he maps what we can identify as features of S1 onto his achievements in actions that more generally fall under S2. Puss takes a curtain call after his ascent up the façade (“with a courtly flourish”; 84]) and the narrative as a whole (95), and hence underlines the parallelism of his efforts in fast, embodied movements and elaborate machinations that drive the narrative plot. The pacing between movements, fast and slow, relates not only to the thematic importance of the interplay between S1/S2 through the ways in which it ties in with cultural templates and genre expectations but also to the overall narrative constitution. According to Seymour Chatman’s definition in Coming to Terms, texts are “any communication that temporally controls its reception by the audience” (1990, 7). Both narrative and description, as text types, guide readers’ understanding through time, but only narrative prompts them to construct the underlying temporal sequence called “story time.” Movement in the text can be descriptive or narrative, depending on whether it constitutes an event that drives story time forward (31). As Chatman puts it, in order to be narrative, action needs to be “keyed […] to the ongoing march of story events” (37). Puss scaling the façades constitutes a narrative action because in the first instance, he demonstrates his skills to the master and is taken into service; and in the second instance, he gets closer to bringing together his master and the lady. At the same time, however, as we have seen, the movements that advance story time are not

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uniform. Rather, to expand on Chatman’s own musical metaphor, there seems to be a “notation” to embodied cognition, as the dyads of movements fast and slow emerge in the discourse of the text. As narratology begins to consider the embodied features of storytelling, it becomes important to trace how the notation of the different kinds of movement in mind and body contributes to how readers experience the “march” of story events, how the different modes of embodied simulation in S1 and S2 relate to typical generic patterns and thematic nodes, and how they are mapped onto each other from individual scenes to the narrative as a whole. We will continue exploring these issues in the next section, which deals with how the representation of bodily movement, and particularly of characters’ gestures, can slow down narrative-advancing action.

3 Disrupting Gestures in Modernist Fiction This section argues that the representation of gestures in narrative can interrupt plot progression and underscore the embodiment of characters and readers alike. Our analysis is historically grounded insofar as we look at gestural patterns in modernist fiction and how they evince a conspicuously modern form of alienation from selves and bodies (see Armstrong 1998). Such reflection on embodiment, which we suggest was, albeit implicitly, ongoing at the time of Modernism, has recently been made explicit for different media. This is the case most notably of cinema, but also the visual arts, and the radical avant-garde have offered fertile soil for reassessing the embodied dimension of the aesthetic artefacts of the period (see McCabe 2001). We will extend this account to literary fiction by pointing to some seminal moments in Rainer Maria Rilke’s hybrid narrative text The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) and Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, where embodiment is brought into sharp relief within the thread of the narration. Yet the most salient moments of embodiment in both novels do not straightforwardly represent pivotal sequences in the time-line of the plot. Far from being “plot-furthering” devices, these disrupting gestures invite attention in their own right, ostentatiously displaying their embodied nature. To understand the distinction we are drawing between action and disrupting gestures, let us have a look at the definition of action. From Aristotle’s (1995 [ca. 335 BC], 49) characterization of plot as the representation (“mimesis”) of action up to recent cognitive-narratological models (Herman 2002, chap. 2), “action” has been one of the key concepts of narrative theory. Philosophers argue that there is action whenever behaviour is coupled with a subject’s intentionality (see Wilson and Shpall 2012). Someone performs an action when he or she moves



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her body in an intentional way—i. e., consciously and purposefully. Thus, mere bodily reflexes such as blinking in response to sunlight do not qualify as actions in that they are normally devoid of intentionality. Gesture as we conceive it in this paper is bodily movement that calls attention to itself, beyond any underlying purpose or intentionality: it is involuntary, often unconscious, and challenges the association—which is otherwise normal in narrative—between characters’ intentions, their bodily movements, and the progression of the story itself. When this association is present, we have actions; when it is problematized, we have what we are calling “disrupting gestures.” Alan Palmer captures the link between characters’ actions and the mental states that propel those actions under the heading of “thought-action continuum” (2004, 212–214). Consider this passage from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black: “I’m horrified at having given myself to the first comer,” answered Mathilde, weeping tears of rage against herself. “To the first comer!” exclaimed Julien, and he sprung to an antique mediaeval sword which was kept in the library as a curiosity. […] Just as he succeeded, with some difficulty, in drawing the sword from its ancient scabbard, Mathilde, delighted at so novel a sensation, advanced proudly towards him; her tears had dried up. (2002 [1830], 363)

Julien’s seizing of the sword is an action insofar as it conveys the character’s intention to threaten Mathilde: Julien acts impulsively on his desire to kill Mathilde in order to defend his honour. As such, his action plays a key role in the narrative economy of the novel: it has an immediate repercussion on the plot, because Mathilde instantly falls in love with Julien as she interprets his aggression as a sign of fiery passion. As our case studies will show, however, bodily movements can be seen as dramatically severed from narrative-advancing elements. In such cases the body is uncoupled from action; a rift opens up within Palmer’s “thought-action continuum” so that characters’ movements, unhinged from the plot, become fullfledged gestures. Berns’s (2013) distinction between two levels of performativity is helpful here: in performativity I, the audience has direct access to an embodied performance (as in theatre or dance); performativity II consists in the “imitation or illusion of performance” in mediated and seemingly disembodied practices such as literary narrative. Both narrated action and disrupting gestures, as we understand them in this article, are forms of performativity II, and both can elicit embodied responses in readers; however, disrupting gestures tend to underscore the embodied nature of performativity, thus highlighting the link between performativity I and II. While the embodied simulations through which we understand plot-advancing actions are mostly unconscious, disrupting gestures can

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heighten readers’ awareness of their own embodied involvement in literary reading.

3.1 Hands and pencils in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge An early milestone for modernist experimentation, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge reads as a deliberate attempt to stretch the structure of the traditional Bildungsroman to unfamiliar boundaries, its jagged narrative plot showing an uneasy subjectivity falling prey to an oppressive urban setting. Rilke wrote The Notebooks between 1904 and 1910, shortly after his stay in Paris (1902–03): through the fictitious autobiography of a Danish nobleman named Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke intertwines his own Parisian memories with Malte’s telling of an imaginary Danish childhood. In the autobiographical mode of “mémoires,” Malte appears as an alter-ego for Rilke, a semi-autonomous spokesperson for the poet’s most intimate life. This ambiguous position wherein Malte is neither a full-fledged character distinct from the author nor a transparent stand-in for the authorial voice is perhaps at its most explicit in what Malte himself calls the “Hand story.” This episode interrupts and bears no evident connection to the ongoing thematic and narrative thread assembling episodes of mourning that occurred during Malte’s childhood. On a winter evening, Malte is drawing a knight with brightly coloured pencils in the vicinity of his nanny Mademoiselle, immersed in reading a book. Just as he reaches for the red colour, he drops the crayon and starts groping for it in the dark. Abandoning his seat and going down on his knees, he fumbles under the drawing table with no source of lighting. As the search goes on and Malte’s eyes grow accustomed to the dark, his right hand comes into sight. There is a first, unsettling effect of distanciation whereby the searching hand is granted an agency of its own and seems to act on an intentionality severed from Malte’s: I took my bearings from the table legs, and in particular made out my own outspread hand, moving all alone below, a little like some aquatic animal exploring the sea-bed. (2009 [1910], 61)

This “moving all alone below”—the disquieting autonomy of Malte’s right hand— is first taken to be an object of curious interest: Malte follows his hand’s gesture of “groping about down there” and “pushing onwards” as an external witness registering the alienating effects which this dissociation between himself and his familiar tool of exploration brings about. The right hand first displays the autonomy of a living being as though it were “some aquatic animal”; then it evinces



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the opacity of a consciousness-endowed entity, “with a mind of its own” fully emancipated from Malte’s: I still recall that I watched it almost with curiosity; as it groped about down there, with a mind of its own, moving in ways I had never seen it move, it seemed to be able to do things I had not taught it. I observed it as it pushed onwards; I was interested, and prepared for anything. (2009 [1910], 61)

This first rift in the “thought-action continuum” is perhaps more of an odd interstice than a strong dissociation, for Malte is still aware that this free-willed hand is his: Malte’s loss of agency while his right hand devises gestures on its own comes across as a form of scare prank or a ludic short circuit in the loop connecting thought and action. However, the game soon turns sour, as a further tremor widens the gap between Malte’s inner proprioception and an odd, external perception of himself: But how could I have expected another hand suddenly to come towards it from the wall, a larger and unusually thin hand, such as I had never seen before? It was searching in similar fashion, from the other side, and the two outspread hands moved blindly towards each other. (2009 [1910], 61)

The alienation is now complete as an unrecognizable hand, larger and thinner than Malte’s facetious right hand, suddenly emerges from the dark and moves from the wall on the carpet rug in a symmetrical trajectory. Part of the horror that shakes Malte seems to be that not only are the two hands dissociated from his will, thus challenging his status of autonomous subject in command of his thoughts and actions but also, and more crucially, that those two uncontrollable hands are now uncoupled from each other: almost identical replicas yet turned “blind” to the presence of the other. Indeed, in Rilke’s Notebooks the continuum linking characters’ “thought” and narrative “action” is not only unsettled and challenged at the margins of the plot; the very idea of a subject as self-evidently, self-transparently embodied is also frayed with holes, ultimately depriving Malte of the possibility of speech and, by extension, of narrating the incident as an integral part of the plot: “If there were words for what had happened, I was too small to find them” (61). The “Hand story” thus displays an embodied blind spot in our proprioception: while groping about in the dark, Malte sees a familiar limb splitting into two disquieting, unrecognizable objects. One hand, exemplifying this sensory loophole, is claiming mischievous autonomy from the protagonist while the other is fully estranged from Malte, displaying his inability to recognize his own body

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through proprioception and thus mimicking quite concretely and in physical terms the rift we are identifying in Palmer’s “thought-action continuum.”

3.2 Pocket knives, shutters and bubbling songs in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Set in central London in the course of one day, Mrs Dalloway charts the narrative trajectories of two couples, Richard and Clarissa Dalloway (who are hosting a high-society party in the evening) and WWI veteran Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife, Lucrezia. The Dalloways and the Smiths never meet in person, but their lives often converge as they wander through London during the day, building up to the announcement of Septimus’s suicide at Clarissa’s party. Clarissa’s long-time friend, Peter Walsh, connects the two groups of characters, since he runs into the Smiths twice during the day before attending Clarissa’s party. Peter is associated with a distinctive gesture throughout the novel: his playing with a pocket knife. Peter has long been in love with Clarissa, but she chose to marry Richard Dalloway instead. Their encounter in Clarissa’s house can be read alongside the scene in the library between Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole: “And how are you?” said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. […] She’s looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocket-knife and half opened the blade. […] “How heavenly it is to see you again!” She exclaimed. He had his knife out. That’s so like him, she thought. (2000 [1925], 44)

Amid the embarrassed politeness of Peter and Clarissa’s first encounter in thirty years, Peter’s pulling out his knife from his pocket triggers only a mild reaction in its interlocutor: unlike Julien’s seizing of the sword, it conveys the character’s uneasiness, perhaps even his social inadequacy, without any impact on the plot. Clarissa herself psychologizes Peter’s gesture by thinking that it is “so like him.” Yet a pocket knife is hardly a neutral object to extract at the sight of an old friend. Peter’s fumbling with the knife runs like a thread through his conversation with Clarissa: the gesture’s automaticity (later on Peter is compared to a machine, “a mere silly chatterbox”; 48) opens a fissure between intentional action and bodily movement. This rift participates in a more general problematization of plot in the Modernist novel (see Matz 2004, 30). More striking examples of this trend are offered by Woolf’s gesture-like descriptions of psychological processes. Consider, for instance, this account of Peter’s inner experience:



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[Down] his mind went flat as a marsh, and three great emotions bowled over him; understanding; a vast philanthropy; and finally, as if the result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside his brain by another hand strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless avenues. (2000 [1925], 47)

As often in Woolf’s prose, mental processes are laid out in a metaphorical, introspective space. In particular, the ending of the passage foregrounds a machinelike metaphor by comparing mental events to mechanisms—“strings” and “shutters”—activated by someone’s physical movements. Such gestures are therefore removed from the domain of narrative action: the mind takes on a life of its own, and its processes unfold independently of any thought-action continuum. Further, the internalization of gesture in Woolf’s novel goes together with its uncoupling from the character’s intentionality, since these internal happenings are explicitly attributed to “another hand” with which Peter had “nothing to do”—an image that is highly reminiscent of the Rilke passage we have examined above. Woolf’s attribution of gestures to inanimate or unconscious forces can be seen as a further step in her laying bare of embodied performativity through the representation of disrupting gestures. One of the most perplexing moments of the novel can be read in this light. As Peter Walsh passes by the entrance of Regent’s Park, he hears a mysterious song originating from an old woman. However, the woman who is the source of the voice is substantially transfigured in a two-page long passage: As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station, still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in rivulets, […] fertilizing, leaving a damp stain. (2000 [1925], 89)

Here the transfiguration of bodily movement reaches a climax: the woman’s singing is turned into an unrecognizable series of natural sounds and movements (“[bubbling] up,” “burbling,” “soaking,” “[streaming] away”) which lose any human semblance while extending into the non-human temporality of “infinite ages.” The passage reveals a form of movement that not only transcends human action but also human embodiment as our condition of spatio-temporal finitude. Through the woman’s song, a faceless, agentless performativity irrupts into—and hence disrupts—the plot of Mrs Dalloway, concluding the process initiated by Peter’s unconscious fumbling with his pocket knife. To conclude, we have examined in this section a number of instances in which Rilke and Woolf highlight an arresting discontinuity between narrative

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actions and disrupting gestures in embodied terms. This fracture, we are suggesting here, seems to be taking part in a wider strategy characteristic of Modernism which lays bare moments of embodied performativity beyond narrative progression. While characters’ gestures have certainly been exploited against the grain of narrativity in texts from previous periods, the recurrence of disruptive bodily patterns that stray from the main narrative thread in our case studies seems to require more thorough attention on a larger scale, calling for a refined historical framing. In our understanding, modernist fiction can direct readers’ attention to the pre-reflexive physicality of gesture, as evidenced in Rilke’s and Woolf’s texts. This sense of pervasive bodily performativity, we suggest, lies at the core of the exploration of disrupting gestures in modernist fiction. Our next section turns to a different form of disruption, where the boundaries of the body as well as the workings of embodied perception are made problematic by the writer’s personal, and historical, predicament.

4 Embodiment and Alien Space in Herta Müller’s Writings The gaze alluded to by the title of Herta Müller’s essay Der fremde Blick oder Das Leben ist ein Furz in der Laterne (The Alien Gaze, or Life Is a Fart in the Lantern) is not the result of Müller’s experience of exile; rather, she insists, this gaze was implanted by the dehumanizing mechanisms of systematic state terror in communist Romania (1999, 5). Born in Romania in 1953, Müller emigrated to West Berlin in 1987 to escape Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime. It is her experience with this regime that is essential to fully understanding the storyworlds of her novels—i. e., the imaginary domain they evoke (Herman 2002). Müller’s personal topography of terror is communicated by means of a narrative that rests on the disruption of the natural, intuitive connection between the subject and his or her surroundings, a connection that is constitutive of our perceptual access to the world as defined by “enactivist” philosophers (see O’Regan and Noë 2001). Our examination of this disruption from an embodied perspective calls attention to the impact of the textual strategies that involve readers’ bodies in the constitution of the historically situated storyworlds. Drawing on Herta Müller’s own descriptive account of her experiences with persecution by the Securitate (the Romanian secret service) in her essays, this section sets out to connect the author’s reflection on perception with aspects of enactivism and situated cognition. We will then move on to discuss how this analysis helps shed new light on



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spatial references in narrative and their contribution to characters’ (and readers’) experiential inhabitation of narrative spaces and the creation of the storyworld. In her essay Der fremde Blick oder Das Leben ist ein Furz in der Laterne, Müller describes her experience with the Securitate, whose agents systematically broke into people’s homes, often only to change little things—moving furniture, displacing an ashtray or a note on the fridge—so as to signal that they had been there during the occupant’s absence: I was used to walking through the flat after coming home and checking whether anything had changed. I wanted to keep the flat familiar by means of these inspection rounds, but it only became that much stranger. (1999, 9; translation SM)

In her later essay In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen (Every Language is the Seat of Different Eyes), Müller sheds further light on the cause of her experience in her reference to the Romanian author Alexandru Vona’s definition of “feelingat-home”: […] when I enter the room in the darkness of the evening, I recognize the chair, because I know that at this hour it must be standing there (and I know that) in an unfamiliar equally dark room, I would not be able to recognize it – because in fact I do not see anything there. (2010 [2003], 22; translation SM)

The way Müller’s portrays the violation of a private sphere as a disrupted “feeling-at-home” is reminiscent of the Freudian notion of the “Unheimliche” (typically translated as “the uncanny”). Yet, rather than relegating this feeling to the unconscious recurrence of the familiar or surmounted thoughts (Freud 1999 [1919]), Müller points to our experiential sense of inhabiting space which, in turn, is based on our embodied knowledge of our surroundings. Indeed, Müller’s reflections on her experience resonate with an enactivist approach to perception: our sensorimotor knowledge of space depends on our awareness that moving through it would give us access to the occluded sides of all objects (Noë 2008, chap. 3, esp. 89). Situated cognition complements this view by taking into consideration the significance of sensorimotor simulation in the recognition of manipulable objects (e. g., Barsalou 2003). Knowing something in this way implicates that the recognition of an object relies on acquired, practical, embodied knowledge. Moreover, the sensorimotor simulation of observed actions in our brains is vital for our understanding of objects as well as gestures or facial expressions (e. g., Iacoboni et al. 2005). We use forks and knives to eat, a chair to sit on and a table to eat on—all actions that define the typical, everyday use of these objects. In such an everyday context, we also acquire a unique familiarity with these objects through the very specific ways in which we have used them.

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The enactivist approach can be enriched through the extended account of cognition (as suggested, for instance, by Kiverstein and Clark 2009) insofar as it acknowledges the fact that objects can extend the autonomous system, i. e., the subject. Thompson and Stapleton distinguish between objects that merely extend the body-mind and those which are incorporated into it (2009, 28−29). According to this distinction, ordinary objects which we use on a daily basis represent a mere extension: they extend the body-mind but remain separate from it. In this conception of incorporation, our own relation to our bodies is categorized into two attitudes: body-as-object (“this is my arm”) and body-as-subject. In the bodyas-subject attitude, the body is the “structure of perception” (Thompson and Stapleton 2009, 29) and therefore transparent to our perception: it is an extension that becomes part of the subject’s perceptual attitude. We argue that the inhabitation of space is a form of incorporation: evoking Vona’s concept of “feeling-athome” in order to grasp her own experience of terror and unrest, Müller draws attention to a quotidian form of incorporation of the environment. For Vona highlights that he does not “see” at all in a familiar place. The chairs and the table in the flat signify a space in which the objects are close to being an extension of the body, just as the stick is an extension of a blind man’s tactile perception. “Seeing” actually means sensing. Thus, Müller’s “alien gaze” reveals how visual experience relies on the body: the storyworld becomes the extension of the protagonist’s body-mind. But the embodiment of Müller’s text doesn’t end here: a number of scholars have already stressed that the reader’s own body is vital to the apprehension of narrative space (see Caracciolo 2011 and Kuzmičová 2012). Likewise, in Müller’s texts the spatialization of the storyworld results from how the protagonist’s sensorimotor knowledge can unconsciously involve readers’ bodies. This process becomes acutely evident when the immediate and intuitive relationship between body and space is deliberately disturbed: as long as we are familiar with the world, as long as there is no disturbance, things are to a certain extent transparent, and corporeal “boundaries” go unnoticed. The experience of terror makes Herta Müller’s body-world boundary fragile and sensitive like the skin, potentially heightening readers’ awareness of their own embodied understanding of the protagonist’s situation. “The alien gaze” thus refers to the embodiment inherent in vision and the fundamental disturbance of the body-mind caused by the mechanisms of state terror. The following passages from Herta Müller’s Herztier (The Land of Green Plums) and Reisende auf einem Bein (Traveling on One Leg), both autobiographical novels which reflect on Müller’s life in Romania and in Berlin, illustrate how this extended body-mind actively shapes the fictional space:



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To this day, I can’t really picture a grave. Only a belt, a window, a nut, and a rope. To me, each death is like a sack. (1999 [1994], 1)

These two sentences, from the first page of the novel The Land of Green Plums, are characteristic of Müller’s paratactic style and the way she introduces something akin to what is called the “perspective of importance” in the visual arts: objects are depicted not according to their relative size in the natural world, but according to their significance vis-à-vis the perspective that is to be conveyed. This perspective then does not depict the space according to geometrical accuracy but to a subjective, emotional (or political) point of view. The belt, the window and the nut, unknown and meaningless to the reader at this point in the novel, are closely related to—in fact are—the cause of the death of the protagonist’s friends, which signify her different life phases: her friend in university, Lola, kills herself with the protagonist’s belt; Gregor, a friend in their conspiracy against the regime, allegedly commits suicide by jumping out of a window at the beginning of his exile in Germany; the protagonist’s friend and colleague at the school where she works, who will later betray her to the security service, dies of cancer. The objects subsequently pervade the novel like leitmotifs (as does the titular green plum). But these leitmotifs are stumbling blocks for readers. Even though the objects are personal objects whose meaning is for the duration of the novel mostly accessible for the protagonist; for the reader, they are signals which cause a disruption: they function because they have lost their-taken-for-grantedness and become opaque, but still impossible to ignore, for the interpreter as well as for the protagonist. Through their “incorrect” use, these objects resist being incorporated into the “natural” space that surrounds them, thus causing a rearrangement of the fictional space. As a consequence of this kind of embodied alienation, the space seems to “fall apart,” as in the following passage: Five girls were left in the cube, five beds, five suitcases. When Lola’s bed was gone, someone shut the door. With every movement in the room, the threads of dust twisted together in the hot, bright air. Someone stood against the wall, combing her hair. Someone shut the window. Someone re-laced her shoes in a different way. (1999, 26)

This passage describes the situation in the dorm after Lola’s suicide and after her corpse has been removed. Throughout the novel, the room shared by the girls is called “the rectangle.” In this particular passage, the furniture in it is merely enumerated: five beds and five suitcases. The mere listing of these spare objects emphasizes their deserted state. They signify the exact opposite of the “feeling-athome” that is described above. The objects are not familiarized through the casual everyday use, and they are not naturalized within the context of action either.

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Their defamiliarization lies in the disconnectedness caused by the disruption of the obvious, unnoticed extension of our bodies through things and actions. (For more on the Russian formalist concept of “defamiliarization” and its relationship with cognitive literary studies, see Fludernik 2010, 2.) This existential disconnectedness is translated into Müller’s austere language and paratactic syntax, which merely enumerates the actions of the girls without placing them in a meaningful context of (potential) action. Instead, the dust is the only dynamic element in the room absorbing the movement in the way its threads get twisted and entangled with one another. The syntax itself encourages an embodied experiencing of the scene insofar as it arrests time and denies causal relations and plot advancement. In her earlier novel, Traveling on One Leg, Müller focuses on her experiences in the new country and the gaze she brought with her from Romania. Entering her new flat in a new country in a divided city, Berlin, Müller describes in striking terms the disturbance and unfamiliarity of this place: As she walked into the apartment, a hallway walked through her. Then a kitchen. Then a bathroom. Then a room. Nothing but empty walls. Irene only noticed later that there was a stove in the kitchen. (1998 [1989], 30)

Contrary to the way in which the room is described as a rectangle in the passage from The Land of Green Plums, the new flat here is by no means an extension. Rather, the new place is so completely undetermined that the inner-outer relation collapses: instead of constituting an extension, the surrounding space invades and negates the body of the protagonist. As with the dust of the passage discussed above, the dynamic verb is ascribed to the objective world whilst the body boundary, which is essential but tends to remain unconscious when the world around us is a mere extension of the body, is absent. The poetic strategy here lies in the reversal of the assumed cause and effect, action and re-action. The disruption lies in the inversion which renders the body permeable and immaterial. The constant danger of obliteration lurking in this space relies on an extended body with fragile borders: The man caught up with her. He was smoking. He walked with slow steps. Irene wanted to let the man overtake her. He didn’t overtake her. The smoke passed over her face. Irene turned her face away. She heard the man’s breathing. And that he walked in step with her. She changed steps. She only looked at the walls of the houses now. She felt that the man moved his arms to the same rhythm as she did. She didn’t move her arms. It was dark. The feeling of not having any arms made Irene dizzy. (1998 [1989], 52)



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To resist being absorbed into the movement of the other person, Irene stops moving her arms, which results in her feeling the extinction of her own arms. Müller invests the Berlin space with fear and paranoia by calling attention to how Irene’s body is affected when confronted with everyday activity on Berlin’s street. In this scene, perhaps most vividly, the embodied enactive imagination is elicited as it relies on the reader’s kinaesthetic empathy in order to convey the disruption between subject and environment. Müller’s textual strategy of disruption of our everyday understanding of space and objects illustrates that even a rather specific, culturally determined image of fictional space can emerge in the imagination of the reader on the basis of embodied responses.

5 Conclusion We have already referred to Hannah Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese’s (2011) article whose subtitle, “Toward an Embodied Narratology,” appears to foreshadow the project outlined in these pages. If Wojciehowski and Gallese answer the question of “how stories make us feel” (through processes of embodied simulation that literary texts elicit in readers), then this article attempts to make a few more determined steps in the process of advancing “towards an embodied narratology” by relating the principle of embodied simulation particularly to narratological questions. The case studies chart out what it means to be embodied as a reader in the coordinates of time and space that a narrative establishes through its plot and fictional world. Linguistic and stylistic strategies can speed up or slow down readers’ embodied simulation, thus modulating their processing of story time as it is evoked by narrative discourse. The thought-action continuum of characters’ fictional minds, as it feeds into the progression of the plot, can be disrupted and disturbed by seemingly uncontrollable gestures. Situated cognition contributes to readers’ (and characters’) habituation to fictional worlds and presents them with interpretive conundrums. The case studies address a limited set of problems, of course, but they offer ready connections with a broad array of narratological concepts (such as telling vs. showing, plot, fictional minds and storyworlds), and they might form a point of origin for a new vector in narrative theory. Based on the considerations offered in the present essay, a more systematic treatment of how embodiment impacts a wide array of narratological categories seems both feasible and desirable. Among the issues to be further explored, also from an empirical perspective, are the psychophysiology of our embodied responses to narrative and how such responses may be shaped or at least modulated by the material context in which we read

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(or watch or listen to) narrative. Arguably, reading on a busy train is not the same thing as reading in the silence and comfort of one’s home, but we know little about the degree to which these different contexts lead to distinct forms of embodied involvement. Bringing to bear the high-precision tool kit of narratology on the embodied engagements of literary reading offers a fertile, yet specific, programme of research into what happens in fictional narrative. At the same time, our analyses in the vein of embodied narratology have shown a feedback loop in action between culture and cognition: going through the cognitive, representational and interpretive dimensions we have discussed, this feedback loop ties the richness of literature’s historical and cultural situatedness back into narratological analysis. The exploits of Puss-in-Boots create effects of intertextual sprezzatura, as Carter’s cat plays it fast and loose with movements fast and slow. Both Woolf’s and Rilke’s experiments in disruptive gestures are firmly located in the modernist moment. The embodied experience of Herta Müller’s fictional world is haunted by the author’s past in totalitarian Romania. An embodied narratology that takes seriously both the embodied perspective and the narratological heritage can rethink established categories for narrative analysis as well as reconnect narratology with literary study more generally.

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Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spolsky, Ellen. 2001. Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Thompson, Evan, and Mag Stapleton. 2009. “Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories.” Topoi 28 (1): 23–30. Wilson, George, and Samuel Shpall. 2014. “Action.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/action/ (Accessed 12 January 2016) Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle and Vittorio Gallese. 2011. “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies 2 (1): 1–35. http://escholarship.org/ uc/item/3jg726c2 (Accessed 13 January 2016) Zwaan, Rolf A. 2009. “Mental Simulation in Language Comprehension and Social Cognition.” European Journal of Social Psychology 39 (7): 1142–1150. Zwaan, Rolf A., and Carol J. Madden. 2005. “Embodied Sentence Comprehension.” In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, edited by Rolf A. Zwaan and Diane Pecher, 224–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zwaan, Rolf A., and Lawrence J. Taylor. 2006. “Seeing, Acting, Understanding: Motor Resonance in Language Comprehension.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 135 (1): 1–11.

Richard Walsh (York)

Beyond Fictional Worlds: Narrative and Spatial Cognition The relation between narrative cognition and other forms of cognition, notably spatial cognition, tends to be obscured in narratological discussions of fiction by the assumption that fictions produce and refer to fictional worlds. However, a world in this sense, as textually produced, is not a referential object but a mental model, and one that works in tension with narrative cognition. In this view, the (fictional) narrative text is not in itself essentially narrative, though it primarily cues our faculty of narrative cognition, but rather the semiotic object of an interpretation in which narrative always functions interdependently with other modes of cognition, such as spatial modelling. These are mutually informing interpretative paradigms, not the figure and ground they become in fictional worlds approaches. The reading of fiction is characterized by a negotiation between sequential and spatial cognitive frames, which involves no inference to the global, but only to the contextually relevant, within the constraints of the cognitive cost of the inferences made. This essay begins with a discussion of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, a novel that invites spatial interpretation in great detail. It explores the implications of critical argument about this novel for the issues of spatial cognition and fictional worlds with respect both to Jealousy itself and to fiction in general. It then seeks to draw together some theoretical conclusions about the relation between fictional narratives and narrative cognition. It’s a curious fact that, while every English reader encounters Robbe-Grillet’s novel via a diagram, preceding the text itself, which shows the floor plan of the house, this diagram does not appear in the French original. Its provenance is uncertain; it seems unlikely to have been supplied by the translator, Richard Howard, familiar as he was with Robbe-Grillet’s essays (which he subsequently also translated). Those essays include several statements on the author’s own descriptive technique along the general lines of the following, from “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy” (French text first published in 1958): The most common criticisms made of such geometric information—“it says nothing to the mind,” “a photograph or a diagram would show the shape better,” etc.—are strange indeed: wouldn’t I have thought of them first of all? As a matter of fact, there is something else involved. The photograph or the diagram aims only at reproducing the object; they are successful to the degree that they suggest as many interpretations (and the same errors) as the model. Formal description, on the other hand, is above all a limitation: when it says “paralDOI 10.1515/9783110555158-022

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lelepiped,” it knows it achieves no Beyond, but at the same time it cuts short any possibility of seeking one. (Robbe-Grillet 1965 [1963], 72)

Robbe-Grillet’s concern is not to facilitate the reader’s imaginative reconstruction of the object of description—“I should prefer to keep him from doing so, in fact” (72)—yet such intentions seem to be directly subverted by this floor plan. The French critic might feel entitled to an ironic smile at one more demonstration of the relentlessly empirical turn of the Anglophone mind, but actually I think the questions raised are more fundamental and theoretical than that. This diagram does not only express a certain interpretative stance towards the novel, it also— according to many narrative theorists, at least—encapsulates something intrinsic to the comprehension of narrative fiction. Put succinctly, this is the view that reading fiction requires us to extrapolate the “world” of the narrative, in order both to understand the story and to engage with it imaginatively, thus providing for emotional involvement and “immersion.” Not that Robbe-Grillet’s own accounts of the purposes and effects of his writing are wholly persuasive, or wholly consistent. At times the dominant impulse behind his descriptive writing appears, contrary to the declaration above, to be indeed an aspiration (hedged around with qualifications, to be sure) to reveal the object in its objectivity, stripped of the impositions of meaning: “To describe things, as a matter of fact, is deliberately to place oneself outside them, confronting them. It is no longer a matter of appropriating them to oneself, of projecting anything onto them” (Robbe-Grillet 1965 [1963], 70). Or again, “Optical description is, in effect, the kind which most readily establishes distances: the sense of sight, if it seeks to remain simply that, leaves things in their respective place” (73). But such a rationale for his objective method is not offered as an escape from subjectivity: “Objectivity in the ordinary sense of the word—total impersonality of observation—is all too obviously an illusion” (18). Nor does he hesitate to affirm the intrinsic role of subjectivity in observation: “As for ‘subjectivity’—principal argument of the opposition—how is its value diminished thereby? Obviously I am concerned, in any case, only with the world as my point of view orients it; I shall never know any other” (74). None of the authorial declarations cited so far address the case of fiction with any specificity, but when Robbe-Grillet does so, he tends to compound the ambiguities of his position. At times the emphasis is very clearly upon the agency and impositions of the subject in the act of observation, and it is this dimension that supplies the point of the exercise: Even if many objects are presented and are described with great care, there is always, and especially, the eye which sees them, the thought which re-examines them, the passion



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which distorts them. The objects in our novels never have a presence outside human perception, real or imaginary […]. Not only is it a man who, in my novels for instance, describes everything, but it is the least neutral, the least impartial of men: always engaged, on the contrary, in an emotional adventure of the most obsessive kind, to the point of often distorting his vision and of producing imaginings close to delirium. (Robbe-Grillet 1965 [1963], 137–138)

In this light, Robbe-Grillet’s novels (in his own conception of them) stage a dialectical encounter between subject and object of a sort that would be amenable to discussion under the rubric of “thing theory” (and indeed Robbe-Grillet’s essays and interviews betray his familiarity with the Heideggerian sources of that theoretical perspective).1 But even within the terms of this dialectic, Robbe-Grillet’s interest sometimes runs entirely in the other direction: “No longer will objects be merely the vague reflection of the hero’s vague soul, the image of his torments, the shadow of his desires. Or rather, if objects still afford a momentary prop to human passions, they will do so only provisionally, and will accept the tyranny of significations only in appearance—derisively, one might say—the better to show how alien they remain to man” (21–22). It would be only fair to acknowledge at this point that Robbe-Grillet’s essays, in his own conception, did not lay out an achieved theoretical position, but rather engaged in the pursuit of a dialectical development of ideas (12). That development goes some way beyond the relation of subject to object, however, especially when the specifically literary nature of the occasion is to the fore. Here, the equivocation between observing and describing that runs through many of Robbe-Grillet’s comments is resolved with decisive emphasis upon description as a textual phenomenon: “The entire interest of the descriptive pages—that is, man’s place in these pages—is therefore no longer in the thing described, but in the very movement of the description” (148). This shift provides for his polemical stance on the relation between form and content—an opposition he repudiates, yet nonetheless continues to rely upon as the foil for his own affirmations of form: “There are not, for a writer, two possible ways to write the same book. When he thinks of a future novel, it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind, and demands his hand. He has in mind certain rhythms of sentences, certain architectures, a vocabulary, certain grammatical constructions, exactly as a painter has in mind certain lines and colors. What will happen in the book comes afterward, as though secreted by the style itself” (44).

1 I’m not aware of any work that approaches Jealousy itself from within such a paradigm, although Bill Brown (2001, 14) did allude broadly to the nouveau roman in “Thing Theory.”

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Such a privileging of écriture is certainly in line with Roland Barthes’s view, as articulated in “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet.”2 For Barthes it is the literary (and aesthetic) qualities of description that prevail over the representational functions it may serve in relation to its object. However, his account runs together two distinct kinds of opposition, only one of which correlates with Robbe-Grillet’s own emphasis upon the tension between discourse and its object, or form and content: “the description of the object somehow exceeds its function in every case, and at the very moment we expect the author’s interest to lapse, having exhausted the object’s instrumentality, that interest persists, insists, bringing the narrative to a sudden, untimely halt and transforming a simple implement into space” (Barthes 1965 [1954], 15). Barthes’s formulation seems odd until we realise that the opposition between descriptive discourse and object of description here is subordinate to an opposition between temporality and spatiality. This contrast of dimensions has a representational basis, but it is not part of the represented world: in fact, the object of representation here is in itself understood in discursive terms (it is communicative, signifying purposes that define its “function” and its “instrumentality” as an “implement”). It is the temporality of narrative that is arrested, subordinated to the spatiality of description. These two discursive modes get hold of different dimensions of their representational objects, yet obviously no world exists outside of time, just as no event occurs outside of space. Barthes is ultimately interested in the way temporality and spatiality pertain, reflexively, to the discourse itself. For him, Robbe-Grillet’s excess of description overwhelms its notional object, “exploding the traditional notion of space and substituting for it a new space, provided, as we shall soon see, with a new depth and dimension in time” (Barthes 1965 [1954], 20). This new space, with its new dimension in time, is that of the text, and it is possible to see here a foreshadowing of Barthes’s later decisive theoretical transition, in S/Z, from the paradigm of “structure” to that of “structuration” (Barthes 1974 [1970], 20). My own concern, though, is to remain focussed upon the representational quality of the novel. The value, for me, of shifting the terms of the discussion from objectivity versus subjectivity to spatiality versus temporality is that it helps to clarify the senses in which Jealousy does and does not serve to confound the notion of a storyworld. In “Time and Description” (1958), Robbe-Grillet argues, very much in line with Barthes, that the descriptive insistence of the nouveau roman is a strategy for re-locating the temporality of the novel from the events to

2 This essay was written before the publication of Jealousy, but pertinent enough to be included with it in the 1965 Grove Press edition, Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth, edited by Richard Howard.



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the discourse, or from the histoire to the récit: Jealousy, he says, “was not a narrative [narration] mingled with a simple anecdote [anecdote] external to itself, but again the very unfolding of a story [histoire] which had no other reality than that of the narrative [récit], an occurrence which functioned nowhere else except in the mind of the invisible narrator, in other words of the writer, and of the reader” (Robbe-Grillet 1965 [1963], 154). But if “the very movement of the description” is the positive basis of such a re-location of temporality, it is also cultivated by a negation of the temporality of the histoire. When Robbe-Grillet insists that the novel defies representational coherence, his claim is emphatically a matter of temporal logic: [I]t was absurd to suppose that in the novel Jealousy […] there existed a clear and unambiguous order of events, one which was not that of the sentences of the book, as if I had diverted myself by mixing up a pre-established calendar the way one shuffles a deck of cards. The narrative was on the contrary made in such a way that any attempt to reconstruct an external chronology would lead, sooner or later, to a series of contradictions, hence to an impasse. (1965 [1963], 154)

It is immediately apparent that such an authorial strategy only works on the assumption that the reader does indeed attempt to reconstruct such a chronology (or is only relevant if readers are prone to making such wilful attempts). Nor is it so utterly implausible to do so, once you have grasped the novel’s insistent perspectival alignment with a jealous husband figure whose presence, actions and speech are never directly represented, but who nonetheless emerges very clearly from the spatial, epistemological and affective implications of the narration, and indeed from its emphatic sensory embodiment throughout the novel: “This brightly illuminated profile still clings to the retina”; “But a fainter sound, something like a hum, makes the ear strain” (Robbe-Grillet 1960 [1957], 69 and 71–72). Jealousy remains strictly ambiguous between first- and third-person narration (and indeed there is little at stake between the two possibilities, if it is granted in the latter case that the focalization remains consistently aligned with the husband throughout), but it is not in doubt that the text implies such a husband figure as clearly as it describes Franck and A…, the house and the plantation. The character of the husband—his attitudes and emotions, his imagination and even delirium—has laid the foundations of every recuperative reading of the novel, from Bruce Morrissette’s influential early essay onwards. Still, such interpretative strategies cannot assimilate just any contradiction: if the contradiction is to be motivated in terms of character, it has to be relevant to character. That is straightforward for the increasingly hallucinatory accounts of the centipede scene—the centipede is “as long as a finger” (33) yet “covers the area of an ordinary dinner plate” (79)—charged as it is with significance for the adultery plot; likewise for

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the narrative’s vagueness about when this scene occurred, at one point specified as “last week, at the beginning of the month, perhaps the month before, or later” (17). The husband’s disturbed subjectivity also clearly motivates the several (imagined) accounts of events during Franck and A…’s trip to the port. But it is far from obvious how the husband’s emotions might bear, for example, upon the chronology of events at the house relative to those down by the stream and in the plantation beyond. These events do present a number of sequencing problems, however. At the time of A…’s letter furtively passed to Franck on the veranda, one of the five logs over the stream below has been replaced (54), but when their affair has progressed to the point of their plan for the dubiously-motivated trip to the port, work on the bridge has not yet begun (41–42). Also at this time when no work is being done on the bridge, the patch of banana trees opposite has been fully harvested (41), yet the same patch is only half harvested when all but two of the logs have been replaced (58–59), which is also the period of the innuendo about Franck being a bad mechanic, following the trip to the port (54–55). And though the patch opposite is half-harvested when the five men by the stream are in the midst of their task, it has not been harvested at all when they begin (52–53). All of which goes some way towards corroborating Robbe-Grillet’s claim to have designed an inherently self-contradictory narrative chronology. At the same time, however, the temporal ambiguities of the narration prevent any of these apparent contradictions from being indefeasible. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the scene frequently shifts unannounced between paragraphs in the novel, to the point where a presumption of continuity, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, ceases to be justified. Rather, temporal continuity between paragraphs becomes a warranted interpretation only on the basis of substantial evidence in support of such an inference. Second, it is clear that while some events are repeatedly narrated in the novel, there may also be repeated or iterative narration of recurring events. The cyclical nature of life on the plantation is frequently emphasized, extending from Franck’s visits to the continual round of planting and harvesting, even perhaps to the periodic replacement of the log bridge. And while the trip to the port is a necessarily singular and irreversible change in the course of the plot, other events that seem to be in the same category may not be. The apparently indelible stain of the squashed centipede on the dining room wall, for example, is successfully removed on page 64. In short, just as the excess of description both facilitates and obstructs any effort to extrapolate the novel’s spatial logic, the achronological narration both defies and allows for the hypothesis of a coherent chronology. One way to view this somewhat muddled state of affairs is to assume that Robbe-Grillet is playing a double game, designed to accommodate both the literary cognoscenti and the general reader. Such an assumption is supported by



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his response to Maurice Blanchot, who had objected to the way the jacket blurb for the first edition, by emphasizing the perspective of the jealous husband only implicit in the text, foreclosed the novel’s preoccupation with the literary event and the primacy of writing, which he found its most important quality. Robbe-Grillet, according to his own account, agreed: “Blanchot was right. I wrote to him that he was right, but that it was I who had written this blurb and that, in fact, it was not intended for him, but for those hurried critics who do not have time to read the books they have to write about in papers” (quoted in Zalloua 2008, 17). Yet if the implication here is that these two kinds of reading are incompatible, the representational overturned by the aesthetic, Robbe-Grillet apparently wants not only to court both kinds of reader but to be both kinds of author: “Sometimes, too, exasperated by objections such as […] ‘A jealous husband doesn’t behave like the one in Jealousy’ […] I myself try to situate my arguments on the realistic level, and I speak of […] this agonized husband fascinated by his wife’s suspect (or too natural) behaviour. And no doubt I hope that my novels and films are defensible from this point of view as well” (1965 [1963], 162). It seems that Robbe-Grillet wants both to have his cake and eat it. But his difficulties are of his own making, or at least they are the product of his inability to step outside of the terms of the literary debates within which he, and French literary culture, were embroiled in the 1950s and 60s. It is all a matter of form versus content, subject versus object, text versus world, scriptible versus lisible, and because it is above all a literary aesthetic that is at stake, the extra-literary ground he takes as a foil is never really scrutinized. My suggestion is that the questions of fiction foregrounded by Jealousy, its critical reception and Robbe-Grillet’s essays are in certain respects more fundamentally questions of narrative in general as a mode of representation and cognition. Nor do I consider myself to be intervening in a debate that played out half a century ago, since it resonates with issues in narrative theory that have been brought to the fore in recent years precisely by the cognitivist turn in narratology and the sometimes convoluted ways in which that frame of reference has been accommodated, addressed and adopted in the study of literary narrative. Indeed, Maria Mäkelä has offered a reading of Jealousy itself as a kind of premonitory allegory of the conflicting notions of the reader enshrined, respectively, in the semiotic and cognitive traditions in narrative theory. Robbe-Grillet’s descriptive technique, she suggests, literalizes Dorrit Cohn’s view (1999, 13) that “a work of fiction itself creates the world to which it refers by referring to it” (quoted in Mäkelä 2012, 146), so that the novel simultaneously proffers and undermines such an interpretative premise. Mäkelä plausibly aligns the two sides of this contradiction with the different model readers hypothesized in structuralist narratology and natural narratology, as represented by Jonathan Culler and Monika Fludernik: “Both

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Culler and Fludernik speak of sense-making in the sense of form-finding; yet the implied notions of coherence in these theories are fundamentally different: in natural narratology, coherence means experiential familiarity, whereas in structuralist narratology, coherence is the result of a perceivable network of relations between semiotic patterns” (Mäkelä 2012, 148). The notional world of the fiction is either hypostasized as the object of experience or sublimated into semiosis. It is not my intention to negotiate the question of narratives and worlds by way of a reconciliation between readings of Jealousy in the non-mimetic tradition (including Blanchot and Jean Ricardou 1967) and those in the recuperative tradition following Morrissette. Not only have such synthetic interpretations been offered before (e. g., Stoltzfus 1985), but they are also implicit, in a duck-rabbit sort of way, in the double game of Robbe-Grillet’s own essays. Instead, I will take as given the fact that Jealousy does offer, in exceptional detail, a basis for the reader’s interpretative construction of the “world” of the story and seek only to clarify what such interpretative activity amounts to. I propose to embrace that activity wholeheartedly, and in order to get under way, I shall return to the helpful plan of the house that precedes the English translation of the novel. The detail of this plan is not beyond criticism, especially perhaps on issues of scale, but on the whole it corresponds well to the descriptive details provided in the text. Two obvious points need stating, however. First, this is not the house referred to in the novel. It is itself a representation, one that differs from the descriptions in the novel in its medium (it is an iconic, visual representation) and in its perspectival orientation (it extrapolates from the novel’s own restriction to the husband’s perceptual and cognitive point of view—or rather, to a perspectival orientation that implies the husband’s point of view—and offers instead a semi-abstract topdown perspective). It collates the descriptions in the text and presents the information they convey in another form, but the house itself, or the idea of the house, is no more present in this diagram than it is in the novel. Since the house itself, we would be well advised to assume, does not exist (this is offered as fiction), we might ask what the idea of the house is; and we must necessarily respond that it is just the product of the same inferential processes that produced this diagram. It consists in an open set of mental models that relate to the text just as this diagram does—that is, as correlated representations. The value of these mental representations consists in the extent to which they facilitate the inferences that may be drawn from the text itself. The unitary idea of the house is constituted only by the pragmatic cognitive horizons to that inferential activity. Second, if the idea of the house is never finally realized, how much less so is the reader’s mental model of the “world” of the novel? The diagram is very far from exhausting the range of inferences possible from the text, so if the reader’s concern is to extrapolate from it to the spatial environment it represents, there is



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much work still to do. Such a reader would need to digest the wealth of spatial information provided by the novel’s elaborate and precise descriptions of the view from the house, which allows for detailed modelling of the terrain of the plantation itself (10–11, 58 and 86), with its several precisely surveyed fields of banana palms in their quincunx pattern, enumerated row by row (19–22 and 41–42), as well as its stream and log bridge (20–21, 22 and 58–59) and even the exact configuration of the pile of new logs (52). Beyond this, the descriptions extend to the road to the north, running east-west below the plateau that bounds the valley, and ending with the rocky spur to the west (10, 12 and 103). Information on these features saturates the novel to the point where full page references would be pedantic. But the interested reader, working methodically through the text, can legitimately extend the diagram of the house to a very detailed map of the terrain in which it sits. I should add at this point that the reader to whom I refer is not an abstract or hypothetical model reader; it is me. I have done precisely this—in a spirit of mischievous perversity, of course, but also with a compulsive fascination for the task—and the results, both for the model of the valley just discussed and for the further extrapolations below, are available for public scrutiny.3 A valley, of course, is not a world. If we are signed up to the quixotic project of extrapolating that world, we will need to go further, and in fact the novel does provide us with the resources to do so. We are told explicitly that this is not Africa (9), so if we correlate the banana crop, the local fauna and the port to the west with a contextual knowledge of the history of French colonialism (and indeed the biography of the author), we might geographically locate this plantation in the south of Martinique, the port being the island capital, Fort de France. Such an inference is not entirely without dividends for our understanding of the novel: it lends weight, for example, to the description of the centipede on the dining-room wall that alarms A…, and that Franck deals with so decisively. According to this description, encounters with centipedes are not uncommon, and “this kind [a Scutigera] is not one of the largest; it is far from being one of the most venomous” (33). Later, the far more venomous Scolopendra is mentioned (63), and indeed Martinique furnishes Scolopendra gigantea, which can be up to a foot long and preys upon lizards, snakes, birds, mice and bats. According to apocryphal lore, if

3 The models are included in the Prezi presentation for the conference paper from which this article derives, which is available under the title “Some Commonsensical and Uncontentious Theses on Narrative and Spatiality, Leavened by a Perverse Reading of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy” on my Academia.edu page: http://york.academia.edu/RichardWalsh The Prezi presentation begins with the “theses” which correspond more or less with the general theoretical remarks at the end of this article and may be profitably skipped if you prefer fancy graphics to theory.

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you tread on its tail it will arch over and bite you through your shoe. So in regarding the centipede on the wall as relatively innocuous, the husband is (as in much else) entirely correct—and entirely beside the point. This double evaluation of the husband’s views applies also to his perspective as manifested in the narration of the novel, and it bears not only upon the character motivation implied by that narration’s stylistic qualities, but also upon the thematics and aesthetics of Robbe-Grillet’s descriptive technique—and upon the theoretical lessons I wish to draw, as we shall see. We can’t become too attached to Martinique, though, since it is hard to accommodate the large plateau, or A… and Franck’s four-hour journey to the port (61) which, even on bad roads, somewhat exceeds the scale of this island. This is fiction, after all, and not necessarily bound to actual geographical space. Geography only affords contingent spatial heuristics, on this or any other scale. But rather than becoming disheartened, we can further pursue our enterprise of world construction in other directions. The bedroom, we learn, is in fact a cube, as high as it is long and broad (77); on that basis we can begin to expand upon the floor plan and construct an accurate three-dimensional model of the house. It would be possible (I know, alas, for I have done it) to elaborate along these lines, generating a high-fidelity model that incorporates such details as the dimensions of the horizontal planks that clad the building (77); the exactly specified windows, with their mouldings and pediments (77–78) and the enumerated slats of their sets of wooden jalousie blinds (85–86); the flagstones of the veranda (36); the wooden balustrade with its flaking grey paint (18 and 23); the six-foot drop to the garden (10); etc. While I can find no interpretative use for such detailed modelling of the spatial environment represented in the novel, it is undeniably an inferential process that is textually well-founded. But this is the construction of complementary spatial representations, not a process of reading through the text to its reference world, and it is in no way intrinsic to making sense of the narrative, whether your interpretative interests are non-mimetic or recuperative. One teasing possibility remains. It is prompted by a somewhat anomalous feature of the floor plan of the house, which is that it includes a representation of the shadow of the southwestern column of the veranda roof. The representation is rather approximate and betrays an uncertain grasp of the physics of light, but the curious thing is that it is there at all, marking, as the legend tells us, the position of the shadow “at the beginning of the novel.” This, then, is a temporal marker (the choice of words nicely equivocates between discourse time and story time, but let that go). The thought behind its intrusion into the domain of this spatial representation is, I take it, the same as that which lurks in Morrissette’s description of the novel’s setting as a “tropical plantation house whose porch columns cast upon the terrace shadows like those of a sun dial” (Morrissette 1965, 7). A



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sun dial, like this shadow, makes time spatial, anchoring time in the world. Given the insistence of Robbe-Grillet’s references to different phases of this shadow throughout Jealousy, does it present an opportunity to cross-reference spatial and temporal inferences in order to clarify the novel’s vexed chronology? Not that the hour of the day is at issue here; that is readily manifest from the textual information anyway and will not clarify the chronology of an action extending over weeks or months. But given that we have established the basis for an accurate three-dimensional model of the house, as well as a good fix on its geographical co-ordinates, a more ambitious prospect opens up: a solar calendar. Modern three-dimensional computer modelling, combined with geo-location, actually makes this a relatively straightforward task for anyone with curiosity, patience and access to the Internet. I am accordingly able to declare with good authority that the opening of the novel is at 2.19 p. m. on the 26th of March.4 It is true that there is also a moment in September when this specific shadow configuration occurs. However, there is also a scene in the novel, later in date than the first (some time after Franck and A…’s trip to town), where the sun at its zenith casts the whole veranda into shadow (95), and this can only be in June. There is also a very specifically-described afternoon shadow which must be on another date again (100–101), establishing a scene that takes place, apparently, on the 5th of April. Indeed, the same date meets the requirements for two other descriptions of the shadow: another zenith, where a specific proportion of the veranda is in sunlight (66); and a moment described late in the novel, towards evening, as the cocktail hour approaches (102). In case this seems too neat and tidy, though, there is also a scene in which the morning sun illuminates A…’s hair in the bedroom, which can only be a date some two months earlier (89). I could go further (I’m tempted to do so), but perhaps that’s enough now. These revelations, however startling, are clearly not a significant advance in scholarship on the novel. Even within the recuperative, mimetic paradigm of interpretation I have been assuming (and which I think is intrinsic to understanding the text, whether or not it is conceived as the ultimate interpretative point of the exercise), and even in the case of a text that offers exceptionally detailed information, it is still not the case that our reading proceeds via the extrapolation of the world of the novel. Making representational sense of it entails making inferences based upon contextual assumptions, internal and external to the novel itself, and these depend upon both spatial and temporal cognitive paradigms. We often need to

4 I refer you again to the presentation mentioned in the previous footnote. The 3D modelling and geo-location software used for the latter part of the presentation was Google SketchUp in combination with Google Earth.

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correlate spatial and temporal logic in the process, but the synthetic product of doing so is not a fictional world, it is merely the relevant cognitive context for the textual particulars themselves. In interpretation we do not extrapolate a global model of the world of the text, as I have just done (a model, note, not a “world” itself; we can only have recourse to complementary modes of representation), and inspect it for information that will supplement the text’s own representation. Rather, we make direct inferences from the textual information using a range of available contexts within the limits of a pragmatic economy of cognitive accessibility and relevance.5 It is the difference between what I have done and noting, for example, that a reference to the sun being in the west implies evening. I’m not, in the end, concerned with the question of this particular novel’s mimetic coherence, with or without the mediating filter of a jealous husband’s psychological state. Ultimately I think it does not cohere, even in terms of that distorted subjectivity. But I also suspect that the same would be true of many novels, if subjected to the same type and degree of scrutiny. In any case, the descriptive insistence of the narration is not primarily of representational interest for the object of description, but for the subject it implies. The text has the form it does because it is aligned with the husband’s strenuous efforts to maintain control of his environment, to abstract himself from the doubts and fears that torment him into an ideal objectivity. He surveys his plantation with a scrupulous precision that affords him the illusion of a colonial mastery, just as he surveys his domestic environment in order to shore up his crumbling sense of patriarchal mastery. His sense-making effort accords a hugely inflated role to spatial cognition, precisely because he is trying to elude a certain narrative logic—one of the most archetypal and inexorable there is: a narrative of illicit desire. It is incidental to the theoretical question that concerns me whether this motivated interpretation is taken as itself the point, or merely as a pretext for the thematic and aesthetic exploration of descriptive discourse and the subject/object relations it negotiates. I did not choose Jealousy as an example of a novel for which the notion of a fictional world doesn’t work (it is no different from other fictions in that respect), but as one which foregrounds and thematizes that notion. I want now to draw together some of the theoretical lessons of this discussion. As I noted in relation to Robbe-Grillet’s own comments on his fiction, these are best framed in terms of the relation between narrative cognition and narrative texts in general. By doing so, I suggest, we can cut through some of the muddle

5 My language here is evoking the theoretical framework of relevance theory; for a discussion of which, in relation to narrative fiction, see chapter one of The Rhetoric of Fictionality (Walsh 2007).



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(and not just Robbe-Grillet’s) surrounding fictional representation. As a first step, it is important to insist that narratives are not purely narrative. A narrative is of course very likely to include description, argument and exposition as well as narrative discourse; but more pointedly, narrative discourse itself—by which I mean a stretch of discourse that conforms to a narrative text-type6—cannot achieve its meaning, as narrative, independent of other kinds of meaning. That is, narrative discourse may foreground narrative meaning, but understanding it more or less inevitably requires us to deploy other modes of sense-making as well; spatial modelling, for example. So while spatial modelling is most obviously elicited by descriptive discourse, it is demanded to some degree by almost any narrative representation imaginable. The foregoing distinction between narratives, narrative discourse and a certain kind of meaning we can appropriately term “narrative” implies that narrative is best conceived as a mode of cognition, as a distinct way of making sense—a distinct representational logic—that is fundamental to our mental functioning, but of specific, limited scope. It is hard to overstate the importance of this universal human cognitive faculty, which would appear to be more fundamental and more primitive than language, intimately bound up with the emergence of consciousness, and a primary determinant of the parameters of any conceivable system of values. It is, nonetheless, possible to overstate its importance, and the paradoxical consequence of doing so is that narrative comes to seem so inclusive and ubiquitous that it loses specificity as a concept and becomes vacuous. This is one reason why I think it is necessary to emphasize the limits of narrative as well as its importance. In order to set those limits, I propose to define narrative cognition in a way that avoids theoretical presupposition, as far as possible, and gives the concept full scope whilst specifying its limits in theoretically consequential ways. Narrative cognition, then, is the semiotic articulation of linear temporal sequence (you’ll note that unlike most such definitions, it avoids mention of events, agency, causality, or even representation). Understood thus, narrative meaning is an imposition of form, an articulation of perceptual or conceptual data that acquires value by virtue of that articulation and the cognitive assimilation it affords. Narrative cognition is not merely the vehicle of raw experiential content; it belongs to the domain of meaning rather than experience per se. Every cognitive process is grounded in, and shaped by, the mind’s physical embodiment along with the continuity such embodiment entails between mental function and experiential

6 The sense of text-type I am invoking here is drawn from Seymour Chatman’s use of this concept in chapter one of Coming to Terms (1990).

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environment. But while embodiment has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the limits and affordances of narrative, it is equally crucial to recognize that narrative cognition does not reduce to embodiment, but emerges out of it.7 Note also that narrative cognition is not equally fit for every kind of temporal process, but privileges sequential over systemic processes. Indeed, to the extent that systemic interactions cannot be manageably reduced to parallel sequential processes, they exceed both narrative understanding and, consequently, our cognitive grasp. One immediate implication of this limit is that narrative cognition and spatial cognition conform to different logics and are thus incommensurable.8 In order to grasp the multiple, network-like interrelations among the elements of a spatial field (the scene before you now, for example), we must suspend consideration of the sequential development of any one relation, or of the aggregate of them all, because in either case the multiple, reciprocal, systemic nature of those relations is obscured. And vice versa: to conceive of a sequential development in narrative form is to isolate it from the systemic context it inhabits. These are different kinds of sense-making, one predicated upon the serial logic of temporal sequence, the other upon the systemic logic of the spatial field; each achieves conceptual integrity only by excluding the other. It follows that narrative cognition does not, and cannot by itself, comprehend the spatiotemporal reality we inhabit. Narrative sense-making is partial, provisional and interdependent with other modes of sense-making. This complementarity is irreducible in cognitive terms; like the word “spatiotemporal” itself, the whole is a product of conceptual juxtaposition, not a synthesis.9 To treat narrative as if it were such a synthetic whole—as if it offered the means to a synoptic understanding of the way the world goes—is to exaggerate the scope of narrative, inflating its importance only at the price of serious misunderstanding. If the concept of narrative cognition assumes that narrative is a way of making sense, narrative communication requires us to make sense of narratives. Any

7 A collection of essays entitled Stories and Minds (Bernaerts et al. 2013) offers an interesting range of views upon cognition and narrative understanding, among which I would pick out Auyoung (2013), Caracciolo (2013) and Mäkelä (2013) as of particular interest. I should say that none of these articles accords with the perspective advanced in this essay, however. 8 One helpful narratological exposition of the distinct modalities of spatial and temporal modelling, albeit ultimately subordinated to a synthetic spatiotemporality, can be found in Marina Grishakova’s The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction (2006, 40–50). 9 Other relevant portmanteau words might be used to make the same point, namely that a terminological compound does not amount to a theoretical synthesis: most obviously, perhaps, Bakhtin’s “chronotope”. See Morris (1994, 18–19, 180–182 and 184–187).



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given narrative is a communicative gesture that assumes a mutual context of narrative cognitive competence as the primary inferential basis for its meaning. And any communicative act is a narrative just to the extent that it privileges narrative cognition as its dominant interpretative paradigm. A narrative may cue interpreters to understand it as a narrative paratextually or internally, and with variable degrees of prominence; the communicative success of a narrative does not require that we understand it exclusively with reference to narrative cognition (and in fact that would probably be impossible), but only that narrative sense-making, narrative meaning, is relatively primed as the locus of its communicative point. Accordingly, the hierarchical relation between narrative and spatial cognition in the interpretation of narrative is just a matter of semiotic priority; both are part of the effort to resolve meaning. While a narrative privileges inference to a context of narrative cognition, it also typically elicits other cognitive contexts, including spatial cognition; and inferences of this sort are also sense-making activities, elaborations of meaning; the spatial representations we mentally construct to make sense of a narrative are, no less than the mental representations of narrative cognition, products of semiotic activity.10 In the context of narrative discourse, spatial cognition is the junior partner in a joint-stock enterprise with narrative sense-making, and so its role tends to be occasional, tentative and auxiliary. Being the cognitive background of narrative interpretation is very different from being its referential ground. The “world” of a narrative, then, cannot be a synthetic product of interpretation. A fictional world or storyworld, understood as a mental model, must itself of course be a representational cognitive tool, not an extra-representational referent, but it must also involve several distinct cognitive modelling strategies—notably, the systemic modelling of spatial cognition and the sequential modelling of narrative cognition. These are complementary but orthogonal modes of meaning; they do not synthesize into a unitary cognitive perspective. At stake, of course, is the nature of the “worldness” in concepts like fictional world and storyworld. In casual usage, worlds in this sense often appear to be taken as the ontological setting for the events of a narrative, the environment in which the action takes place. More rigorous discussions, by Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) and David Herman (2002), for example, readily acknowledge that such worlds are mental models, and that their particulars will inevitably be unspecified in some respects, to a greater or lesser extent. Nonetheless, it remains a fundamental premise of these

10 The distinction I am drawing here, between the contingent semiotic construction of spatial contexts and reference to fictional worlds or storyworlds, is (within a specifically linguistic context) a premise of Fauconnier (1985), insisted upon in the introductory note.

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nuanced accounts that our engagement with a narrative involves the extrapolation, in some sense, of its “world”; and it is at this fundamental level that my objections arise.11 We have no use in interpretation for an inference to the global, or to a spatiotemporal whole. A totalizing global conception of a story world is too general and abstract to be of any interpretative assistance in itself and is not required as the basis for top-down comprehension of the narrative particulars. Making sense of narrative communication is a process to which we bring our set of cognitive faculties on the fly, and our inferences are necessarily partial and contingent.12 Topdown cognitive frames (concepts, generalizations, schemas) arise and proliferate as we engage with the specifics of a narrative, and only to the extent that we find use for them; they do not derive from, or converge towards, a totality. Finally, while a cognitive perspective on meaning is founded upon embodiment and hence arises (in an ontogenetic or phylogenetic sense) from an experiential base, it does not therefore reduce to the experiential. Our cognitive engagement with a narrative is irreducibly semiotic, not experiential, and its effects are not “immersive.”13 The concept of immersion, as used with respect to fictional worlds or storyworlds, makes an appeal to the virtual worlds of immersive media, but immersive media are only immersive as media, not as representations. A simulation is an experiential environment in its own terms; it is also a representation of another environment. To understand this is to understand it as meaningful— and meaningful, moreover, in a systemic mode of representation. The experience of an immersive environment is something of which we may make narrative sense, but it is not itself narrative. Immersion, then, is an unhelpful metaphor for our engagement with a narrative. It proposes, redundantly, that we respond to meaning by reducing it to experience and then finding that experience mean-

11 So for example, I can broadly accept many of the theoretical premises of Herman’s chapter on “How to Build a Storyworld” in Basic Elements of Narrative (2009) regarding the role of assumptions and inferences in narrative comprehension. We part company, however, when narrative artefacts are characterized as “blueprints for the creation and modification of […] mentally configured storyworlds” (107). And I am still less willing to accept that “the power of narrative to create worlds goes a long way towards explaining its immersiveness, its ability to transport interpreters into places and times they must occupy for the purposes of narrative comprehension” (119). 12 Compare Gregory Currie (2010), discussing story content in the context of an approach to narratives as intentional-communicative artefacts, who notes that with narratives “we expect rich but bounded relations of consequence between items within the corpus, partly to keep the quantity of information manageable, but also because we are looking for thematic unity […]” (8–9). 13 The stance I am taking here on the experiential base for narrative cognition implies that experientiality has an important role in the logic of narrative, but in a more abstract sense than that accorded to it by Monika Fludernik (1996).



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ingful; or conversely, it explains meaning only by appeal to an inflated concept of experience that itself subsumes meaning. Jealousy includes several possible mises en abyme which may or may not illuminate the narration and the narrative as a whole. Among these are the native song (50–51) and the picture on the post-office calendar (75–76). But the most blatant is the African novel which serves as a vehicle for the flirtation between A… and Franck and which is summarized in a chaotically self-contradictory way near the end of Jealousy itself (this summary, however, like the rest of the text, articulates the husband’s perspective—the husband being the one who, precisely, has not read it). My own preferred choice of mise en abyme comes from the other end of the novel, before the beginning in fact, in the paratext provided in the English translation: the supplementary representation of the floor plan of the house. A paratextual mise en abyme is suitably paradoxical, and this one is also spatial. I find the room labelled number ten in the plan to be particularly symptomatic of the interpretative perversity I have been discussing: its caption helpfully explains that this room is a “storage room or other (not described)” (7).

Works Cited Auyoung, Elaine. 2013. “Partial Cues and Narrative Understanding in Anna Karenina.” In Bernaerts et al., eds., 59–78. Barthes, Roland. 1965 [1954]. “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet.” In Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth, edited and translated by Richard Howard, 11–25. New York: Grove Press. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1974 [1970]. Translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell. Bernaerts, Lars, Dirk De Geest, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, eds. 2013. Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 2003 [1959]. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. Caracciolo, Marco. 2013. “Blind Reading: Toward an Enactivist Theory of the Reader’s Imagination.” In Bernaerts et al., eds., 81–105. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1999. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Currie, Gregory. 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge.

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Grishakova, Marina. 2006. The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Mäkelä, Maria. 2012. “Navigating – Making Sense – Interpreting (The Reader behind La Jalousie).” In Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature, edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen and Maria Mäkelä, 139–152. Berlin: De Gruyter. Mäkelä, Maria. 2013. “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds.” In Bernaerts et al., eds., 129–151. Morris, Pam, ed. 1994. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Edward Arnold. Morrissette, Bruce. 1965 [1958]. “Surfaces and Structures in Robbe-Grillet’s Novels.” In Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth, edited and translated by Richard Howard, 1–10. New York: Grove Press. Ricardou, Jean. 1967. Problèmes du nouveau roman. Paris: Seuil. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1957. La Jalousie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1960 [1957]. Jealousy. Translated by Richard Howard. London: John Calder. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965 [1963]. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stoltzfus, Ben. 1985. Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Zalloua, Zahi. 2008. “Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie: Realism and the Ethics of Reading.” Journal of Narrative Theory 38 (1): 13–36.

Ralf Schneider (Bielefeld)

Is There a Future for Neuro-Narratology? Thoughts on the Meeting of Cognitive Narratology and Neuroaesthetics 1 From Cognitive Narratology to NeuroNarratology: Prospects and Caveats Neuro-Narratology does not exist yet, either as a sub-discipline of narratology or as a unified method. Still, the answer to the question raised in the title of this article is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Yes, neuro-narratology can have a future if narratology adopts a general attitude of thinking about the human being inspired by concepts from the neurosciences in order to reconsider some of its assumptions, categories and methods; and no, nothing will come of neuro-narratology in the foreseeable future if anyone expects explanations on how exactly neural activity affects the production and reception of narrative. In what follows I would like to trace where the impulse to turn to neurobiology comes from, what the prospects for an incorporation of neuroscientific findings in narratology are and which transfers from neurobiology to narratology had best be avoided. I believe that the desire for a better understanding of the connections that exist between the workings of the brain and their influence on the production and reception of narrative is both understandable and justified, but that the transfer of neurological findings to the humanities in general, and to narratology in particular, must be carried out with extreme caution. At the root of the humanities’ interest in the brain lies its ongoing concern with the cognitive sciences and their study of the human mind in general. In the wide and varied field of postclassical narratologies, cognitive approaches have been gaining ground for at least a decade. To be sure, the paradigm of cognitive approaches to narrative is diverse enough in itself: as David Herman (2003, 12–14) explains, it comprises both studies of how humans make sense of stories and of how humans use stories as sense-making instruments.1 In fact, further differentiations can be made to classify approaches within this paradigm: some retain

1 See also Herman (2014 [2009]) and Bernaerts et al. (2013) for a survey of approaches within cognitive narratology; see Kukkonen and Caracciolo (2014) for recent developments in cognitive narratology which acknowledge the fact that cognition is embodied and embedded in specific DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-023

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close links to the information processing paradigm established by cognitive psychologists in the 1970s and frequently incorporate the concepts and methods, including empirical testing, of cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics (Gerrig and Egidi 2003; Miall 2011; Sanford and Emmott 2012). Other approaches consider more complex dispositions of the human mind in its reactions to narrative (e. g., Herman 2003, 2013; Hogan 2003, 2011; Aldama 2010a). Despite the diversity of research interests, theories and methods, however, all cognitive-narratological approaches share a common belief: they start from the assumption that the advancement of our understanding of the architecture, processes and functions of the human mind gained by the “confederated disciplines of the cognitive sciences” (Herman 2003, 4)—including psychology, neurobiology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy and evolutionary psychology—may also shed light on our understanding of the nature, uses and effects of narrative in its literary and non-literary guises. The increasing amount of narratological borrowings from the cognitive sciences is mirrored by the growing interest scholars of cognition such as Rolf Zwaan, to name only one prominent representative,2 have shown in natural, extended stories. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we may well write Cognitive Narratology with capital letters, for the field has developed into a well-established, truly interdisciplinary area of research. Parallel to the consolidation of cognitive narratology in the wake of the boom of general cognitivism, the field of brain research within the cognitive sciences has advanced immensely since the late twentieth century. Academics working in various disciplines as well as the broader public have become keenly interested in the functioning of the brain from the 1990s to the present day, so that the results of brain research are now ubiquitous in all sorts of academic and non-academic discourses. The years 1990 through 2000 were labelled the “Decade of the Brain” by the American government, and the EU has recently initiated the heavily funded Human Brain Project, which involves the use of the most sophisticated high-performance computers for simulating the complex processes of the human brain.3 Although Stanislas Dehaene complains that “[i]n the twenty-first century,

contexts. Caracciolo (2014) has formulated a new approach to experientiality on the basis of these premises. 2 For Zwaan’s research profile and publications, which include much research on narrative and text understanding, see http://www.eur.nl/fsw/psychologie/research/profielen/profiel_ mis/10314/ 3 The aims of the project are, according to the project website, “[g]aining profound insights into what makes us human, developing new treatments for brain diseases and building revolutionary new computing technologies.” See The Human Brain Project https://www.humanbrainproject. eu (Accessed 14 October 2014).



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the average person still has a better idea of how a car works than of the inner functioning of his own brain—a curious and shocking state of affairs” (2009, 3), the amount of information on the workings of the brain available to both academia and the wider public has increased immensely in the last decade or so. To be sure, we do not have to be neurobiologists to know more about our brains, just as none of us needs to be an automotive engineer to drive a car competently. But most drivers have at least a basic understanding of the functions of the individual parts of their car and their interaction. Without taking the analogy too far, it would perhaps help at least to realize that most of the various popular assumptions about the brain are wrong. For instance, the two brain hemispheres are not responsible for entirely different tasks; rather, highly complex interconnections between brain areas in both hemispheres are required by each and every task. Also, the brain is not a muscle that can be trained; muscles can be trained regardless of content (whether you lift weights in a gym or milk bottles in a supermarket is of no relevance for the muscle), whereas you can train your brain only for particular tasks (solving crossword puzzles will not help you to learn Chinese more easily, but only to solve crossword puzzles better). Nor do we only use a small percentage of our brain capacity; all parts of the brain are always active, even in sleep. And finally, there is no ‘archive’ in the brain in which memory could be ‘stored’; memory processes involve the activation of both established and recently formed neural networks, combining activities of perception and imagination in the moment of ‘remembering’, which can consequently no longer be conceived as retrieval but at best as a reconstruction (see Brockmeier 2015, esp. 46–62 and 91–96). It has been suggested that an acknowledgement of the findings of neurobiology may prompt us to re-conceptualize the human being as “neuronal,” as the early contribution by Jean-Pierre Changeux (1985) already had it, and the self as “synaptic,” in the words of Joseph LeDoux (2003). These concepts encapsulate the fact that all activities of the human mind, all mental operations, whether cognitive or emotional, conscious or unconscious, ultimately result from electrochemical processes of information transfer by excitation between neural cells, and particularly the activation of neural networks. In addition, the processing of sense impressions, the emergence of moods and emotions, reasoning, the dispositions to act and all actions themselves are enabled by neural connections that exist between the various parts of the brain and the central nervous system.4 Since neurobiology has investigated neural activation patterns and neural con-

4 For the connections between brain regions responsible for cognition, emotion and action, see also Panksepp’s (1998) and LeDoux’s (1999) earlier work. See Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell

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nections with increasing precision, these insights seem to come along with the promise that the neuro-sciences will allow us to see the mind ‘at work’, and thus to understand its ways and means of making sense of the world, of communicating with other minds and of creating and dealing with artefacts such as literature and other works of art. The promise of brain research has affected not only scholars in the humanities but has also influenced many social debates—from gender divisions to education and ethics—which are currently being carried on in the light of neurobiological findings. The old saying that ‘seeing is believing’ might be altered expresses a mistaken belief that ‘seeing is understanding’: public interest in the underlying biological workings of the mind is so pervasive that pictures provided by modern brain imaging techniques such as fMRI scans5 (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) jump at readers whenever they open a magazine or newspaper. Scholarly articles about neuroscientific findings that contain such images have in fact been shown to appear more credible to readers than articles without brain scans (McCabe and Castel 2008). Here, a scientific prejudice inherited from the long tradition of empiricism holds sway over our understanding of the brain: Brain images may be more persuasive than other representations of brain activity because they provide a tangible physical explanation for cognitive processes that is easily interpreted as such. The physical evidence may appeal to people’s intuitive reductionist approach to understanding the mind as an extension of the brain. (McCabe and Castel 2008, 349–350)

Knowledge of the physical realities of neural activity and of the brain regions in which this activity occurs tends to replace, rather than replenish, knowledge of how and why or what the world means to the human mind. It is here that the fundamental danger of the project lies: whatever the topic of popular or academic interest, such recourse to the biological, material substrate of human cognition creates the illusion that the gap between the neurobiological workings of the brain, on the one hand, and the conscious and unconscious processes of the human mind as well as the qualia of human experience, on the other, has been bridged. This, however, is not the case at all (cf. Dietrich 2007, 13). It would therefore be unwise to discard the well-established traditions of hermeneutics, believing that the neurosciences could provide a more thorough, reliable or in any other way ‘better’ approach to the study of narrative. As with the integration

(2000) for a profound introduction to the science of the brain. Outlines of the neurosciences of more popular appeal include Aamodt and Wang (2008) and Lehrer (2009). 5 fMRI is a standard procedure used to make the activation of brain areas visible.



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of findings from the cognitive sciences, the aim can only be to enrich hermeneutics by integrating findings of brain research. In the interpretation of texts, we constantly formulate hypotheses as to the potential reading effects of particular textual features and aesthetic strategies. The hypotheses must be based on what we believe the mind does in the production or reception of narrative. After Cognitive Narratology has already broadened the spectrum of what we know about the functioning of the mind, the hope is now that even more can be known when and if the activities of the brain are understood better. I will return to a number of particular difficulties below. If there is both a promise and a difficulty in the propagation and application of neuroscientific findings to the more complex activities of the mind, how should scholars of literature in general, and narratologists in particular, proceed? They need to ask themselves whether the latest advances in the neurobiological branches of the cognitive sciences can be overlooked. Might they not prompt us to take the next step in following the road of cognitivism and get involved with the study of the brain proper? The fundamental question is whether current neurobiological models of the physiology of the perception, storage and retrieval of information in the human nervous system can shed light on the questions that narratologists ask. In these areas, too, we are confronted with hopes and promises, on the one hand, and with scepticism and criticism, on the other.

2 Neuroaesthetics: The Brain, the Arts— and Narrative? Recent contributions to a new field that terms itself ‘neuroaesthetics’ (or ‘neuroesthetics’) seem to be paving the way for narratology to further develop into ‘neuro-narratology’.6 A number of statements and manifestoes evoke an integrative approach that will one day elegantly combine “the social and the biological sciences with the humanities.”7 This combination includes, of course, the study

6 For contributions to neuroaesthetics, see the neurobiological work of Changeux (1994) and Zeki (1999); the more evolutionary view by Zaidel (2005); the cognitive-linguistic considerations of Lakoff (2006); the explorations of the field in Nalbantian (2008, 2009), Skov and Vartanian (2009), Chatterjee (2010) and Lindenberger (2010). 7 See the “Manifesto” published by the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts at http:// myrifield.wordpress.com/literary-reading-and-emotion-manifesto/ (Accessed 17 April 2014).

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of the brain, “through which all art is created, executed and appreciated.”8 There is a hope, then, that we will arrive at a new understanding also of the conditions and laws governing the creation and reception of art or, as Michelle Ty describes neuroaesthetics: “[T]his new discipline seeks to demarcate the limits of what our nervous system is capable of seeing, hearing, and perceiving, and it understands how those limitations influence our affective and cognitive responses to an aesthetic encounter” (2010, 209). If aesthetics, i. e., the study of the creation, reception and appreciation of art, goes neurological, narratology is likely to follow suit.9 In a recent interview, Marie-Laure Ryan prophesises that “cognitive narratology will be more and more focused on the level of neurons, and it will increasingly rely on brain scans, even though we still don’t know how certain neuronal configurations are interpreted as meanings” (Ryan 2014, 80). So far, however, neuroaesthetics has mainly focused on music and painting, which is partly due to the obvious technical reason that it is much easier to study the processing of visual and auditory signals in the brain than the understanding of texts; the activities of neural networks that link the visual perception of print letters to meaning evoked by sentences is as yet invisible to brain scans.10 It is therefore advisable to consider the limits of insights gained from neuroaesthetics to the study of narrative given that so far, the major obstacle in taking over insights from neuroaesthetics has been language. This difficulty is of course detrimental to the application of neuroaesthetics to the language-oriented approaches of narratology. To see an image or hear a sound cannot be assumed to trigger precisely the same experience as the imagination of an image or a sound evoked by words in a narrative text. And even if more refined technologies of imaging were to give us access to the processing of narrative texts, much uncertainty remains as to what these images would tell us. As Irving Massey admits, the application of neurobiological findings to the analysis of works of art is “of great value in exploring the ‘how’ of aesthetic processes, if not necessarily the ‘why’ or the ‘what for’” (2009, 18). While neurobiology, on a very basic level, is now better able than ever to trace the neural activities involved in reading, as Dehaene points out, he himself states

8 From Semir Zeki’s “Statement on Neuroesthetics” at http://www.neuroesthetics.org/statement-on-neuroesthetics.php (Accessed 17 April 2014). 9 Narratologists might prefer to speak of poetics rather than aesthetics; I use aesthetics here, however, very much in the sense that poetics is usually used, namely with an eye to the study of what ways particular choices of the producer and the discernable features and structures of the artefact are likely to engender particular acts of meaning construction and understanding, as well as aesthetic appreciation and emotional response in recipients. 10 Nalbantian (2008, 2009) does refer to literature, but she mainly uses literary texts that describe processes of perception and memory as illustrations of neurobiological findings.



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that word the ‘meaning’ still confronts researchers with a major puzzle (2009, 111). What philosophers and linguists have discussed extensively seems to lie outside the confines of neurological research: meaning in the mind cannot as yet be traced back to activities of cells. Marie-Laure Ryan also makes this point, concluding her criticism of studies using MRI technology by saying that “current techniques of brain imaging have not yet reached the necessary precision to tell narratologists something truly new and interesting concerning the cognitive foundations of narrative” (2010, 472). She explains that, for instance, “MRI may be able to detect that reading the word ‘dog’ and watching a dog both activate a region of the brain specialized in visualization, but it cannot (yet) identify a configuration of active neurons that mean ‘dog’ to the mind of a certain subject” (473; emphasis added). On the grounds of such scepticism, Ryan holds that cognitive narratology is “a project uncomfortably sandwiched between the speculative and interpretive disciplines of the humanities and the experimental disciplines of the hard sciences” (2010, 474). It is debatable whether this position must really be regarded as so uncomfortable. If the hard sciences provide insights into the complex and unconscious operations of the brain, why should the humanities not make use of that knowledge and link it to their speculations and interpretations? Of course, the levels of observation between the disciplines may differ, sometimes dramatically so. To look at the activation of brain areas in the processing of individual words, for instance, is a laughably inadequate route to a better understanding of the complex mental processes triggered by so much as a single sentence in a more complex narrative. Take, for instance, a sentence concerning Clarissa Dalloway’s feelings at meeting Peter Walsh on the day of her party in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: “He’s very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticizes me” (Woolf 1976 [1925], 46; emphasis in the original). How could brain scans ever capture the ambivalent feeling of admiration and irritation this sentence transports? Even if neuro-imaging were able to show that the words “well dressed” activate brain areas concerned with visual memory and that “he criticizes me” triggers areas that involve emotional memory (which is most likely), narratologists would still be more interested in how “thought Clarissa” is processed. Narratology has tried to understand, among other things, how the choice of perspective affects the rendering of fictional worlds. Although it has used predominantly visual metaphors (perspective, point of view, focalisation), would “thought Clarissa” actually involve visual areas of the brain? It would be interesting to find out which parts of the brain are in fact active in such processing and whether they are the same for all readers. What a reader knows about the world, her reading skills, familiarity with narrative genres and mastery of language are, after all, factors that influence the wiring of neural networks active in understanding narrative.

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Although the underlying mechanisms of neural activity may be universally the same in all brains, readers’ individual learning and reading histories, apart from their emotional development, will determine which networks are activated when they understand a particular text. Perhaps the worst culprit in the business of precipitative transfer of neuroscientific ‘knowledge’ to the arts is the theory of mirror neurons. First detected in monkeys in whose visuo-motor brain areas neurons fired when they observed another monkey reaching for an object (the same brain areas were activated in observing that would be active in carrying out the action), mirror neurons quickly turned into an explanation of social cognition and empathy.11 I am not in a position to doubt the adequacy of this neurobiological concept for an explanation of what happens in a human brain when a person watches another person’s actions or facial expression; nor can I side with one or the other groups of neurobiologists who argue about the notion. I would simply like to raise three fundamental doubts concerning the value of mirror-neurons theory with regard to narrative. First, I find it very difficult to believe that it should be altogether irrelevant that in reading prose fiction we simply do not see anything—except, of course, for the letters on the page; to what extent a visual imagination of, say, a character’s facial expression described in the text, which might then give rise to a mirror-neuron activation of the same emotions the character is described to experience, is an entirely open question. Second, the concept of mirror neurons suggests an automatic, involuntary process: the monkey cannot help the firing of his neurons, but would that not imply that all empathic reaction is at its root automatic, too? And is that a plausible assumption for the reading of narrative? The death of Bill Sykes in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist would have to evoke a gruesome amount and intensity of empathic emotions. But is it irrelevant that I as a reader may have developed a strong dislike against this most vicious and ruthless character of the entire novel? Will the same kind of empathy be evoked through my imagination of his death as the empathy I felt with Nancy being beaten to death by Sykes? If the theory of mirror neurons is unable to account for the shading of emotions, for bias and evaluation, how much use will it be for the analysis of even novels by Dickens, which mostly make no claim as to particularly fine-tuned emotions? This brings me to the third doubt: to what extent are mirror neurons involved in the processing of complex emotions in which visuo-motor areas are unlikely to play a role? Consider again the sentence quoted above from Mrs Dalloway, or take a scene from Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion. In chapter six, Anne Eliot, the protagonist, is startled to the point of alarm by a remark Mrs Croft makes, the sister

11 For presentations of the theory, see Gallese and Goldman (1998) and Rizzolatti (2005).



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of Captain Wentworth, a man Anne was once in love with but could not marry on account of her family’s intervention in the match. Mrs Croft says: ‘It was you, and not your sister, I find, that my brother had the pleasure of being acquainted with, when he was in this country.’ Anne hoped she had had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not. (Austen 1988 [1816], 75)

One might argue that the mention of blushing, even if it is likely not to occur, allows for a mirror-neuron directed empathic imagination of Anne’s state. But when in Mrs Croft’s next sentence it turns out that she is referring to Captain Wentworth’s brother, Mr Wentworth, Austen invites us to share the complex emotions Anne experiences: She could now answer as she ought; and was very happy to feel, when Mrs Croft’s next words explained it to be Mr Wentworth of whom she spoke, that she had said nothing which might not do for either brother. She immediately felt how reasonable it was, that Mrs Croft should be speaking of Edward, and not Frederick; and with shame at her own forgetfulness, applied herself to the knowledge of their former neighbour’s present state, with proper interest. (Austen 1988 [1816], 75)

I wonder which part of mirror-neuron theory would be able to account for the quick succession of Anne’s emotions including relief, understanding, shame and concentration incorporated in this short passage in which Anne is simply sitting there, apparently not moving, and her facial expression not described by the narrator. It think it has become clear that while mirror neurons may explain some aspects of social cognition and empathy (if I see a person in pain or distress, I can to some extent feel her pain, though it is not mine; if I see a person in a state of happiness, I may empathically share that happiness), they are inadequate for an account of the effects of prose narrative of any complexity worth mentioning. Generally, the concept of mirror neurons suggests that the same neurons are automatically activated in the observer as are active in the person observed. But my witnessing somebody else’s happiness will not automatically create the same feeling of happiness in me; watching somebody in pain will not give me the same pain. I would therefore not follow David Miall, who in an article of 2009 seeks to evaluate the findings of mirror-neuron studies and integrate them into a conception of literary reading. Although Miall is careful in his wording (“This suggests that simulation of emotional responses can also occur” (2009, 241; emphasis added), he is still confident that the concept of mirror neurons “also provides a mechanism for helping to understand social cognition” (241), and he goes so far as to say that “[e]vidence for the role of mirror neurons during reading, and their

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activation of empathic and other affective responses, is available from several studies” (242). Apparently, it depends a bit on interpretation whether the ‘evidence’ is classed as trustworthy or not. I would like to conclude, then, that while neuro-imaging research has provided some insights into the brain areas involved in reading (Mar 2004; Dehaene 2009), I am not convinced that this explanation of neural activity will be able to elucidate the most significant effects of reading narrative fiction, mostly because the complexity of vicarious emotional experience and emotional reaction to narrative mediated by written (printed) language is so much higher than the stimulation of emotions in social interaction.

3 What might Neuro-Narratology Be, and Do? As I have tried to show, at this time in the development of the brain sciences no stringent method can be derived that would provide narratology with a truly neurological toolkit. This is why I suggested at the beginning that neuro-narratology is best considered a general attitude according to which some concepts of literary studies, and particularly those of cognitive narratology, may come under review. The general epistemological framework of both cognitive narratology and a potential future neuro-narratoloy is a constructivist paradigm, and the driving force behind such approaches is to learn more about the dispositions and mechanisms of human meaning construction. Meaning in narrative is not solely in the text but needs to be created in the reader’s mind. The attempt to find out about precisely these constructive activities in literary, and particularly in narrative, analysis obviously comes within the tradition of reader response theory. The hope has been, and remains, to arrive at ever more fine-grained hypotheses of how textual cues initiate the reader’s mental processes. The neurosciences have been the most recent addition to interdisciplinary field in which literary scholars have hoped to find precise descriptions of mental activities. However, if neuro-narratology must renounce ever finding complex neural explanations of the complex mental phenomena involved in the production and reception of narrative, as the caveats discussed above suggest, what can it be, and what can it do? One central impulse to be taken over from neurobiology comes from acknowledging a position that has been held for a long time by cognitive psychology and is now supported by brain research: a considerable portion of mental processes occur below the level of consciousness. The workings of neural networks are not accessible to conscious introspection at all, and reasoning, emotions and judgments frequently come into play before a person becomes aware of a thought. As Gerrig (2011) proposes, narratologists and cognitive psychologists must develop



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models of text understanding that account for the possibility of unconscious processes, in particular unconscious memory activation, in the progressive process of reading. Another important effect of a neurobiological attitude might be to re-think the notion of schemata, a central concept in cognitive literary studies. A schema is held to be an information structure stored in the long-term memory: by evoking individual elements of the schema, it can be mentally activated in its entirety. Schemata have been the dominant in genre theory because genre knowledge can be regarded as schematic.12 When a text provides signals that trigger the activation of a genre schema (such as setting, particular character constellations or specific language use), the reading process will be guided by the expectation that other slots in the schema will also be filled. While this is a fairly widespread conception, a neuroscientific approach would have to be much more careful as to the concept of memory ‘structure’ and would seek to avoid the rather mechanistic implications of such thinking. Apart from the fact that many notions of mental structures, including schemata, prototypes and categories, need to be conceptualized as much more flexible than they used to be (Gibbs 2003; Gerrig 2011, 39–44), there is actually no storage room situated in a particular space in the brain from which ‘things’ such as concepts, schemata and the like could simply be re-activated in the same way they were encoded at the time of the initial experience.13 Rather, the encounter of an item ‘stored’ in memory at the time of processing will trigger neural co-activation patterns of traces left by the original experience in widely distributed brain areas. As McClelland explains his version of a theory that reckons with various brain mechanisms of memory-formation complementing each other: Unlike the standard view of the memory trace as a record of the experience itself that can be separately filed away, somewhat like a memorandum, for subsequent retrieval, the complementary learning systems theory holds that memory traces of different experiences are not kept separate. […] According to the theory, then, there is no real possibility of retrieving a specific memory. A memory does not exist in its own separate storage location—its residue

12 On schemata as memory structures activated in text processing, see e. g., the classical study by Rumelhart (1975) and the survey of research by McKoon and Ratcliff (1998). Emmott (1999) makes use of schema theory to capture the relationship between textual information and the reader’s knowledge. Bracher (2013) ascribes the modification of schemata the most prominent place among significant reception effects. Cf. Hartner and Schneider (2014) for a discussion of, and further references to, the schema theory of literary genre. 13 For a very accessible discussion of the current state of research on the neural basis of memory, see McClelland (2011); see also the remarks above as well as Brockmeier (2015) for further elaborations on the functions of memory in the context of recent neurobiology.

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in the brain is distributed over many synaptic connections, whose values have also been shaped by many other experiences. (McClelland 2011, 138–139)

Memory must therefore be seen as a constructive process, and what we think of as a memory structure is much fuzzier and much less stable than the term suggests. While cognitive psychologists have long pointed to the processual and dynamic aspects of memory structures, the way that literary scholars have spoken about schemata, for instance, has had a tendency to hypostasize these structures. In the case of literary genre, the standard view has had it that readers form schemata from exposure to prototypical examples and ‘store’ these schemata to retrieve them when encountering a new instance of that schema. If, for example, a reader has read a few bildungsromane, she will expect the typical character constellations (protagonist versus blocking character, a mentor figure), settings (stages of development usually associated with changing places) and activities (falling in love, first with an inadequate partner, then another time with a more suitable one) when a new novel begins to deal with the growing up of the protagonist. However, in the light of the above considerations, why would we expect this particular reader to activate memory traces exclusively from literary experience? Might not watching movies, listening to pop songs, hearing other people’s life narratives, and of course the lived experience of the reader herself, leave widely distributed traces in the brain, activated in the moment of reading? If that is the case, the activation—or better: construction—of a schema that will guide further reading of the novel is much more complex, much more connected to non-literary memories than narratology has assumed for a long time.14 The biggest and probably insurmountable challenge is to integrate the individual, subjective ways of meaning construction, to take the individual reader seriously and to find out which memory traces a reader is likely to activate when reading. Of course, apart from the unpractical idea of subjecting every individual reader to a brain scan investigation, one will have to resort, once again, to generalisations. Hans Robert Jauss’s (1982 [1977]) ‘horizon of expectations’ was one such generalisation, Wolfgang Iser’s (1978 [1976]) ‘implied reader’ another, but there are also many more reader constructs (see Schneider 2005). Another issue raised by insights into the workings of the brain and the central nervous system is the status of emotion in narrative research. Much neurobiological work has been done to trace the connections between brain regions

14 See also Gerrig’s (2011) discussion of exemplars, a concept that allows for more flexibility and greater diversity of memory traces activated in reading than prototype theory has assumed; this approach would seem to point in the same direction as the view just sketched.



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responsible for affect and those concerned with rationality, and it appears that no region functions without the other and even that many perceptions and rational thoughts are either first primed by an excitation of emotional areas or at least involve the parallel activation of cognitive and affective networks.15 All in all, narratology has been rather reluctant to tackle emotions. Indeed, the structuralist roots of much narratological thinking have led scholars away from acknowledging the complexities of emotional reactions to narrative. Emotion in narrative has been studied especially in connection with phenomena such as suspense and story structure16 as well as empathy.17 I believe that integration of neurobiological findings pointing to the primacy of affect in understanding is an area in which much work lies ahead for narratologists. If we take the conception of the human being as fundamentally influenced by affect seriously, we need to admit that the time-honoured distinctions which narratology has made to describe how narrative texts ‘work’ have given us rather poor access to the emotional qualities or narratives. This is the case with such distinctions as those between different types of narrators (e. g., heterodiegetic versus homodiegetic), or between narration and focalization, reliable and unreliable narration, flat and round characters, etc. While some narratological categories do capture emotional aspects, a neuroaesthetic approach might in the future be able to provide more detailed knowledge about the precise mechanisms and effects of, say, curiosity, suspense and surprise, which are central emotional facets of narrative understanding (see Sternberg 1990): at what point is emotion strongest in processing? How long does the excitation of neural networks responsible for affect linger on, and how are such networks connected to the more logical understanding of a text? It is especially the way in which readers connect their own emotions, and emotional memories, with emotions elicited by or described in narratives (cf. Miall 2011, 331–335) that ought to be studied in more detail. Needless to say, the business of capturing the text-reader interrelation on the level of emotions is much more difficult and will yield much fuzzier categories than those narratological terms of analysis describing phenomena located only in the text. Still, if in the light of neurobiological approaches to thought and affect connectivity, the human being is more and more understood not primarily as an animal rational but as an affec-

15 See Panksepp (1998), LeDoux (1999), Oatley (1992) and Hogan (2011, 29–67) for a discussion of various approaches to the issues and the differences between them. 16 See, for example, Sternberg (1990, 1992), Miall (2006, chap. 8; 2011), Sklar (2009), Hogan (2011); see Schneider (2013) for an attempt to think of the structure a narrative evokes in the reader’s mind as a blending of emotion episodes. 17 See especially Keen (2007, 2011) and Robinson (2005).

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tive being, I do not see how narratology can refrain from studying emotions more than has been done to present. Among others, Michael Burke (2011) and Patrick Colm Hogan (2011), the latter with his proposal for an ‘affective narratology’, have pointed out the direction in which narratology may move, but no approach so far has made a major breakthrough. Since neurobiology also has yet to develop a unified theory of the emotions, we will have to wait and see whether neurobiological conceptions of the emotional aspects of thinking will become reliable and fine-tuned enough for narratologists to turn to them in order to develop categories for text analysis. Until then, however, the concepts developed in cognitive narratology will maintain their place in narratological practice.

4 Conclusion As with any new approach, the turn to neurobiology cannot and should not be expected to turn narratology on its head. Among the tasks of narratological text analysis is the construction of hypotheses with regard to the interplay of aesthetic choices and meaning construction. In authors and readers, this involves the experience of phenomena of high complexity for which we may rely, to some degree, on introspection, as, for instance, when we consider how a story would develop differently if rendered by a homodiegetic or a heterodiegetic narrator. However, the production and reception of narrative also involves activities in brain regions and neural networks which lie below the consciousness level, so that introspection is of limited use. For descriptions of the reading effects of such neural activities as the workings of semantic and emotional memory, we have to rely on neuro- and cognitive-psychological theories and models. As Frederick Luis Aldama states in the introduction to a collection of essays on narrative and the cognitive sciences, narratologists are fully “entitled to use any knowledge coming from any discipline that will shed light on our object of study” (2010a, 8). There is no reason, then, why narratologists should not look at the results of the neurosciences in the search for a more comprehensive understanding of how narratives work. However, as Aldama also cautions, we should not assume that “whatever there is to know is to be taken from neurobiology” (8). As I have pointed out, since most contributions to neuroaesthetics have come from the fields of music and the visual arts, we must ask whether and to what extent the language and structure of narrative mediation might fundamentally impair a transfer of such theories to narrative texts. The task at hand, then, is to enquire to what extent neurobiology offers access to mental operations that do involve language and how the brain processes narrative structuring in the production and reception of narrative.



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If we want to prevent ‘cognitive’ and ‘neuro-’ from deteriorating into mere buzz words, it is necessary to develop a responsible and critical attitude towards borrowings from the neurosciences and avoid premature applications of neurobiological data. So far, neurobiologically informed studies of the arts, including neuro-narratology, cannot claim the status of a unified theory, and much less that of a well-developed method. I have tried to show that neuro-narratology is best thought of as an attitude, a heightened awareness of the richness and complexity of mental processes below the level of consciousness. From the perspective of neuro-narratology, it is necessary to accept the fact that we simply do not know yet whether and to what extent classical and postclassical categories of narratological text analysis actually correspond to the neural operations underlying writers’ and readers’ conscious understanding of narratives. Also, it is uncertain as yet that if or when we arrive at more reliable neurobiological data on the neural patterns underlying human engagement with narrative this will in fact cast new light on what we have thought about narrative so far or whether shortcomings of established approaches can be remedied. Of course, narratology has prospered for decades without taking recourse to neurobiology, and the discipline may well continue to do so. However, if the general interest in the workings of the brain and the central nervous system continues, narratologists are likely to go along with that trend. It remains to be seen whether a shift in emphasis in narratological methods of text analysis will be the consequence.

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Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2010. “Narratology and Cognitive Science: A Problematic Relationship.” Style 44 (4): 469–495. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2014. “My Narratology: An Interview with Marie-Laure Ryan.” Diegesis: Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung/ Interdisciplinary Journal for Narrative Research 3 (1): 78–81. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/ article/view/148 (Accessed 15 December 2015) Sanford, Anthony J., and Catherine Emmott. 2012. Mind, Brain and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Ralf. 2005. “Reader Constructs.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan, 483–484. London and New York: Routledge. Schneider, Ralf. 2013. “New Narrative Dynamics? How the Order of a Text and the Reader’s Cognition and Emotion Create its Meanings.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 63 (1): 47–67. Sklar, Howard. 2009. “Narrative Structuring of Sympathetic Response: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Toni Cade Bambara’s ‘The Hammer Man’.” Poetics Today 30 (3): 561–607. Skov, Martin, and Oshin Vartanian, eds. 2009. Neuroaesthetics. Amityville, NY: Baywood. Sternberg, Meir. 1990. “Telling in Time: Chronology and Narrative Theory (I).” Poetics Today 11 (4): 901–948. Sternberg, Meir. 1992. “Telling in Time: Chronology and Narrative Theory (II).” Poetics Today 13 (3): 463–541. Ty, Michelle. 2010. “On the Cognitive Turn in Literary Studies.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19 (1): 205–219. Woolf, Virginia. 1976 [1925]. Mrs Dalloway. London: Triad. Zaidel, D. W. 2005. Neuropsychology of Art: Neurological, Cognitive and Evolutionary Perspectives. Hove, GB: Psychology Press. Zeki, Semir. 1999. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eva Sabine Wagner (Osnabrück)

In Search of Coherence: Tacit Negotiations between the Paradigmatic and the Syntagmatic in Narratology and Narrativity 1 Introduction At first glance, the question “Toward consolidation or diversification?”, raised by the third ENN conference in March 2013, may be understood in (at least) two different ways. On the one hand, it might be interpreted as an invitation to reflect, descriptively, upon recent developments in the field of narratology. On the other hand, it could be understood, normatively, as an invitation to defend one position or another in the debate about whether the division of narratology into a plurality of ‘postclassical’ vectors is a blessing or a curse. However, these two interpretations can be said to coalesce in a third, rather ‘performative’ one, since the answers which the two different readings may produce represent (speech) acts that serve one and the same common goal: that of coming to terms with the high and ever-growing complexity of the narratological field of research. If we trace the developments that have occurred in narratology, we reveal or create an order which was invisible before and thus exert an influence on our object of research. Similarly, if we defend a position in favour of either consolidation or diversification, we respond to narratology’s current state by attempting to foster a specific development. The interrogative topic of the third ENN conference can thus be said to bring the complexities of narratology out into the open as a problematic in its own right, calling for contributions that, on a performative level, constitute a response to this situation. This contribution will seek to answer this call by looking into the problem itself, that is, by investigating in what ways or to what extent narratology can be said to be “complex.” I shall therefore start by briefly problematising the question as to whether and how complexity theory and narratology may be interconnected. The paper then focuses on the “complex” relationship between narratology and narrativity. I analyse forms of mutual feedback between them, considering them as representing two different, hierarchically ordered levels of narratology, the latter being argued to constitute a “complex system” (hereafter complex system narratology). Third, taking these interdependencies into account, I propose to understand DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-024

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self-organisation in narratology as being governed (inter alia) by coherence in progress, that is, by a plurality of dynamics that aim at the establishment of a coherent gestalt. In order to concretise this idea, I identify and analyse, in the last part, one type of such a dynamics, namely tacit negotiations which take place between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes of the narratological system.

2 Complexity Theory and Narratology: Some Preliminary Remarks The first question that comes up when we talk about the complexity of narratology is, of course, what exactly we mean by that term, if not the very fact of narratology’s diversification. However, although complexity has been studied from various angles and in a broad range of disciplines, both in natural and social sciences (see Érdi 2008, 1), there does not seem to exist an exhaustive definition of complexity. Instead, there is a shared interest and research into the workings of complex (open, living) systems. Recursion, dissipative structures, self-organisation and emergence are some of its key concepts (see Prigogine and Stengers 1984; also, Capra 1996, De Wolf and Holvoet 2005, Érdi 2008). Moreover, circular dynamics (such as circular causality, logical paradoxes, or strange loops) play a crucial role in complexity theory (see Hofstadter 1979). Indeed, that complexity theory may be interesting for the study of literature is not a new insight. More than twenty years ago, Katherine Hayles (1991a) published the anthology Chaos and Order, which, as the subtitle suggests, is entirely devoted to “complex dynamics in literature and science.” A number of traditional concepts in literary theory can be analysed as relying on complex dynamics: the hermeneutic circle, for instance, can be considered as an interpretative feedback loop according to which the reading of specific parts of the text and the development of hypotheses about the text as a whole form a self-regulating circle. Even more recondite key aspects of complexity theory, such as fractal structures (see Mandelbrot 1977 [1975]), increasingly find entrance into the practice of literary interpretation.1 Complexity theory also seems to have arrived in narratology, but its influence often remains implicit. Many narratological contributions are influenced by its vocabulary but do not explicitly refer to complexity theory. Dancygier (2012, 15), for instance, mentions, in her excellent study on the mechanisms of story con-

1 See, for example, Ette (2005, esp. 78–83, 125–127).



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struction, feedback loops, analyses in what ways narrative “relies on the dynamic emergence of representations” (27) and reflects upon the relations between narrative and “the system of distributed cognition” (18). David Herman presented, in the context of his so-called CAPA model of narrative world-building, the idea of a “recursive ascription of intentions” (Herman et al. 2012, 229), which corresponds to his claim of a nested structure of communicative goals. But do such punctual overlaps between complex and narrative phenomena authorise us to draw parallels between literary or narrative theory and the extra-literary theory of complexity? I fully agree with Katherine Hayles who points to the necessity to reflect upon the question of why we establish what kind of relationship between literature and science. In this connection, Hayles remarks: “One way to understand the connection between literature and science is to see science as a repository of tropes that can be used to illuminate literary texts. […] A bolder and perhaps more interesting move is to posit connections that go beyond metaphor” (1991b, 20). Currently, John Pier is undertaking just such a move. In his contribution to this volume, Pier claims that narratology itself is implicitly or latently a theory of complexity, arguing that a number of aspects of complexity theory lie at the core of narrative phenomena and narratological concepts. His hypothesis has the merit of going beyond the identification of coincidental overlaps between complexity theory and narratology by confronting the two domains through the principle of commensurability. Adopting a slightly different perspective, I maintain the hypothesis that narratology itself is a complex system, thus using complexity theory as a heuristic for an understanding of the workings of narratology. Of course, in order to justify such an approach, one needs to demonstrate that narratology fulfils the basic criteria and conditions of complex systems. Is narratology a system at all? And if so, is it an open system? If we agree with the definition of a system as “a delineated part of the universe which is distinguished from the rest by a real or imaginary boundary” (Érdi 2008, 5), then narratology can surely be considered as a system. This does not mean, of course, that there can be no dispute about narratology’s boundaries—such discussions surely being one of the hallmarks of ‘postclassical’ narratology. Quite the opposite: the sustained effort of narratology to “expos[e] its limits” (Prince 2008a, 116), in other words, to mark itself off from theories of interpretation (see Kindt and Müller 2003a; Patron 2011), of fiction (see Martínez and Scheffel 2003)

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or from the practice of interpretation,2 speaks for its systemic nature rather than questioning it. Considered from this angle, narratology can also be said to be “in permanent interaction with [its] environment to ensure normal performance” (Érdi 2008, 5); in this way it corresponds to the idea of an open system. But what about all the other aspects of complexity? Can they also be found in the narratological system? It is these questions that sound the bell for a new, systemic perspective that narratology might adopt and that may represent the starting point for a larger project of analysing the processes of self-organisation that take place in narratology. It is possible to qualify such a project as a “metanarratological enterprise” (Herman et al. 2012, 232). However, since, in complex systems, order may come from within, emerging as a result of internal dynamics, I do not wish to position my argument on a metanarratological level.3 This article stands as a tentative contribution to the project of studying narratological self-organisation.

3 Narrativity and Narratology: Interdependencies This section explores one aspect of the complexity which turns narratological self-organisation into a real challenge: interdependencies between narrativity and narratology which create circular dynamics. My analysis is guided throughout by two contrastive pairs: 1) narratology4 (level of research and representation) versus narrativity (level of the research object and of the represented), considered as two levels of complex system narratology; 2) categorisation (vertical axis) versus historicisation (horizontal axis),5 regarded as two modes of self-organisa-

2 According to Prince, for instance, narratology “devotes much of its energy to interpretation. One may regret the latter while recognizing that the examination of specific texts in specific contexts can test the validity and rigor of narratological categories” (Prince 2008a, 120). 3 See also Ryan’s (2006a, 212) remarks on “infinite recursion.” 4 As Fludernik (2007 [2005], 37) has noted, the term narratology is ambiguous to the extent to which it is used to denote either an early historical phase of narrative theory (“classical” narratology) or “narrative theory” in a broader sense. I will be using the term in the latter sense. 5 Categories are vertical insofar as they are often conceptualised as hierarchical structures (see, for example, “basic-level categorization”; Lakoff 1990 [1987], 13); histories, by contrast, can be conceptualised as horizontal inasmuch as temporal extent is conventionally represented as a horizontal time line. My distinction—itself a categorisation—between categorisation and historicisation should highlight the difference between the (analytical) drawing of conceptual boundaries, based on contrasts (e. g., “narration” versus “description”), and the (integrative) modelling



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tion.6 While the present section focuses on the interweaving of the terms of the first conceptual pair, the interplay of vertical and horizontal modes of organisation will be examined further below (see section 5).

3.1 Narrativity as a source of consolidation? The need for self-organisation is not new to narratology, expressing itself, inter alia, in numerous attempts to explore its boundaries.7 On what grounds can the boundaries of narratology be established? Many researchers agree that it is by illuminating the nature of narratology’s object of research—in other words, by determining what exactly is (or should be) denoted by narrative or narrativity—that narratology can give itself a foundation. Prince, for instance, explains: “Since narratology is the science of narrative (or a theory of narrative), its very scope depends on the definition of the latter” (2003, 1). In a similar vein, Sternberg notes: “Unless narrative has been defined in or by its narrativity, we leave

of conceptual links, changes or transitions, based on time-bound developments or historical contiguity (e. g., from “classical” to “postclassical” narratology). 6 A related distinction has been made by McHale (2007 [2005]) who argues that all of narratology is divided into two competing orientations, one being structuralist, the other historicist. He claims that “under the big tent of narrative theory, structuralism and historicism jockey for position, each seeking to outflank or overcome the other, to contain the other, […] to forget or repress the other” (64, original emphasis). While structure, in McHale’s terminology, represents only one side of his dichotomy (“transhistorical,” “norm”-based, “structuralist” narratology; 64 and 66), I think that both of McHale’s “orientations” display narratology’s effort to organise itself, that is to say, to provide itself with structure. This is why I prefer to understand “structure” as an umbrella term, substituting McHale’s (narrow-sense) notion of “structure” by the term categorisation. In my opinion, “categorisation” denotes more precisely the mode of organisation which McHale paraphrases, in different contexts, as “system of ideas” (61, original emphasis), “system of concepts” (61) or “dehistoricized form” (63), thereby denoting (ideational, conceptual or gestalt) categories. 7 Genette (1976 [1969]), for instance, explores the boundaries of narrative by examining the extent to which it overlaps with—or dissociates itself from—classical mimesis and diegesis, description and discourse. Mathieu-Colas (1986), who argues for a conception of narrative based on story (“histoire”), establishes two “boundaries,” represented by narrative eventfulness and discourse, which should delimit both narrativity and narratology. His article stands as an attempt to give “coherence” (104) to a narratology which is threatened by “discordance” (92), that is, by the “divergence of points of view and of preoccupations” (91, translation mine). A similar concern manifests itself in Kindt and Müller’s (2003b) question “What is narratology?” which incited researchers to “survey narratology” (Prince 2003) and to determine its “systematic place” (Titzmann 2003).

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the subject matter undelimited and risk missing its generic feature(s): narratologists then become liable to do everything indiscriminately together with, if not anything but, narratology” (2010, 512). Considered from this angle, the shape and identity of narratology (its “borderlines” and “central” versus “peripheral” concerns)8 depends primarily on boundaries of narrativity. In view of the apparent agreement in narratology not only on the goal of establishing narratological boundaries and thus “well-defined (ultimate) goals for the discipline” (Prince 2003, 10), but also on the means by which this goal may be achieved, it is indeed astonishing that, despite decades of research on that question, a consensus concerning narratology’s scope is still far from being achieved. Narratology is currently divided into many research branches.9 Why is it so difficult to achieve disciplinary unity? A possible answer is that narrativity is hard to define. One of the greatest challenges to narrativity theory becomes evident with the diverse concepts of narrativity, breaking it down into various alternative key terms and dimensions: narrativehood, narrativeness and narratability (Prince 2008b); tellability (Baroni 2014 [2009]; Labov 1972; Ryan 1991, 2005); canonical narrative schema (Courtés 1991, 98–123); sequentiality-plus (Sternberg 2010);10 mimetic versus diegetic narrativity (Nünning and Sommer 2008); narratemes (Wolf 2003); modes of narrativity (Ryan 1992); narrative logic (Sturgess 1989, 1992); narrative tension (Baroni 2007); experientiality (Fludernik 1996, 2003); eventfulness (Hühn 2008, 2014 [2009]; Schmid 2003); narrative worldmaking (Herman 2013a, b). All of these concepts, and others as well, claim, each in its own way, to capture the nature of narrative, to specify the notion of narrativity, yet in quite different ways.11 To compli-

8 These spatial metaphors, which are in wide use in narratology, are consistent with Lotman’s (2001 [1990]) theory of the semiosphere, which could be fruitfully applied to an analysis of the moving boundaries and inner dynamics of narratology. 9 Nünning and Nünning (2002, 10–13) and Nünning (2003, 249–251) distinguish no fewer than eight classes of narrative theories which comprise more than forty narratologies. 10 With this term, Sternberg (2010, 543–552) denotes models of narrativity which provide event sequentiality with further (thematic, perspectival, causal, etc.) devices of cohesiveness. He criticises these and other definitions for their adherence to an “objectivist” paradigm, defending, for his part, a functionalist approach that defines narrativity in terms of “the play of suspense/curiosity/surprise between represented and communicative time (in whatever combination, whatever medium, whatever manifest or latent form)” (642). In a related development, Pier (2016) has explored the narrativity of narrative sequences. 11 The approaches referred to by these key terms vary in a number of methodological and epistemological regards. For example, while some definitions of narrativity (such as through experientiality or eventfulness) focus on a single specific feature which is argued to be essential to narratives, Wolf (2003) advances the discussion on narrativity significantly by performing a



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cate things even more, there is no consensus as to how to deal with this diversity of rivalling definitions.12 So in a way, “narrativity” refers to a conceptual blank space, to a search for the specific nature or defining quality of narrative. In doing so, it raises a bundle of questions such as: What makes narratives more or less narrative? Where is the narrative quality to be found: in the text, in cognition or in the context? Does the narrative quality denote features, processes, emotions, or a combination of these factors? Are such problems of defining narrativity responsible for the enormous difficulty of consolidating narratology? I contend that there is more to the problem of consolidation than the approaches listed above, namely that narrativity and narratology stand in a relationship of bidirectional influence: narratology defines (or seeks to define) narrativity (narratology → narrativity), but also, as I will discuss below, narrativity impinges on narratology (narrativity → narratology). This being the case, narratology and narrativity are caught in a circle of mutual feedback, typical for complex systems. In what follows, I would like to examine this narratological feedback loop in further detail.

3.2 Consolidation reconsidered: the “vicious circle” According to the “objectivist ideal” of “scientific realism” (see Ryan 2006a, 214: figure 18),13 definitions of narrativity are an instance of the first direction of

methodological shift: away from the production of continually new key terms which highlight alternative key factors of narrativity towards an examination of how various narrative key factors jointly constitute (different levels of) narrative manifestation. 12 While these concepts mostly seem to compete with each other, Ryan (2006b) seeks to overcome the rivalry of criteria by proposing a prototypical approach, presenting a list of nine “nested conditions” of narrative. In putting forth this list, she contends that proponents of opposing definitions “basically agree about what requirements are relevant to narrativity and about their importance relative to each other,” so that the debate could therefore take a new direction, turning away from exclusive definitions towards the less mutually exclusive question of “where to draw the line” (Ryan 2006b, 194). This position is attacked by Sternberg (2010, 617–618) for its lack of systematicity and for its “arbitrary” mix of criteria. 13 My analysis is inspired by two circular figures, proposed by Ryan (2006a, 214: figures 18a, b), which illustrate the difference between “scientific realism” and “scientific relativism.” The circle of scientific realism is constituted by the two levels of “world” and “discourse,” interconnected by “relations of causality and mimesis […]: here the world [causally] determines the content of the image [i. e., of the scientific representation, ESW], and the image [mimetically] represents the world” (214). In the circle of scientific relativism, by contrast, “the world and the image are linked by the same relation [of causality], and they determine each other in a vicious circle that

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influence outlined above: narratology (“mimetically”) represents narrativity.14 However, insofar as the definition of narrativity is not an end in and by itself, but only an intermediate goal which serves the higher end of consolidating narratology (narrativity (“causally”) determines narratology15), the second direction of influence is already implied by the first. This is problematic only to the extent to which narratology, itself shaped by narrativity (concepts), in turn retroacts on narrativity (concepts), thereby participating in never-ending cycles of mutual feedback and determination.

3.2.1 Interdependent diversifications The diversification of narratology illustrates the dynamics of this “vicious circle”16 inasmuch as it can be understood as both the source and the outcome of the diversification of narrativity. Do new notions (definitions, insights into the nature) of narrativity create new vectors of narratological research, or, conversely, do new narratological research interests or perspectives lead to new definitions of narrativity? In a circle of mutual feedback, one can start from different positions, with the severe consequence that one lacks a fixed point from which narratological consolidation could start.

undermines the possibility of their absolute distinction” (214). I apply her analysis to the problem of narratological consolidation, considering contaminations between narratology (level of research) and narrativity (level of the object of research). However, while Ryan makes a difference between two circular structures, my analysis is based on only one feedback loop, since I think that the difference between “representation” and “determination,” which underlies Ryan’s distinction of two feedback loops, is often hard to make, especially when it comes to generic definitions (and thus to the so-called “problem of universals”; see Fricke 2010). 14 One can also say that, conversely, narrativity causally determines narratology (i. e., its narratological representations). Both expressions amount to the same feedback loop associated with scientific realism (see Ryan 2006a, 214: figure 18a). 15 In the sense outlined at the beginning of section 3.1 of this article. Inasmuch as the two levels interconnected by Ryan’s feedback loops refer to (i) concrete representations (“images,” “discourse”) of (ii) specific phenomena (entities of the “world”) (see Ryan 2006a, 214), I am reaching beyond the scope of Ryan’s analysis, for I am examining not only the relationship between narrativity-the-phenomenon (Ryan’s “world”-level of the object of research) and narrativity-the-narratological-concept (Ryan’s “discourse”-level of research), but also the relationship between narrativity-the-concept(s) (“second-degree” object of research) and narratology-the-discipline (“second-degree” level of research) which emerges within the feedback loop by means of recursion. 16 See Ryan (2006a, 214).



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I would like to briefly present two examples which show that diversification on the level of narratology (splitting up of the field into various “narratologies”) and of narrativity (splitting up into various “narrativities”) are interdependent. As a first example, Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer (2008) contribute to the diversification of narrativity by their proposal to divide it into two kinds: mimetic and diegetic. Mimetic narrativity, anchored in classical mimesis, refers to “the representation of a temporal and/or causal sequence of events, with the degree of narrativity hinging upon the degree of eventfulness” (338). Diegetic narrativity, by contrast, which goes back to classical diegesis, denotes the “verbal, as opposed to visual or performative, transmission of narrative content” (338). In a nutshell, to lend support to a new, “transgeneric narratology” which contributes to narratological diversification, the authors give it a theoretical basis by developing a pluralised definition of narrativity. In another example, Brian Richardson’s “unnatural narratology” aims at an “additional” “antimimetic poetics” which “expand[s] the area covered by narrative theory” so far (2006, 138). His unnatural narratology relies on the distinction between “mimetic” and “antimimetic” narratives. Mimetic narratives “model themselves on or substantially resemble nonfictional works” (2015, 3). They “strive for realism or verisimilitude,” nineteenth-century fiction being “a major subspecies of the mimetic tradition” (3). Antimimetic (“unnatural”) narratives, by contrast, “violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres” (3). They break the mimetic illusion on the level of the fabula (see 93), following a “postmodern” poetics which flaunts artificiality instead of hiding it (see 172). In view of a “sustained neglect of antimimetic narratives and, most importantly, [of] an absence of comprehensive theoretical formulations capable of encompassing these works” (Richardson in Herman et al. 2012, 21), Richardson proposes his “unnatural” narratology in order to give antimimetic dimensions of narrativity a systematic place in the field of postclassical narratology. These examples raise an important question: if definitions of narrativity rely on the narratological approach one chooses and if, conversely, the narratological approach that one chooses depends on a specific notion of narrativity; moreover, if both narrativity and narratology are inordinately diversified and complex, then how can we achieve any form of consolidation? The feedback loop underlying this question deserves our full attention, since it uncovers a threat to a fundamental ontological boundary which serves scientific objectivity by establishing “a rigid separation between the observer and the observed phenomenon” (Ryan 2006a, 213), that is, between narratology as a scientific discipline and its object

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of research, between “discourse” and “world”17 or meta-language and object-language. To be clear, I am not claiming that all narratology lacks scientific objectivity, or that all of its concepts have a narrative shape. But I do claim that the levels of research and representation (narratology) and of the represented (narrativity) occasionally feedback on each other and that this feedback loop can explain the degree of difficulty associated with the consolidation of narratology.

3.2.2 Interdependent dimensions: vertical and horizontal axes The interdependency between narrativity and narratology is not restricted to their diversifications. Other forms of interdependency can be found on the vertical and horizontal axes of the complex system narratology, narrativity’s vertical and horizontal dimensions feeding back on their narratological counterparts (and conversely). The interdependent diversifications of narrativity and narratology, for example, can be said to take place on the vertical axis of the complex system narratology insofar as the competition between diverse narratologies (as well as between various related concepts of narrativity) is a struggle for categorisation:18 categories produce the same notional oppositions, contrasts, hierarchies and overlaps as they characterise the relationship between competing narratologies (and concepts of narrativity).19 Narrative Theory. Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Herman et al., 2012), for instance, is entirely devoted to exploring not only the peculiarities of, but also the contrasts and overlaps between feminist, rhetorical, cognitive and antimimetic narratologies: the authors draw conceptual boundaries and criticise the boundaries set by others.20

17 See notes 13 and 15. 18 See notes 5 and 6. 19 Richardson’s “unnatural narratology,” for example, contrasts sharply with Fludernik’s (1996, 2003) “natural narratology,” even though Richardson himself (2015, xvi, 5–6) mitigates their differences. “Feminist narratology” and other historicist varieties are regarded as subtypes of the paradigm of “contextualist” narratology (see McHale 2007 [2005], 64). “Rhetorical narratology” overlaps with “feminist narratology” in its use of an inductive methodology but differs from it as to the questions which orient the inductive analysis (as Warhol explains in Herman et al. 2012, 201). 20 Phelan and Rabinowitz, for instance, criticise Richardson by explaining that they are “less invested in drawing a thick line between mimetic and antimimetic narrative, and, thus, more inclined to see how these kinds are interrelated” (Herman et al. 2012, 198). They are themselves criticised by Herman who argues that their triad of the mimetic-synthetic-thematic “draws sharp lines between domains that are overlapping and interlinked” (225).



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The horizontal axis, by contrast, is involved, for example, in the narrativisa21 tion of narratological historiography which projects a syntagmatic kind of narrative coherence onto the history of narrative theory. (Unfortunately, this subject cannot be discussed here due to a lack of space.22) To conclude, if the goal of “consolidating” narratology means to provide our discipline with a “solid” basis, then the circular dynamics of mutual feedback which interconnect narratology and narrativity transform this imaginary “solid” ground into a wheel. If we don’t want to be the mice who run in our wheels, wondering why we can’t reach solid ground, we first need to recognise the circular dynamics in which we are caught and then search for a way out of our situation. But how can we get out of this vicious circle if we are a part of it? All we can do, I think, is to search for principles of organisation that simultaneously govern narrativity and narratology, in other words, that precede, transcend or enable the circularity of narrative-narratological dynamics. Does such a principle exist? The answer is yes. This is where the principle of coherence enters the picture.

4 Coherence in Progress The goal of achieving coherence can be considered the driving force of narratological self-organisation. Accordingly, descriptions of the state of narratology invoke key dimensions of coherence: Herman (1999, 11), for example, observes a postclassical “move toward integration and synthesis,” and Alber and Fludernik (2010, 23) discover “recurrent strategies of patchwork and blending.” The “patchwork” metaphor conveys the idea of creating a unity out of a variety (of different narratological approaches) while “blending,” a key concept in Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) cognitive theory and in narratological uses of the latter (see Dancygier 2012, Hartner 2012, Schneider and Hartner 2012), refers to the idea of interconnecting and conceptually integrating this variety. These aspects may be

21 Drawing on White’s (1996 [1981]) and Fludernik’s (1996) understandings of the term, Jan Alber defines narrativisation as the process “of giving narrative form to a discourse for the purpose of facilitating a better understanding of the represented phenomena” (2005, 386). 22 For readers who are interested in that subject, I recommend considering White (1996 [1981]), Ricœur (1984 [1983], 1985 [1984]), Fludernik (1996), Alber and Fludernik (2010), McHale (2007 [2005]) and Richardson (2000).

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considered as key characteristics of coherence, since they have played a crucial role in coherence theory for decades.23 Bearing these aspects of coherence in mind, in what way can this concept be said to “govern” narrativity? Coherence has long been an essential ingredient of accounts of narrative and narrativity. An exhaustive overview of all the relevant approaches would exceed by far the confines of this paper (for a survey, see Toolan 2014 [2009]), but one may think, for instance, of Propp, who understands morphology as “a description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole” (1968 [1928], 19); of Prince, who asserts that “[n]arrativity depends also on the extent to which the events presented constitute (or pertain to) a whole, a complete structure with a beginning, a middle and an end” (Prince 1982, 151); of Trabasso, Secco and Van Den Broek (1984), who find that the coherence of a story first and foremost depends on the way in which story events are causally connected; or of Ricœur (1984 [1983], 1985 [1984]), who defines narrative through the concepts of “narrative configuration” and “temporal synthesis of the heterogeneous.” The hegemonic status of such conceptualisations of narrative or narrativity in terms of coherence has been called into question in the anthology Beyond Narrative Coherence (Hyvärinen et al. 2010a). The editors “suggest and nurture a kind of paradigmatic change within narrative studies” in order to challenge what they call “the coherence paradigm” according to which the condition for the ascription of narrativity is coherence: e. g., thematic closure, chronological order or experiential gestalt. They note that “the coherence thesis […] obviously contradicts what avant-garde literature and film have been doing with narrative,” and they propose to integrate “the coincidental, unexpected, experimental, even the chaotic” (Hyvärinen et al. 2010b, 9) into the notion of narrativity. Although I share the concerns of the editors and agree especially with Freeman’s (2010) concluding considerations on that topic, I would not subscribe to

23 De Beaugrande and Dressler’s (1983 [1972], 95) understanding of coherence as “the construction of a continuity of sense” remains valid today (cf. Blumenthal 1997, 114; Schwarz 2001, 22). Nonetheless, coherence refers to different things, depending on both the historical context and the scientific orientation of the respective linguistic approach. In both regards, the basic disagreement lies in the question of what carries more weight in the creation of coherence: the text or the cognitive (inferential, interpretative, etc.) processes of the reader. At issue, on the one hand, is the difference between cohesion and coherence (see, for example, Bublitz 1998) and, on the other, the historical stages of the concept of coherence (see Viehweger 1989). Psycholinguistic theories of discourse processing approach the conceptual continuity of coherence by analysing the ways by which readers build “situation models” (for surveys, see Tapiero 2007 and Traxler 2012).



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the project of moving “beyond narrative coherence” because I think that coherence embraces more than what the authors of the volume concede. Indeed, many models of narrativity use the adjective “coherent” in order to refer to the idea of an integrated gestalt, but there is also a wide variety of theories that highlight the processual aspect of narrative coherence and of narrative in general. In text linguistics, Viehweger emphasised early on that coherence is “a dynamic procedure” (1989, 262), and Bublitz maintains that “coherence is rarely static but frequently dynamic, i. e., a process rather than a state” (1998, 12). In literary theory, Iser (1978 [1976]) analyses the meaning of the literary work as a “dynamic happening” (22) which relies on processes of literary “consistency-building” (119) at the nexus of the text and the reader. In narrative theory, Fludernik (1996), for example, invokes the dynamic nature of coherence by studying processes of narrativisation, and Dancygier (2012) has presented an excellent study on the processual aspects of narrative coherence which applies the framework of Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) cognitive theory of blending to the analysis of narratives. According to her model, the story as a coherent whole is the emergent result of processes of conceptual integration taking place between all partial narrative structures, called “narrative spaces.” Although such narrative theories account for the dynamics of story creation, the criticism of Hyvärinen et al. (2010b) also applies to them, because narrativity (or “storiness”), even in these theories, is associated with the (more or less) successful completion of the story-constructing processes, in other words, with coherence as a positive result of the dynamics that engender it. It is this exclusively resultative understanding of coherence which is implicitly criticised by most of the contributions of Against Narrative Coherence. It thus seems reasonable to distinguish, terminologically, two dimensions of coherence, namely coherence-as-a-result versus coherence-as-a-dynamics (for a related distinction, see Hellmann 1995, 194–195). The former, which may be termed resultative coherence, denotes the existence of a (more or less) unified, fully integrated whole.24 The dynamic dimension of coherence, by contrast, for which I would like to introduce the term coherence in progress, refers to processes which aim at (or work towards) the establishment of such a unifying, integrated gestalt or structure. These two dimensions of coherence are, of course, interrelated: coherence in progress may lead to resultative coherence.25

24 Resultative coherence is a scalar property, displaying different degrees “ranging from the minimal to the maximal” (Toolan 2014 [2009], 71; see also Bublitz 1998, 12). 25 With regard to this distinction, one may also distinguish two semantics of incoherence which correlate with two different perspectives. On the one hand, incoherence may be understood as

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The distinction between two dimensions of coherence allows us to better understand the position defended in Beyond Narrative Coherence: the authors argue that one should extend definitions of narrativity so that they do not include resultative coherence only, but also coherence in progress. I totally subscribe to this argumentation which can be found, at least implicitly, in a variety of theoretical statements. Richardson’s (2006, 2015) unnatural narratology, for example, with its focus on the experimental, antirepresentational structures of postmodern narratives, may be considered to have the function of integrating coherence in progress into the notion of narrativity inasmuch as the narratives under consideration do not lend themselves easily to (and perhaps even resist) resultative coherence.26 Coming back to the observation that Herman, on the one hand, and Alber and Fludernik, on the other, make a case for a narratological dynamics of interconnectivity and integration, I would like to conclude that coherence in progress is a central principle which governs the complex, self-organising system of narratology. It leads to attempts to integrate what is disconnected and diversified on the level of both narrativity and narratology. But does this claim help us to better understand self-organisation in narratology? How does integration take place in the narratological system? What concrete forms does it take on in the process of coherence in progress? And are the dynamics of coherence really similar on the two levels of narratology and narrativity? These are far-reaching questions, and all I can propose here is an initial, tentative answer which consists in identifying one form of coherence in progress which takes place both on the level of narrativity (5.1) and of narratology (5.2): tacit negotiations between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic.

that which precedes coherence in progress, in other words, as a state of disconnected or disintegrated multiplicity which may trigger processes that aim at establishing resultative coherence. On the other hand, incoherence may be understood as the negative result of coherence in progress, a judgement according to which the multiplicity under consideration cannot be transformed into an integrated gestalt. 26 For further examples, see Petersen (2003) and Stanzel (1981).



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5 Tacit Negotiations between the Paradigmatic and the Syntagmatic The paradigmatic and the syntagmatic have been theorised differently by various theorists and in quite different scientific domains and contexts.27 In order to avoid misunderstandings and unintended implications, I would like to clarify that my understanding of this opposition should allow us to distinguish, on a deliberately abstract level, between vertical and horizontal modes of organisation.28 I conceive of the syntagmatic as covering all forms of linguistic, textual, narrative or historical sequentiality or linearity (horizontal axis). The paradigmatic, by contrast, should denote all kinds of linguistic, textual, narrative or historical categories (vertical axis) which may be derived or abstracted from sequential (syntagmatic) wholes. The opposition between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic has its roots in linguistics, where these two axes are still considered to be fundamental aspects of language as a sign system (see Aitchison 1992, Clément 2005, Glück 2005 and McGregor 2009, 8–11). It denotes two kinds of relations between linguistic signs. A syntagm is a group of two or more linguistic units that occur within the same construction so as to form a sequence (horizontal axis). Linguistic signs stand in a paradigmatic relationship to each other if they can replace each other at the same position of a syntagm. A paradigm thus denotes a class or category on one of the multiple levels of a sign system (vertical axis) and is related to “the notion that each sign invokes a contrast with other signs that might have been used instead” (McGregor 2009, 10). That the distinction between these two axes may be pertinent for the understanding of coherence was highlighted early on by Viehweger who proposed to distinguish between two kinds of semantic text processing. Viehweger’s horizontal propositional integration denotes “coherence relations between two or several propositions […] constructed by the hearer due to the connexity of the states-ofaffairs reflected by them” (1989, 264). Vertical propositional integration, by contrast, occurs when the horizontal propositional integration does not allow coherence to be established. Then, knowledge structures are activated which enable the hearer to connect the syntagmatic elements. The interplay of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic has also been applied to literary and narrative theory.

27 See, for example, the enormous differences between Chambers’ (1994), Kuhn’s (1996 [1962]) and Lotman’s (1977 [1970]) ideas of what constitutes a paradigm. 28 The opposition between categorisation and historicisation, used in section 3, represents but one way of concretising the opposition between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic.

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5.1 … in narrativity For Roland Barthes the interplay of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic is fundamental for an understanding of the “complexity” of “the system of narrative” (1975 [1966], 266, 269). “[D]ystaxy29 initiates a ‘horizontal’ reading, while integration superimposes on it a ‘vertical’ reading. […] Through the concurrent use of these two dimensions, structure branches out, proliferates” (270). Concerning part-whole relationships, Barthes asserts that “the unit is claimed by the whole, yet on the other hand, the narrative ‘hangs together’ only through the distortion and irradiation of its units” (267), the units being distributed on different levels. Despite significant differences, Barthes’ reflections have much in common with Dancygier’s (2012) approach. The two models analyse “the language of narrative” (Barthes 1975 [1966], 266) and rely on the idea of processual, ascending integration (and thus, also, on coherence in progress). Barthes’ ideas prefigure, in a way, a narrative blending theory when he explains that, in the process of “integration,” “what has been disjoined at a certain level […] is joined together again at a higher level” (269). The two theories identify basic narrative unities which lie on different narrative levels and which, through complex interactive dynamics, produce a global coherence found on the highest level of the narrative hierarchy. A paradigmatic axis is present in these models as a hierarchy of narrative units or spaces; a syntagmatic axis is represented by the conceptually integrated, sequentially configured story that results from dynamics of integration. An interesting new interpretation of the two narrative axes has been presented by Rainer Warning (2001), who positions himself critically towards approaches like those of Barthes and Dancygier, even prefiguring central ideas of Hyvärinen et al. (2010a). Warning claims that, since the time of structuralism, narrative theory has been primarily a theory of syntagmatic organisation: paradigmatic oppositions which are constitutive for the story play a role only to the extent to which they participate in the constitution of a holistic syntagmatic axis that has a beginning, a middle and an end. According to Warning (2001, 176), the notion of narrative has thus been equated with syntagmatic teleology, closure and the control of contingency. This “syntagmatic narrativity” thus refers to a linear, causal, chronological kind of resultative coherence. Warning proposes to add a

29 According to Barthes, dystaxy “occurs as soon as the signs (of a linguistic message) are no longer juxtaposed, as soon as the linear (logical) order is disturbed (for instance, the predicate preceding the subject).” He adds that “that is exactly what happens in the narrative: the units of a sequence may […] be separated from each other by the insertion of units from other sequences” (1975 [1966], 266).



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second, paradigmatic type of narrativity (Erzählen im Paradigma), which may be said to represent a nonlinear type of coherence in progress. Besides its exposure of contingency, this “telling in the paradigm” is primarily characterised by “an ana- and cataphorical web of relationships [that develops] on the back of the text sequence” (179, translation mine). Warning’s model thus describes dynamics that invert the direction of integration described by Barthes: the syntagmatic, fully integrated story gives rise to paradigmatic processes of coherence in progress. As these theoretical approaches show, it is difficult to determine the direction that the interplay between the two axes takes, but one may assert that the understanding of stories (the latter being understood as textual manifestations) relies on tacit (i. e., textually not manifested) negotiations between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. One of the most influential accounts of such negotiations was given by Roman Jakobson in his article “Linguistics and Poetics” (1988 [1960]), the primary concern of which is to provide a linguistic account of literariness. Within the context of his model of six constitutive factors of verbal communication and their corresponding functions, Jakobson claims that “[t]he particularities of diverse poetic genres imply a differently ranked participation of the other verbal functions along with the dominant poetic function” (38). It is this dominant “poetic function” which introduces the idea of an interplay between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (39, original emphasis). In other words, there is a “projection of the equational principle into the sequence,” a “superposition30 of similarity upon contiguity” (50–51, emphasis added).

30 The concepts of “superposition” and “superimposition” are used alternatively by different theorists to describe specific narrative dynamics. While the verb “superpose” means generally “to put sth on or above sth else” (Hornby 2010, 1553, r. c.), the verb “superimpose” adds (together with the morpheme “-im-”) the idea of integrating the two superposed entities (“to add some of the qualities of one system or pattern to another one in order to produce sth that combines the qualities of both”; 1553, l. c.). The idea of a “superimposition” is invoked by Barthes (1975 [1966], 270) to theorise the integration of horizontal and vertical narrative dimensions and by Schmid (2010 [2005], 109) in order to describe the integration of figural and narratorial point of view in first-person narration. Jakobson, by contrast, describes the interplay of vertical similarity and horizontal contiguity as a “superposition.” It is my firm contention that Jakobson uses this metaphor in order to point to the essential incompatibility of the two axes in interaction. This incompatibility is the condition and thus the starting point of readerly processes of integration that finally produce “literary” effects, such as ambiguity. “Superposition” and “superimposition” are thus used to highlight different aspects of one and the same integrational dynamics: either the initial incommensurability of two interacting narrative dimensions or the integration which finally results from their interplay. In what follows, I will be using the two concepts ac-

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That Jakobson’s projection principle well describes the structural qualities of lyric poetry is widely acknowledged (see, for example, Link 1981, Weich 1998, 21–43). But can we speak of narrative projection? Do narratives project paradigmatic equivalences onto the syntagmatic axis?31 I would like to address this question using a literary example, namely Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel Dangerous connections (Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782). I shall begin directly with an excerpt of some passages from letter XLVIII: It is after a very stormy night, during which I have not closed my eyes; it is after having been in incessant agitations […] [that] I come to you; […] for the situation I now write in, convinces me more than ever of the irresistible power of love: I can hardly preserve command over myself […] Believe me, Madam, settled tranquility […] does not lead to happiness; the active passions alone lead the way; […] I may, I think, assure myself, that I am this moment happier than you […] Everything conspires to raise my transports! […] even the table I write on, now, for the first time, consecrated by me to that use, becomes to me a sacred altar of love […]. (Choderlos de Laclos 1784 [1782], 233–236)

What an uninformed reader might interpret as an authentic expression of love and longing is in fact an “extended series of ambivalent statements” (May 1963, 182)—a highly insolent and manipulative letter from a libertine, the Viscount de Valmont, who deploys all his rhetorical strategies to seduce and break the resistance of the addressee, the Présidente de Tourvel, who is supposed to be the next victim of his seductive manoeuvres. In fact, Valmont writes this letter while taking a break from the bodily “agitations,” “passions” and “happy” moments he shares with the prostitute Emily, using, indeed, her naked back as his “table.” The full meaning of this letter, especially its impertinence, is due to a sort of ambiguity which results from a specific interplay of viewpoints (or character-perspectives; see Nünning 2001) or, more precisely, from a special kind of multiperspectivity (see Hartner 2014 [2009]). There is a lively debate in narratology concerning the differences between the labels perspective, point of view, focalisation, viewpoint and multiperspectivity, especially with regard to their intended theoretical implications (for an overview, see, for example, Hartner 2014 [2009], Niederhoff 2014 [2009], Schmid 2010 [2005]). I will work with the term viewpoint for two reasons: first, in order to avoid Genette’s (1980 [1972], 189–211) term of focalisation, which implies a text-centred approach to narrative perspective; second, in

cordingly. However, inasmuch as I am primarily interested in readerly dynamics of coherence in progress which precedes the resultative integration of superposed dimensions, my focus will be most often on narrative forms of “superposition.” 31 According to Todorov, they do: “on suppose que le récit représente la projection syntagmatique d’un réseau de rapports paradigmatiques” (1967, 55; original emphasis).



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order to signal my theoretical proximity to Sweetser’s (2012) notion of viewpoint. Sweetser conceives of viewpoint as an “intersubjective phenomenon” (2012, 12) insofar as the language used to express someone’s viewpoint is susceptible of expressing not only the speaker’s spatial and temporal deixis as well as her/his epistemic, emotive or evaluative stances, but also the (deictic, emotional, social) relationships between different participants of the communicative situation (including the speaker, the addressee, audiences, etc.) according to the speaker’s cognitive representations.32 However, my concept of viewpoint is tendentially more “constructivist” (in Nünning’s [2001] sense) than Sweetser’s, approaching Hartner’s (2012) reception-oriented model of perspective. According to this theoretical stance, letter XLVIII encodes at least two (or three, if one counts the reader) different viewpoints simultaneously.33 First, knowing that the author of the letter is Valmont, readers may adopt his viewpoint. Valmont’s viewpoint may be analysed with regard to three Jakobsonian functions. Concerning the “referential function,” the reader understands the sexual allusions as actually pointing to the situation in which Valmont really is: the motif of sleeplessness alludes to the long duration of his bodily pleasures, and the metaphor of storm to their intensity. Concerning the “emotive function,” a reader may detect that Valmont implicitly characterises himself. When he speaks, for instance, about the “irresistible power of love,” he alludes not only to his present arousal but also to his addiction to sexual adventures in general. Concerning the “conative function,” a reader may see that Valmont uses a host of rhetorical strategies aimed at manipulating Tourvel, one of them being a strategy of mirroring Tourvel’s feelings. The metaphor of the “stormy night,” for example, is supposed to make her think of her own nocturnal inner struggles, while the motif of sleeplessness should appeal to her state as a desperate lover, to her longing for him during the night.

32 If, for example, the question “Can you come to my party?” is answered, with the grammatically correct sentence, “Sure, I’d love to come” (instead of: “Sure, I’d love to go”); here, the speaker has integrated a central element of the viewpoint of his/her interlocutor, since “to come” corresponds to the interlocutor’s spatial deixis (see Sweetser 2012, 9–10). 33 I restrict my analysis to the two viewpoints of Valmont and Tourvel although the letter brings the viewpoints of Emily and Merteuil into play as well: Valmont encloses the letter for Tourvel in a letter for Merteuil (letter XLVII) in which he describes both Emily’s reaction to it and the effect which the letter is supposed to have on Merteuil herself (“Emily, who read the epistle, laughed immoderately, and I expect it will make you laugh also”; 231). Especially Merteuil’s role as an informed reader (and Valmont’s accomplice) provides the letter with further meanings (see Bourgeacq 1980, May 1963, Rousset 1983).

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The discovery of the conative, manipulative dimension of the letter triggers a shift of viewpoint, passing from Valmont’s perspective to that of Tourvel. Having read all the preceding 47 letters, the reader is already so familiar with her character, her emotional life and her way of thinking that s/he may read the letter not only through the eyes of Valmont (as the sender) but also through the eyes of Tourvel (as the addressee). This is consistent with Hartner’s claim that the processing of perspectives is closely intertwined with the mental models of characters which readers create and update during reading (see Hartner 2012, 100), but also with his hypothesis that readers imaginatively enrich mental models. The reader may therefore anticipate the thoughts and feelings that Tourvel will have (while reading this letter) as a possible future element of the plot.34 Such a mental simulation of Tourvel’s viewpoint is triggered especially by the sharp contrast between her viewpoint and Valmont’s and, within these viewpoints, between the linguistic functions that the letter fulfils from Valmont’s and from Tourvel’s respective viewpoints. Considering the referential function, Tourvel will not be able to understand which “situation” Valmont is referring to and may misrepresent it as a situation of nocturnal longing. She will also not be able to interpret the “emotive” aspects of the letter in the right way, since she does not know Valmont as well as the reader knows him (and as much as Valmont himself). She will possibly also misinterpret the conative function of the letter as an attempt to make her accept his (and her own) love instead of detecting its rhetorical sophistication. However, Tourvel’s viewpoint is itself incoherent and ambiguous, since she is torn between two rivalling viewpoints: on the one hand, Tourvel is inclined to interpret his words as signs of real love; on the other, she fears being taken in by a cunning seducer. The viewpoints of Valmont and Tourvel thus contrast with each other, and that even in a number of regards (which is not surprising if one conceives of viewpoint as a compositional problem35). If one agrees with Nünning’s concept of perspec-

34 More precisely, the simultaneous presence of Tourvel’s and Valmont’s viewpoints results from a readerly anticipation of Tourvel’s reading of the letter. Lindemann characterises such anticipatory activities of reception as typical for epistolary “polyperspectivity” (1999, 49). 35 Uspenskij (1973 [1970]), for example, distinguishes between the ideological, phraseological, spatial, temporal and psychological “planes” of point of view. Schmid (2010 [2005], 100–105) distinguishes, in a partly overlapping categorisation, between five “parameters” of point of view (space, ideology, time, language, and perception). The contrast between Tourvel’s and Valmont’s viewpoints, evoked by letter XLVIII, may be analysed according to these “planes” or “parameters”: the difference between their viewpoints is based on differences concerning their spatial, temporal and ideological positions and their psychological, perceptual and linguistic dispositions and habits.



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tive as being “applicable […] to the world-models of the fictional individuals that populate the represented universe” (2001, 207), and if the world-models of these fictional individuals also comprise the (communicative and/or epistolary) situation in which they are, then their viewpoints should also comprise their mental representations of the “constitutive factors of verbal communication” and of their corresponding “functions” (see Jakobson 1988 [1960]).36 Accordingly, there is not only a single contrast between the viewpoints of Tourvel and Valmont, each taken as a whole, but several contrasts, internal to their viewpoints: between their communicative roles (sender/receiver), “actantial” roles (manipulator/victim), linguistic behaviours (“addressed”/“undressed language”)37 as well as between their ways of conceptualising the referential, emotive and conative functions of letter XLVIII. How can this letter serve as an example for tacit negotiations between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic? What does its narrative projection consist of? If, in letter XLVIII, the viewpoints of Valmont and Tourvel contrast with each other, where is the Jakobsonian “similarity” (“superposition of similarity upon contiguity”; 1988 [1960], 50–51) to be found? Differentiating between a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic axis may help to answer these questions. In narrative projection, the syntagmatic axis is represented by the textual syntagm of the (quoted) text. The paradigmatic axis, by contrast, is represented by crucial elements of narrative structure (such as voice, narrator, plot, viewpoint or character). In what follows, I shall refer to these elements as narrative paradigms, since, just as subjects, predicates or complements are important categories of linguistic analysis and syntactic paradigms which jointly constitute the sentence, character, event or viewpoint are important categories of narratological analysis which jointly constitute the narrative. Letter XLVIII can be analysed as a form of narrative projection insofar as (at least)38 two elements of the same paradigm (here: viewpoint) are projected onto the same syntagm (here: letter XLVIII). As a result, there is the impression of a “superposition”39 of character viewpoints on the axis of contiguity which creates a multiple or “‘vertical’ reading” (Barthes 1975 [1966], 270) and provides the letter with a “polysemantic

36 Todorov (1967) uses Jakobson’s functions for the analysis of Les Liaisons dangereuses as well. See also Moravetz (1990, 29, note 89). 37 Altman (1978) uses these terms in order to denote the difference between two linguistic behaviours and attitudes of the characters of Laclos’ novel: language either serves the end of lending transparency to the sender’s feelings, experiences or thoughts, or it is used to create, in a utilitarian manner, a fictive picture of oneself and/or of one’s experiences. 38 See note 33. 39 See note 30.

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essence” (Jakobson 1988 [1960], 49). The interplay of similarities and contrasts40 which occurs with narrative projection can be explained in terms of levels of the paradigmatic. Tourvel’s and Valmont’s character-perspectives are similar in that they both pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure (viewpoint); but as one “zooms” deeper into this paradigm, contrasts emerge: first, between the two specific viewpoints of Tourvel and Valmont, and then, within these viewpoints, between the various constitutive (communicative, ideological, psychological, linguistic, etc.) factors of their viewpoints.41 Why should the letter not simply be considered as an example of multiperspectivity? I would like to highlight two differences. First of all, the concept of multiperspectivity accounts mainly for the fact that the text presents several viewpoints consecutively on the same event (see Todorov’s “vision stéréoscopique”; 1967, 39 and 81; Lindemann 1999, 48), thus relying on an “iterative mode” (see Lindemann 1999, 51). Accordingly, Lindemann describes “polyperspectivity” as “a simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous” (57, translation mine), arguing that the simultaneous perception of one and the same event from different viewpoints is transformed into the nonsimultaneous form of successive letters. The “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous” of letter XLVIII, however, has to be understood the other way around: as the simultaneous presence of two viewpoints (as an “effect of reception”) which are nonsimultaneous (since there is a temporal distance between Valmont’s writing of the letter and Tourvel’s actual reading of it). Second, according to Hartner’s (2012) blending-theoretical approach, multiperspectivity denotes both a more general and a more cognition-centred phenomenon than narrative projection, depicting any kind of sustained attention which the reader brings to the interplay of perspectives due to a possibly broad range of textual strategies. The narrative projection of viewpoints, as it occurs in letter XLVIII, by contrast, denotes a form of ambiguity which is related to the simultaneous representation of two contrasting viewpoints; in addition, narrative projection is, despite its constructivist nature, more text-centred than Hartner’s multiperspectivity in that the two viewpoints overlap in (i. e., are cognitively activated by) the same textual segment.42

40 According to Lotman, the simultaneity of similarity and contrast is peculiar to the paradigmatic inasmuch as the latter is characterised by “that equivalence which arises on the basis of a relation of incomplete equality; it occurs where there is a level (or levels) on which elements are equal and a level (or levels) on which they are not equal” (1977, 80; emphasis added). 41 See note 35. 42 Of course, one could also describe letter XLVIII in terms of blending, but I am not sure whether this is a better option. In her blending-theoretical analyses, Dancygier (2012) shows convincingly how two (or more) narrative spaces, distributed along the syntagmatic chain, are connect-



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Analysing letter XLVIII in terms of narrative projection has four advantages. First of all, it allows us to bridge the gap between (non-narratological) concepts of ambiguity and the (narratological) concept of multiperspectivity, both crucial for an understanding of the letter in question. Second, this makes it possible to account for “patterns of contrast” between character-perspectives (see Nünning 2001, 215–216), in other words, for perspectival “frictions” and “dissonances” whose importance is highlighted by some approaches (see, for example, Lindemann 1999, 51 and 54) and downplayed by others (see Hartner 2012, 169–175). Third, it may serve as a corrective to a wide-spread conviction according to which the only form of “super(im)posed”43 narration consists in a combination of narrator and character speech,44 either in free indirect speech45 or in first-person narration where “the dominant figural perspective […] is superimposed with the accentuation of the narrating self” (Schmid 2010 [2005], 109). Fourth, narrative projection may serve as an instrument of analysis of tacit negotiations between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic not only with regard to viewpoint but also with regard to other narrative phenomena. Ryan’s concept of “functional polyvalence,” for instance, describes a form of narrative projection: it denotes a phenomenon according to which two (or more) functions—which are paradigmatic insofar as they categorise the “special strategic significance [of story events] for the story as a whole” (1991, 155)—are projected onto one and the same event along the (syntagmatic) plot chain (see also Ryan 2005, 590). Moreover, certain forms

ed and compressed upwards by the reader. Concerning the viewpoints of Tourvel and Valmont in letter XLVIII, by contrast, there are not two narrative syntagms which the reader connects and compresses upwards but, conversely, one narrative syntagm which the reader decompresses (downwards, so to speak). One might still argue in favour of a blending-theoretical description by saying that, if letter XLVIII is perceived as ambiguous, it is itself a “blend” that triggers complex backward projections to the viewpoints of Valmont and Tourvel (which themselves are complex blends of the mental models of their characters and behaviours). Nonetheless, in my eyes, the principle of narrative projection has a greater potential for adequately describing the “effect of reception” according to which letter XLVIII does not trigger a conceptual integration of viewpoints, but rather represents a superposition of contrasting viewpoints in a textual syntagm. In any case, I do not conceive of blending theory and of the principle of narrative projection as being mutually exclusive: the question is which framework better fits for the description of coherence in progress in relation to specific textual strategies. 43 See note 30. 44 Schmid, for instance, holds that “a narrative work can represent, in one and the same sections of text, […] two centers for the generation of meaning: the narrator and the character. There is no third possibility” (2010 [2005], 105). Uspenskij, however, has argued that different points of view may be found even “in a single word” (1973 [1970], 40). 45 “If the narrator places his or her accentuation on the words that express the character’s evaluation, this statement becomes ‘double voiced’ (Bakhtin)” (Schmid 2010 [2005], 107).

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of the disnarrated (Prince 1988), “virtual strings of events” (Ryan 1991, 158) and “plots of counterfactuality” (Dannenberg 2008, 2) display the principle of narrative projection to the extent to which virtual, unrealised event sequences are projected onto the one actual path that the story can only follow. I thus think that the superposition of paradigmatic elements upon one and the same textual syntagm is a general (literary) narrative phenomenon. Besides viewpoint, there are other paradigms of narrative structure and analysis (such as voice, narrator, plot or character) which may also undergo narrative projection. Concerning character, we may take the example of Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis. It is indeed misleading, as the narrator explains that Gregor Samsa “found himself transformed […] into a gigantic insect” (Kafka 1986 [1915], 9, emphasis added), for this insinuates a (temporally and ontologically successive) transition from a human state to an animal state. Gregor, however, is simultaneously both a man and a vermin—a blend of a human being and a repulsive insect. The story thus relies heavily on a process of narrative projection whereby two contrasting features of the character (man and vermin) are projected onto the same character slot (that of the protagonist) as the narrative unfolds syntagmatically. Narrative projection might also be fruitfully applied to other features: free indirect discourse, for instance, may be analysed as a superposition of two voice frames. As a principle that underlies a wide range of narrative phenomena, narrative projection may thus be considered as one way of analysing negotiations between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, tht is to say, as one dimension of the dynamics of coherence in progress that governs narrativity. Earlier it was stated that tacit negotiations between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic are a form of coherence in progress which takes place in the areas of both narrativity and narratology. So what about narratology?

5.2 … in narratology The division of the history of narratology into a “classical” and a “postclassical” phase, which is not uncontested,46 may be said to identify two basic paradigms of narratology inasmuch as the historical categorisation which it indicates is based upon paradigmatic oppositions:47 while classical, structuralist narratology focuses primarily on the text, postclassical narratology integrates the recipient as

46 See, for example, Sternberg (2010, 509 and 519). 47 Elements of this contrastive model can be found, for example, in Nünning (2003), Nünning and Nünning (2002), Prince (2008a) and Sommer (2004).



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well as various contexts into its scope of theoretical examination. Classical narratology tries to fix well-defined narrative qualities or deep structures and displays a strong tendency to establish binary categories, taxonomies and symmetrical models, whereas postclassical narratology has “a better awareness of the processual character of [narrative] texts” (Jahn 2000, 384) as well as of the pitfalls of “geometrical clarity, symmetry and proportion” (Gibson 1996, 3). Kindt and Müller (2003a), however, offer another way of ordering the diversity of narratological approaches. Considering the relationship between narrative theory and the theory of interpretation, they identify four paradigms of narratology that represent four contrasting conceptions of what narratology should be, namely an autonomist, a foundationalist, a heuristic and a contextualist conception of narratology. If it is correct to say that “all narratology nowadays is context-sensitive” (Alber and Fludernik 2010, 22), then the contextual paradigm prevails over the others in current narratological research. But if one interprets such a statement as one possible way of “narrating” the development of narratology, then it is possible to see how the contextualist paradigm is projected onto one segment of narratology’s historical syntagm. Obviously, narratology, in its attempts to self-organise, cannot but negotiate between its inner conflicts, which may be paradigmatically categorised, and its history, which displays narratology’s effort to bring its paradigms into a syntagmatic order.48 However, this seems to function the better the more one keeps a distance from the syntagmatic axis. If we zoom into the relatively punctual syntagmatic segment of the postclassical narratology of today, the paradigmatic categories, which, from a historical distance, unify postclassical approaches, prove to be a superposition of various paradigms. Postclassical narratology (as against classical narratology) is said, for instance, to conduct research on narrative dynamics. But current postclassical approaches differ remarkably as to which dynamics they take into consideration. For instance, Phelan and Rabinowitz’s rhetorical approach is interested in the dynamics of communication; Warhol’s feminist approach examines the dynamics of culturally produced differences; Herman’s cognitive approach studies the dynamics of the construction of storyworlds; and Richardson studies “antimimetic” dynamics (see Herman et al. 2012). These paradigms of narrative dynamics overlap in today’s narratology, making it a prodigiously multifaceted, but also an “ambiguous” science—indeed, a reflection of

48 In the present context, the concepts of synchrony and diachrony can concretise the opposition between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic. It should be noted, however, that the two conceptual pairs are per se not entirely congruent. The question of how exactly they are related cannot be adequately elucidated here.

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the very “literary” objects of its research (as one might say with a side glance to Jakobson). The great complexity of narratological negotiations between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic becomes especially obvious in Ricœur’s argumentations.49 Ricœur (1985 [1984]) considers narratives to be governed by “the very principle of order” (7). According to him, this order is syntagmatic in two respects. First, singular narratives, no matter how experimental they may be, are always temporal configurations. Second, Ricœur assumes a historical perspective, reflecting upon the “metamorphoses of the plot,” that is, on the succession of narrative forms (configurations). He identifies a number of historical classes of narrative (re-)configurations, called “paradigms,” arguing that they are governed by a syntagmatic principle of order: they manifest, intrinsically, a historical development according to which new forms are always intelligible, since they are an (orderly) reaction to familiar ones. He proposes to integrate even extreme deviations from established forms of narrativity into the notion of mimesis so that the latter comprises a more “refined, convoluted, or labyrinthine” (26) idea of order. Such an order, however, includes exactly those dynamics of deconstruction of established categories that Richardson proposes to call “antimimetic.”50 What Ricœur proposes to regard as a historical dynamics of sedimentation and innovation under the all-encompassing order of the syntagmatic is projected by Richardson, as well as by Warning (2001), onto two contrasting narrative paradigms that also lead to the opposition between two narratological paradigms (natural versus unnatural narratology). Interestingly, Ricœur defends his syntagmatic position by criticising the “dechronologizing,” “paradigmatic” models of Propp, Bremond and Greimas. He

49 In this connection, Ricœur’s considerations on the relationship between concordance and discordance are highly relevant (see 1984 [1983], 31–51). In the second volume of Time and Narrative (1985 [1984]), he ranks concordance over discordance as the law of narrative form, although he admits that modern narrative forms threaten the principle of concordance. He tries to preserve the validity of the latter by drawing, first, on “the reader’s expectations […] where the paradigm of consonance takes refuge” (24–25); second, on verbal communication which lives by a search for concordance (28); and third, on literary art, understood as “an imitation of the non-literary uses of language,” including “narrative as a means to arrange systematically what happens in life” (22, emphasis added). The concordance defended by him, syntagmatic in kind, is argued to contain paradigmatic structures and changes of narrative form, in other words, instances of non-syntagmatic discordance. His argument thus illustrates the kind of narratological competition outlined by McHale (see note 6). 50 As Richardson puts it in Narrative Theory. Core Concepts and Critical Debates: “Postmodern and other antimimetic authors […] delight in collapsing established categories” (Herman et al. 2012, 52).



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argues that their deep-structural models either presuppose or require the teleology of the syntagm. The problem with his argumentation does not reside in his claim that, in narratives, the paradigmatic cannot exist independently from the syntagmatic. It lies, rather, in the fact that he classifies the approaches of Propp, Bremond and Greimas as pertaining to one and the same class and that he conceptualises this class as being purely paradigmatic. However, if Propp’s methodology consists of “breaking the tale into its components” (1968 [1928], 15), and if he speaks about a “chain of variants” (114), does he then really ignore the syntagmatic axis of fairy tales? And if Bremond, when studying the logic of plot, comments on the succession of “amelioration,” “degradation,” and “reparation” by saying that “the narrative circle is now closed” (1980 [1966], 405), is this really an anti-syntagmatic account? Moreover, central concepts of Greimas’s theory, such as the “narrative schema,” constituted by three “narrative trajectories” (see Greimas and Courtés 1979b, 245, and 1979a), contain a syntagmatic component. Considered from this angle, Ricœur creates a paradigm of “paradigmatic” approaches by abstracting from the syntagmatic chain of the history of narratological approaches. He thereby does on the level of narratology exactly the same thing he reproaches Propp, Bremond and Greimas with doing on the level of narrativity: he “paradigmatises” a syntagmatic configuration.

6 Closing Remarks It is difficult to achieve a goal if one does not have a clear idea of what that goal is. This paper has thus tried to give substance to the goal of narratological “consolidation,” first by exploring the phenomenon that gave birth to that goal: narratological complexity; and second by interpreting the goal of consolidation as a search for resultative coherence. However, since narratology is continuing to develop, any resultative coherence can be achieved only temporarily. Consequently, the only constant that can serve the goal of consolidation is the continuous process of establishing coherence itself. The search for coherence may be considered as part of the process of consolidation inasmuch as it reflects a crucial, dynamic dimension of coherence, namely coherence in progress, which characterises not only narrativity and narratology but their interplay51 as well. According to my argument, part of the dynamics which constitute coherence in progress within the narratological system is the tacit negotiations that take place

51 See section 3 of this paper.

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between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, a dynamics on which I would like to make a final comment. Inasmuch as the distinction between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic relies on the opposition between two “spatial orientations” (the vertical versus the horizontal), it can be considered, with Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 14), as metaphorical. Does its metaphorical nature invalidate the opposition and/or its usefulness? Lakoff and Johnson hold that we “live by” metaphors, defending the view that “[o]ur ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (1980, 3). Similarly, Fauconnier and Turner, whose blending theory covers metaphorical thinking, hold that blending “is our means of living in the world” (2002, 390). They are convinced that “conceptual knowledge develops […] through the cascade of blends. So does cultural and scientific knowledge” (393). In the light of these powerful theories, I do not think that the very use of metaphors (or blends) should (or could) be banned from academic discourse. Metaphors should be used consciously, with an awareness of what their added values represent and what their drawbacks are. Lakoff and Johnson emphasize that, “[i]n allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […], a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor” (1980, 10). This observation is valid for the metaphorical opposition between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic as well. As a metaphorical opposition, it has the merit of highlighting the tacit negotiations between two modes of self-organisation (in terms of selection and combination, categorisation and contiguity, systematicity and history), which make a significant contribution to the creation of coherence; but it also tends to conceal some aspects of coherence which could be highlighted by network metaphors. Which metaphor one chooses ultimately depends on the phenomenon one wishes to describe, and on the aspects one wishes to highlight. If we contrast the metaphors of the network and of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic, considering them as two opposed analytical instruments between which one should select, don’t we create, then, a paradigmatic opposition?52 If so, are we then not in the midst of coherence in progress? Insights into the dynamic relationship between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic may raise our awareness of the constructive role which we play in this relationship within the complex, self-organising system of narratology which

52 Kuhn highlights the connection between metaphors and scientific paradigms: “Though the strength of group commitment varies […] along the spectrum from heuristic to ontological models, all models have similar functions. Among other things they supply the group with preferred or permissible analogies and metaphors” (1996 [1962], 184).



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is in search of coherence. We create categories, contrasts and similarities, and this is a good thing as long as we do not lose sight of their functionality and their historical conditionality.53

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53 See Herbert’s (2004) excellent considerations on the historical conditionality of coherence as a scientific norm. I am deeply grateful to John Pier whose comments and revisions have helped me considerably to improve an earlier version of this article. I also owe special thanks to Lisa Muszynski for her kindly proofreading this essay and for inspiring discussions as well as to Till Hink for his support.

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Rousset, Jean. 1983. “Les lecteurs indiscrets.” In Laclos et le libertinage 1782–1982; actes du Colloque du Bicentenaire des Liaisons dangereuses, 88–96. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. “Virtuality and Tellability.” M.-L. R. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, 148–174. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1992. “The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors.” Style 26 (3): 368–387. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Tellability.” In Herman et al. eds., 589–591. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2006a. “Metaleptic Machines.” M.-L. R. Avatars of Story, 204–230, 246–248. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2006b. “Semantics, Pragmatics, and Narrativity: A Response to David Rudrum.” Narrative 14 (2): 188–196. Schmid, Wolf. 2003. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” In Kindt and Müller, eds., 17–33. Schmid, Wolf. 2010 [2005]. “Point of view.” W. S. Narratology: An Introduction, 98–117. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Schneider, Ralf, and Marcus Hartner, eds. 2012. Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Schwarz, Monika. 2001. “Establishing Coherence in Text. Conceptual Continuity and Text-world Models.” Logos and language: journal of general linguistics and language theory 2 (1): 15–23. Sommer, Roy. 2004. “Beyond (Classical) Narratology: New Approaches to Narrative Theory.” European Journal of English Studies 8 (1): 3–11. Stanzel, Franz K. 1981. “Wandlungen des narrativen Diskurses in der Moderne.” In Erzählung und Erzählforschung im 20. Jahrhundert: Tagungsbeiträge eines Symposiums der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Bonn-Bad Godesberg veranstaltet vom 9. bis 14. September 1980 in Ludwigsburg, edited by Rolf Kloepfer and Gisela Janetzke-Dillner, 371–383. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Sternberg, Meir. 2010. “Narrativity. From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm.” Poetics Today 31 (3): 507–659. Sturgess, Philip J. M. 1989. “A Logic of Narrativity.” New Literary History 20 (3): 763–783. Sturgess, Philip J. M. 1992. Narrativity: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sweetser, Eve. 2012. “Introduction: viewpoint and perspective in language and gesture, from the Ground down.” In Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective, edited by Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser, 1–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tapiero, Isabelle. 2007. Situation Models and Levels of Coherence: Toward a Definition of Comprehension. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Titzmann, Michael. 2003. “The Systematic Place of Narratology in Literary Theory and Textual Theory.” In Kindt and Müller, eds., 175–204. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1967. Littérature et signification. Paris: Larousse. Toolan, Michael. 2014 [2009]. “Coherence.” In Hühn et al. eds., vol. 1: 65–83. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/coherence (Revised 1s October 2013) Trabasso, Tom, Tom Secco and Paul van den Broek. 1984. “Causal Cohesion and Story Coherence.” In Learning and Comprehension of Text, edited by Heinz Mandl, 83–111. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Traxler, Matthew J. 2012. “Discourse Processing.” In M. T. Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Understanding Language Science, 187–240. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.



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Uspenskij, Boris. 1973 [1970]. A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Translated by Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press. Viehweger, Dieter. 1989. “Coherence—Interaction of Modules.” In Connexity and Coherence: Analysis of Text and Discourse, edited by Wolfgang Heydrich, Fritz Neubauer, János S. Petöfi and Emil Sözer, 256–274. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Warning, Rainer. 2001. “Erzählen im Paradigma. Kontingenzbewältigung und Kontingenzexposition.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 52: 176–209. Weich, Horst. 1998. Paris en vers: Aspekte der Beschreibung und semantischen Fixierung von Paris in der französischen Lyrik der Moderne. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. White, Hayden. 1996 [1981]. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative. 6th ed., edited by William J. T. Mitchell, 1–23. Chicago, etc.: The University of Chicago Press. Wolf, Werner. 2003. “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and its Applicability to the Visual Arts.” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 19 (3): 180–197.

John Pier (Tours and Paris)

Complexity: A Paradigm for Narrative? The renewal of narratological studies since the early 1990s has been accompanied by a wealth of changes in epistemological outlook, ranging from possible worlds theory to artificial intelligence, the cognitive sciences and more. The field has also seen a broadening of disciplinary focus resulting from the so-called narrative turn as well as closer attention to the contextual determinants of narrative discourse, not to speak of an expansion of the corpus stretching beyond literary narratives. The result was a passage during the 1990s from “classical” to “postclassical” narratology, the latter a proliferation of theories and models which, according to Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (2010), can now be seen as breaking down into two phases: one a period of multiplications, interdisciplinarities and transmedialities; the other a period of consolidation and diversification. The goal of this essay is neither to consolidate nor to diversify research in the field but to investigate some of the implications of complexity theory underlying the principles of narratology itself. My claim is not that complexity theory forms the basis for yet another double-entry narratology—a so-called complex systems narratology—but rather that narrative itself is a complex system and that narratology, in at least some of its past and more recent phases and dimensions, is implicitly or latently a complexity theory in its own right. This is admittedly a tall claim and one that cannot be fully substantiated in these few pages. Although there is much to separate complexity theory and narrative theory, it is safe to say, as Richard Walsh (2012) has observed, that both “are concerned with ways of modeling temporal processes”; and while it is true that “these paradigms are not in competition with each other,” it may be overstating the case to say that the two are “locked together in mutual dependence.”

1 Paradigm In this essay, the questions surrounding narrative theory and complexity studies will be considered in light of the notion of paradigm. It was Thomas Kuhn who defined a scientific paradigm as “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners” (2012 [1962], 10). In this sense, a paradigm undergirds “normal science,” prompting further articulation and elaboration of that paradigm, evaluation of facts and testing the points at which empirical data merge with the theory in DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-025

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question. A paradigm shift occurs when it is determined that anomalies must be accounted for within a new conceptual and methodological framework, as occurred with the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics or, in the case of the social sciences, with the transition from behaviorism to the cognitive sciences. In these pages, however, it is another aspect of paradigm that will come into play: commensurability or incommensurability between paradigms (see Kuhn 2000 [1991]; Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene 2013 [2009]). Two paradigms are said to be incommensurable when there are no uniform and historically invariant standards for appraising scientific theories. This can result not only in a change of paradigm, but in a change of worldview, as occurs, for example, with the passage from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy. Incommensurability does have its degrees, of course, Aristotelian physics being largely incommensurable with Newtonian physics, for instance, while classical dynamics is partly commensurable with nonequilibrium thermodynamics. At the same time, incommensurability does not preclude comparability between historically separate paradigms or between competing paradigms that are contemporaneously situated. Indeed, the absence of any neutral observation language into which competing paradigms can be translated may well open the way to reasoned comparison and disagreement. These principles carry over, mutatis mutandis, to “softer” sciences such as narrative theory. Historically, it is possible, for example, to regard the succession of “research traditions” that have dominated Occidental poetics based on the mereological model,1 in an analysis by Lubomír Doležel (1990), as paradigms possessing various degrees of commensurability. Starting with Aristotle’s stratificational poetics and its emphasis on universal generic “essences,” the conceptual reference passed on to the organic model during Romanticism which yielded a morphological poetics that developed into, inter alia, narratology. This model, in turn, was followed at the beginning of the twentieth century by the rise of a semiologically-based theory which, freed from organic-morphological poetics, regards literature as a form of signification through semanticization.2 In a similar way, though over a much shorter historical span, the more than thirty varieties

1 Mereology: “The abstract study of relations between parts and wholes” (Oxford Dictionaries Online: https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/mereology). 2 “The semanticization of the poetic structure,” notes Doležel in commenting on the mereological model of the Prague Linguistic Circle, “affects not only its ‘vertical’ (stratificational) but also its ‘horizontal’ (linear) dimension. The linear progression of the poetic text is not only a ‘meaning-creating process occurring in time’ but a process of semantic accumulation, of a bidirectional ‘growth’ of sense within the sentence and beyond” (Doležel 1990, 156).



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of “context-oriented” postclassical narratologies inventoried by Ansgar Nünning (2003), which are set off from classical “text-centered” narratology, are paradigms that extend from an “undertheorized” to an “overtheorized” pole, open to comparison according to their degree of commensurability. As any researcher in the field knows only too well, proponents of these various theories speak of concepts such as narrator, implied author, sequence or perspective in ways that range from the overlapping to the well-nigh incommensurable.3 This essay will not seek to demonstrate that narratology and complexity theory share a common disciplinary paradigm or that complexity theory can serve as a model for narratology; nor will it, in the fervor of certain tendencies in recent research, endeavor to “narrativize” this theory. Rather than the “export” of concepts and principles from one branch of knowledge to another, it will focus primarily on how certain paradigms of sequence and sequentiality, a bedrock feature that permeates all aspects and forms of narrative, are reflected in complexity theory and how this theory, thanks to its own categories and configurations, might serve to frame sequence and sequentiality as complex narrative phenomena. In itself, this will not enable us to conclude that narrative is a complex system; but by raising the question through the confrontation of certain aspects of narratology and complexity theory, it is possible to highlight a number of ways in which narratology can effectively enable us to apprehend narrative as a complex phenomenon.

2 Complexity 2.1 General Before looking more closely at the connections between narratology and complexity theory, a few words are in order with regard to the notion itself. Complexity, which originally evolved out of the natural sciences, is not itself a unified science with a distinct set of axioms, theorems and methodologies, but a loose ad hoc federation of sciences, both natural and social, resulting from advances in

3 In his contribution to this volume, Roy Sommer outlines a model for paradigm change in narratology based on “backward,” “forward” and “sideways” compatibility. Commensurability, the framework adopted for the present essay, is concerned less with questions of evolution than with how complexity theory can serve to highlight latent and not fully realized underlying dimensions that span a variety of existing narratological paradigms.

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fields ranging from physics, cybernetics, biology, immunology, cognitive science and meteorology to sociology and the study of organizations including ant colonies and multinational corporations as well as economics, the stock market, city planning and traffic patterns.4 Complexity studies are not a discipline in their own right, nor are they bound by the criteria of any single discipline.5 For this reason it has been stated that complexity is “not a theory with a set of axioms and theorems that can be applied across disciplines” and that most definitions “are only applicable to a limited context” (Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 275 and 286); and elsewhere that “complexity is one of those ideas whose definition is an integral part of the problems that it raises. […] the possibility of performing transitions among various modes of behavior remains the principal fingerprint of complexity” (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 38 and 232). It has also been observed that “there is not yet a single science of complexity but rather several different sciences of complexity with several different notions of what complexity means. Some of these notions are quite formal, and some are still very informal” (Mitchell 2009, 95). Even though complexity lacks a generally acknowledged definition, however, complex systems (or complex behavior, as Prigogine and Stengers, among others, would have it), in whatever field they are found, do share a number of general characteristics. According to MIT physicist Michel Baranger (2000), six typical properties can be singled out, as synthetically summarized below: 1) Complex systems contain many constituents interacting nonlinearly. Both chaos and complexity are anti-reductionist to the extent that, contrary to the premise of calculus, in neither case do all objects become simpler when analyzed into smaller and smaller parts (e. g., analysis of ocean waves into the chemical composition of water). Moreover, both are dynamical systems or nonlinear dynamics whose very configuration and variables may change over time such that “sensitivity to initial conditions” results in uncertainty growing exponentially and nonlinearly over time to the point of unpredict-

4 It is not helpful in this context to consider “complex” to be synonymous with “complicated” in the dictionary sense of “consisting of interconnected parts” (Holland 2014, 3). Complexity, unlike complication, is unpredictable, even when one has thorough knowledge of the components of a complex phenomenon (cf. Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 282–283). 5 Much the same can be also said of structuralism. In narratological circles, however, where structuralism is often associated exclusively with French structuralist narratology, it is often forgotten that structuralism was first formulated by Tynjanov and Jakobson in a set of theses entitled “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language” (2002 [1928]); that it embraced a variety of disciplines (see Ducrot et al. 1968; Dosse 1997 [1991]); and that within structuralist narratology itself, research was diversified and positions were subject to change and evolution (see Pier, forthcoming).



2)

3)

4)

5)

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ability (e. g., the butterfly effect). Complexity differs from chaos in that its constituents are far more numerous.6 The constituents of a complex system are interdependent. Example: when 20 % of the gas in a container is removed, the remaining gas is redistributed; when 20 % of a human body is removed (e. g., a leg), the consequences are far more dramatic. A complex system possesses a structure spanning several scales. Unlike chaotic systems, which exist on one scale only, complex systems involve several, as is the case of the human body consisting of (a) head, trunk, limbs; (b) bones, tendons, muscles; (c) organs; (d) cells; (e) chromosomes containing DNA. Each scale possesses its own structure.7 A complex system is capable of emerging behavior. Emergence occurs when attention is switched from one scale to a coarser scale above it. Example: walking, which involves the interaction of several scales. Moreover, when combined, structure and emergence result in self-organization, the production of a new structure. Complex adaptive systems (unlike complex physical systems) are capable of adapting to their environment, and some of them, notably biological organisms, are self-reproducing.8 Complexity presupposes chaos, but not vice versa. Thus if chaos occurs on level n, it may be that the coarser scale above it (n – 1) is self-organizing—the opposite of chaos. Complexity involves an interplay between chaos and non-chaos. Most nonlinear systems are not entirely chaotic but operate “at the edge of chaos,” a point at which long-range correlations come into play and where self-organization is most likely to occur. In other terms, complexity occurs at an intermediate position between order and disorder, poised between equilibrium and chaos and tending toward new forms of internal self-organization (cf. Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 279, 282 and 287).

6 Note, however, that research on networks focuses on relationships between entities rather than on the entities themselves, leading some biologists to suggest that complexity in organisms arises out the interactions between genes, not as a result of the number of genes (cf. Mitchell 2009, 233). 7 “The interaction of components on one scale can lead to complex global behavior on a larger scale that in general cannot be deduced from knowledge of the individual components” (Crutchfield et al. 2008, 386). 8 “An adaptive complex system is an open system, made up of numerous elements that interact with one another in a nonlinear way and that constitute a single, organized and dynamic entity, able to evolve and adapt to the environment” (Gandolfi 1999, 19; quoted in Bertuglia and Vaio (2005 [2003], 276).

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6) Complexity involves an interplay between cooperation and competition. In the interaction between scales, competition on scale n is dependent on cooperation at the finer scale n + 1 below it. This occurs in ant and termite colonies as well as in many types of social organization. A broad view of complexity theory will show that, historically, it has developed out of a series of challenges to Newton’s physics and classical mechanics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with manifestations in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, cybernetics, information theory and general systems theory,9 but also that the principles of complexity have spread to biology, sociology, the cognitive sciences, organizational theory, philosophy and more. It has been observed that if the theory of relativity reconceptualized the relations of time and space, decisively breaking with Euclidean geometry, and that if quantum physics concluded with the intrinsic indetermination of measurement of the state of a particle-wave, fundamentally altering the position of the observer in relation to the observed, the findings in the respective sectors involved, namely cosmic and subatomic, do not readily extend to other disciplines.10 Complex systems, by contrast, enjoy a greater degree of “transversality” (cf. Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 266–279; Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 218–222) or, as Kuhn would say, commensurability.

2.2 Complexity and literature But what, now, is the role of complexity theory in the humanities and, more particularly, in literature? To gain a sense of this connection, we can refer to Katherine Hayles’s Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990) and to an anthology edited by her entitled Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (1991). Hayles draws attention to the parallels between the paradigm shift brought about in the sciences by the attempt to come to terms with the complexities of nonlinear or dynamical systems (as opposed to the linear dynamics of classical mechanics) and the new forms of literary theory

9 These four domains constitute the field of systems theory. Central to all of them is the principle of entropy which, through Prigogine’s work on the topic, bring them together into what Bailey (1994, 121) calls the transdisciplinary field of a “new” complex systems theory. For an overview, see Clarke (2011). 10 See, however, Ryan (2006b) who confronts the many-worlds cosmology of quantum physics and the possible vs. actual worlds of possible worlds narratology as exemplified in transworld, alternate history and time-travel narratives.



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and criticism that arose during the 1960s. Where the New Criticism, for example, focused on the bound and finite verbal object, the new approaches saw textual boundaries as arbitrary and porous, and texts as unstable constructs that are no longer deterministic or predictable. “The well-wrought urn, it seemed, was actually a reservoir of chaos” (Hayles 1990, 2). Without there being any direct or conscious disciplinary influence between chaos theory and the humanities, Hayles does nevertheless point out the existence of a “cultural matrix” that has emerged out of the co-presence of developments in the two fields which she describes as “an archipelago of chaos […] triangulating among chaos theory, poststructuralism, and contemporary fiction” (3). Hayles provides many well-informed observations on the conceptual links between the two domains as well as on works from antiquity to present in which chaos is thematized, thereby underscoring the cultural and historical resonances between scientific and humanistic developments. She also points out the two sharply opposed strands of chaos theory as represented by James Gleick’s Chaos: Making of a New Science (2008 [1987]), which is concerned with the order hidden in chaos (a view held by many scientists), and by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’s Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (1984), which argues that entropic disorder is a spontaneous self-organizing force that creates order, a position that has proved conducive to philosophical and other types of reflection beyond the natural sciences (cf. Hayles 1990, 11–13 and 91–114; 1991, 12–14). The perspective adopted by this approach (including the essays in the anthology Chaos and Order) is that of the relations between chaos theory and poststructuralism/deconstruction (see esp. 1990, chap. 7) with an overall focus on theme and interpretation. At the same time, however, little is said in these two volumes—or in publications in this area generally—about the implications of chaos with regard to the theories, concepts and analytical practices that are typically associated with narratology or about the relations that narratological research might have with the questions taken up by complexity studies. The apparent neglect of these matters is perhaps due to the fact that during the early nineties research in narratology was undergoing significant mutations that were not well known outside narratological circles.11 A survey of the relevant literature will show a number of not unrelated tendencies in the ways authors perceive the relations between complexity theory

11 More recently, the situation has begun to evolve. The University of York’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies now includes a research group devoted to Narrative and Complex Systems. Homepage: http://www.york.ac.uk/narrative-studies/research-themes/complex-systems/

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and narratology, three of which can be mentioned within the present context. Briefly (as only a sampling can be discussed here), we will find those who seek to formulate narrative theory along the lines of complexity systems; those who consider the concepts and principles of complexity more adequate than those of narratology when examining at least some types of narrative; and those who, indirectly or even unconsciously, single out or evoke aspects of narrative that are compatible with certain principles of complexity theory. Regarding the first tendency, Bruce Clarke (2008) observes that narrative, discourse and narration (sensu Genette) anticipate systems-theoretical concepts, and he proposes to rearticulate these categories according to Mieke Bal’s three-layered distinction between text, story and fabula. Clarke draws attention to the unrealized potential of narratological theories to achieve “the self-consistent epistemological constructivism of systems theory” (33). Stressing the emergent and self-referential quality of both systems and narrative, he establishes a connection between Bal’s criteria for fabula construction and Niklas Luhmann’s axiom that (in Clarke’s words) “a system must reduce its own complexity relative to that of its environment” (34). In this way, he concludes, “it may be that narratives connect to worldly systems not in their putative representative verisimilitude […] but in the ways that, at their deepest levels of abstraction, […] allow the construction of functional homologies to real processes of life, mind, and society” (35). In her dissertation entitled “Before or Beyond Narrative? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films” (2011), Maria Poulaki examines a corpus of films that came to be known, starting in the 1990s, as “complex films.” Arguing that these films (especially “forking path,” “puzzle” and “network” narratives) “do not reflect complex systems, but function themselves as such, in the context of their complex environments” (13), Poulaki advocates a change of approach for analysis “from the narratological to the complex systems framework” in order to demonstrate “how three ‘post-narrative’ characteristics—self-reflexivity, loose causality and description—perform an organizational, rather than disorganizing, function in relation to the diegetic world” (213). Existing narratological approaches, she contends, are hampered by their “tendency to prioritize the ‘linear’ causal-logical and temporal succession of events in [their] definition of narrative,” making them unsatisfactory for accommodating “the complex and non-linear structure of complex films” (4). The critique is understandable to the extent that one might define narrative as “a way of organizing spatial and temporal data into a cause-effect chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end” (Branigan 1992, 216; quoted in Poulaki 2011, 106) or subscribe to “the notion of causality as an organizing principle that arranges events in causal-logical sequences” (133). Indeed, this position is widely held among narrative theorists.



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Nevertheless, a variety of alternatives have been put forth, so that the solution does not, in my estimation, consist in making “a shift of theoretical and methodological framework from narratology to complex systems theory” (124) in order to accommodate a corpus such as the one studied by Poulaki, a corpus that extends “before and beyond narrative.” Some branches of narratology already incorporate certain aspects of complex systems theory. This is a situation which, as I will argue, invites further reflection so as to determine the nature and extent of the links between the two fields and what this might contribute toward clarifying various issues of narrative theory. Indeed, Poulaki’s discussion of Tzvetan Todorov’s five-stage model of the narrative sequence, reinterpreting it in accordance with the complex systemic criteria of emergent, nonlinear causality (108–118), effectively acknowledges a degree of commensurability (as Kuhn would put it) of narratological concepts with complexity theory, thereby casting doubt on the need to put forward an alternative to narratology. More broadly speaking, this informative study, by expanding reflection on narrative to englobe “anti-narrative” forms of film that are open-ended (“before” narrative) as well as films that include and surpass narrative, identifies three areas of complexity studies that, in some way and to some degree, converge with key concerns of narratology: reflexivity,12 emergence13 and pattern-based forms of self-organization in which order merges with randomness.14 Finally, in a discussion of “denaturalized” forms of narrative causality, Marina Grishakova (2011) evokes questions that point in the direction of dynamical systems, but without addressing them as such. She opposes “natural causality,” based on “the relation of antecedence-subsequence and necessary implication” that carries over to “‘naturalized’ socio-historical connections,” and several forms of “interpretive” or “intentional” causality instilling “an intelligible order” in the narrative text through the various effects of prospective and retrospective ordering. These forms include fuzzy causality, zero-degree causality, retrograde or backward causality, causal closure and causal loop, the effect of which is, in various ways, to “restructure the ‘natural’ order of time and experience” (129, 135 and 143). In a brief discussion of Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991), where the events of the story are narrated in reverse chronological order, Grisha-

12 Poulaki’s focus is on metanarration and metafiction in the context of Niklas Luhmann’s brand of cybernetics drawn from systems theory. 13 At issue are nonlinear forms of causality and the spontaneous self-organization of complex reactions between the units of a system. 14 “A simple kind of emergent property of a system, where the pattern is a property of the system as a whole but is not a property of small parts of the system” (Bar-Yam 2011; quoted in Poulaki 2011, 191).

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kova refers to entropy, the principle of the irreversibility of time according to the second law of thermodynamics, and she observes that Amis’s novel, by inverting the entropic passage from order to disorder, “closes off causality and precludes the further propagation of effects and their causes” (138). It remains unclear, though, how the two causalities, natural and interpretive, come into play here.

3 Sequentiality and Irreversibility For my part, I wish to argue that when confronting the elements of complexity theory with narratological principles, narrative, by its very sequentiality, can be regarded in terms of irreversibility, also known as the arrow of time, coming from the second law of thermodynamics.15 From this perspective, I will attempt to provide some insight into narrative processes as they reflect three key dimensions of complex systems: stochastic processes, dissipative structures and spontaneous self-organization. The framework of reference adopted for this trio of concepts comes largely from Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues at the “Brussels school” who have consistently argued that the sciences, long dominated by the static view of the physical universe propounded by the classical mechanics of Newtonian physics as opposed to the evolutionary view associated with entropy, began evolving early in the nineteenth century away from a strictly deterministic, reversible conception of natural phenomena toward a conception that also seeks to incorporate stochastic and irreversible processes. “What has changed since the beginning of this century is our evaluation of the relative importance of these four types of phenomena: reversible versus irreversible, deterministic versus stochastic” (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 2; emphasis added).16 The repercussions

15 “All arrows of time in nature have the same orientation: They all produce entropy in the same direction of time, which is by definition the future” (Prigogine 1997 [1996], 102). Two principles underlying this basic concept of nonequilibrium thermodynamics that should be borne in mind are as follow: – Irreversible processes (associated with the arrow of time) are as real as reversible processes described by the fundamental laws of physics; they do not correspond to approximations added to the basic laws. – Irreversible processes play a fundamental constructive role in nature. (27) 16 Determinism is defined as “[t]he viewpoint that evolution is governed by a set of rules that, from any particular initial state, can generate one and only one sequence of future states” (Prigogine 1997 [1996] 201). In Prigogine’s system, determinism is broken down into the interaction of necessity and chance in the description of nonlinear systems far from equilibrium (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 14, 170 and 176). Stochastic processes are processes “whose dy-



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of this reconfiguration of forces are considerable, for as it is argued elsewhere: “The artificial may be deterministic and reversible. The natural contains essential elements of randomness and irreversibility. This leads us to a new view of matter in which matter is no longer the passive substance described in the mechanistic world view but is associated with spontaneous activity” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 9).17 Focusing on narrative sequentiality in its relations of partial commensurability with complexity theory is a privileged vantage point from which to gain insight into the relevance of this theory for narrative. Against the backdrop of Baranger’s six typical properties of complexity and the emergence of reversible versus irreversible processes together with deterministic versus stochastic processes in the physical and social sciences, the discussion will proceed by foregrounding the phenomena of nonequilibrium, instabilities, dissipative structures and self-organization and their possible correlates in narrative sequentiality. The comments on sequence, centered mainly on Tzvetan Todorov’s model, and those on sequentiality, drawing from Meir Sternberg’s treatment of the subject, though relatively brief, are intended to frame the issues in a significant way and highlight them for further discussion and research.

3.1 From classical mechanics to non-equilibrium thermodynamics Various developments in the sciences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that culminated in the complex concepts of stochastic processes, dissipative structures and spontaneous self-organization can serve to shed light on certain narratological concepts and principles. To this end, a brief account of the evolution from classical dynamics to thermodynamics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics is instructive. The foundations of classical mechanics were laid by Newton with the three laws governing force and mass, which run as follow:

namics is nondeterministic, probabilistic, even completely random and unpredictable” (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 2). 17 For a discussion of the implications of this momentous shift in outlook that extend beyond the “hard” sciences to the “soft” sciences as well as to philosophy and the history of ideas, see the numerous passages in Prigogine and Stengers (1984) which, notably in Book Three, discuss the physics of “being” and the physics of “becoming.” See also Toffler (1984) and Prigogine (1997 [1996]).

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1) Constant motion: Any object not subject to a force moves with unchanging speed. 2) Inertial mass: When an object is subject to a force, the resulting change in its motion is inversely proportional to its mass. 3) Equal and opposite forces: If object A exerts a force on object B, then object B must exert an equal and opposite force on object A. (Mitchell 2009, 19; cf. Prigogine 1997 [1996] 109–110) In the “clockwork universe” of classical mechanics, trajectories of all scales— atoms, planets, stars—are subject to the same forces of gravity. These trajectories are governed by lawfulness, determinism and reversibility. To calculate a trajectory, one need only know the “initial state,” from which that trajectory and all ensuing states can be deduced, just as in logic the conclusion can be deduced from the premises (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 60). Due to the inherent stability of the system, natural processes are predictable and thus deterministic and reversible, following the example of the perpetual movement of a pendulum (characterized by “structural stability”) or that of ideal thermal machines. Reductionist, classical mechanics failed to account for randomness and irreversibility, yielding a “static view of nature” in which “future and past become equivalent” (11).18 More generally, classical science, from the time of Newton on, can be characterized by the features of equilibrium (mechanisms are aimed at achieving states of stability), linear causality (direct proportionality between cause and effect: a cause external to the system changes the system’s structure) and negative feedback (as in first-order cybernetic systems such as the mechanical governor employed by the steam engine which feeds information about the state of energy back into the process in order to limit the loss of usable energy in a closed system) (Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 261–265; cf. Clarke 2011, 216–217). When turning now to narrative, one cannot but be struck by the affinity of these principles of classical mechanics and science with current narratological conceptions of sequence. Such is the case, for example, of the widely acknowledged model proposed by Todorov: An ideal narrative [and the narrative sequence] begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by some force. From this there results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a

18 “In the classical view the basic processes of nature were considered to be deterministic and reversible. Processes involving randomness or irreversibility were considered only exceptions” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, xxvii).



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force directed in the opposite direction, equilibrium is re-established; the second equilibrium is quite similar to the first, but the two are never identical. (1973, 82; my translation)19

Indeed, this schema, which has taken on various forms since it was first formulated, extending from structural narratology to text grammars and linguistics as well as to possible worlds narrative theory and cognitive narratology, follows the pattern of equilibrium, linear causality and negative feedback rather closely. At the same time, Todorov’s sequence (and ideal narrative [récit idéal], to which we will return) reflects the principle of conservation of energy, an outgrowth of the first law of thermodynamics according to which, in an isolated system (such as the pendulum in the absence of friction), kinetic energy and potential energy are continuously converted into one another so that total energy remains constant and undiminished.20 The pervasiveness of this and comparable schemas in narratological theory building, both classical and postclassical, can hardly be overstated.21 But this is not all. What happens when a mechanical system encounters friction? Classical mechanics is not armed to answer this question, for it is concerned with gravity, not heat, and with the conservation of energy, not with the dissolution or loss of energy. This is where the second law of thermodynamics enters the picture, stressing the irreversibility of processes in nature: over time, the differences of temperature, pressure and chemical potential in a closed system level out, the measure of how far this process has progressed being known as entropy, the maximum value of which is situated at thermodynamic equilibrium.22 During the nineteenth century, the age of the machine (marked, inter alia, by attempts to

19 For lack of space, the present commentary will be carried out with reference only to Todorov’s model. Another influential model, developed by Claude Bremond, corresponds to a triad marked by the development of a process involving virtuality, actualization or non-actualization of an act and achievement or non-achievement of a goal, wherein each posterior term stands in logical implication of the anterior term (1973, esp. 131–136; see also Pier, forthcoming). 20 As Prigogine and Stengers have pointed out, the cultural implications of this principle are far-reaching and long-lasting: “With the conservation of energy, the idea of a new golden age of physics began to take shape, an age that would lead to the ultimate generalization of mechanics” (1984, 110–111). 21 For a recent synthetic overview of approaches to narrative sequence, see Prince (2016). 22 The original definition of the second law was formulated by Rudolf Clausius in 1865: “The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe is increasing” (quoted in Prigogine 1997 [1996], 19). This definition is based on the conservation of energy and marks the transition from mechanics (the world of motion) to thermodynamics (the world of increasing entropy), which was later to become nonequilibrium thermodynamics, characterized by dissipative structures and spontaneous self-organization.

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counter the loss of energy in steam-driven engines with the use of the mechanical governor), the notion of heat death (and ultimately the death of the universe) entered the popular imagination as witnessed, for instance, by H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine (1895). At the same time, however, and continuing into the twentieth century, numerous developments in the sciences were taking place that were to put the second law in a new light, transforming it, as Prigogine was later to argue, into a constructive force that occurs in natural processes, thereby effectively dissociating entropy solely from an increase in disorder. One important step was taken with the development of statistical dynamics: how large-scale properties such as heat emerge from trillions of molecules cannot be calculated by determining the position and velocity of each and every molecule (as would be required by classical dynamics), but must be projected in terms of possibilities and probabilities, thus replacing the deterministic treatment of trajectories at the individual level in closed systems with probability distribution in ensembles at the statistical level as well as breaking the symmetries of classical mechanics and giving rise to uncertainty relations (cf. Mitchell 2009, 47–51; Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 243 and 274; Prigogine 1997 [1996], 11, 42 and 73–74).23 These considerations regarding the transition from the static view of classical dynamics to the evolutionary paradigm of thermodynamics are of particular interest for narrative sequentiality in its various dimensions, following, as already stated, the principles of irreversibility or the arrow of time. Among the most pertinent aspects of these developments for our purposes are the thermodynamic principles of equilibrium.

3.2 Equilibrium In mechanics, equilibrium is a state in which velocity and acceleration at all points in a system are equal to zero: only if the balance is disturbed is the equilibrium broken. As for equilibrium in thermodynamics, one form occurs in isolated systems in which neither energy nor matter interact with their environment and probability is at a maximum (e. g., the crystal, an “equilibrium structure” which is inert, atemporal and not subject to evolution24). Systems that do interact

23 A “statistical view of entropy,” notes Hayles, questions “the absoluteness of a predicted ‘heat death’ by giving entropy an interpretation that was overtly probabilistic rather than deterministic” (1990, 41–42). 24 “For a biological system,” by contrast, “equilibrium equals death” (Bruni 2011, 229).



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with their environment, however (this is true especially of living organisms and social organizations), behave quite differently, with the smallest of fluctuations in near-equilibrium states being amplified in far-from-equilibrium phenomena (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 54–55; Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 127, 131–132 and 286; on adaptive complex systems, see Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 275–277). What characterizes these two types of equilibrium is their degree of instability. Take, for instance, a population whose birthrate and death rate are equal and whose unchanging environmental conditions are adequate for it to meet its needs (equilibrium). A small increase in the number of births, but with no change in the number of deaths or in the environment, will result in near equilibrium with little overall effect—merely a slight increase in sensitivity to initial conditions. The situation will be quite different if the birthrate were to double, the death rate remained stable and, due to an unforeseen drought, the food supply were to dwindle. Due to increased sensitivity of the initial conditions, variations will be amplified exponentially (cf. the butterfly effect), new patterns of behavior will emerge, and the system will reorganize spontaneously—all this in ways that cannot be deduced or predicted on the basis of the more stable forms of equilibrium: in this case it is the system itself that has undergone change.25 More generally, while phenomena in near equilibrium remain relatively “linear,” those that are far from equilibrium are subject to a new norm: fluctuations and instabilities (Prigogine 1997 [1996], 63–65). Returning now to Todorov’s sequence, we see a starkly different situation. Here, an initial equilibrium and a final equilibrium are set off from one another by an intervening state of disequilibrium caused by and succeeded by symmetrically opposing forces. To this “Newtonian” model of narrative sequence can be opposed a thermodynamic “nonequilibrium” conception: unstable, fluctuating and unpredictable relations of varying degrees between subsystems interact with their environment as a narrative is deployed in its irreversible sequentiality. In place of the reductive balance between equilibrium and disequilibrium of Todorov’s model, we propose near equilibrium and far from equilibrium, features whose effect is to infuse the narrative sequence with instabilities and asymmetries. In light of these considerations, the opening sentences of the following novels can be characterized as expressing states near equilibrium, each with a specific sensitivity to initial conditions:

25 Adapted from Toffler (1984, xvi). For further comments on self-organization in human systems, see Nicolis and Prigogine (1989, 238–242).

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [1813]) Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina [1877]) Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [1925])

The ironic tone of the first example, the aphoristic nature of the second and the use of indirect speech in the third bear witness not only to the great variety of initial conditions that pertain in narratives but also to their varying degrees of sensitivity and to the highly diverse and potentially multiple paths yet to come. It is equally noteworthy that the told and the telling in these sentences do not interrelate in a neutral or balanced fashion, for each sentence is colored by various perspectival, generic and grammatical features, thereby creating a state of near equilibrium from the start.

4 Intersequentiality Examples such as those above suggest that, in narrative, nonequilibrium conditions arise not out of a sequence (or multiple sequences) of events or happenings per se, but that these conditions are generated in the “gaps” encountered between two sequentialities: that of “the absolute dynamics of the causally propelled action” (fabula) and that of “the variable dynamics of the reading process” (governed by the sjuzhet) (Sternberg 1978, 13). On this basis, Sternberg contends, narrative sequence is not a given but emerges from “intersequential relations, or dynamics, whereby gaps open between the order of the telling/reading (‘discourse’) and the told (‘action’)” (2003, 612). Elsewhere it is stated that such intersequential relations give rise to an “interplay between temporalities [that] generates the three universal effects/interests/dynamics of prospection, retrospection, and recognition—suspense, curiosity, and surprise, for short” (Sternberg 2001, 117). Key to this system is inferential reasoning, the process by which conflicting hypotheses are entertained about what will happen next, conclusions are drawn as to why such-and-such occurred, and the parts are tied together into a whole. Sternberg thus rejects the numerous “objectivist” models and their variants that define sequence solely by the causal links binding events together, opting, instead, for a functionalist “means-ends” position: the process of inferencing between the actional and the communicative in the filling of gaps.



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Among the models of sequence examined by Sternberg in his critique of theories of narrativity, Todorov’s is singled out as being compatible with his own functionalist or intersequential paradigm. The five successive steps in Todorov’s sequence, passing from equilibrium to disequilibrium and interspersed by symmetrically opposed forces, constitute, according to Sternberg, a “three-implying-five” schema: it is through this schema that the inferential operations of prospection, retrospection and recognition are engaged (Sternberg 2010, 642). Clearly, though, this inferential perspective on sequence is a departure from Todorov’s more “mechanistic” model in that it is formulated according to irreversible, nondeterministically ordered processes. On the other hand, due to its teleological nature, Sternberg’s version of intersequentiality sets itself off from the various degrees of nonequilibrium that are fundamental to the more probabilistically-oriented theories of complexity.26 This point can be corroborated if we look at network-based hypertext narratives whose digitally-based organization opens up parameters that are unavailable to print-based narratives. Here, according to Marie-Laure Ryan, sequence is located at the story level, where it unfolds in a random way. “Suspense, curiosity, and surprise,” she argues, are incompatible with randomization because they are highly dependent on a controlled management of information that determines what the reader knows and does not know when he reaches a certain point in the story. With a hypertext based on a network, however, the reader might reach a certain node through different routes: in one case, he might learn the identity of the murderer before discovering the body; in another case, he first finds the body and then learns who did it […]. (Ryan 2016, 188–189)

What we see here are not, strictly speaking, narrative sequences but rather various chronological successions of events and actions that can be shuffled around at will, unconstrained by a pre-established format or a set of instructions. Such chronological successions, occurring more or less randomly, may very well not elicit suspense, curiosity and surprise, yet they do underscore the entropic processes that occur in hypertext narratives due to two factors: exchanges between the network and the outside world through the interventions of the hypertext reader and the irreversible processes set in motion within the network, a system that self-organizes in response to the choice of routes adopted (cf. Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 118). Although the point cannot be adequately argued here, it is

26 In an earlier discussion of Sternberg’s intersequentiality and its appropriation of Todorov’s sequence, I espoused the latter’s criteria for equilibrium and disequilibrium (Pier 2016, 22–28). Re-examination of the issues in light of complexity theory has since led me to adopt another view.

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certainly the case that such entropic processes are not confined to hypertext narratives alone. Taking things a step further, the question can be considered within the framework of information theory, which itself is closely linked to complexity theory through the principles of probability.27 Nicolis and Prigogine provide a telling example. As reading advances temporally in a fixed direction from the starting point (cf. the arrow of time), unpredictable elements may pop up that cannot be determined from what is known at any given point. In this way, information is generated out of stochastic processes. In support of this idea, the authors point out the high improbability of devising an algorithm that would enable a reader of Euclid’s Elements or of Newton’s Principia to infer or predict the second half of these treatises from reading the first half (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 186). Only in a state of absolute structural stability would it be possible to design such an algorithm; in this case, however, the level of information transmitted would be nil and entropy at its maximum. Referring this principle back to the narrative contexts of the opening sentences of the novels discussed in the previous section, we can see that the states of near equilibrium incorporated into the initial conditions also give rise to probability relations within each of the global narratives in question.28 From these comments it can be concluded that intersequentiality exists in two forms. One, through the use of inference, involves prospection, retrospection and recognition in the processing of gaps between the actional and the communicative. The other, more commensurable with the principles of complexity theory, results from the probabilistic relations that arise in narrative contexts as a result of near-equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium situations. One operates

27 For an overview of information theory, see Nöth (1995). In this context, probability is a statistical concept and is thus not to be confused with verisimilitude. Example: what is the missing letter in the word “ax–”? The only possibility (in the system of English spelling) is the letter “e,” resulting in “axe,” so that the addition of “e” transmits a low level of information. Consider now “a–e,” which can be completed in several ways: “ace,” “age,” “ale,” “ape,” “are,” “ate.” Choosing one of these possibilities is more informative than completing the letters “ax–” with the letter “e.” Needless to say, the probability that one or another of these words will appear at a certain point in time varies according to the grammatical environment. 28 The logic of narrative probability is thus distinct from that of langue and parole as employed in structural narratology. According to Claude Bremond: “It is starting from the terminus a quo, which opens up in the general language [langue] of narratives a network of possibilities, and no longer from the terminus ad quem, in view of which the particular word [parole] of the Russian folktale makes its selection between the possibilities, that we must construct our sequences and functions. The implication of Struggle by Victory is a logical requirement; the implication of Victory by Struggle is a cultural stereotype” (1973, 25; my translation).



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in conformity with the cognitive and semiotic dimensions of narrative, the other along the lines of narrative’s information theoretical and entropic processes. These forms of intersequentiality are not mutually exclusive or incompatible. Indeed, narrative as a complex system relies on both, for the two function concurrently. Although an in-depth corpus-based analysis is required to clarify and modulate this point, it would seem that probabilistic intersequentiality forms the undercurrent of narrative generally. This is true of the three works already mentioned, whose initial conditions open up a situation of near equilibrium and which, at the same time, are conducive to the operations triggered by inferential intersequentiality. Probabilistic intersequentiality can be made salient, as in hypertext narratives, but this is also true of print-based narratives such as Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1961) with its randomly ordered pages; William Gass’s Willy Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968/69) with its elaborately metareferential use of graphic devices (see Pier 2011); or Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) with its startling compositional permutations.

5 Instabilities If entropic states near equilibrium and far from equilibrium prevail in narrative sequentiality (rather than equilibrium and disequilibrium), then three additional properties of complex systems must be taken into account that contribute to instabilities: nonlinearity, positive feedback and bifurcations.

5.1 Nonlinearity As we have already seen, what characterizes the linearity of a system is the proportionality between cause and effect (e. g., ‘an event A brings about an event B’). Such is the case in the individual trajectory forming the object of study in mechanics. This postulate generally holds in classical science, with carryovers into other fields, but it was brought into question by, among others, Henri Poincaré, one of the pioneers of statistical thermodynamics. When trying to solve the so-called three-body problem, Poincaré discovered that the moon’s motion, influenced by the gravitational pull of the earth and the sun, could not be calculated using Newton’s laws, thus demonstrating that dynamical systems are not isomorphic (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 72). In such instances, where asymmetrical relations arise, nonlinearity provokes disproportionality between initial conditions and results.

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A striking difference between linear and nonlinear laws is whether the property of superposition holds or breaks down. In a linear system the ultimate effect of the combined action of two different causes is merely the superposition of the effects of each cause taken individually. But in a nonlinear system adding a small cause to one that is already present can induce dramatic effects that have no common measure with the amplitude of the cause. (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 59)

Nonlinearity, then, occurs with the spanning of scales rather than along a single level (cf. Baranger’s third property of complexity) and, unlike in linear relations, introduces elements of fluctuation and unpredictability into a system. Climate patterns are a clear example of nonlinear systems. It is important when considering narrative sequentiality from the perspective of irreversibility to bear in mind that the latter notion does not equate with linearity in a spatial sense, such as that of ‘linear time’ in which time is said to follow a unilinear path. Irreversibility is a time-bound phenomenon that moves from past to future, and it is thus linked to probabilistic processes which themselves evolve over time, resulting in various states of nonequilibrium and, in the case of far-from-equilibrium states, increased complexity. There is in fact a fundamental difference between space and time to the extent that it is possible to move from and return to a given point in space, but not to exchange past and future (as in the putatively frictionless pendulum). The separation of time and space is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics that runs counter to the principles of classical mechanics to the extent that it results in an “infinite entropy barrier” in which permitted states remain distinct from prohibited states: only after the initial state has been selected (cf. the initial conditions set out in the opening sentences of the three novels mentioned above) can irreversible probabilistic processes get underway or the inferential operations of prospection, retrospection and recognition be triggered by actional and communicative processes. Because of the probabilistic nature of irreversibility, moreover, space acquires a temporal dimension, leading Prigogine and Stengers to adopt a term from geography to describe this process: “timing of space” (1984, 16–17, 272, 277–280 and 295– 297). The timing of space contrasts significantly with the various narrative theories, structuralist and otherwise, that seek to “spatialize” narrative through, for example, “spatial form,” effectively immobilizing the process of irreversibility.29

29 Poulaki identifies spatial form with pattern-based forms of self-organization in her corpus of films (the other two complexity-based criteria in her model being reflexivity and emergence). In this connection, she cites Joseph Frank’s “space-logic” of reflexive reference which makes it necessary “to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended in a unity” (1977, 232; quoted in Poulaki 2011, 198).



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5.2 Positive feedback Another factor that comes into play with nonlinearity is feedback. Negative feedback, we have seen, pertains in closed or isolated systems where a control mechanism is used for the purpose of maintaining equilibrium in the system in question. Nonlinearity, however, is associated with positive feedback, the effect of which is to push the system far from equilibrium by amplifying fluctuations in unexpected ways, leaving it open to unpredictable change. Although it exists in the inorganic world, positive feedback, as confirmed by research in molecular biology, is more prevalent in living systems; it is also a critical factor in biological evolution as well as in social interactions. Moreover, the role of cybernetics in conceptualizing nonlinearity is not to be overlooked, for this was the first science to make extensive use of self-regulation by means of internal feedback cycles in closed or isolated systems. It was, in fact, Norbert Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics, who decisively ushered in the idea of nonlinear causality, although cybernetics was subsequently overtaken by complexity studies which, in the case of open systems, incorporate emergence and self-organization as well as nonlinearity (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 153–154; Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 56–61; Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 264 and 273–274; Poulaki 2011, 130–131).

5.3 Bifurcations We see, then, that nonlinearity and positive feedback draw phenomena away from equilibrium. But how far can this process go? What are the limits? It is here that the expression “at the edge of chaos” gains relevance, a notion synonymous with states far from equilibrium and near disintegration, but which at the same time refers to an order implicit in the system (Bertuglia and Vaio 2005 [2003], 270, 279 and 282; cf. Baranger’s fifth property of complexity).

However, the attempt to assimilate temporality into spatial relations (“the sequential or temporal principle is replaced by the principle of ‘reflexive reference’: that is, suspension of meaningful reference until the whole pattern is perceived”; Holtz 1977, 272–273; quoted in Poulaki 2011, 199) not only duplicates the principle of reversibility in classical mechanics, but it also overlooks the entropic principles of irreversibility and their connections with dissipative structures and spontaneous self-organization. See also Ryan (2016, 176–182) who extends her critique of spatial form for its neglect of plot to the use of distributed networks in narrative experiments such as Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1961) and to Roland Barthes’s “plural text,” a “network” with a “thousand entries” but no root node and no beginning, middle and end, thus precluding the possibility of narrativity.

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The mechanism through which the edge of chaos functions is known as bifurcation. In primary or “pitchfork” bifurcations, to take the simplest example, as fluctuations in an irreversible process are amplified and the thermodynamic branch becomes increasingly unstable, a “choice” between two solutions pops up within the open system itself, a choice that can in no way be determined when referring to the nonlinearities and constraints of the macroscopic dimension of the system concerned: at this point, the system has been pushed “beyond the threshold of stability.” Bifurcation can be characterized as a source of diversification and innovation. There is more, however. Bifurcation possesses distinct symmetry breaking properties which, as the dissymmetries of many phenomena in nature show, serve as one of the prerequisites of complex behavior. Together with their symmetry breaking effects, bifurcations are the manifestation of an intrinsic differentiation between the parts of the system itself and the system and its environment. Once a dissipative structure is formed, the homogeneity of time […] or space […], or both, is broken. (Prigogine 1997 [1996], 69; cf. Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 74)30

Bifurcations in a system are not isolated, of course, but come in successions. Between bifurcations, the process advances deterministically while the choice of branch at any given bifurcation point occurs probabilistically,31 thus giving the process a historical dimension in a mixture of necessity and chance (see also Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 170 and 176). At the same time, it should be noted that bifurcations reflect Prigogine’s reformulation of the principle of entropy not as an increase in disorder but as an irreversible process taking place inside the system, on the one hand, and exchanges of the system with the outside world, on the other (118; cf. Hayles 1990, 94). It must also be emphasized that symmetry breaking introduces an element of randomness between the macroscopic dimension of a system, which provides no basis for determining the path the system

30 Modern science was born when “the homogeneous and isotropic space of Euclidean geometry” replaced Aristotelian space (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 171), a feature characteristic of classical mechanics; symmetry breaking, however, “brings us from a static, geometrical view of space to an ‘Aristotelian’ view in which space is shaped or defined by the functions going on in the system” (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 13). 31 With respect to information theory, this means that bifurcation points are richer in information than the more deterministic stretches in between. A similar situation arises in narrative theory, where Boris Tomashevsky’s “free motifs” vs. “bound motifs,” just as Roland Barthes’ “kernels” vs. “catalysts,” can be recast in information theoretical terms (Tomashevsky 1965 [1928]; Barthes 1977 [1966]).



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will follow, and microscopic description, which is unable to predict the long-term outcome (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 162 and 180). “Complexity,” write Bertuglia and Vaio, “is characterized by the breakdown of symmetry […] due to the fact that no part of the system is able to provide sufficient information to predict, even statistically, the properties of the other parts” (2005 [2003], 289). What are the implications of the above principles for sequence and for the broader, underlying phenomenon of narrative sequentiality? From the perspective of complexity studies, sequence operates within states near equilibrium and far from equilibrium in an irreversible process from past to future. This occurs probabilistically (cf. footnote 27) rather than in a linear trajectory, as in Todorov’s sequence where “a stable situation […] is disturbed by some force.” Given that the starting point of the sequence is a set of initial conditions, and not a state of equilibrium, positive feedback tends over time to cause the system to evolve toward a state far from equilibrium, toward greater complexity and thus toward greater unpredictability.32 Unlike Todorov’s sequence, modeled after closed or isolated systems, in this conception there occurs not a disturbance “by some force” but a bifurcation point, an alternative which is determined neither at the microscopic level (e. g., a series of actions by narrative agents guided by desires, goals, etc.) nor at the macroscopic level (e. g., an overarching structure such as that of the quest narrative or a love story). In narrative, as in complex systems, bifurcations are probabilistic while the stretches of discourse between these points unfold according to criteria of a deterministic nature. By functioning this way, narrative sequentiality breaks down symmetries such as that of “the action of a force directed in the opposite direction,” the supposed effect of which is to re-establish equilibrium. The relations between microscopic and macroscopic scales thus become random to some degree or even stochastic, raising a fundamental question that can be but mentioned within the limit of this essay: to what extent might necessity and chance take precedence over or in some way intermingle with cause and effect in narrative contexts?33

32 This can be illustrated, on a scale larger than the sequence, by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) in which a poem by John Shade entitled “Pale Fire” is commented on in a “Foreword,” “Commentary” and “Index” by Charles Kinbote. As the reading of the various sections of the book advance, it becomes apparent that the paratext takes on a life of its own in such a way that it becomes increasingly undecidable as to whether it is the commentary that forms the paratext of Shade’s poem or the poem that forms the paratext of Kinbote’s commentary. For an analysis, see Pier (1992). 33 It is worth noting that Aristotle’s Poetics lays stress on necessity linked either to probability or verisimilitude and on chance rather than on cause and effect. Causation in narrative remains one

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6 Dissipative Structures Bifurcations, together with their symmetry breaking effects, are one of the formative factors of dissipative structures, a key concept in Prigogine’s thermodynamics. Defined as “[s]patiotemporal structures that appear in far-from-equilibrium conditions” (Prigogine 1997 [1996], 202), dissipative structures are inseparable from irreversibility. Moreover, they associate “structure and order on the one side, and dissipation or waste on the other. […] The interaction of a system with the outside world, its embedding in nonequilibrium conditions, may become in this way the starting point for the formation of new dynamic states of matter—dissipative structures” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 143). Unlike conservative structures, in which kinetic energy and potential energy are converted into each other with total energy remaining constant (cf. section  4.1 above), dissipative structures, provoked by far-from-equilibrium states and occurring beyond the bifurcation point, produce a new situation, effectively leaping from disorder to order in a choice that is not deterministically inscribed within the system. “Nonequilibrium,” says Prigogine, “leads to concepts such as self-organization and dissipative structures” (1997 [1996], 27). As a complex system, narrative can be considered a dissipative structure rather than, in line with Todorov’s sequence and ideal narrative, a conservative structure.

7 Ideal Narrative, or Emergence and Self-Organization? These considerations bring us now to the supposed isomorphism in Todorov’s model between sequence and the “ideal narrative” (récit idéal), an isomorphism rooted in the principles of classical mechanics which, when viewed through the lens of complexity studies, calls for considerable re-examination. On the whole, narratology appears not to have addressed in an explicit or sustained way the questions raised by the passage from a sequence to a narrative in its entirety.34

of the most controversial topics in narrative theory. For a nuanced and keenly argued discussion, see Göran Rossholm’s contribution to this volume. 34 This is true particularly of structural narratology, but it pertains also to many of the more recent currents of research, due in part to the holdover of the story/discourse dichotomy in its various avatars. A case in point is unnatural narratology, one version of which treats unnatural



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Complexity theory, on the other hand, having devoted a great deal of research to the questions surrounding the relations between parts and wholes in the natural and the social sciences, offers a number of takes on the issues from a different angle, notably through the concepts of emergence and self-organization. In my estimation, these findings open up potentially fruitful lines of reflection for the narratologist.35 In a historical and conceptual overview of emergence and self-organization, Tom De Wolf and Tom Holvoet distinguish between the two phenomena as follows, stressing that, although interconnected, they must not be confused: the essence of emergence is the existence of a global behaviour that is novel with regard to the constituent parts of the system. The essence of self-organisation is an adaptable behaviour that autonomously acquires and maintains an increased order (i. e., statistical complexity, structure, etc.). (De Wolf and Holvoet 2005, 9)

Moreover, emergence is characterized as “a global behaviour that arises from the interactions of the local parts and that […] cannot be traced back to the individual parts” (3). Emergents are novel because they arise as the system evolves over time, cannot be predicted or deduced from local parts and are decentralized, with no part of the system controlling or directing macroscopic behavior. The principles of emergence, as they began to be applied in complexity studies during the 1980s, have been integrated in various forms into complex adaptive systems theory, nonlinear dynamical systems theory and chaos theory, synergetics and, most pertinent for our purposes, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, where emergent phenomena arise as dissipative structures out of far-from-equilibrium conditions. As for self-organization, De Wolf and Holvoet define it as “a dynamical and adaptive process where systems acquire and maintain structure themselves, without external control” (7). Self-organization is thus characterized by autonomy, adaptability to perturbations and far-from-equilibrium dynamical processes. What binds emergence and self-organization together is nonlinearity

or antimimetic fabulas separately from unnatural syuzhets (i. e., texts that are not ordered in the conventional linear way). Doing so, however, rules out the entropic processuality of narrative that results from nonequilibrium states and intersequentiality. At the same time, severing fabula from syuzhet in this way tends to underestimate narrative discourse as a complex system as well as to overlook exchanges of narrative as system with the outside world through positive feedback and dissipative structures. (See Richardson 2013 and Richardson’s contribution to this volume.) 35 Path-breaking work on narrative understanding and emergent behavior has been undertaken by H. Porter Abbott (2008) and by Richard Walsh (2011) on emergent narrative as a form of simulation in digital and non-digital environments.

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and positive feedback, the result of which is to amplify initial fluctuations, thus producing the “small cause, large effect” phenomenon on the macroscopic scale in the form of emergents (cf. Baranger’s first, third and fourth properties of complexity). The term emergence, it should be noted, does not appear in nonequilibrium thermodynamics. In place of this concept are dissipative structures which require, and occur in, far-from-equilibrium conditions, themselves a prerequisite for the process of self-organization (cf. Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 175 and 189; Prigogine 1997 [1996], 70). Dissipative structures are caused by bifurcations, “the manifestation,” as stated in section  6.3 above, “of an intrinsic differentiation between the parts of the system itself and the system and its environment.” In an open system, bifurcations have a symmetry breaking role, infusing the relations between microscopic and macroscopic scales with stochastic processes. It should be fairly evident at this point why narrative sequence, once it is viewed in terms of the principles of complexity rather than in those of classical mechanics and science, cannot be isomorphic with ideal narrative. Indeed, narrative sequence itself is in a state of nonequilibrium, wavering between near equilibrium and far from equilibrium (rather than a passage from equilibrium to disequilibrium and back to equilibrium). Due, furthermore, to the instabilities generated out of fluctuations (inherent to one degree or another in initial conditions) as well as to the symmetry breaking effects of bifurcations (i. e., critical turning points) and the dissipative structures resulting therefrom, the global narrative cannot be predicted on the basis of its sequences, any more than the sequences can be formally deduced from the global story. This being the case, the very notion of “ideal narrative,” according to which the properties of the micro scale are reduplicated on the macro scale, must be abandoned. As a result of dissipative structures (or emergence), the parts do not add up to the whole, just as the whole cannot be broken down into parts. A complex system, narrative is self-organizing to the extent that, through its exchanges with the outside world, the system itself evolves irreversibly, adapting in a nondeterministic, probabilistic, random or unpredictable way so as to either maintain or increase its levels of organization and complexity.36

36 The intensification of narrative self-organization can be seen in John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968). Reading this work in the conventional way, from the first page to the last, poses serious difficulties of cohesion between the fourteen stories. However, closer examination reveals an intricate serialization of the text into seven alternate paths which can be read in any order. The highly ordered symmetries that emerge from these various paths and their different combinations as well as the multiple interactions resulting from these combinations open up numerous symmetry breaking bifurcation points which, according to the order of paths chosen (cf. initial



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8 The Two Intersequentialities The correlate of the nonisomorphic relation between sequence and the global narrative resulting from symmetry breaking forces, the random relation between microscopic and macroscopic scales and the disproportion between parts and wholes is that narrative sequence, a reductive or summative notion, ultimately gives way to the overriding principle of sequentiality, understood as an irreversible process, the arrow of time.37 This being the case, however, it is essential to bear in mind that sequentiality, as it pertains to narrative, differs from irreversibility in nature in at least one fundamental respect. The subject matter of the natural sciences is natural phenomena, and the goal of these sciences is to formulate testable laws about these phenomena. Such is not the case of narrative theory, whose object of study is narrative, a certain form of semiotic representation. In narrative, the instabilities and other factors that trigger nonequilibrium, nonlinearity, positive feedback, bifurcations and dissipative structures occur within the culturally situated artifact, not in nature. It is for this reason that narrative sequentiality, in its irreversibility, ultimately consists in intersequentiality, both inferential and probabilistic. On the one hand are the differential relations, or gaps, occurring between the communicative and the actional—generators of the sense-making inferences peculiar to narrativity. On the other hand are the probabilistic or, more broadly, stochastic relations that arise between the arrow of time and nonequilibrium conditions with their fluctuations and instabilities—generators of information and entropic processes.38 While the latter form does not pertain directly to all aspects of narrative, it does underlie processes of all kinds, in both nature and culture, and thus in narrative—processes that unfold reversibly and irreversibly, determinis-

conditions), produce a nonlinear assembly of long-range correlations at the edge of chaos where self-organization is most likely to occur. For an analysis, see Pier (2011). 37 In his contribution to this volume, Richard Walsh also views narrative in terms of sequentiality, defining narrative cognition as “the semiotic articulation of linear temporal sequence.” He further states that spatial modeling and temporal modeling are two distinct modalities in themselves and that they are not assimilable into narrative cognition, thus calling into question holistic conceptions of narrative worlds. Walsh’s cognitive-semiotic system thus runs parallel in several regards to the positions advanced in this paper, notably as concerns the separation of time and space through the second law of thermodynamics (cf. section 6.1 above), although the criteria do not fully coincide. 38 In light of these considerations, the definition proposed by Herbert Grabes is underspecified: “Sequentiality is the linear, unidirectional succession of elements or events, either reversible (as with motion in space) or irreversible (as in the flow of time)” (2014 [2013], vol. 2, 765).

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tically and stochastically (cf. section 4 above), following a set of criteria that are distinct from those evoked in current narratological debates about the “natural” and the “unnatural,” for example.39 Together, the two forms of intersequentiality in narrative not only represent a potentially fruitful way to reframe critical issues in narrative theory, but they also open the way to positioning narratology in a way that addresses the barrier between the “two cultures,” the sciences and the humanities. Such a positioning would be tantamount, for narratology, to what Kenneth Bailey (1994) describes as the passage from “the age of equilibrium” to “the age of entropy.”

9 Conclusion Narrative is a complex system, but complexity theory as it has been developed in the natural and social sciences does not represent a paradigm for narratology or serve as a master discipline for the study of narrative. By outlining some of the ways in which narratology might be commensurable with complexity theory, I have refrained from the attempt to “export” categories, concepts and methodologies wholesale from one discipline to another (cf. section 1 above). At the same time, the lines of reasoning adopted in these pages follow neither rigorous deductive procedures such as those of Greimasian semiotics nor loose inductive techniques of the type practiced by unnatural narratology. This is due partly to the fact that complexity studies have yet to achieve the status of a well-defined or unified discipline, for complexity is “one of those ideas whose definition is an integral part of the problems that it raises” (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 38 and 232). Complexity manifests and configures itself in different ways according to the field concerned, and for this reason its theorization and analysis must be adapted accordingly. Moreover, narrative theory, in its various approaches, has developed many sophisticated and fine-grained methods of analysis that stand on their own merits, oftentimes with disciplinary allegiances of other sorts. Consequently, when turning to complexity studies, the most promising way to proceed is to seek

39 Defined by Jan Alber as “physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones” (2009, 80), the unnatural is predicated on a number of unspoken scientific and philosophical postulates that, as the principles elaborated on this essay suggest, are challenged by the theory of complexity. For starters, unnatural narratology regards the natural and the unnatural in ways that are almost diametrically opposed to the complex conception, where the natural is random and irreversible and the artificial is deterministic and reversible.



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out in what ways and to what degree narratology might be commensurable with that theory. As stated at the beginning, complexity theory does not serve as a paradigm for yet another narratology. In conjunction with narrative theory, this line of reasoning can nonetheless offer ways to capture some of the underlying complex processes that occur in narrative while at the same time bringing to light various features of complexity that are implicit in a range of narrative theories or, in other cases, underscoring issues that might call for re-examination from the perspective of complex phenomena. The testing ground for any narrative theory is of course the going-and-coming between theory and analysis and the comparative study of narratives included in an appropriately selected corpus.40 The present essay, by seeking to determine the aspects of complexity studies that are relevant for the theory of narrative, has not chosen this route, focusing instead on formulating a set of issues open for further research and debate. Among the features of narrative potentially concerned by these lines of inquiry are narrative progression (e. g., Phelan 2007),41 narrative tension (Baroni 2007), dialogism (Bakhtin 1981 [1934–35]), eventfulness (Schmid 2010 [2005], 1–21, and Schmid’s contribution to this volume; Hühn 2014 [2009]), the “open work” (Eco 1989 [1976]), cognitive processing of narrative (e. g., Herman 2013) as well as the highly diversified phenomena now coming under scrutiny by the burgeoning field of media studies along with transmedial and intermedial approaches to narratology (e. g., Grishakova and Ryan 2010; Jenkins 2006; Rippl 2015; Ryan 2006a; Thon and Ryan 2015). The list does not stop here, however, for complexity in narrative exists in many forms yet to be explored, and the study of narrative remains an open-ended endeavor.42

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. “Narrative and Emergent Behavior.” Poetics Today 29 (2): 227–224. Alber, Jan. 2009. “Impossible Storyworlds—and What To Do with Them.” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1 (1): 79–96.

40 See, for example, Valery Timofeev’s fine-grained discussion in this volume of Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule” (1942) which, though working with a different set of criteria from those employed here, shows how the creative process engages processes of monitoring, regulating and controlling narrative progression. 41 Also concerned in this regard is work by, for example, Kafalenos (1999) and Toolan (2009). 42 I wish to thank José Ángel García Landa, Per Krogh Hansen and Wolf Schmid for their insightful reading of this article and their suggestions.

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Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik. 2010. “Introduction.” In Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by J. A. and M. F., 1–31. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Bailey, Kenneth D. 1994. Sociology of the New Systems Theory: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981 [1934–35]. “Discourse in the Novel.” In M. M. B. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259–442. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baranger, Michel. 2000. “Chaos, Complexity, and Entropy.” New England Complex Systems Institute. http://necsi.edu/projects/baranger/cce (Accessed 16 July 2015) Baroni, Raphaël. 2007. La tension narrative: suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris: Seuil. Baroni, Raphaël, and Françoise Revaz, eds. 2016. Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977 [1966]. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” In R. B. Image—Music—Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 79–124. New York: Hill and Wang. Bar-Yam, Yaneer. 2011. Concept: Patterns. New England Complex Systems Institute. http:// necsi.edu/guide/concepts/patterns (Accessed 15 July 2015) Bertuglia, Cristoforo Sergio, and Franco Vaio. 2005 [2003]. Nonlinearity, Chaos and Complexity: The Dynamics of Natural and Social Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London and New York: Routledge. Bremond, Claude. 1973. Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil. Bruni, John. 2011. “Thermodynamics.” In Clarke and Rossini, eds., 226–237. Clarke, Bruce. 2008. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narratives and Systems. New York: Fordham University Press. Clarke, Bruce. 2011. “Systems Theory.” In Clarke and Rossini, eds., 214–225. Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini, eds. 2011. The Routledge Companion to Science and Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Crutchfield, James P., et al. 2008. “Chaos.” In Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy of Science, edited by Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys, 375–386. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. De Wolf, Tom, and Tom Holvoet. 2005. “Emergence Versus Self-Organisation: Different Concepts but Promising When Combined.” In Engineering Self-organising Systems: Methodologies and Applications, edited by Sven A. Brueckner, Giovanni Di Marzo Serugendo, Anthony Karageorgos and Radhika Nagpal, 1–15. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. Doležel, Lubomír. 1990. Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Dosse, François. 1997 [1991]. History of Structuralism. Translated by Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ducrot, Oswald, et al. 1968. Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil. Eco, Umberto. 1989 [1979]. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Hutchinson Radius. Frank, Joseph. 1977. “Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics.” Critical Inquiry 4 (2): 231–252. Gandolfi, A. 1999. Formicai, imperi, cervelli. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Gleick, James. 2008 [1987]. Chaos: Making of a New Science. New York: Penguin. Grabes, Herbert. 2014 [2013]. “Sequentiality.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 2: 765–776. Berlin and Boston. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/sequentiality (Revised 26 March 2014)



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Grishakova, Marina. 2011. “Narrative Causality Denaturalized.” In Unnatural Narratives— Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, 127–144. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Grishakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. 2010. Intermediality and Storytelling. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Hayles, Nancy Katherine. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hayles, Nancy Katherine, ed. 1991. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Herman, David. 2013. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Holland, John H. 2014. Complexity: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holtz, William. 1977. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: A Reconsideration.” Critical Inquiry 4 (2): 271–283. Hühn, Peter. 2014 [2009]. “Event and Eventfulness.” In Hühn et al., eds., vol. 1: 159–178. Also available at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/event-and-eventfulness (Revised 13 September 2013) Hühn, Peter, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid, eds. 2014 [2009]. Handbook of Narratology. 2nd edition, 2 vols. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Available online as the living handbook of narratology at: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ Jenkins, Henry. 2006. “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedial Storytelling.” In H. J. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Meet, 59–130. New York and London: New York University Press. Kafalenos, Emma. 1999. “Not (Yet) Knowing: Epistemological Effects of Deferred and Suppression of Information in Narrative.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman, 33–65. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 2000 [1991]. “The Road Since Structure.” In T. S. K. The Road Since Structure, edited by C. Conant and J. Haugeland, 90–104. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012 [1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 4th edition. With an introductory essay by Ian Hacking. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, Melanie. 2009. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicolis, Grégoire, and Ilya Prigogine. 1989. Exploring Complexity: An Introduction. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. Nöth, Winfried. 1995. “Information.” In W. N. Handbook of Semiotics, 134–143. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nünning, Ansgar. 2003. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposal for Future Usages of the Term.” In What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 239–275. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Oberheim, Eric, and Paul Hoyningen-Huene. 2013 [2009]. “The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ incommensurability/#Int (Accessed 20 September 2015) Phelan, James (2007). Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Pier, John. 1992. “Between Text and Intertext: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.” Style 26 (1): 12–32.

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Tynjanov, Jurij, and Roman Jakobson. 2002 [1928]. “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language.” In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited and prefaced by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, 79–81. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press. Walsh, Richard. 2011. “Emergent Narrative in Interactive Media.” Narrative 19 (1): 72–85. Walsh, Richard. 2012. “What Have Stories Got to Do with Systems? Narrative and Emergence.” Paper presented before the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies, University of York. May 11. http://www.york.ac.uk/narrative-studies/events/seminars/stories-andsystems/ (Accessed 15 December 2015)

José Ángel García Landa (Zaragoza)

The Story behind any Story: Evolution, Historicity and Narrative Mapping “The narratives of the world are numberless” (Barthes 1977 [1966], 79)—and yet all stories may be seen as chapters of a single story. Evolutionary approaches to literary and cultural phenomena (Wilson 1998; J. Carroll 2004) have led to a growing awareness that these literary and cultural phenomena are best accounted for within a consilient disciplinary framework. From this consilient standpoint, human modes of communication must be contextualized as situated historical phenomena, and history as such is to be placed within the wider context of the evolution of human societies and of life generally (what is often called “big history”). Using the notions of “narrative mapping” and “narrative anchoring,” a series of conclusions relevant to narratology may be drawn from the aforementioned theoretical outlook, bearing in particular on the narratological conceptualization of time. Cultural conceptions of big history underpin the production, reception and critical analysis of any specific narrative, as well as any narrativizing strategy, in the sense that these conceptions provide both a general ideational background to the experiences depicted in the narratives, and a mental framework in which to situate (e. g., historicize) the narrative genres used in the depiction. A major contribution to evolutionary theory, Herbert Spencer’s philosophical work, can be examined through the lens of its narratological significance as a significant step both in the narrativization of science and in the development of a scientific narratology. Narratology was born with a scientific aspiration to universality. In Aristotle’s poetics, philosophy, understood as knowledge of universals, is contrasted to history conceived as knowledge of individual facts. Any opposition seems to call for a synthesis or mediation, and Aristotle suggested one in his theory of poetry: poetry is more philosophical than history, because it imposes a conceptual order or pattern on the events of human experience and action. The Poetics offers a foundational model for narratology—it is the first narratological treatise, besides much else. But in addition to its structural analyses of plot dynamics, of anagnorisis, of eventfulness and of closure, in addition to its theory of genres and media, and its metacritical observations, the treatise also contains some pointers relating to evolutionary poetics—to the origin of drama and of mimetic art generally, grounding it on the imitative instincts in human nature. It can also lay claim, therefore, to taking precedence as the first treatise in cognitive poetics.

DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-026

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Paul Ricœur (1985 [1984]) pointed out the cognitive importance of emplotment, as first conceived by Aristotle. Emplotment, organizing events into a story, is a prime cognitive move, equal at least in importance to the joining of subject and predicate in a proposition, or to metaphor, which (as pointed out by Vico 1968 [1744]) stands at the root of creative thought. And there is of course a chapter on metaphor in the Poetics, although its main emphasis falls on the analysis of plot. Emplotment and narrativity allow us to see, or establish, the connection in a series of events. Much post-structuralist criticism has been suspicious of such connections, and has deconstructed narrative causality and the unities built by master plotters. Gary Saul Morson’s Narrative and Freedom (1994) may be singled out as an instance of such criticism. It is a masterful critique of several ills attending the retrospective stance of narrative, and a major contribution to the analysis of hindsight bias (although this term is not used in the book). Hindsight bias (see García Landa 2005) is the narrative fallacy par excellence, although one might go one step further and argue that narrative itself is the narrative fallacy par excellence, so entwined with distortions and illusions is the knowledge we articulate and the stories we tell, with truth and fiction present in almost equal proportions—though not in the same positions—in fictional stories and in historical or biographical records. Connection, unity and unity-finders have been abundantly disparaged and deconstructed since the 1960s, although they no doubt tell part of the truth in the story. Nietzsche’s fragmentary aphorisms and his hermeneutics of suspicion have been much preferred to the grand philosophical systematics of Hegel, which are largely left unread, at least outside the philosophical field. But the task of unification, unfashionable like romantic fiction, keeps on rolling nonetheless, with much labor being done behind the backs of the deconstructors, quietly changing the very landscape in which all of us live and work and think. Quietly—or rather suddenly sometimes. “Only connect”: the unforeseen revolution of Internet communications, unforeseen by the imagination of science fiction even, is a particularly relevant example. The demise of the Grand Narratives became one of the catchphrases of the academy precisely at the time in which the Grand Narratives of globalization, electronic communications and relativistic cosmology were asserting their cultural influence in the most incontestable way. As my title suggests, I want to emphasize one such aspect of narrative: its inherent power to provide unification, to connect—in the last analysis, to connect all narratives and the whole of reality in a cognitive sweep which makes a unified sense of the whole of the world we live in—a Key to All Mythologies, indeed, if there is ever to be one. The term “third culture” has become widespread in recent years, associated with E. O. Wilson’s notion of consilience—the building of bridges



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between the sciences and the humanities. This integrational work is currently being carried out most prominently in the fields of cognitive (neuro)science, behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology (including biological anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology)—and environmental science.1 Wilson’s seminal formulation in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and his most recent contributions (2013, 2014), emphasize the mutual involvement of science and human praxis. Cultural and moral options, political choices, and ethics, must be ultimately grounded on human nature and on the sustainable and rational use of resources. As an example, if we start with forest management, an entire academic and practical field in its own right, we soon are up against great problems of moral reasoning having to do with resource management and the relation of humanity to the natural environment. And then, of course, in order to really make judgments of a moral nature we must know the environment much more thoroughly than we know in most cases. And as part of that we have to understand the impact of economics and of human nature. What are our desires and our needs? And that leads us back then to how we handle forest management. (Wilson 2014, 46)

Human history might be told from the perspective of forest management, just as it can be told as the story of the division of work and of the development of specialized techniques for the organized exploitation of natural resources. The accounts of “Big History” in the books by David Christian (2004) or Fred Spier (2010) provide histories of cosmic evolution in order to, as it were, historicize human history and set in a wider context the rise of life, minds and civilizations. The scientific contextualization provided by such works throws a muchneeded light on the challenges faced by human societies and cultures—especially in the context of the present and oncoming energy crisis and of current concerns about overpopulation, ecological sustainability and the industrial depletion of the environment. These are the inescapable contexts of both present and future cultural investigations and representations. And such Big Histories make it clear that in the last analysis there is just one human story, and one history of the universe, which is the inescapable backdrop to all the stories dreamt and devised by mankind, and the soil on which they grow.

1 See Wilson (1998). My paper “Consilience and Retrospection” (García Landa 2013b) provides a critical narratological approach to the notion of consilience. Mellmann (2010) may serve as an example of a consilient approach to the theorizing of narrative voice, perspective and focalization. S. Carroll (2013) elegantly bridges the gap between the purposeless descriptions of the universe provided by the physical sciences, and the purposeful human universe of action and story.

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There are many directions one can take to go from the many stories to the principle of all stories. One was the road taken by structuralist critics, the founding fathers of narratology, trying to establish the basic structural principles of stories, finding a grammar of stories or a semiotic system accounting for all narratives. Both the Central and East European formalists in the early decades of the twentieth century and the structuralists from the 1960s were re-appropriating Aristotle’s project, with all narratives being analyzed as answering to common structural principles. Myth criticism, as best exemplified in the work of Northrop Frye (1957), outlined a similar project, and the insights provided from these perspectives can be usefully rethought from a consilient stance. Joseph Carroll’s Darwinian poetics or Brian Boyd’s book On the Origin of Stories (2009) are only the first steps in this reassessment. And a pugnacious reassessment it is, often taking a contentious stance on (post-) structuralism. The sociobiological critics stress the limited flexibility of human nature, as against the claims of post-structuralist constructivist critics, who tend to favor the view of human nature as a blank slate for culture to write on.2 The sociobiological critics claim that human nature, for all its flexibility, is limited and circumscribed, tied to our age-long heritage and evolutionary history. Mankind’s Big Story is especially prominent from this stance, and the prehistoric heritage weighs heavily on the shoulders of the clothed apes. Another way to synthesis, from the many to the one, and to science, was provided in the nineteenth century by historicist and dialectical philosophies—by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1977 [1807]) and by his philosophy of history, by Marxist historical materialism—and also by Darwinian evolutionary theory, which provided the conceptual frame for an evolutionary grounding of all living phenomena as part of a biological big history. In this context, a close acquaintance of George Eliot’s provides us with yet another version of what Mr. Casaubon might call the key to all mythologies. One of the earliest and most complex theories of evolution was formulated by the British positivist philosopher Herbert Spencer over one hundred and fifty years ago. His groundbreaking First Principles appeared in 1862, and was last revised by the author in 1900. It is somewhat ironic that Spencer is often regarded today as something of an epigone of Darwin, given that Spencer’s theory of evolution not only predated the publication of the Origin of Species, in Social Statics (1850): as a theory of self-organization (or “dumb design,” as opposed to so-called intelligent design), it is also much more complex and wide-encompassing than Dar-

2 See some of the arguments against evolutionary criticism and neuroaesthetics in Tallis (2012). On neuroaesthetics, see Ralf Schneider’s contribution to this volume.



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winism. It is a theory of the global evolution of the universe and its phenomena, not merely a theory of the evolution of living forms, although it certainly takes into account the evolution of living beings, for the details of which Spencer often refers the reader to Darwin. Spencer goes much farther in trying to account for the self-organizing generation of all phenomena, at the physical-mathematical level, at the cosmological level, and also at the level of geology, biology, psychology, sociology, economics and culture. It goes without saying that Spencer’s conception of evolution is much more abstract and general than Darwin’s, as it aims to explain a multitude of phenomena which were outside the scope of Darwinian biology. Actually, Darwin does not address the origin of life, not venturing to write on the subject, being too prudent both in scientific terms and in terms of the possible damage to his social life and reputation. Darwin suggests that all living beings descend from one primeval living form, but he does not speculate much on the origin of that being, other than telling us in pseudo-biblical language that “life was breathed into it.” Darwinism addresses evolution understood as the formation of species and diverse varieties of living beings; evolution means for Darwin (who does not much use the term himself) “descent with modification”; and his celebrated principle of natural selection and of the self-organizing emergence of complexity applies only to living beings. But many complex biological phenomena, such as consciousness, are not dealt with by Darwin either. In contrast, the evolution of consciousness is central for Spencer’s system. His definition of evolution is more encompassing and ambitious than Darwin’s— too ambitious, some have said. Spencer’s definition of evolution runs thus: Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 358: § 145, original emphasis)

To para-rephrase, evolution is the dialectic process whereby greater complexity is generated through the spontaneous integration of natural forces and phenomena, giving rise to identifiable subsystems and relatively autonomous structures, with laws of their own, in specific circumstances and local environments resulting from prior evolution. Some examples of this relative integration, at various levels, may be mentioned here: – – – –

The formation of a planet out of disperse matter. The formation of pluricellular beings out of unicellular beings. The formation of complex societies, unifying dispersed populations. The integration of productive and economic systems in a global economy.

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I pause to say that these transformations can only be accounted for through narrative, through the kind of cognitive grasping and that integrates diverse phenomena into a coherent account, a story of perceived processes and their development. It is also in this sense that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” as Muriel Rukeyser said.3 Now for some instances of the growing heterogeneity which goes along with these unifications: – –

– – –

The formation of planets with different characteristics, a plurality of worlds, in different positions of the Solar System. The diverse forms of pluricellular beings and of anatomical structures, as compared with the relative uniformity of single-celled organisms or of the first hypothetical primeval organism. Different modes of social life, different ecological economies, exploiting a variety of natural resources and landscapes. The differentiation of social classes and professions in a nation. The global division of work and the extreme specialization of production allowed by the development of communications.

Although Spencer was not familiar with the Internet or with GATS, present-day notions such as the global village, the business niches of the Long Tail, etc. are only a corollary of this law of evolution, once we acknowledge the growing generation of complexity through dialectical processes of feedback and the ecological differentiation of systems of equilibrated forces. Spencer did not know about the European Union, either, but he announces it quite explicitly, a century in advance, in the mid-Victorian age, on the basis of his analysis of data and of historical processes, and well before the idea had reached the thoughts of any politician in Brussels. Spencer could not deal in any detail with the origin of life and of consciousness, but he does situate them within the framework of this general theory of the evolution of complexity. It should be said that although in a more general sense any change, including processes of disintegration and disaggregation, are part of evolution, Spencer considers those as a contrary process: the growth of integrating and complexifying evolution in certain sections of the Universe may be followed by dissolution; actually, this may be taking place elsewhere at the same time. Dissolution is the result of a tendency to what Spencer’s near-contempo-

3 Quoted by S. M. Carroll (2013). Carroll’s lecture provides a consilient justification of this statement from the point of view of contemporary physics.



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rary Boltzmann called entropy, a reduction in heterogeneity.4 Consciousness, within the scope of Spencer’s theory, is a phenomenon that is possible only in the context of highly complex living processes, resulting from a high degree of heterogeneity. The materialist and evolutionary theory of consciousness formulated some decades later by George Herbert Mead in The Philosophy of the Present (2002 [1932]) is much in consonance with Spenser’s thought, and it is tempting to see these two highly elaborate theories of complexity in terms of each other. The global integration of evolutionary processes observed by Spencer (resulting from what Mead would call the sociality of physical phenomena), and his notion of consciousness, cannot but culminate in a philosophy of evolution which redefines itself, and accounts for itself, in such terms. Philosophy must need be a process of integration. Being the highest activity of consciousness, philosophy must conceive of itself in these terms and develop an awareness of what it is, considered in the light of overall evolutionary processes. And Spencer, like Hegel, must be forgiven if these reflections lead to a somewhat circular reflexivity (the “circling thoughts” of consciousness being essentially reflexive) or, more immodestly, to an aggrandizing of their own system within the scale of Being. I for one will not question the accuracy of their self-assessments. William Whewell’s term “consilience,” revived of late by E. O. Wilson (1998), was not used by Spencer, but he is as clear-sighted and ambitious as Wilson when it comes to the formulation of such cognitive integration as an aim for thought. Without any need to reorient the task of philosophy, Spencer finds consilience presupposed in the very notion of philosophy, which operates under “the tacit implication that Philosophy is completely unified knowledge” (Spencer 1937 [1862], 484). After a preliminary definition of the task, First Principles sets down the axiomatic bases of knowledge, “Fundamental propositions, or propositions not deducible from deeper ones” and deriving from the very nature of rationality, taking as our data “those components of our intelligence without which there cannot go on the mental processes implied by philosophizing” (484). And from there we pass to certain basic truths, which for Spencer are “the Indestructibility of Matter” (the reader should remember that we are working here within a largely Newtonian paradigm predating Einstein and Bohr) and “The Continuity of Motion,” both derived from the more basic principle of “The Persistence of Force”—a notion whose ultimate nature would have to be revised in our universe of quantum fluctuations. Be it as it may, Spencer derives other basic principles of physics from these primary axioms: “The Persistence of the Relations among

4 On the current understanding of entropy, cosmology and the arrow of time, see Sean Carroll (2010).

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Forces” or the “Uniformity of Law,” a necessary consequence of the fact that a Force cannot arise out of nothing nor lapse into nothing. Present-day cosmology is still grappling with the limits set to these principles, and to our universe, by the Big Bang theory, black holes and baby universes; but of course those lay beyond the Newtonian paradigm of nineteenth-century physics.5 The next step in reasoning is that forces which seem to contradict the principle of the Persistence of Force and to be lost “are transformed into their equivalents in other forces; or, conversely, that forces which become manifest, do so by the disappearance of pre-existing equivalent forces” (1937 [1862], 484–485)—a principle exemplified in astronomical physics, in common geological phenomena, and in biological processes. For instance, Spencer reminds us of the huge amount of biological or geological forces on earth which result from the transformations of incoming solar radiation… although he underestimates the role of self-generated energy coming from radioactive decay. Other laws are derived from the principle of the Persistence of Force and illustrate in their turn a multitude of physical, biological or neuropsychological phenomena. Thus, Spencer’s celebrated Law of Minimal Effort, “The law that everything moves along the line of least resistance, or the line of greater traction, or their resultant” (1937 [1862], 485). It is to be noted that long before Ramón y Cajal or neuroscience, Spencer lays down at this point a bridge between the psychology of the association of ideas and the modern science of neural connections.6 The same principle is applied by Spencer to the acquisition of habits, to

5 See S. M. Carroll (2010) and Aguirre (2013) for an overview of some contemporary approaches to these issues. A highly interesting proposal to extend evolutionary theory to the realm of physics and rethink the nature and role of time in cosmology has been put forth by Smolin (2013) and by Unger and Smolin (2015). 6 “A stimulus implies a force added to, or evolved in, that part of the organism which is its seat; while a mechanical movement implies an expenditure or loss of force in that part of the organism which is its seat: implying some tension of molecular state between the two localities. Hence if, in the life of a minute animal, there are circumstances involving that a stimulation in one particular place is habitually followed by a contraction in another particular place—if there is thus a repeated motion through some line of least resistance between these places; what must be the result as respects the line? If this line—this channel—is affected by the discharge—if the obstructive action of the tissues traversed, involves any reaction upon them, deducting from their obstructive power; then a subsequent motion between these two points will meet with less resistance along this channel than the previous motion met with, and will consequently take this channel still more decidedly. Every repetition will further diminish the resistance offered; and thus will gradually be formed a permanent line of communication, differing greatly from the surrounding tissue in respect of the ease with which force traverses it. Hence in small creatures may result rudimentary nervous connexions.” (Spencer 1937 [1862], 211–212: § 79)



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learning, and to the personal association of impressions and memories (and this he did before the age of Proustian madeleines). Another of the principles derived is that of the Rhythm of Movement, the creation of alternance and rhythm out of the composition of forces, out of repetitions, undulations, of partial—provisional—balancing of forces. As a matter of fact, if life exists at all as a form of complex order, it is because physical forces and chemical processes have come to be arranged in a complex and rhythmical way, and because there have come to exist large, complex and long-standing equilibria of forces giving rise to the appropriate ecosystems. No life is “breathed” into Spencer’s primitive living beings, which are conceived in a thoroughly materialist perspective as complex chemical packing systems for the preservation and rhythmical circulation of energy. Knowledge of natural phenomena thus rests on a physics grounded, in its turn, on the principles necessary for the rational understanding of phenomena. The task of philosophy is to elucidate the way in which diverse physical and cosmic phenomena obey a common logic, a “law of cooperation” (which G. H. Mead will later refer to as the basic sociality of physical phenomena, present at any level from the interaction of forces to the phenomenology of consciousness and cultural dynamics). “And hence in comprehending the Cosmos as conforming to this law of co-operation, must consist that highest unification which Philosophy seeks” (Spencer 1937 [1862], 486). The law Spencer wished for, a law accounting for “the continuous redistribution of matter and movement,” might be seen as realized at least in part in Einstein’s theory of relativity, specified in the formula relating energy and matter, e=mc2, although physicists are still looking for a comprehensive “theory of everything” which may account for all of the basic forces of the universe under a single physico-mathematical explanation. It eluded Einstein, and this particular key may well be kept under lock forever.7 But, beyond the problem of physical reductionism, a consilient science should account for emergent phenomena; it should be able to explain all phenomena “in their passage from the imperceptible to the perceptible, and back to the imperceptible.” This passage takes place in each of the phenomena of the universe, and also in the universe considered as a whole. The passage from nothing to everything and back to nothing is in one sense the ultimate short short story, one with a cosmic scope—a “Small History” which is also the most comprehensive

7 Readers may, however, keep abreast of recent developments in string theory, quantum gravity and other attempts at a Theory of Everything in the Wikipedia article “Theory of Everything.” See also Unger and Smolin (2015) on this issue.

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evolutionary backdrop to any narrative. It comprises the history of everything, the gradual and emergent development of all phenomena which is evolution as conceived by Spencer. Let us note in passing that the grand theoretical sweep of Spencer’s theory of evolution is not without precedent or contextual Zeitgeist. We have already mentioned Darwinism. But one might as well point out the cosmological-evolutionary theories of Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, or, immediately before Spencer, that unique seamless texture of mysticism and scientific speculation, Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka—both building bridges between traditional accounts of Creation and what can only be termed nineteenth-century versions of the Big Bang theory, long avant la lettre.8 I find a fascinating historiographic and narratological dimension in the philosophical project of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, and one much akin to the contemporary concerns with the natural and ecological contextualization of the whole of human endeavors, as expressed for instance in E. O. Wilson’s book The Social Conquest of Earth (2012). A philosophy of evolution is necessarily a global theory of the history of the universe, considered in its physical, astronomical, geological and biological aspects. It includes, too, a history of human evolution (although in First Principles Spencer avoids dealing head-on with this contentious subject). But this evolutionary conception also provides a framework—a cognitive map, or all-encompassing script—for the narratives of human history: a narrative structuring of the development of cultures and societies, and of psychological and ideological phenomena, allowing the narrative anchoring and the narrative mapping of human experience. We have had a spate of excellent documentaries on this issue, notably those by Jacques Malaterre (2003, 2007, 2011), that bear witness to a growing interest of educated audiences in the need to connect cultural history and the history of civilization with an increased awareness of the origins and the ecological significance of the human phenomenon; the success of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2015 [2011]) is another case in point. Anthropology and cultural history find their appropriate perspective within this scope, as does the more specific disciplinary study of psychological, political, economic and ideological phenomena in the various branches of the social sciences and the humanities. Any given phenomenon is understandable, on the one hand, as a manifestation of more basic principles of which it is an expression; on the other, it becomes part of a wider interactional context. Thus, the history of specific phenomena, “in their appearance and until their disappearance,” is rooted on a

8 See my article on the Big Bang before the Big Bang (García Landa 2014).



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wider history, the comprehensive framework of all effective histories. As to possible or imagined histories, they are best approached initially as culturally situated fictions or cognitive constructions within the highly specific context of human communications and cultural myths. We may use the term narrative anchoring (see García Landa 2008) to refer to the cognitive manœuvre which situates a given narrative with respect to, or within the context of, those larger and more encompassing narrative and temporal schemes which structure our large-scale interpretation of reality, such as the Christian myth from Creation to Apocalypse, or Polybius’ notion of Universal History arising as an emergent phenomenon associated with the development of the Roman Empire. Historicizing a phenomenon within the cognitive frame of modern historiography is only one specific mode of narrative anchoring, given that experience may be embedded or cognitively situated within narrative frames arising from many other cultural and cognitive activities (e. g., myths) besides modern or formal historiography. With narrative mapping I refer here (taking another, and complementary, perspective) to our awareness that the narratives we use and those we recognize in our cultural landscape are themselves historically situated within a historicized map of developing narrative modes, a historicity some aspects of which are recognized at first sight in our interpretation of culturally situated narratives (e. g., as giving rise to such aesthetic experiences as the dated, the corny or the exotic), while other aspects require much detailed contextualizing and analysis. From a philosophical standpoint, the notions of narrative anchoring and narrative mapping may be further theorized as cognitive instruments resting on the social and intersubjective nature of time experience, on the one hand, and the typification of experience on the other—concepts which may be grounded in a tradition of phenomenological reflection on the theory of social life. Some pointers in this tradition may be briefly mentioned: Edmund Husserl’s notion of the intersubjective dimension of immanent time, which gives rise to the experience of a world-time (1982 [1931], 128); Heinrich Schütz’s examination of the social nature of knowledge-schemes, which are transmitted through cultural typifications and generalizations (see López Sáenz 1994, 194); and Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s analyses of the conceptual machineries of universe-maintenance (1967 [1966], 126). The notion of an all-encompassing text of history resulting from the sum of partial historical accounts and perspectives might be traced from Polybius to J. G. Droysen or W. Dilthey…9 But basta!—given that the conceptual

9 In (2013a) I provide a perspective on Polybius from the standpoint of narrative hermeneutics. On Droysen’s Historik and Dilthey’s Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, see H. G. Gadamer’s commentary (2013 [1960], 216 ff.)

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genealogy of the concepts of narrative anchoring and narrative mapping might be traced through whole libraries and would take up many papers like this one. Suffice it to say that the narrative and time-schematic dimension of experience is already experienced at a reflexive level in the context of everyday experience, and has therefore been approached from many angles by philosophers, historians, literary scholars and social scientists who nonetheless would never have dreamt of being associated with the term narratology. There is a continuum and an overlapping of perspectives on the issue, ranging from naïve and unreflecting everyday concepts to elaborate theories couched in specialized discourses: the narratological perspective on these phenomena may bring out to the fore many narrative aspects of these cognitive modes, aspects which are insufficiently theorized, even in the most elaborate philosophical or scientific accounts. The evolutionary interpretation of historical phenomena at different levels of complexity is a project with a prominent narrative dimension, and with many implications for the theory of narrative. In analyzing a story’s narrative anchoring, we show how individual narratives are not a narratologically simple phenomenon; rather, they are made up of many narrative layers and structures: processes, anecdotes, previous histories, archetypes, interpretive frames and scripts, virtual plots and sideshadows. All of these find an anchoring through the individual narrative which articulates, uses or invokes them, but they can only do so thanks to the link provided by the general narrativity of reality—that relational character of all evolutionary phenomena, the all-encompassing frame of temporal development, which is conceptually grasped by evolutionary and consilient “Big Histories” such as the one articulated by Spencer. Every time a narrative presupposes a specific world view, a given theory of reality or a practical assumption of the way things are or are not, it is anchoring itself to such a narrative understanding of reality—or if it does not do so explicitly, we must bring that anchoring to light in order to make sense of the narrative. This is also the case every time a “grand narrative” is taken to be the background of lived or narrated experience—grand narratives such as the spread of civilization, cultural progress, rural exodus and the development of cities, industrialization, dreams of utopia, globalization—or conversely, grand narratives of crisis, impending catastrophes, ecological doom, overpopulation, global warming and collapse. Perhaps we need an updated Theory of Myths (yet another Key to All Mythologies)—a contemporary and historicized Anatomy of Criticism, to help us



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contextualize and anchor these narratives of Spring, Summer, Crisis, and Winter which are at work structuring our discourse every time we do not hold our peace.10 Michel Butor wrote that narrative “is a phenomenon which goes significantly beyond the domain of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our apprehension of reality” (1992 [1960], 7). And indeed, our understanding of reality is a narrative one; reality is for us narrative in nature, a universal story taking place before, while and after it is told. The human symbolic world is made of words and of the stories we build with them, but there is a perceptual grounding both in words and in stories which ensures that our virtual world of symbols is not arbitrarily imposed on the real world. One may say that reality is a narrative, literally so, from the moment we have a brain—a narrative generator—to understand and structure it.11 An intuitive cognitive projection of complex narrative frames is to be found in the very substance of our everyday experience as well as in the production of narrative discourses and in the activity of their interpreters and critics. Elaborate intellectual articulations of this complexity, such as the one we find in Spencer’s systematics, build on this general narrativity of our experience and communication. We perceive the world as an ongoing process of transformation and change, integrated in its complexity and diversity, made up of analogies between temporal processes and obeying observable regularities. The spontaneous analogy between the cycles of the day and of the year, the course of human life, and the stories of creation and apocalypse, is only one prominent example. The Universe, universal evolution, can be conceived, as suggested by Spencer’s philosophy, as an all-encompassing narrative (or narratable) process and as a complex multitude of narrative processes, framed within one another, embedded or sequenced in ways familiar to narratologists; processes which are classifiable or understandable through their relation to the whole. History as usually taught—that is, the history of nations and civilizations—is only a small chapter in this big history of mankind, the history of humanization, of the origin of lan-

10 Big history should provide us with tools for rethinking both the modes of repetition and of static time (habit, laws, customs, etc.) and the modes of crisis and event (transformation, conflict, epiphany, etc.)—historicizing them in a new light. More generally speaking, Frye’s poetics of myth is in for an appreciative revaluation from the standpoint of present-day evolutionary and cognitive poetics. 11 On the brain as a structuring generator of reality, see Gazzaniga (1998, 2008). See also Mellmann (2010) for a cognitive evolutionary perspective on narrative structures, and Bergen (2012) on the neurological substratum uniting language and perception. Bergen’s book may serve as an example of a consilient approach bridging the gap between the disciplines of semantics and neuroscience.

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guage, the history of the dozen extinct species of humans and proto-humans which preceded us or were driven to extinction, as happens even today to the primitive populations, cultural isolates still surviving in their ancestral mode of life and caught up in the sweep of globalizing civilization. The Big History of mankind was for Darwin a “grand sequence of events” (Darwin 2001 [1874], 249) that should be explained by evolutionary biology. And sociobiologists like E. O. Wilson have shown that our story is not just our story: it is our nature too, indelibly stamped in our being. The evolutionary perspective shows the extent to which our very bodies and minds are living narratives, historical texts made of flesh and bone, biological sediments structured by embodied history, if only we can read them. Darwin’s perspective was grand, but Spencer’s is grander; it is also much more closely argued than Nietzsche’s vision of the Eternal Return. The history of life and consciousness is only a chapter—our chapter—in the history of physical and chemical processes. And Spencer conceives the role of his evolutionary philosophy (his System of Synthetic Philosophy, as he called it) as a consilient perspective on reason and knowledge, on the natural and human sciences. It is in fact a narrative explanation of all possible phenomena in nature (and culture), from their emergence (at the beginning of the story) to their disappearance, given that nothing is eternal: If [Philosophy] begins its explanations with existences that already have concrete forms, then, manifestly, they had preceding histories, or will have succeeding histories, or both, of which no account is given. Whence we saw it to follow that the formula sought, equally applicable to existences taken singly and in their totality, must be applicable to the whole history of each and to the whole history of all. This must be the ideal form of a Philosophy, however far short of it the reality may fall. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 486: § 186)

The Universe is a complex process in which Spencer distinguishes a primary process of evolution, an “integration of matter and dissipation of movement,” as he puts it, and secondary processes accompanying it, a composite evolution: “The primary re-distribution of Matter and Motion is accompanied by secondary re-distributions” (1937 [1862], 487: § 186)—re-distributions resulting in the generation of complexity, rather than in an integration of everything into a simple universal unity. Separate wholes divided into parts are created, and there are indirect processes of integration making these parts mutually dependent, even as they become differentiated. From this primary re-distribution we were led on to consider the secondary re-distributions, by inquiring how there came to be a formation of parts during the formation of a whole. It turned out that there is habitually a passage from homogeneity to heterogeneity, along with



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the passage from diffusion to concentration. While the matter composing the Solar System has been assuming a denser form, it has changed from unity to variety of distribution. Solidification of the Earth has been accompanied by a progress from comparative uniformity to extreme multiformity. In the course of its advance from a germ to a mass of relatively great bulk, every plant and animal also advances from simplicity to complexity. The increase of a society in numbers and consolidation has for its concomitant an increased heterogeneity both of its political and its industrial organization. And the like holds of all super-organic products – Language, Science, Art, and Literature. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 488: § 187)

In any kind of phenomena, as Spencer puts it in a necessarily general formulation, we pass from a relatively diffuse, uniform and indeterminate structure to the creation of multiple, concentrated, complex and mutually integrated forms. Unless, that is, these complex forms enter a process of decay and dissolution. It is not by chance, Spencer asserts, that all disciplines of knowledge and all phenomena can be subsumed under this all-encompassing law of evolution. It works, rather, the other way round: the disciplines we use to know and classify reality are “mere conventional groupings, made to facilitate the arrangement and acquisition of knowledge,” but their ultimate object is the same cosmic evolution: “there are not several kinds of Evolution having certain traits in common, but one Evolution going on everywhere after the same manner” (1937 [1862], 490). As a matter of fact, the labor of science is to show the common grounding of the evolution of all phenomena, once we have come to know the general principle of reality as manifested in the elementary laws of physics governing matter and energy—that is, in the primary effects of the Force which has generated the universe: Analysis reduces these several kinds of effect to one kind of effect; and these several kinds of uniformity to one kind of uniformity. And the highest achievement of Science is the interpretation of all orders of phenomena, as differently conditioned manifestations of this one kind of effect, under differently-conditioned modes of this one kind of uniformity. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 498: § 194)

Spencer’s theory of complexification and dissolution has an interesting aspect related to the observability of the amount of information—one which might be further explored, though not at this point. Still, we may note in passing that the difference established here between Evolution and Dissolution is relative to the observing subject. As life and consciousness are in themselves complex phenomena, and the necessary basis on which theories of evolution must rest, the very phenomenological constitution of the subject matter leads per se to conceiving of the subject matter directionally. Complexification is positively evaluated (it is a “rising” phase of evolution), while disintegration is negatively evaluated— although, if we imaginatively suppress the material basis of our cognitive viewpoint, it’s all the same old process of evolution. And indeed, both evolution and

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dissolution, in Spencer’s theory, fall under the same explanation as effects resulting from the same causes, as a continuum in fact. We may argue that Spencer’s using two different terms, evolution as against dissolution, is invidiously “teleological,” “directionalist,” “anthropic” and other potentially nasty words from the standpoint of late twentieth-century evolutionism. Nonetheless, his theory is quite self-consciously deliberate on this point: we live in a world of objects (as a matter of fact, subjects have to be objects before they are subjects), and therefore we are keenly interested in the formation of objects, and in their dissolution—in their biography, we might say, because we ourselves are subject to the same law of evolution and dissolution that governs other things.12 Arguably, our knowledge is narrative knowledge precisely because it is not neutral with respect to the universe: the structure of our knowledge is of a piece with the evolutionary nature of the universe itself. This is perhaps the key sentence in this paper, so I will repeat it for emphasis: Our knowledge is narrative knowledge because it is not neutral with respect to the universe—the structure of our knowledge is of a piece with the evolutionary nature of the universe itself. To say that our theorizing is not merely constative or descriptive, but also performative and world-making, is an Austinian take on the same issue. What follows? Consilience. – Only connect. The understanding of narrative dynamics is therefore an essential cognitive tool in order to understand the universe and evolution. But understanding the universe and evolution, our evolution, and the evolution of our story-making ability is an essential cognitive tool in order to understand narrative.13

12 I would modify, however, the way in which Spencer formulates the relationship between evolution and dissolution to show that the mutual involvement of processes of integration and decay is much closer than his formulation would seem to suggest. I add the italicized words in the following quote: “All things are growing and/or decaying, accumulating matter and/or wearing away, integrating and/or disintegrating” (Spencer 1937 [1862], 251: § 95). 13 To put it otherwise, narrativity (and narratology) are emergent phenomena which feed back into the complex dynamics of cognition (García Landa 2010b). And this feedback takes place at many levels: from the limited system of a literary narrative to cognitive representations of the ultimate complex system which is the universe as a whole. See John Pier’s contribution to this volume for a theoretical background on complex dynamics in narrative and further reflections on its implications as regards dissipative structures and narratological theory. Ondřej Sládek distinguishes the modeling function of narratives in science as a distinct one, set off from such explanatory functions as the illustrative, historical, popularizing or didactic functions: “Modelling narratives are in this sense an integral part of theoretical and scientific concepts” (Sládek 2010, 65). Arguably, a powerful cognitive model (narrative or otherwise) also performs a legitimizing function for the discipline, which is Sládek’s sixth function of narrative in the sciences.



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Spencer explains, in an admirable feat of reasoning, just how all phenomena in the evolutionary process derive from the principle of the Conservation of Force. Any homogeneous whole to which a force is applied must lose its homogeneity: an inequality of relationships is thereby produced, and with it a differentiation of parts, to which this same process is applied recursively in phases of growing complexity, so that objects moderately heterogeneous spontaneously tend to become more and more heterogeneous. Darwin is often credited nowadays with the notion of the spontaneous emergence of order without an intelligent design. The notion actually goes far back to the Atomists, and more immediately, back to Adam Smith.14 But Spencer provides one of the most comprehensive, wide-ranging and closely argued expositions of this notion: the universe arises out of Nothing—out of undifferentiated, homogeneous Force—through a systematic application of the domino effect, the butterfly effect and the snowball effect. Mind is no exception: it is a complex outcome of evolution and is therefore to be found at the end of the process, not at the origin. Everywhere, the unintended consequences of the processes of spontaneous organization can be discerned and understood through the mental processes of retrospection. Brains and minds arose in order to prospect the environment through mental models, plans and intentions, but they have also developed, as mirror images perhaps, the ability to retrospect and to construct narratives and explanations.15 The evolution of consciousness is therefore the last chapter of this law of evolution, so that Spencer’s theory turns back reflectively (one might say Hegellike) on its own genesis. If the Universe is the product of a unified Force resulting in complex and diversified effects, Thought evolves towards an ever deeper understanding of that underlying unity and of those modes of local complexity: planets, living beings, ecological niches, social institutions, manners and fashions. Conscious thought evolves towards the consilience of the disciplines, of the modes of knowledge that account for the specific modes of complexity: it evolves,

14 On Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and the law of unintended consequences see Macfarlane (2007). See also my article on self-generated order (García Landa 2015). 15 We fast-forward at this point. Although this conception of mind and cognition is implied in Spencer’s evolutionary theory, it is only spelt out in rather more recent evolutionary thought. See for instance S. Carroll’s “Purpose and the Universe” (2013), Richard Dawkins on “The Purpose of Purpose” (2009) and, as an intermediary step between them and Spencer, G. H. Mead’s account of the origin of consciousness and mental representations in The Philosophy of the Present (Mead 2002, originally published in 1932). Peirce’s scale of semiotic complexity, from simple icons exhibiting their mere Firstness, to more complex signic structures involving Secondness and Thirdness (Peirce 1956, 105), may also be seen as a contribution to evolutionary semiosis and thus as a grounding for an evolutionary theory of consciousness.

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for instance, toward reflexivity, toward evolutionary theory and toward this book of Spencer’s, First Principles. Only in this sense may we speak of an anthropic principle in the Universe: consciousness, the product of complex human sociality and of a reflexive attitude to natural phenomena (including consciousness), tends quite spontaneously to analyze its own genesis and its own complexity and to build mental models of both nature and consciousness. It is quite another thing to suppose that a consciousness of any kind has designed the universe— that is, perhaps, the ultimate instance of hindsight bias, the mother of all narrative fallacies. An interesting passage in First Principles addresses the evolution of science and of religion and the way in which the agency of gods is a notion with a historical genesis, and with a dissolution: Towards some conception of this order [i. e., the recognition of a persistent Force as a power which transcends knowledge], inquiry, scientific, metaphysical, and theological, has been, and still is, manifestly advancing. The coalescence of polytheistic conceptions into the monotheistic conception, and the reduction of the monotheistic conception to a more and more general form, in which personal superintendence becomes merged in universal immanence, clearly shows this advance. It is equally shown in the fading away of old theories about “essences,” “potentialities,” “occult virtues,” &c.; in the abandonment of such doctrines as those of “Platonic Ideas,” “Pre-established Harmonies” and the like [one might include here Intelligent Design or the agency of a personal deity!—JAGL]; and in the tendency towards the identification of Being as present in consciousness, with Being as otherwise conditioned beyond consciousness. Still more conspicuous is it in the progress of Science, which, from the beginning, has been grouping isolated facts under laws, uniting special laws under more general laws, and so reaching on to laws of higher and higher generality; until the conception of universal laws has become familiar to it. Unification being thus the characteristic of developing thought of all kinds, and eventual arrival at unity being fairly inferable, there arises yet a further support to our conclusion. Since, unless there is some other and higher unity, the unity we have reached must be that towards which developing thought tends. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 495–96: § 192)

One might of course want to somewhat qualify this theory of the “Persistence of Force” in the age of quantum fluctuations, dark energy and baby universes (S. Carroll 2010; Aguirre 2013). But the picture is accurate enough as regards the evolution of our cosmic ecological niche, our own observable and historical universe. I have chosen Spencer’s theory not as a currently valid scientific model, but as a particularly self-conscious and well-argued instance of our trans-historical tendency to interpret individual phenomena as part of a single sequence and as deriving from first principles, a tendency which can be discerned throughout history in creation myths and in materialist philosophies alike. Moreover, Spencer warns us that his theory should not be judged by the details of the exposition, or by the limitations of nineteenth-century science, but on the basis of a general



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plan mapping out the relationship of first principles to a global and unified interpretation of phenomena in the universe. And it is at this point that we encounter Spencer’s most explicit formulation of a convergence between consilient interpretation, evolutionary theory, and narrative anchoring: If these conclusions be accepted—if it be agreed that the phenomena going on everywhere are part of the general process of Evolution, save where they are parts of the reverse process of Dissolution; then we may infer that all phenomena receive their complete interpretation only when recognized as parts of these processes. (1937 [1862], 496: § 193)

C. S. Peirce thought as much in 1891; and it is only a small step (but one that has waited more than a century to be taken) from this insight to Lee Smolin’s (2013, xxv) contention that an evolutionary framework is required at the level of elementary physical principles if the laws of physics are to be explained at all. Reading this passage of Spencer’s through the lens of some additional narrativistic awareness, we might say that consilient knowledge of a phenomenon is a narratively structured knowledge. It is knowledge of the present structure of the phenomenon and of how it relates to similar phenomena; but it is also the knowledge of its history, of its possible future, and of the interpretations it has received in the past; knowledge, therefore, which includes an account of how we have come to this knowledge. A global interpretation necessarily involves a global framework, and that is a cosmological, evolutionary framework. Every individual object has a history: we may see the whole action of the universal forces “in every grain of sand,” or recognize the way in which each object tells a story—the history of its specificity. There may be many stories around an object or phenomenon, depending on the tellers, but again, a deeper understanding must see the single story that encompasses them all. An entire history of anything must include its appearance out of the imperceptible and its disappearance into the imperceptible […]. And knowledge of it remains incomplete until it has united the past, present, and future histories into a whole. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 246: § 93)

Theodosius Dobzhansky (2001 [1973]) famously asserted that “nothing in biology makes any sense outside the theory of evolution.” We might extend this formula in order to argue that nothing makes any sense outside the theory of evolution—or if it does make sense, it is a partial, imperfect sense whose relations to the sense of other things can be fully understood only within this consilient framework.

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I have chosen Spencer as a model for consilient narratological analysis at a high level of theoretical elaboration; but we may also find in his work some insights on the conversational and garden-variety versions of narrative anchoring. Narrative mapping is not just a theoretical-philosophical activity, but also a constituent part of everyday life. We do it all the time: the narrative anchoring of stories within larger stories, and within an evolutionary and narrative conception of reality, is one of the most basic cognitive manœuvres allowing us to construct and organize a world: Our daily sayings and doings presuppose more or less such knowledge, actual or potential, of states which have gone before and of states which will come after. Knowing any man personally implies before having seen him under a shape much the same as his present shape; and knowing him simply as a man, implies the inferred antecedent states of infancy, childhood, and youth. Though the man’s future is not known specifically, it is known generally: that he will die and decay, are facts which complete in outline the changes to be gone through by him. So will all objects around. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 246: § 93)

– The great Globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. There is a theory of evolution of sorts in Shakespeare, too, as in so many places from Genesis and Gilgamesh onwards.16 Science is a powerful generator of such implied biographies for all things, as it helps explain any phenomenon as a historical phenomenon. But so does history, within its own scope, and gossip too, and literary criticism. The nineteenth century was a historicist century. And, after a structuralist twentieth century, it is salutary to gaze back to Spencer’s radically historicist theory as a reminder that there is a story in everything, and that the world, the Universe, is a story. Every single thing is a potential chronotope made of sedimented evolutionary processes; any object or practice is a unique conjunction of phenomena containing an inherent history which can be deciphered and contextualized.17 We still live in a forest of symbols—and this forest we cannot get out of, nor demythologize it. Science studies a human being, a sheep or a silkworm as beings with a life history which defines them as such, and with an evolutionary background;

16 See my note on ordo naturalis and complexity (García Landa 2009). 17 Bakhtin’s (1987 [1937–38]) discussion of the chronotope, though somewhat loosely theorized, contains many insights bearing on narrative anchoring and narrative mapping, e. g., on the conceptualization of the historicity of narrative settings and materials, showing the historicity of modes of plotting and of bringing characters together (on the road, in the salon, the castle, etc.). Settings (e. g., the castle) he conceives as resulting from congealed time and action, i. e., as “objects which tell a story” in themselves. See also my note on “objects which tell a story” (2012).



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but it also sees the evolution of their bodies, or of the materials of that man’s house, as a natural phenomenon: Not stopping short at the sheep’s back and the caterpillar’s cocoon [or the tulip’s streaks, one might add—JAGL], [Science] identifies in wool and silk the nitrogenous matters absorbed by the sheep and the caterpillar from plants [or finds in the human body the quintessence of dust from a dead star – JAGL]. The substance of a plant’s leaves, in common with the wood from which furniture is made, it again traces back to certain gases in the air and certain minerals in the soil. And the stratum of stone which was quarried to build the house, it learns was once a loose sediment deposited in an estuary or on the sea-bottom. (Spencer 1937 [1862], 247: § 93)

Thus, the Science of Everything, a consilient science, cannot but be a Story of Everything: it is a science with a prominent narrative dimension (García Landa 2013b). Evolutionary biology arose as a historical and narrative science of life in the nineteenth century. Physics, like chemistry, became narrative, it is said, in the twentieth century, but it was already a narrative and evolutionary science from Spencer’s standpoint. If, then, the past and the future of each object is a sphere of possible knowledge; and if intellectual progress consists largely, if not mainly, in widening our acquaintance with this past and this future; it is obvious that the limit towards which we progress is an expression of the whole past and the whole future of each object and the aggregate of objects. (1937 [1862], 247: § 93)

Perhaps, too, this is the only way in which so many of these objects, the unobserved and the irrelevant as well as the precious ones, may be redeemable after the death—or the historicization—of God… although such language goes beyond Spencer’s impassive perspective. Spencer’s attempt at a universal system of knowledge, his Key to the Unlocking of Everything, may seem in some respects hopelessly old-fashioned—inescapably, whiskeredly Victorian. But he recognized the extraordinary scope of this endeavor and notes that he is only pointing in the direction towards which knowledge tends, not setting the limits it may reach because of its inherent limitations. Be it as it may, twentieth-century science, whatever its methodological assumptions as regards its labor, has not ceased moving in this consilient direction, and there has not been a shortage of histories of everything, histories of Time or histories of the Universe (García Landa 2010a). More will follow, to the crack of Doom, and they will provide the backdrop to our stories of what we are, and of what we do.

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I will end with a recent reflection by E. O. Wilson, the major spokesman for present-day attempts at a consilience between the sciences and the humanities: The human condition is a product of history, not just the six millenniums of civilization but very much further back, across hundreds of millenniums. The whole of it, biological and cultural evolution, in seamless unity, must be explored for an answer to the mystery. (2013)

That seamless unity is also the unity of a narrative which must be spun and unwoven. And retold, and analyzed.

The illustration shows a scientific version of the story underlying all stories—our current narrative of the history of reality, comprising more than 13,700 million years of cosmic evolution, up to the present moment. But there’s no telling that another Big Bang might not take place within the next minute or two. Our reality is contingent, both partially predictable and ultimately unpredictable. Both dimensions require a narratological analysis. (Image courtesy of NASA/WMAP science team).

Works Cited Aguirre, Anthony. 2013. “Infinite Space, Infinite Time.” YouTube (Philosophy Cosmology) 18 June. http://youtu.be/1pvrDdCyKS0 (Accessed 28 November 2013) Aristotle. 1971 [c. 330 BC]. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher. In Critical Theory since Plato, edited by H. Adams, 47–66. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981 [1937–38]. “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel.” In M. B. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press.



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Barthes, Roland. 1977 [1966]. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” In R. B. Image-Music-Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 79–124. New York: Hill and Wang. Bergen, Benjamin K. 2012. Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann 1967 [1966]. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press-Belknap Press. Butor, Michel. 1992 [1960]. “Le roman comme recherche.” In M. B. Essais sur le roman, 7–14. Paris: Gallimard. Carroll, Joseph. 2004. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Carroll, Sean M. 2010. “The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time.” 2-part video lecture. TED (February) http://www.ted.com/talks/sean_carroll_on_the_arrow_of_time.html (Accessed 9 December 2013) Carroll, Sean M. 2013. “Purpose and the Universe.” Video lecture. YouTube (Carl Wong) 8 June. http://youtu.be/bcqd3Q7X_1A (Accessed 14 December 2013) Christian, David. 2004. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Foreword by William H. McNeill. Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press. Darwin, Charles. 2001 [1874]. From The Descent of Man. 3rd edition. In Darwin: Texts. Commentary, edited by Philip Appleman, 175–254. New York: Norton. Dawkins, Richard. 2009. “The Purpose of Purpose.” Video lecture. YouTube (Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science) 19 June. http://youtu.be/mT4EWCRfdUg (Accessed 12 December 2013) Dobzhansky, Theodosius. 2001 [1973]. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Evolution. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/10/2/text_ pop/l_102_01.html (Accessed 30 June 2013) Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2013 [1960]. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. García Landa, José Ángel. 2005. “Hindsight, Intertextuality, and Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov’s ‘Christmas’.” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 5: 267–294. Online at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1624262 (Accessed 13 June 2010) García Landa, José Ángel. 2008. “Harry Thompson, This Thing of Darkness: Narrative Anchoring / Harry Thompson, This Thing of Darkness: Anclaje narrativo.” Social Science Research Network 18 March. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1121438 (Accessed 5 December 2013) García Landa, José Ángel. 2009. “El orden natural y la complejidad: Paley, Lamarck, Vico y el Génesis.” Vanity Fea 30 March. http://garciala.blogia.com/2009/033001-el-ordennatural-y-la-complejidad-paley-lamarck-vico-y-el-genesis.php (Accessed 30 March 2009) García Landa, José Ángel. 2010a. “Historia(s) de todo.” Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 15 April. http://www.ibercampus.es/articulos.asp?idarticulo=14488 (Accessed 9 December 2013) García Landa, José Ángel. 2010b. “Emergent Narrativity.” In Linguistic Interaction in/and Specific Discourses, edited by Marta Conejero López, Micaela Muñoz Calvo and Beatriz

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Penas Ibáñez, 109–117. Valencia: Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. Philpapers. http://philpapers.org/rec/LANEN (Accessed 7 December 2013) García Landa, José Ángel. 2012. “This Object Tells a Story.” Vanity Fea 5 February. http:// vanityfea.blogspot.com/2012/02/this-object-tells-story.html (Accessed 9 December 2013) García Landa, José Ángel. 2013a. “Retroperspectiva y perspicacia: El emergentismo crítico de Polibio a Wilde.” In Otium cum dignitate, edited by J. A. Beltrán et al., 677–688. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza. SSRN http://ssrn.com/abstract=2352369 (Accessed November 2013) García Landa, José Ángel. 2013b. “Consilience and Retrospection.” Social Science Research Network 24 Oct. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2344625 (Accessed 5 December 2013) García Landa, José Ángel. 2014. “El Big Bang antes del Big Bang – en Spencer, Darwin, y Poe (The Big Bang before the Big Bang – in Spencer, Darwin, and Poe).” Social Science Research Network 10 July. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2463993 (Accessed 5 October 2014) García Landa, José Ángel. 2015. “Hágase (a sí misma) la Tierra: Sobre el Orden Autogenerado (Let the World Create Itself: On Self-Generated Order).” Social Science Research Network 15 April. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2593975 (Accessed 9 September 2015) Gazzaniga, Michael S. 1998. The Mind’s Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gazzaniga, Michael S. 2008. Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York: Harper Collins-Ecco. Harari, Yuval Noah 2015 [2011]. Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind. Translated by Yuval Noah Harari with John Purcell and Haim Watzman. London: Vintage. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit. Edited by J. N. Findlay. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press; Oxford: Clarendon Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1982 [1931]. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, 7th printing. Translated by Dorian Cairns. The Hague, etc.: Martinus Nijhoff. López Sáenz, Mª Carmen. 1994. Investigaciones fenomenológicas sobre el origen del mundo social. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Macfarlane, Alan. 2007. “3. Adam Smith (1723–1790).” (Social Anthropology). YouTube (ayabaya) 20 November. http://youtu.be/Z92pjQVgqmY (Accessed 9 December 2013) Malaterre, Jacques, dir. 2003. La odisea de la especie. Documentary film. Script by Jacques Dubuisson and Michel Fessler. Music by Yvan Cassar. Scientific director Yves Coppens (Spanish version dir. Juan Luis Arsuaga). Production France 3 / RTBF, Pixcom, Transparences Productions, 17 Juin Production, Mac Guff Ligne. France, 2002. (Los orígenes de la Humanidad, 1). Spanish DVD: Divisa Red. Malaterre, Jacques, dir. 2007. El amanecer del hombre. Documentary film. (Los Orígenes de la Humanidad, 3). 2 DVD. France 2 / Boréales / ProSieben / RTBF / Nota Bene / Motion Investment Group / NHK / Rainbow Angels / Sagrera. Malaterre, Jacques, dir. 2011. Homo sapiens. Documentary film. (Los orígenes de la Humanidad, 2). France: France 3 / Boréales / Productions Pixcom, 2004. 2 DVD. Valladolid: Divisa. Mead, George Herbert. 2002 [1932]. The Philosophy of the Present. Prefatory remarks by John Dewey. Edited with an introduction by Arthur E. Murphy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Mellmann, Katja. 2010. “Voice and Perception: An Evolutionary Approach to the Basic Functions of Narrative.” In Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 119–140. Austin: University of Texas Press. Preprint in K. Mellmann’s website. http://www.mellmann.org/preprints/Mellmann_Voice.pdf (Accessed 9 December 2013)



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Morson, Gary Saul. 1994. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. Peirce, C. S. 1891. “The Architecture of Theories.” The Monist 1 (2): 161–176. Peirce, C. S. 1956. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs. ” (From ms. c. 1897, 1910). In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by J. Buchler, 98–119. New York: Dover. Ricœur, Paul. 1986 [1984]. Time and Narrative. Vol. 2. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin-Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sládek, Ondřej. 2010. “The Role of Stories in Science and Humanities.” In Four Studies of Narrative, edited by Bohumil Fořt et al., 59–76. Prague: Institute of the Czech Literature. Smolin, Lee. 2013. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Spencer, Herbert. 1937 [1862]. First Principles. London: Watts. Spier, Fred. 2010. Big History and the Future of Humanity. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Tallis, Raymond. 2012. “A Suicidal Tendency in the Humanities.” On the Human 9 January. http://onthehuman.org/2012/01/a-suicidal-tendency-in-the-humanities/ (Accessed 1 December 2013) “Theory of Everything.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Theory_of_everything (Accessed 20 October 2014) Unger, Roberto Mangabeira and Lee Smolin. 2015. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vico, Giambattista. 1968 [1744]. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf. Wilson, Edward O. 2012. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York and London: Norton-Liveright. Wilson, Edward O. 2013. “The Riddle of the Human Species.” New York Times (Opinionator) 24 February. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/the-riddle-of-the-humanspecies/ (Accessed 1 December 2013) Wilson, Edward O. 2014. “3. Consilience: The Role of Human Nature in the Emergence of Social Artifacts.” In Predicting the Future in Science, Economics and Politics, edited by Frank Whelon Wayman et al. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. http://t.co/2Tqci5lGE0 (Accessed 12 November 2014)

Roy Sommer (Wuppertal)

The Future of Narratology’s Past: A Contribution to Metanarratology 1 Introduction In his survey of postcolonial narratology, Gerald Prince (2005, 379) suggests that “[t]he future of narratology lies partly in its past.” Diachronic accounts of narratology seem to agree that postclassical approaches to narrative are indeed indebted to their classical predecessors in many ways. But what exactly is the legacy of structuralism? What kind of future do we envisage for narratology? And what part of the future of narratology does not lie in its past? Another way of looking at the potential of narratology is to situate it in the wider context of cross-disciplinary narrative research.1 Is it really true that “narratology is increasingly appealed to as a master discipline,” as Monika Fludernik (2005, 47) observes? Or should we rather subscribe to the more sceptical view held by Matti Hyvärinen (2006), who argues that other disciplines use concepts of narrative differently from narratology? The ongoing boom in cross-disciplinary narrative research does not necessarily increase the popularity of narrative theory or narratology. A discussion of the emerging vectors of narratology provides an excellent forum for posing such questions, which may contribute to what has been termed a consolidation of postclassical narratology (Alber and Fludernik 2010; Sommer 2012). This essay is an attempt to reconsider the narratological enterprise from the vantage points of epistemology and the philosophy of science. These provide equally suggestive and enigmatic concepts such as knowledge, induction, deduction, abstraction, paradigms and progress that may be helpful in compiling narratological profiles apt to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of competing,

1 Narrative research (Erzählforschung) is used here as a cross-disciplinary umbrella term that subsumes a wide range of scholarly approaches to narrative in literary studies, linguistics, sociology and other disciplines; it is also used, however, to designate transdisciplinary or even postdisciplinary work that transcends disciplinary boundaries, establishing new fields of inquiry by linking the study of narrative systematically to the study of culture, mind, memory and identity. Narrative research can be defined very broadly as a collaborative effort to generate new and relevant systematic knowledge within a given discipline, field or epistemic community, or in cross-disciplinary collaborative projects. This understanding of narrative research as an umbrella term (as used at the Center for Narrative Research at the University of Wuppertal) is broader than notions of narrative research in the social sciences (cf. Andrews et al. 2016 [2008]). DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-027

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or complementary, ways of theorizing narrative. It goes without saying that these terms have to be used more loosely in literary theory than in philosophy; yet they still retain considerable analytical value. Epistemology and the philosophy of science may serve as a mirror which helps narratology to see what it is by showing what it is not. I will focus on two aspects of the legacy of classical narratology which seem crucial for the ways narrative theorists imagine the future of their field. The first aspect concerns the kind of knowledge and insights we may expect not only from narrative, but also from narrative theory. The oscillation between intuitive and abstract knowledge, which I think is constitutive of narratological reasoning, has thus far not been sufficiently acknowledged. The second aspect is the relationship between narratological approaches that restrict themselves to studying narrative fiction and those that theorize both fictional and nonfictional narratives. This also concerns the question of conceptual integration between narrative theory and other theoretical discourses in literary and cultural studies, on the one hand, and between theoretical and empirical approaches to narrative, on the other.

2 Narrative Theory and Knowledge Narratologists have often pointed out that the term narrative is linked etymologically not only with storytelling but also with knowledge.2 Storytellers have something to tell, something that needs to be told, something they know and wish to share. They possess both exclusive knowledge and the skills to convey that knowledge in ways that delight and teach. Such an emphatic understanding of the storyteller is usually reserved for authors of fiction. But the epistemological value of narrative also pervades the more mundane contexts of conversational narratives and the diverse forms of strategic narration from commercial advertising to political propaganda, not to mention the discourses of law, journalism and

2 The Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere reminds us that narrare is derived from the adjective gnarus, which refers both to having knowledge of a thing and to being skilful: “The research centre thus approaches narrative as a mode of knowing, as a socially and culturally conditioned practice of sense-making, and as an art, exploring how different kinds of narratives construct social reality and shape and transform our ways of seeing the world” (see http://www.uta.fi/ltl/en/narrare/about.html; accessed 19 March 2016). See also Prince (1982, 60).



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medicine. Culturalist and cognitive approaches have therefore theorized the epistemic functions of narrative as a “cultural way of worldmaking” (Nünning 2010). While the manifold links between narrative and knowledge are thus well-established, the ways current narrative theories produce knowledge about the forms and functions, contexts and uses of narrative have so far received hardly any attention.3 Epistemological and methodological issues are usually confined to the margins of narratological work such as prefaces, introductions and footnotes. Metanarratology encourages systematic reflection on epistemological positions, conceptual and terminological preferences and methodological choices in theoretical, empirical, experimental and qualitative approaches to narrative. Such a discourse could fill the gap left by the structuralist school of thought which is no longer the dominant cognitive template it used to be during the classical phase of narratology. By looking at different ways of theorizing narrative and of engaging empirically with the forms and effects of storytelling, metanarratological reflection helps to answer the deceptively simple question, first raised by Mieke Bal in 1990: What’s the point of narratology? Interestingly, epistemology rarely discusses knowledge production in the humanities while scientific knowledge and methods of generating such knowledge are a major concern. Moreover, the philosophy of science restricts its use of concepts like paradigm and paradigmatic research to discussions of the natural sciences, with occasional references to the social sciences, while the humanities are largely ignored. This scientific bias of epistemology and the philosophy of science reflects the emergence of dominant structures of epistemic authority which, in science-oriented societies, support the notion of the “two cultures” (Snow 1959). As Thomas G. Pavel points out, scholarship in the humanities follows its own rules: “Every discipline develops its own culture, but the human sciences, not having been governed by harsh or explicit rules like medieval theology or modern science, are fashioned more intimately by the acceptance of informal agreements, savoir-vivre and intellectual tact” (1989 [1988], 23). A comparative epistemology will not efface existing boundaries between theoretical, empirical and experimental methodologies, but it might help to sharpen the profile of narratological work among the diversity of approaches involved in narrative research and to reflect on the potentials and limits of knowledge transfer, especially between the

3 I use the terms ‘form’ and ‘function’ in their classical, narratological sense (i. e., to designate textual structures and strategies) whereas ‘context’ and ‘use’ are reserved for what Herman (2009) calls, respectively, the ‘situatedness’ of narrative and the ‘culturally and socially determined practices of storysharing’ (i. e., pragmatic aspects).

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cognitive sciences and narrative theory. This is a collaborative project for a future metanarratology to which this programmatic essay can only make a preliminary contribution. For present purposes, it will suffice to assume that literary narratology, like its empirical and experimental counterparts, is capable of producing, and indeed seeks to produce, new and relevant knowledge, albeit under specific conditions and in specific ways. My working hypothesis is that the specific situation of narrative theory is characterized by a productive convergence of two distinct kinds or sources of knowledge.4 On the one hand, intuitive knowledge is acquired individually through aesthetic experience in the process of reading a book or watching a film (one should also consider the impact of re-reading, second viewings and teaching narratives, questions which are all but neglected in most concepts of model audiences). On the other hand, abstract and systematic knowledge is produced collectively by theorizing intuitive knowledge in terms of narrative and narrativity. This process involves, among other things, the description, definition and classification of salient features of narrative, the creation of models of narrative structures, and the explication of terms that allow us to communicate as unambiguously as possible about aesthetic experiences and the conceptual systems devised through abstraction. This double structure of narratological knowledge and the hermeneutics of individual and collaborative knowledge production differ from epistemological accounts of scientific knowledge in one crucial respect. The philosophy of science acknowledges that intuition may play a key role in scientific discoveries, a stage in scientific research that is traditionally referred to as context of discovery. Scientific intuition has no value of its own, but is only considered as an initial, and somewhat mysterious, stage in the germination of new hypotheses, theories or methods. From a literary perspective, however, the aesthetic experience is valued independently from the knowledge it may help to produce. There is always an element of l’art pour l’art in narratological abstractions, since such abstractions are drawn in part from intuitive knowledge. Narrative theory can possibly contribute to understanding the process of reading, viewing or listening to narratives (though this is arguably a side effect rather than its main goal), but it never replaces aesthetic experience. What philosophical concepts of knowledge and knowledge generation are available to a metanarratology that seeks to theorize the productive tensions and

4 An exception to this rule is a purely deductive approach that creates sample sentences in linguistic fashion in order to devise a narratological theory that is conceptually independent from, but claims to account for all, individual narratives (cf. Prince 1982).



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convergences between intuition and abstraction? An alternative to JTB theory (for the standard definition of knowledge as Justified True Belief, see Pritchard 2014 [2006], 23) is the concept of ‘situated knowledge’, originally developed in feminist epistemology (cf. Anderson 2015). Situated knowledge proceeds from the assumption that people stand in different relations to other knowers, to existing knowledge and to the object they seek to understand. Factors determining the specific relationships between situated knowers and the objects under investigation include 1) embodiment, 2) access to bodily and mental states as well as phenomenological facts about these states (first-person vs. third-person), 3) emotions, attitudes, interests and values, 4) personal knowledge of others, 5) knowhow, 6) cognitive styles, 7) background beliefs and worldviews and 8) relations to other inquirers. These factors are believed to be sources of tacit, incompletely articulated and intuitive knowledge that also enable individual knowers to produce specific propositional knowledge. Elizabeth Anderson’s concepts of individual, situated knowers and their specific access to knowledge tie in well with Teun A. van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to discourse and knowledge, which examines the ways discourses “presuppose, imply, convey and produce old or new knowledge” (2014, 22). Although van Dijk’s focus is on the relationship of personal to social knowledge,5 emphasizing the relativity of natural knowledge, his way of defining the shared beliefs of epistemic communities nicely complements a ‘situated’ analysis of scholarly and, more specifically, narratological discourses. Considering narratology as a discourse, or rather a web of several distinct but potentially related or relatable discourses produced by situated knowers with specific intuitions who share the aim of producing more abstract forms of knowledge, provides a good starting point for discussing the process of generating new and relevant knowledge about narratives.

5 van Dijk defines social knowledge as “the shared beliefs of an epistemic community, justified by contextually, historically and culturally variable (epistemic) criteria of reliability. This implies that a community may use, presuppose and define knowledge as ‘true belief’ what members of another community or period may deem to be ‘mere’ or ‘false’ belief, ideology, prejudice or superstition” (2014, 21).

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3 Narratological Ways of Reasoning and Backward Compatibility In the history of narratology, narrative as an abstract entity has been conceptualized in various ways: as a semiotic system, a text or discourse type, a mode of representation, a form of communication or, if viewed from a cognitive angle, a way of sense-making or world-making. Proceeding from such general premises, narratological approaches have developed more constrained descriptions of narrative as a specific text type, as a verbal, auditory or visual representation, a fictional or non-fictional form of communication; and they have proposed heuristic frameworks for theorizing cognitive parameters in order to further our understanding of how we make sense of narratives. This is not to say that narratological reasoning is wholly deductive: in practice, aesthetic experiences and individual preferences influence conceptual and terminological decisions (this is especially true for approaches that limit themselves to the analysis of narrative fiction). However, narratology has always sought to reconcile intuition and abstraction in a systematic way. For this reason, narratological theory design traditionally starts with definitions of narrative that allow us to deduce further hypotheses, develop models and propose terminologies in order to produce systematic knowledge about the forms and functions of narrative. It should be noted that classical narratology, as the systematic study of narrative representations, always provides nominal rather than real definitions. These do not aim to capture the distinctiveness of specific (sets of) narratives, but mainly serve to distinguish narrative from non-narrative and anti-narrative (cf. Prince 2005, 373). The term narrative thus signifies an abstraction, an idea of what constitutes a narrative. New narratological definitions of narrative are usually designed in such a way that they remain ‘backward’ compatible with existing definitions. David Herman (2009), for instance, integrates structuralist notions of temporality and eventfulness into his new concept of event sequencing but adds further defining features of narrative (situatedness, worldmaking/world-disruption and qualia) which become more or less salient, depending on which profile of narrative is foregrounded in the analysis. Similarly, Matías Martínez (forthcoming) proposes a construction kit approach to defining narrative, distinguishing between necessary conditions and optional features, a procedure successfully employed in genre theory. Herman’s and Martínez’s definitions remain backward compatible, but they also possess a high degree of ‘forward’ compatibility, since they acknowledge the transgeneric and transmedial dimensions of narrative and the gradient nature



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of characteristic features.6 It is likely, therefore, that their definitions of narrative will remain compatible with future reconceptualizations of narrative (or will make it easier for future narratologists to achieve backward compatibility). The significance of backward compatibility is even acknowledged by new approaches that seek to distance themselves from existing theories of narrative. The most prominent example of such a project is unnatural narratology, a narrative theory that claims to offer “a radical reconception of narrative that goes well beyond any existing paradigm” (Richardson 2015, xvi).7 In the preface to Unnatural Voices (2006), the book that initiated the current debate, Brian Richardson criticizes the alleged mimetic bias of most contributions to narrative theory and rejects the deductive principles of classical narratology, making the case for an inductive approach.8 This is not the place to engage in detail with the rhetoric and logic of unnatural narrative theory or with its development since 2006.9 What is more relevant from a metanarratological angle is how conceptual innovation can be reconciled with the narratological principle of backward compatibility. In his most recent book, Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (2015), Richardson himself no longer explicitly advocates an inductive approach based on empirical evidence. Instead, he proceeds from a generic distinction between two kinds of narrative fiction that links narrative to mimesis. He thus seeks to move beyond what he calls the “single basic model of narrative”: “Almost all traditional narratologists, including the more inclusive ones, have a single basic model of narrative; my position differs from theirs insofar as I strongly advocate a dual or oscillating conception of narrative, one mimetic, the other antimimetic” (Richardson 2015, xvi).

6 The latter is particularly important for Herman (2009, 6), whose understanding of narrative proceeds from a strong premise, namely “that there are modes of representation that are prototypically narrative.” However, this claim is rendered less controversial by Herman’s contention that the basic elements of narrative are mostly “gradient (i. e., they operate by degrees) rather than binarized” (15): “[T]he gradient nature of these elements or properties helps account for variations in the degree of goodness-of-fit between the text-type category ‘narrative’ and representations or artifacts that may be more or less prototypically story-like” (15). 7 For a survey of recent developments in unnatural narratology, see Brian Richardson’s contribution to this volume. 8 See Richardson (2006, ix): “This is an empirical study that describes and theorizes the actual practices of significant authors, instead of building on a priori linguistic or rhetorical categories; such an inductive approach is essential because many extreme forms of narration seem to have been invented precisely to transgress fundamental linguistic and rhetorical categories.” 9 For a critical response to unnatural narratology, see Fludernik (2012). A special issue of Style is devoted to Richardson’s approach; it includes my critique of the inductive logic of unnatural narratology (cf. Sommer 2016).

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The question, then, is not so much whether a theory of narrative can function without a priori categories, but rather what these categories might be: what premises does narratological theorizing proceed from, and what kinds of knowledge does it seek to produce? In some contexts, narratology may appear too reductive, and has in the past often been considered “guilty of repressing other concerns” (Bal 1990, 730).10 Unnatural narratology shifts the focus from identifying features shared by all practices and artefacts commonly defined as narratives to specific kinds of literature: to antimimetic, postmodern or experimental literary texts. By doing so, it encourages us to reconsider the boundaries between theories of narrative and theories of fiction, genre theory and poetics. How can we distinguish theories of narrative from other theoretical and interpretive approaches to literary fiction? Does the unnatural take on narrative imply that we should abandon the structuralist and cognitivist project of developing a single coherent and unified theory of narrative worldmaking, both in literature and in everyday conversational storytelling?11 What is really at stake here is the quest for a new postclassical consensus on the aims and reach of narrative theory, the role of literary criticism and poetics for narratology and the relevance of backward and forward compatibility with existing and future models of narrative. Such reflection requires a comparative approach to narratological ways of reasoning. Systematic metanarratological evaluation of complementary, alternative or competing ways of theorizing narrative might begin by analysing the use of technological and other metaphors in narratological discourse (oscillation would be a strong candidate). It should also offer a critical review of the types of inference most frequently employed by scholars of narrative, and at the same time explore the balance of intuition and abstraction in narratological theory design. Finally, given the current transitional phase of narratology, the relevance of scientific concepts like paradigm, innovation and progress for research in literary studies needs to be examined. As stated in the introduction, epistemology, logic and the philosophy of science, concepts we frequently employ without specifying how our understanding of them differs from established uses, should not force us to conform to the theoretical and methodological ideals of other disciplines. Instead, they should

10 Bal sums up this argument as follows: “Once the relation of entailment between narrativity and narrative objects is abandoned, there is no longer any reason to privilege narratology as an approach to texts traditionally classified as narratives. Instead, other approaches may be better equipped to account for those aspects of narrative texts that have traditionally been under-illuminated, partly because of the predominance of a text-immanent, structuralist approach” (1990, 730). 11 See, for instance, Fludernik (1996) and Herman (2013).



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allow us to explore if, how and why narratological theorizing is different and why, despite the heterogeneity of postclassical narrative theory and its disaffection with its classical predecessor, it is still the centripetal force of structuralism that prevents the field from disintegrating: structuralism is a modular paradigm which encourages not only what philosophers of science call normal research, but also facilitates ‘sideways’ compatibility and thus invites exploration of the interfaces with related (or rather, relatable) conceptual frameworks.

4 Modularity, Sideways Compatibility and Interfacing: Defining Features of Future Theories of Narrative? According to Thomas S. Kuhn, who introduced the concept of paradigm into the philosophy of science, normal science is firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that a specific scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. Such achievements have to be sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity (cf. Kuhn 2012 [1962], 15). “To be accepted as a paradigm,” Kuhn continues, “a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted” (18).12 Most narrative theorists today would readily agree that structuralist narratology is unable to fully explain narrative, and few would insist that it is, in Kuhn’s sense, “better than its competitors.” But what are its competitors? Can rhetoric and ethics, gender and postcolonialism or cultural and cognitive theories be said

12 Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, derived from the Greek word paradeigma (example), is notoriously underdefined, referring either to a field, a theory or a research programme. It can also mean a disciplinary matrix answering epistemological questions or a set of exemplars that serve to introduce aspiring scientists to their discipline (cf. Ladyman 2002, 100). Kuhn has often been criticised for this lack of terminological precision, although one might also argue that this underdefinition accounts for the interdisciplinary success of the term, often used in literary studies to describe well-established approaches such as postcolonialism or gender. Although Kuhn’s own work is clearly limited to the natural sciences, especially physics, its heuristic value for the humanities and social sciences in general, and narrative research in particular, should not be underestimated. By explaining why and to what effect scientific theories are proposed, Kuhn creates a template that can be a useful starting point for a metanarratological study of principles of theory design.

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to compete with structuralism? What happened to the structuralist paradigm? Have we really witnessed a paradigm shift from structuralism to cultural studies (cf. Fludernik 2005)? The structuralist school of thought (cf. Pavel 1989 [1988]) is not a unifying paradigm in Kuhn’s sense (i. e., one that is based on a universally accepted theory and defines what normal science is supposed to do), but one that has successfully managed to reconcile backward compatibility with expansion and evolution. The difference between these two kinds of paradigms is partly a consequence of the intuitive dimension of knowledge in literary studies (there are systemic and pragmatic reasons, too). Theorists of narrative often have an aesthetic preference for specific genres, periods, authors or modes of writing, or they hold ideological and ethical convictions that inform their specific take on narrative. Individual scholars not only have to reconcile conflicting research interests; they must also be aware that not all fields are deemed equal in literary studies: for many, history and interpretation hold sway over theory. Moreover, narrative scholars are usually engaged in teaching literature, which means that more esoteric research questions pursued in foundational theoretical work may conflict with the more mundane demands of undergraduate or graduate courses (this rather sobering experience is also shared by scientists). These tensions are not new, and they have been addressed in various ways. In her now classical survey of the state of the art in 1990, Mieke Bal discusses three scenarios:13 Today’s options seem to be either regression to earlier positions (Genette 1983), primary focus on application, or rejection of narratology. All three are problematic: Regression demonstrates a powerlessness to move on; application may imply an unwarranted acceptation of imperfect theories; and rejection, while motivated by a shift in priorities, is also a denial of the importance of the questions—rather than the answers—of narratology, and sometimes even a lack of understanding. (728–729)

Bal’s diagnosis of the reasons why scholars thought of abandoning the narratological project in the late 1980s (rejection, a shift towards applications, or the denial of relevance) seems to anticipate current disaffection with the perceived limitations of structuralist narratology. One thing has changed, however: experience now tells us that narrative theorists tend to return to structuralist narratology despite its limitations. All historical accounts of the transition from classical to postclassical narratology agree that textual and contextual, structural and cognitive, formal and rhetorical approaches coexist quite happily. Why is this so?

13 For a more recent comment on the future of narratology, cf. Bal (2016).



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Why haven’t narrative scholars long since abandoned the structuralist paradigm, moving on to new pastures? The reason is that structuralism and its main ‘competitors’—rhetoric, ethics, mind/brain, postcolonialism, gender, identity, memory and culture—are not in fact competing or even incommensurable, but highly compatible paradigms. What all approaches to narrative have in common is that they employ or—in the case of cognitive narratology, at least conceptualize—analytical procedures which Susan S. Lanser (2016, 83) describes as “reading form”: “It’s astonishing what one can learn from reading form—which is why I make such a strong case for narratology.” Whenever a fresh take on reading form is proposed, even if it is labelled as a new paradigm, compatibility with the structuralist paradigm is emphasized in principle. Thus, Richardson (2016) stresses that he is not offering “an alternative paradigm so much as another, complementary one.” Similarly, James Phelan (2011) attempts to establish a rhetorical conception of narrative discourse that criticises Seymour Chatman’s well-established model of story and discourse, the “mother’s milk of narratology” (64), but he doesn’t seek to replace it: “We need not completely wean ourselves from the story/discourse distinction, but we should replace the belief that it contains some immutable truth about narrative with an understanding that the distinction is a sometimes helpful—and sometimes not so helpful—heuristic” (65). This quality of postclassical approaches that challenge, revise and supplement existing models without questioning their raison d’être and rendering them obsolete adds a fourth, and indeed new, scenario to Bal’s three prototypical responses to the limits of narratology. The terms that best describe postclassical ways of dealing with the structuralist heritage are paradigm expansion or paradigm evolution. The former emphasizes the process of revision while the latter highlights the opposition to Kuhn’s notion of revolutionary paradigm shifts, in other words, the emergence of theories that fundamentally change the premises and practices of a discipline. Paradigm evolution allows us to describe progress in narrative theory in terms of continuities and of backward, forward and sideways compatibilities. Sideways compatibility is based on the realization that narrative theory can never explain everything that needs to be explained about fictional or factual narratives. Indeed, the narratological community is convinced that other paradigms benefit from, or maybe even depend on theories of narrative in order to develop their own potential. The high degree of sideways compatibility of concepts and models inspired by structuralism, and the fact that structuralist narratology is not tied to specific artefacts or ideological positions, may be the reason why they

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seem to have a longer life cycle than other concepts and paradigms:14 they can, with very few restrictions, be combined with other concepts in a modular manner. One question remains, however: how can we explain that narrative theorists find it less problematic now than in the 1980s to combine structuralist narratology with other paradigms? I agree with John Pier that “[t]he single most decisive factor in the rise of the new paradigms for the study of narrative is the integration of context into narrative theory and analysis” (2011, 338).15 Thanks to Lanser’s pioneering work and Ansgar Nünning’s explorations of the semantics of narrative structure,16 the pursuit of narrative theory no longer forces us to choose between politics and form, but rather encourages us to explore the ideological dimensions of narrative. Instead of suppressing the desire to make (subjectively) more meaningful or relevant statements, narratologists today can link the study of narrative with postcolonial, feminist or queer discourses or with the key concepts of cultural theory.

14 The technological metaphor of the life cycle may be helpful in evaluating the epistemic and pragmatic functions of concepts in literary studies. Successful proposals, followed by an initial gestation period, are first appreciated and then institutionalized (the growing number of narratological research centres and networks indicates that narrative has reached this phase). The increase in symbolic capital associated with the concept may lead to its appropriation and, finally, trivialization, as occurs, for instance, in the exploitation of storytelling as a marketing tool or the use of the terms ‘story’ and, increasingly, ‘narrative’ in non-academic contexts that ultimately render them meaningless. The scholarly community can then choose to reconsider and recycle the concept, or adopt an alternative proposal. 15 Pier (2011) also reminds us that the division between classical and postclassical narratologies mainly concerns Anglo-American narrative theory and is not entirely relevant for French narratology. See also Claude Calame’s contribution to this volume, which provides a critique of the classical-postclassical paradigm from the francophone perspective. This is not the place to discuss such cross-cultural and cross-border aspects further, but they should certainly play a more prominent role in future surveys and histories of narrative theory. 16 Lanser’s study The Narrative Act (1985) paved the way for contextual narratology. In order to fully appreciate the novelty of this approach, one should reread Chatman’s (1990) criticism of “contextualism.” Nünning has published numerous contributions outlining his take on the links between culture, mentalities and narrative. Here, I refer to his (2013) insightful critique of the relationship of theories of narrative and culture in a German collection of articles devoted to culture, knowledge and narration.



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5 Conclusion What should we learn from the past of narratology, and how can epistemology, logic and the philosophy of science help us understand the nature of the narratological endeavour? The ‘science of narrative’ never intended to establish scientific procedures such as proposing testable hypotheses and making predictions. Narrative theories are not designed to be falsified, nor can they be confirmed (unlike the recent empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves), but they will continue to refine existing ways of defining and studying narrative across genres and media. Narrative theory ideally combines both deductive and inductive ways of reasoning in innovative ways, and is well advised to steer clear of both extremes. A purely deductive account of narrative may work, as Prince (1982) has demonstrated, but will yield results that many narrative scholars will find too technical or even pointless, as it neglects the intuitive dimension of narratological knowledge, drawn from aesthetic experience. This explains why the majority of narratologists are sceptical of restrictive proposals to separate narrative theory from interpretation, if only for heuristic purposes. On the other hand, giving up deductive reasoning in favour of inductive approaches is likely to lead to a fallacy, since it (implicitly) introduces a hidden a priori (cf. Sommer 2016). And thus we move from the lessons learnt from the past to the present. Just as we have to distinguish narrative from non-narrative or anti-narrative in order to be able to propose a nominal definition of the domain of narratology, so we are well advised, against current pan-fictionalist tendencies,17 to continue to distinguish between the related but distinct theoretical frameworks of narrative theory, genre theory and fictionality theory. This does not mean that one shouldn’t continually challenge and transcend the boundaries of theories, fields and disciplines. Cognitive approaches to narrative are an excellent example of how cross-disciplinary conceptual transfer can bring about a reconceptualization of old problems of reception theory: the earlier theory does not necessarily become obsolete, but the insights gained from cognitive approaches may provide more satisfactory explanations for the processes and, possibly, purposes of narrative comprehension and sense-making, if not for aesthetic experience as such. Challenge, modify, revise: this is the path towards the narratological equivalent of normal science, in other words, theoretical and analytical work conducted under a commonly accepted paradigm. Such a modified structuralism puts emphasis on backward compatibility and promises a fairly high degree of forward

17 For a critical survey, see Klein and Martínez (2009, 7); cf. also Ryan (1997).

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compatibility, too, while at the same time facilitating interfaces with other paradigms. These paradigms provide new input and new ways of reading form, and thus contribute to paradigm development, and eventually paradigm evolution. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (2012, 30) have called themselves committed pluralists, and this seems the best way to think of the relationship between postclassical narratologies: theorize and let theorize, but don’t forget that narrative theory and interpretation, to quote Phelan once again, “are both collective enterprises” (2005, xi). As Lanser (2016, 83) reminds us, “the future of narratology will be what we make it. Or, to be more precise: what you, the younger generations, make it.” Every generation of scholars will bring something new to the table—new experiences and questions that will inform the ways we design our theories. However, narrative theorists will also have to come to terms with the pragmatic pressures of innovation, originality and visibility, increasingly also felt in the humanities. While a certain degree of rhetoric, repetition and reinvention seems inevitable, as competition in the narratological market increases, there is no doubt that the magic forces of stories and the manifold forms and functions of storytelling and storysharing in narrative communities will keep us busy for years to come. The life cycle of narratology is far from complete. The chances are high that narrative will be a sustainable concept.

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Prince, Gerald. 2005. “On a Postcolonial Narratology.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., 372–381. Pritchard, Duncan. 2014 [2006]. What is This Thing Called Knowledge? London and New York: Routledge. Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Richardson, Brian. 2015. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Richardson, Brian. 2016. “Unnatural Narrative Theory.” Style 50 (4): 385–405. Ryan Marie-Laure. 1997. “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality.” In Narrative 5 (2): 165–187. Snow, C. P. 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Sommer, Roy. 2012. “The Merger of Classical and Postclassical Narratologies and the Consolidated Future of Narrative Theory.” DIEGESIS: Interdisciplinary E-Journal of Narrative Research 1 (1): 143–157. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:468-20121121-124341-0 (Accessed 18 July 2016) Sommer, Roy. 2016. “Unnatural Fallacy? The Logic of Unnatural Narrative Theory.” Style 50 (4): 405–409.

Notes on Contributors Jan Alber is Professor of English Literature and Cognition at RWTH Aachen University. He is the author of Narrating the Prison (2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016). He has received fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the German Research Foundation and the Humboldt Foundation. In 2013, the German Association of University Teachers of English awarded him the prize for the best Habilitation written between 2011 and 2013. Between 2014 and 2016, he worked as a COFUND (Marie-Curie) Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark. Alber is President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN). E-mail: [email protected] Raphaël Baroni is Professor of French at the University of Lausanne and co-founder of the Réseau romand de narratologie (RRN) and of the Groupe d’étude sur la bande dessinée (GrEBD). He is the author of La tension narrative (2007), L’œuvre du temps (2009) and Les rouages de l’intrigue (2017). He has published numerous articles in journals such as Narrative, Image [&] Narrative, Semiotica, Poétique, Littérature and Questions de communication. He is co-editor of several anthologies and journal issues, among them, Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology (2016). E-mail: [email protected] Natalya Bekhta is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen and a visiting scholar at Helsinki University, where she is working on a project called “Imagining Alternative Worlds: Spectres and Saviours in Semi-Peripheral Literature” and on the manuscript of her book, We-Narratives: Plural Narrators and Untypical Narrative Situations in Contemporary Fiction. E-mail: [email protected] Nora Berning is General Manager of the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS) at the University of Mannheim and a co-opted member of the ENN Steering Committee. She is a co-founder and past postdoctoral member of the editorial board of On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture and has published numerous articles and book chapters on ethical narratology and literary non-fiction. She is a guest-editor of a special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies on narrative and narcissism. E-Mail: [email protected] Matthias Brütsch is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Film Studies of the University of Zurich. He has published a book on oneiric narration and the function of dreams in film (Traumbühne Kino, 2011) and a number of articles on film narratology and dramaturgy. Recent publications include “Irony, Retroactivity, and Ambiguity: Three Kinds of ‘Unreliable Narration’ in Literature and Film” (in Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness, ed. Vera Nünning, 2015) and “When the Past Lies Ahead and the Future Lags Behind: Backward Narration in Film, Television, and Literature” (in (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, ed. Julia Eckel et al., 2013). E-mail: [email protected] Claude Calame is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he directs the Centre AnHiMA: Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques. He has also taught at the Universities of Urbino and of Lausanne and at Yale University. In English he has published The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece (Cornell UP, 1995), The Poetics DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-028

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of Eros in Ancient Greece (Princeton UP, 1999), Masks of Authority: Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Poetics (Cornell UP, 2005), Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece (Harvard UP, 2009) and Greek Mythology. Poetics, Pragmatics and Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2009). E-mail: [email protected] Marco Caracciolo is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. His work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters (2016); A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; 2016). E-mail: [email protected] Paul Dawson is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction (2013) and of Creative Writing and the New Humanities (2005). Dawson is winner of the 2010 prize for Best Essay in Narrative, and his first book of poems, Imagining Winter (2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry award in Australia. E-mail: [email protected] José Ángel García Landa (MA Brown University, Ph. D. University of Zaragoza) is Professor of English at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, University of Zaragoza. He has co-edited a Longman Critical reader on Narratology (1996) and the volumes Gender, I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film (1992) and Semiosphere of Narratology (2013). He is the author of Samuel Beckett y la Narración Reflexiva, of Acción, Relato, Discurso (1998) and of more than a hundred academic papers, book chapters and blogs. He is a past editor of the journal Miscelánea and is the current editor of A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology. Further information and online papers are available at http://www.garcialanda.net E-mail: [email protected] Cécile Guédon is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University (July 2015–June 2018). She was previously a post-doctoral Research Associate in the Romance Languages and Literatures / Visual and Environmental Studies Departments at Harvard University (August 2014–June 2015), and prior to that a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Intermediality at the University of Groningen (September 2012–July 2014). She was awarded her PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies in July 2014 (London Consortium, Birkbeck College, under the supervision of Daniel Albright, Harvard University, and Steven Connor, Cambridge University). Her monograph Abstraction in Motion: A Choreographic Approach to Modernism is currently under review (2017). She is a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed journal Evental Aesthetics (UCLA/University of Southern California). E-mail: [email protected] Per Krogh Hansen is Head of the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark and founder of The Center for Narratological Studies. He has published on a great variety of literary and narratological concepts (character, narration, unreliable narrators, metafiction, realism, fairy tales) and has studied literature and film as well as corporate communication, musicals and news broadcasting. Per Krogh Hansen has edited many books, the



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latest being Beyond Classical Narration. Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges (with Jan Alber, 2014). He is a past chairman of the ENN Steering Committee (2011–2013). E-mail: [email protected] Manja Kürschner received her Ph. D. in English Literature from Kiel University, having also studied in Montreal. Her research interests include the relation between philosophy and literature, narratology and historiography. She has published several articles in these areas. At Kiel University, she has taught courses in English and American literature, culture and didactics. E-mail: [email protected] Karin Kukkonen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She is an elected member of the ENN Steering Committee. She works in the fields of cognitive narratology, cognitive poetics and transmedial narratology. Among her publications are Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (2017). For the Narratologia series, she has edited the volume Metalepsis in Popular Culture (2011) together with Sonja Klimek. Email: [email protected] Silke Lahn works as an academic employee at Hamburg University, where she is a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narratology. She is the co-author with Jan Christoph Meister of Einführung in die Erzähltextanalyse (3rd ed., 2016; includes articles by nine other narratologists). Her research interests include Austrian literature around 1900, German post-war literature, unreliable narration, fic/fac/tionality and general narratology. E-mail: [email protected] Huaiyu Luo is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the English Department at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology and also a guest lecturer at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. He has published widely on literary studies, narratology and comparative poetics, his most recent publications including Comparative Narrative Poetics: A Comparative Study of Western Classical Narratology and Chinese Narrative Thought of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (in Chinese, 2016) and From ‘Death of the Author’ to Quest for Authority (in Chinese, 2017). E-mail: [email protected] Sabine Müller is Humanities and Educational Sciences Research Manager and Consultant at the Leibniz Association and an independent scholar. She obtained her PhD from Oxford University and worked subsequently as lecturer for German studies at Magdalen College and at St John’s College, Oxford, where she was a postdoctoral researcher with the Balzan Project “Cognitive Approaches to Literature.” She has published articles on cognitive approaches to camera movement and embodiment in film and literature. E-mail: [email protected] Stephanie Neu is Assistant Professor for Italian and French Literature and Media Studies at Mannheim University and a long-time member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg. She has published articles on issues related to fictionality, factuality and authorial ethos as well as a monograph devoted to the Baroque author Alessandro Tassoni: Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1635). Metamorphosen des Epos (2012). E-mail: [email protected] Jannike Hegdal Nilssen is a PhD Candidate in Norwegian Language Arts Didactics at the Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. In her doctoral research, she explores

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how textbooks of Norwegian Language Arts and Mathematics in lower secondary school facilitate text-based learning as a way to obtain disciplinary literacy. In addition to textbook analysis, her research interests include the unreliable narrator, the implied reader, social semiotics and content knowledge for teaching. E-mail: [email protected] Małgorzata Pawłowska, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Academy of Music in Cracow, where she teaches music history, music analysis, music literature and ear training. She has published a monograph in Polish based on her doctoral dissertation, which has been translated into English under the title Exploring Musical Narratology: The Romeo and Juliet Myth in Music (forthcoming). She has also authored numerous articles concerning musical semiotics, musical narratology, the myth of Romeo and Juliet and the motif of the devil in music. E-mail: [email protected] John Pier is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Tours and statutory member of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CNRS-EHESS) in Paris, where he has co-directed the seminar “Recherches contemporaines en narratologie” since its creation in 2003. A co-founder of the ENN and past chairman of the ENN Steering Committee (2013–2015) as well as joint editor of the Narratologia series, Pier has published numerous articles and book chapters on narrative theory and literary semiotics. He has edited and co-edited nearly fifteen anthologies, among them The Dynamics of Narrative Form (2005), Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation (2005), Théorie du récit. L’apport de la recherche allemande (2007), Theorizing Narrativity (2008), Handbook of Narratology (2nd ed., 2014) and the proceedings of the international conference Le formalisme russe cent ans après: interprétation, réception, perspectives (forthcoming in the journal Communications). E-mail: [email protected] Brian Richardson is Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland. He is the author or co-author of four books on narrative theory, most recently Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (co-authored, 2012) and Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (2015). Richardson has edited six collections of essays on narrative theory, including Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices (2008) and A Poetics of Unnatural Narratives (co-edited, 2013). He is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. He is currently completing a book on narrative beginnings, middles and endings. E-mail: [email protected] Göran Rossholm is Professor Emeritus of Literature at Stockholm University. He works mainly on narrative theory, the theory of interpretation and literature and philosophy. He has published numerous articles as well as a book entitled To Be And Not to Be. On Interpretation, Iconicity and Fiction (2004) and has edited or co-edited several anthologies devoted to these topics, the latest entitled Disputable Core Concepts of Narrative Theory (2012). E-mail: [email protected] Philippe Roussin is a Senior Researcher at the CNRS and a member of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CNRS-EHESS) in Paris, where he co-directs the seminar “Recherches contemporaines en narratologie.” He was Visiting Professor in French Studies at Wadham College (Oxford University) from 2013 to 2016. Roussin is the coordinator of the international research network funded by the CNRS “Literature and Democracy: Theoretical, Historical and Comparative Approaches (XIXth–XXIst Centuries).” He is the author of a monograph entitled



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Misère de la littérature, terreur de l’histoire. Céline et la littérature contemporaine (2005) and is currently co-editing the proceedings of the international conference Le formalisme russe cent ans après: interprétation, réception, perspectives (forthcoming in the journal Communications). E-mail: [email protected] Wolf Schmid is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Literatures at the University of Hamburg. He founded the Hamburg Research Group for Narratology and the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology and also initiated the founding of the European Narratology Network. Among his numerous publications are Elemente der Narratologie (Russian 2003, 2008; German 2005, 2008, 2014; English 2010; Chinese and Brazilian translations forthcoming) and Mentale Ereignisse (2017). He is executive editor of the Narratologia series. E-mail: [email protected] Ralf Schneider is Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at Bielefeld University. He has been contributing to cognitive narratology since the early 2000s, and he currently leads research projects on narrative constructions of childhood in contemporary British novels, on migration experience in British literary narrative and on practices of comparison in 18th-century British prose fiction. He is co-editor of Characters in Fictional Worlds (2010), Blending and the Study of Narrative (2012) and of two forthcoming handbooks, Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War and Fiktionalität, both to be published with De Gruyter. E-mail: [email protected] Dan Shen is Changjiang Professor of English Language and Literature at Peking University. She is on the advisory or editorial boards of the American journals Style and Narrative, the British Language and Literature and the European JLS: Journal of Literary Semantics. In addition to six books and more than one hundred essays in China, she has published Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction with Routledge (2014) and numerous essays in North America and Europe devoted to stylistics, narrative studies and translation studies. E-mail: [email protected] Roy Sommer is Professor of English and the Director of the Center for Graduate Studies at the University of Wuppertal. He is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary Center for Narrative Research in Wuppertal, of which he has been a member of the Executive Board since 2007. He is a co-editor of DIEGESIS, a bilingual open access journal dedicated to cross-disciplinary narrative research, and has published more than forty book chapters and journal articles that reflect his interest in fictional and factual storytelling and in narrative theory. E-mail: [email protected] David Stromberg completed his doctorate in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has undertaken postdoctoral research at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and is currently a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow the Hebrew University’s Institute for Contemporary Jewry. He has published articles and book chapters on literature, narrative theory, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. He is editing a collection of essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer and developing a research project on Idiot Love which deals with concepts of intimacy in Plato, Dostoevsky and Melanie Klein. His first monograph is Narrative Faith in Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer (University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). E-mail: [email protected] Valery Timofeev is Associate Professor of Literature at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Saint Petersburg State University. He has published numerous articles on Russian and

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English literary history, narrative theory, literary semiotics and a book on John Fowles’ Classes (2003). He has given numerous lectures at Daugavpils University in Latvia, the Sorbonne in France and Middlesex University in the UK. E-mail: [email protected] Eva Sabine Wagner is a research assistant at the University of Cologne, where she teaches French literature. She is a member of the European Narratology Network and an associate member of the Centre for Narrative Studies (ZEF) in Wuppertal. She has published articles on Proust and Kafka and is currently working on her PhD thesis in which she explores the notion of narrativity. E-mail: [email protected] Richard Walsh is a Reader in English and Related Literature at the University of York and the Founder and Director of York’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. He is a past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, the author of The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction (2007) and co-editor of two forthcoming volumes of essays: Narratology and Ideology (Ohio State UP) and Narrating Complexity (Springer). E-mail: [email protected]

Index A Aamodt, Sandra 482 Abbate, Carolyn 285, 301, 303 Abbott, H. Porter 30, 199, 316, 351, 355, 557 Abelson, Robert P. 235 Abrams, M.H. 364 Achilles Tatius 344 Adam, Jean-Michel 90, 135, 158, 338, 347, 583 Adams, Hazard 120 Aeschines 344 Aeschylus 344 Aesop 427 Agawu, Victor Kofi 285, 297 Aguirre, Anthony 574, 584 Aitchison, Jean 511 Alber, Jan 35, 42, 202, 265, 267, 268, 279, 321, 351, 507, 510, 521, 533, 560, 593 Aldama, Frederick L. 480, 492 Alexander, Marc 235, 354 Allan, Rutger 16, 92, 94, 345, 576 Allen, Woody 134, 273 Almén, Byron 285, 287, 305 Altman, Janet Gurkin 517 Amis, Martin 541, 542 Andersen, Hans Christian 85 Anderson, Benedict 400 Anderson, Elizabeth 597 Anderst, Leah 265, 280 Ankersmit, Franklin R. 153, 155 Apatow, Judd 183 Argyros, Alex 408 Aristophanes 203 Aristotle 207, 211, 212, 221, 223, 225, 235, 293, 325, 339, 340, 444, 534, 555, 567, 568, 570 Armstrong, Tim 444 Arquette, Patricia 268, 269 Astington, Janet Wilde 428 Atkinson, Paul 418 Auden, W.H. 309 August, Bille 29, 32, 35, 134, 141, 142, 183, 215 Aursland, Tonje 54 DOI 10.1515/9783110555158-029

Austen, Jane 7, 237, 238, 428, 486, 487, 548 Auster, Paul 49 Auyoung, Elaine 474 B Bacchylides 344, 345, 347 Bacon, Francis 362 Bailey, Kenneth D. 538, 560 Baird, Tadeusz 310 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 17, 27, 88, 92, 280, 302, 438, 474, 519, 561, 586 Bakker, Egbert J. 346 Balakirev, Mily 295 Bal, Mieke 337, 419, 424, 540, 595, 600, 602, 603 Balsom, Erika 383 Balzac, Honoré de 232 Bandello, Matteo 287, 289, 298 Baranger, Michel 536, 543, 552, 553, 558 Barger, Jorn 131 Barnes, Julian 156 Baroni, Raphaël 148, 247, 256, 352, 354, 502, 561 Barry, Jackson G. 405, 411, 426 Barsalou, Lawrence W. 437, 451 Barthes, Roland 66, 318, 394, 401, 410, 464, 512, 513, 517, 553, 554, 567 Barth, John 558 Bar-Yam, Yaneer 541 Basseler, Michael 128 Bayard, Pierre 257, 260 Beaugrande, Robert-Alain de 508 Beaumarchais, Pierre de 441 Beckett, Samuel 194, 197, 202, 203 Bedell, John Patrick 129 Beethoven, Ludwig van 288, 301, 310 Bégaudeau, François 400 Behrendt, Poul 25, 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 48 Belgion, Montgomery 15 Bellini, Vincenzo 286, 288, 289, 295, 298, 308, 310 Benda, Georg Anton 288, 289, 295, 298, 310 Benveniste, Émile 109, 341, 342, 344, 349 Bergen, Benjamin K. 579

616 

 Index

Berger, Karol 285, 287, 301 Berger, Peter L. 577 Bergström-Edwards, Pia 30 Berlioz, Hector 288, 289, 295, 297, 298, 299, 303, 308, 310 Bermúdez, José Luis 79 Bernaerts, Lars 437, 474, 479 Berning, Nora 127, 129, 130, 142, 285 Bernstein, Leonard 288, 290, 295, 310 Berns, Ute 445 Bertuglia, Cristoforo Sergio 536, 537, 538, 544, 547, 553, 555 Bhabha, Homi K. 400 Bierce, Ambrose 164 Biggs, Abraham K. 129 Birch, Cyrill 364, 370 Blacher, Boris 288, 295, 310 Blanchot, Maurice 467, 468 Block, Haskell M. 374 Bluestone, George 265 Blumenthal, Peter 508 Boccaccio, Giovanni 229 Boldizsár Simon, Zoltán 393 Bolens, Guillemette 439 Boltzmann, Ludwig 573 Bøndergaard, Johanne Helbo 177, 180, 182, 186 Booth, Wayne C. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 26, 27, 43, 56, 57, 61, 174, 317, 440 Bordwell, David 328, 419 Borges, Jorge Luis 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 257 Bornand, Sandra 348 Bortolussi, Marisa 9, 10 Bourdieu, Pierre 389, 390, 391, 436 Bourgeacq, Jacques 515 Boyd, Brian 407, 427, 428, 570 Boyle, Danny 271 Bracher, Mark 489 Bradbury, Malcolm 198 Bradley, A.C. 203 Branigan, Edward 265, 266, 270, 276, 307, 540 Braudel, Fernand 383 Bremond, Claude 285, 318, 522, 523, 545, 550 Brockmeier, Jens 481, 489

Broek, Paul van den 508 Bronfen, Elisabeth 129, 130 Brooke, Arthur 287, 291 Brooks, Cleanth 116 Brooks, Peter 131, 255, 419, 439 Brown, Bill 463 Bruner, Jerome 69, 386, 387, 388, 407, 411, 422 Bruni, John 546 Brütsch, Matthias 265, 315, 324 Bublitz, Wolfram 508, 509 Bullough, Geoffrey 291 Burckhardt, Jacob 394 Burke, Kenneth 394 Burke, Michael 492 Butor, Michel 579 C Cai, Zong-qi 364 Calame, Claude 335, 339, 340, 342, 346, 347, 348, 349, 604 Callimachus 344 Camus, Albert 66 Cao Cao 366 Cao Pi 366, 367 Capra, Fritjof 498 Caracciolo, Marco 221, 435, 437, 452, 474, 479, 480 Carothers, James B. 116 Carradine, David 277 Carr, Edward Hallett 66 Carroll, Joseph 567, 570 Carroll, Lewis 91, 94 Carroll, Noël 207, 210, 214 Carroll, Sean M. 569, 572, 573, 574, 583, 584 Carter, Angela 438, 440, 441, 442, 443, 456 Casati, Roberto 230 Case, Alison 7, 257 Cassirer, Ernst 232 Castel, Alan D. 482 Castillo, Ana 198 Cato 129 Cavell, Stanley 65 Ceaușescu, Nicolae 450 Cervantes, Miguel de 49, 79 Chambers, Ross 511 Chandler, Raymond 216

Index 

Changeux, Jean-Pierre 481, 483 Charon, Rita 130 Chatman, Seymour 6, 285, 315, 320, 321, 327, 328, 419, 424, 443, 444, 473, 603, 604 Chatterjee, Anjan 483 Chekhov, Anton 92 Chen, Pingyuan 365, 368 Choi, Jinhee 266 Christensen, Casper 182, 184, 185, 186, 187 Christian, David 569 Christie, Agatha 215 Christman, John 388 Churchill, Caryl 196, 198 Clark, Andy 437, 452 Clarke, Bruce 538, 540, 544 Clausius, Rudolf 545 Clément, Danièle 511 Coetzee, J.M. 49 Cohn, Dorrit 50, 57, 62, 101, 137, 138, 278, 279, 396, 418, 420, 421, 467 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 64 Collins, Christopher 442 Cone, Edward T. 285, 308 Confucius 363, 366 Conrad, Joseph 114 Coover, Robert 196 Cortázar, Julio 102 Coste, Didier 341 Courtés, Joseph 338, 342, 352, 502, 523 Crane, Ronald S. 13, 14, 15, 18, 277 Crowe, Russell 272 Crutchfield, James P. 537 Culler, Jonathan 8, 71, 419, 467, 468 Cumberbatch, Benedict 274 Currie, Gregory 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 219, 221, 476 Currie, Mark 3, 365, 409, 424 Czarniawska, Barbara 406 D Daleski, H.M. 61, 65, 73 Damasio, Antonio 352, 353 Damon, Matt 268 Dancygier, Barbara 498, 507, 509, 512, 518 Dannenberg, Hilary P. 247, 251, 253, 255, 259, 520

 617

Dante 49, 81, 90, 305, 439 Danto, Arthur C. 155, 393 Darby, David 3 Darwin, Charles 570, 571, 576, 580, 583 Darwin, Erasmus 576 David, Larry 183 Davydov, Sergey 87 Dawkins, Richard 399, 583 Dawson, Paul 43, 44, 397, 405 De Cataldo, Giancarlo 178, 179, 181, 182 De Fina, Anna 408 Dehaene, Stanislas 435, 480, 484, 488 Deleuze, Gilles 265, 280 Deleyto, Celestino 270 DeLillo, Don 155 Demby, William 15, 17 Demosthenes 344 Denning, Stephen 386, 399 Derrida, Jacques 129, 400 Descartes, René 72, 300 De Wolf, Tom 498, 557 DiCaprio, Leonardo 271 Dickens, Charles 269, 270, 486 Dieltjens, Sylvain 106 Dietrich, Arne 482 Diezel, Peter 329 Dijk, Teun A. van 597 Dilthey, Wilhelm 390, 391, 577 Dimaggio, Giancarlo 77 Dinesen, Isak 40 Dixon, Peter 9, 10, 156 Dobzhansky, Theodosius 585 Doctorow, E.L. 156 Doležel, Lubomír 172, 203, 421, 534 Dolinin, Alexander 90 Dollinger, Sonia 289 Dong, Xiaoying 365, 369 Donoghue, Denis 400 Dorris, Michael 103 Dors, Diana 278 Dosse, François 536 Doubrovsky, Serge 47, 48, 49, 51, 185 Dowden, Edward 12 Drabble, Margaret 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169 Dressler, Wolfgang Ulrich 508

618 

 Index

Droysen, Johann Gustav 577 Ducis, Jean-François 289 Ducrot, Oswald 536 Dufays, Jean-Louis 255 Dusapin, Pascal 288, 290, 295, 296, 299, 303, 304, 308, 310 E Eagleton, Terry 128, 361 Eckermann, Johann Peter 229 Eco, Umberto 64, 249, 255, 259, 340, 353, 561 Eder, Jens 265, 270 Edzard, Christine 269, 270, 271, 280 Egidi, Giovanna 480 Einstein, Albert 88, 89, 573, 575, 605 Eliot, George 12, 111, 486, 570 Ellis, Bret Easton 49 Elton, Geoffrey R. 157 Emmott, Catherine 235, 354, 480, 489 Empedocles 375 Enke, Robert 129 Epimenides 52 Érdi, Péter 498, 499, 500 Ernaux, Annie 400 Ertel, Paul 298 Escola, Marc 257, 260 Esrock, Ellen J. 439 Ette, Ottmar 498 Euclid 550 Eugenides, Jeffrey 103 Euripides 344, 348, 349 Evans, Jonathan St.B.T. 441, 442 Evans, Richard 156 F Fauconnier, Gilles 475, 507, 509, 524 Faulkner, William 103, 106, 108, 111, 116, 118, 119, 120 Faurisson, Robert 397 Fenigstein, Allan 78 Ferenz, Volker 273 Ferris, Joshua 107, 108, 112, 116 Ferry, Jean-Marc 387 Fielding, Henry 16, 19, 200, 440 Fincher, David 272 Fisher, Walter R. 399, 407

Fitzgerald, F. Scott 189 Flaubert, Gustave 15, 156 Fleishman, Avrom 275 Flesch, William 223 Fletcher, Paul C. 78, 215, 216, 217, 218, 223 Fludernik, Monika 3, 4, 62, 102, 103, 104, 113, 114, 115, 155, 156, 158, 173, 196, 221, 279, 280, 321, 351, 400, 406, 408, 435, 436, 454, 467, 468, 476, 500, 502, 506, 507, 509, 510, 521, 533, 593, 599, 600, 602 Foppa, Giuseppe Maria 289 Forster, Edward Morgan 208, 210, 221, 230, 371 Foucault, Michel 400, 436 Fowles, John 156 Fox, Susannah 131 Fox, Vivica A. 276 Frank, Joseph 552 Freeman, Mark 508 Freud, Sigmund 166, 451 Frey, James 130 Freytag, Gustav 291, 292, 293, 294, 307 Fricke, Harald 504 Friedemann, Käte 316, 317, 323 Friis-Mikkelsen, Jarl 183 Frye, Northrop 394, 570, 579 Fulton, Dawn 107 Fu, Xiuyan 368, 369, 371 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg 374, 577 Gallagher, Shaun 437 Gallese, Vittorio 437, 439, 441, 455, 486 Gandolfi, Alberto 537 García Landa, José Ángel 3, 561, 567, 568, 569, 576, 577, 582, 583, 586, 587 Garrick, David 289, 298 Gass, William 388, 551 Gaudreault, André 316, 321, 322, 325, 326, 331 Gazzaniga, Michael S. 579 Gendler, Tamar Szabó 218 Genette, Gérard 10, 26, 27, 38, 42, 49, 64, 66, 101, 102, 105, 109, 111, 115, 140, 171, 175, 183, 185, 194, 202, 215, 258, 317, 322, 325, 326, 328, 329, 337, 338, 339,

Index 

340, 341, 342, 343, 345, 384, 419, 440, 501, 514, 540, 602 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 408 Gerrig, Richard J. 203, 480, 488, 489, 490 Gervais, Bertrand 255 Getty, Balthazar 268 Gibbon, Edward 200, 383 Gibbs, Raymond W. 437, 489 Gibson, Andrew 129, 521 Gilbert, William Schwenck 436 Gilmore, Leigh 148 Ginzburg, Carlo 395, 397 Gjerlevsen, Simona Zetterberg 177 Gleick, James 539 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 289, 298 Glück, Helmut 511 Goedsche, Charlotte 316 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 229, 230 Goffman, Erving 387 Gogol, Nikolaj 92 Goldman, Alvin 486 Golianek, Ryszard Daniel 298 Goodman, Nelson 145 Gordon, Ian 375 Gottschall, Jonathan 407, 426, 428 Gounod, Charles 286, 288, 289, 295, 298, 310 Grabes, Herbert 559 Grabócz, Márta 285, 298, 307 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 306, 307, 337, 338, 339, 342, 352, 522, 523 Grethlein, Jonas 344 Grice, H. Paul 174 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 209, 240 Grinager, Jill 135 Grisey, Gérard 295, 310 Grishakova, Marina 92, 202, 474, 541, 561 Gu, Ming Dong 364, 369 Gunton, Bob 267 H Habermas, Jürgen 397, 398 Halliday, Michael A.K. 4 Hamburger, Käte 172, 173, 316 Hanan, Patrick 364 Hand, Ferdinand Gotthelf 298, 446, 447 Han, Jiaming 365

 619

Hannah, Daryl 276, 439, 455 Hanninen, Vilma 423 Hansen, Per Krogh 25, 26, 32, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 54, 62, 163, 176, 270, 273, 393, 401, 561 Harari, Yuval Noah 576 Harrison, Bernard 66, 292 Hartner, Marcus 489, 507, 514, 515, 516, 518, 519 Hatten, Robert S. 285, 297, 303 Hauschild, Christine 230 Hawkes, John 155 Hayek, Friedrich 392, 393 Hayles, N. Katherine 129, 498, 499, 538, 539, 546, 554 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 568, 570, 573, 583 Hegel, Robert E. 364 Heidmann, Ute 347 Heinen, Sandra 411, 414 Heinze, Rüdiger 43 Heise, Ursula 197 Heiß, Nina 319 Helfer, Tricia 277 Heliodorus 344 Heller, Joseph 155 Hellmann, Christina 509 Helmbrecht, Johannes 105, 106, 108 Helmig, Thomas 187 Helms, Gabriele 128 Hemingway, Ernest 69 Hempel, Carl Gustav 393 Herbert, Christopher 525 Herman, David 3, 8, 9, 30, 79, 121, 127, 145, 174, 202, 203, 247, 255, 258, 259, 341, 350, 354, 355, 365, 405, 408, 412, 413, 419, 425, 428, 444, 450, 475, 476, 479, 480, 499, 500, 502, 505, 506, 507, 510, 521, 522, 561, 595, 598, 599, 600 Herman, Luc 201 Herodotus 344 Herring, Susan C. 130, 131, 132 Herrndorf, Wolfgang 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara 419, 420 Hesiod 344

620 

 Index

Heynderickx, Priscilla 106 Higonnet, Margaret 134, 136, 137, 139, 144 Hitchcock, Alfred 266, 277 Hitler, Adolf 51 Hofstadter, Douglas R. 498 Hogan, Patrick Colm 111, 118, 119, 120, 121, 480, 491, 492 Holland, John H. 536 Holmes, Anthony 257, 274, 275, 399 Holtz, William 553 Holvoet, Tom 498, 557 Homer 80, 281, 344 Hook, Sidney 130, 137 Horace (Horatius) 375 Hornby, Albert Sydney 513 Howard, Richard 461, 464 Howell, Simon 183, 184 Hoy, David Couzens 436 Hoyningen-Huene, Paul 534 Hsia, C.T. 364 Hühn, Peter 229, 230, 234, 240, 415, 502, 561 Hume, David 136 Hurley, Matthew M. 221, 222, 225 Huron, David 225 Hurt, John 268 Husserl, Edmund 63, 72, 577 Hutcheon, Linda 148, 155, 156 Hutchins, Michael 131 Hvam, Frank 182, 184, 185, 186, 187 Hydén, Lars-Christer 128 Hyvärinen, Matti 405, 406, 409, 410, 508, 509, 512, 593 I Iacoboni, Marco 451 Ingarden, Roman 63, 64, 66 Innis, Harold A. 143 Iser, Wolfgang 63, 64, 66, 158, 207, 259, 353, 490, 509 Iversen, Stefan 202 J Jacobi, Derek 269 Jacobsen, Louise Brix 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 185, 186, 187, 189 Jahn, Manfred 121, 321, 330, 521

Jakobson, Roman 513, 514, 517, 518, 522, 536 James, Henry 200 Jays, David 154 Jenkins, Henry 561 Jenkins, Keith 153 Jessell, Thomas M. 481 Jin Shengtan 361, 368, 373 Johnson, Donald Barton 90 Johnson, Mark 146, 436, 437, 443, 524 Johnson, Samuel 375 Jones, David 15, 16, 18, 19, 324 Jonson, Ben 203 Jost, François 321, 331 Joyce, James 79, 80, 147, 197, 280 Joyce, Michael 134 K Kabalevsky, Dmitry 288, 310 Kacandes, Irene 103 Kafalenos, Emma 247, 255, 260, 561 Kafka, Franz 104, 520 Kahneman, Daniel 441 Kaldis, Byron 230 Kandel, Eric J. 481 Kant, Immanuel 136 Kapp, Volker 130 Käßmann, Margot 136 Kavan, Anna 196 Kawin, Bruce 275 Keaton, Diane 273 Keats, John 72 Keen, Suzanne 491 Kellner, Hans 156 Kemp, Ian 303 Kempton, Kenneth Payson 116 Kennedy, John F. 15, 17 Kerman, Joseph 285, 301 Kindt, Tom 13, 411, 429, 499, 501, 521 Kircher, Tilo 78 Kiverstein, Julian 452 Klauk, Tobias 440 Klein, Christian 605 Klein, Julie 414 Knapp, Lore 130 Knausgård, Karl Ove 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 Komorowski, Jarosław 288

Index 

Köppe, Tilmann 114, 440 Korthals Altes, Liesbeth 129, 190, 385 Krah, Hans 230 Kreiswirth, Martin 383, 384, 385, 405, 408, 418, 421, 422 Kristensen, Eivind 54 Kristóf, Ágota 104 Kuhn, Markus 265, 271, 273, 276, 319, 321, 322, 330 Kuhn, Thomas S. 511, 524, 533, 534, 538, 541, 601, 602, 603 Kukkonen, Karin 435, 437, 479 Kuukkanen, Jouni-Matti 393, 398 Kuzmičová, Anežka 452 L Labov, William 220, 352, 406, 502 Lacan, Jacques 384 LaCapra, Dominick 156 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 514, 517 Ladyman, James 601 Laffay, Albert 321, 322 Lakoff, George 146, 436, 437, 443, 483, 500, 524 Lamarque, Peter 388, 411 Lane, R.D. 77 Langellier, Kristin 435 Langer, Susan 296, 297 Lansbury, Angela 215 Lanser, Susan S. 5, 6, 7, 103, 110, 111, 365, 603, 604, 606 Laudrup, Michael 183 Lavocat, Françoise 251, 396 Lawrence, D.H. 279, 383, 397 Leavis, Frank R. 426 LeDoux, Joseph 481, 491 Lee, Young-Oak 167, 585 Leguy, Cécile 348 Lehrer, Jonah 482 Leigh, Janet 277 Leitch, Vincent 417, 418 Lejeune, Philippe 48, 54, 131 Lenhart, Amanda 131 Lennon, Kathleen 436 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 143 Leube, Dirk 78 Levé, Édouard 103

 621

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 354 Lewis, David 210, 216 Leyner, Mark 194, 195, 196 Lichačev, Dmitrij 239 Liddell Hart, Basil 250 Lindemann, Uwe 516, 518, 519 Lindenberger, Herbert 483 Lin, Gang 369 Link, Jürgen 514 Linklater, Andrew 409 Liszka, James Jakób 305 Litt, Toby 113, 121, 122 Liu, James J.Y. 374 Liu, Lucy 277 Liu Xie 363, 366, 372 Longus 344 López Sáenz, Carmen 577 Lothe, Jakob 265 Lotman, Jurij 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 239, 241, 242, 502, 511, 518 Lovink, Geert 144 Lubbock, Percy 316, 317 Lucas, George 260 Luckmann, Thomas 577 Luhmann, Niklas 540, 541 Luhrmann, Baz 290 Lu Ji 366 Lundholt, Marianne Wolff 401 Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng 364 Lynch, David 268 Lyotard, Jean-François 384, 385, 386, 408, 424 Lysias 344 M Macaulay, Thomas 200, 383 Macfarlane, Alan 583 MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 387, 388, 390, 394, 398, 399, 407 Mackie, John Leslie 209, 210 Madsen, Michael 276 Magarshack, David 66 Mahler, Andreas 317 Mair, Victor H. 364 Mäkelä, Maria 202, 467, 468, 474 Malaterre, Jacques 576 Malraux, André 204

622 

 Index

Mandelbrot, Benoît B. 498 Mandle, Carol Lynn 129 Mann, Thomas 138, 237 Mansfield, Katherine 16, 376 March, Joss 134, 140, 269, 271, 315, 471, 497, 594 Marcus, Amit 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 118 Marc-Wogau, Konrad 210 Margolin, Uri 8, 103, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 118, 120, 121 Marino, Marco 181 Mar, Raymond A. 488 Martínez-Bonati, Félix 62, 64 Martínez, Matías 499, 598, 605 Massey, Irving 484 Masuccio da Salerno 287 Mathieu-Colas, Michel 501 Matuszczak, Bernadetta 290, 295, 296, 310 Matz, Jesse 448 Maupassant, Guy de 390 Maus, Fred 285, 301 Mayer, Frederick W. 399, 400 May, Georges 514, 515 McCabe, David 482 McCabe, Susan 444 McClelland, James 489, 490 McCourt, Frank 50, 52, 57 McGregor, William B. 511 McHale, Brian 280, 501, 506, 507, 522 McInerney, Jay 103 McKoon, Gail 489 McNeill, Laurie 131, 132 Mda, Zakes 113 Mead, George Herbert 573, 575, 583 Meck, Nadezhda von 288 Meister, Jan Christoph 230, 335, 356 Mellmann, Katja 569, 579 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 63 Metz, Christian 316, 321, 322 Meuter, Norbert 384 Miall, David S. 480, 487, 491 Michelet, Jules 394 Micznik, Vera 285, 287, 288, 296, 298, 303 Miller, Carolyn R. 130, 131, 132, 133 Miller, J. Hillis 365 Mill, John Stuart 136 Milton, John 436

Mink, Louis O. 393 Mitchell, Melanie 536, 537, 544, 546 Momigliano, Arnaldo 394 Monaco, James 271 Monelle, Raymond 285, 297 Monforte-Royo, Cristina 130, 131, 141 Moravetz, Monika 517 Moravia, Alberto 102 Moretti, Franco 27 Moro, Aldo 180, 181 Morris, Sara M. 142, 144, 474 Morrissette, Bruce 465, 468, 470 Morson, Gary Saul 568 Moulthrop, Stuart 248 Mourad Jr., Roger P. 413 Mo Yan 224 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 441 Müller, Hans-Harald 13, 499, 501, 521 Müller, Herta 438, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456 Musholt, Kristina 78 N Nabokov, Dmitri 81 Nabokov, Vladimir 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 154, 197, 474, 555, 561 Nalbantian, Suzanne 483, 484 Nannucci, Teresa 181 Narayan, Deepa 392 Nash, Christopher 272, 273, 384 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 301 Nelles, William 13 Nesbet, Anne 129, 139 Newcomb, Anthony 285 Newton, Adam 135, 136 Newton, Isaac 538, 543, 544, 550, 551 Nicolis, Grégoire 536, 542, 543, 547, 550, 552, 553, 554, 560 Niederhoff, Burkhard 337, 514 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 182, 186, 188, 189 Nie, Qingpu 365 Nietzsche, Friedrich 568, 580 Noë, Alva 437, 450, 451 Noé, Gaspar 35 Nolan, Christopher 35

Index 

Norlyk, Brigitte 393, 401 Norton, Edward 267, 272 Nöth, Winfried 550 Nünning, Ansgar 3, 20, 21, 47, 62, 127, 132, 147, 155, 318, 330, 351, 502, 505, 514, 515, 516, 519, 520, 535, 595, 604 Nünning, Vera 19, 20, 62, 127, 318, 502, 520 Nussbaum, Martha 426 O Oates, Joyce Carol 109 Oatley, Keith 491 Obama, Barack 145 Oberheim, Eric 534 Olson, Greta 62, 71 Onega, Susan 3 Ortega y Gasset, José 300 Osbourne, Ozzy 184 Otsuka, Julie 112, 113 Owen, Stephen 364, 366, 367, 373 P Pabst, Walter 239 Palmer, Alan 121, 265, 266, 269, 353, 445, 448 Panksepp, Jaak 481, 491 Park, Ed 49, 163, 193, 449 Pascal, Roy 280 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 280 Passig, Kathrin 137, 141, 142 Pater, Walter Horatio 304 Pavel, Thomas G. 249, 255, 261, 595, 602 Pawłowska, Małgorzata 285, 286, 294, 296, 300, 301 Peirce, Charles Sanders 583, 585 Perkins, Anthony 277 Peskin, Joan 428 Petersen, Jürgen H. 510 Peterson, Eric E. 435 Petesch, Patti 392 Pfister, Manfred 319, 320, 321, 329, 330 Phelan, James 7, 10, 15, 18, 20, 21, 30, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 62, 69, 70, 107, 112, 113, 117, 119, 122, 134, 148, 173, 202, 255, 258, 365, 388, 424, 506, 521, 561, 603, 606 Philostratus 344

 623

Pickering, Sarah 269 Pier, John 44, 221, 256, 280, 304, 341, 342, 351, 356, 376, 391, 499, 502, 525, 533, 536, 545, 549, 551, 555, 559, 582, 604 Pindar 344, 345, 347 Pinget, Robert 196, 202 Pinter, Harold 196, 324 Pirandello, Luigi 79 Pitt, Brad 272 Placido, Michele 178 Plaks, Andrew 364, 367, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373 Plato 82, 115, 325 Plutarch 344 Podlipniak, Piotr 296 Poe, Edgar Allen 16, 92, 94, 576 Polkinghorne, Donald 407, 409 Polybius 577 Potente, Franka 268 Poulaki, Maria 540, 541, 552, 553 Prigogine, Ilya 498, 536, 538, 539, 542, 543, 544, 545, 546, 547, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 558, 560 Prince, Gerald 63, 66, 109, 197, 213, 216, 221, 252, 253, 258, 302, 303, 307, 315, 317, 322, 323, 329, 339, 350, 351, 352, 499, 500, 501, 502, 508, 520, 545, 593, 594, 596, 598, 605 Pritchard, Duncan 597 Prokofiev, Sergei 288, 290, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298, 300, 304, 308, 310 Propp, Vladimir 230, 247, 255, 339, 371, 508, 522, 523 Proust, Marcel 81 Pullman, Bill 269 Punday, Daniel 146, 408, 409, 439 Puschmann, Cornelius 133 Pushkin, Alexander 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 238 Pynchon, Thomas 155, 156 Q Qian, Zhongwen 373 Queneau, Raymond 198 R Rabinowitz, Peter J. 10, 15, 16, 17, 21, 69, 202, 365, 506, 521, 606

624 

 Index

Rader, Ralph W. 15, 16, 18, 19 Rajewsky, Irina O. 285, 286, 318, 323, 330, 331, 332 Ramón y Cajal, Santiago 574 Ranke, Leopold 394 Ratcliff, Roger 489 Ratner, Leonard G. 285, 297 Readings, Bill 21, 366, 416, 417 Reed, Ishmael 155 Reed, Lou 290 Reinerth, Maike Sarah 265, 276 Reitan, Rolf 102, 103, 104, 176, 177 Renault, Emmanuel 391 Renner, Karl Nikolaus 230 Repko, Allen 412 Resnais, Alain 278 Revaz, Françoise 339 Ricardou, Jean 468 Richardson, Alan 439 Richardson, Brian 102, 103, 104, 108, 114, 118, 119, 120, 197, 198, 251, 321, 505, 506, 507, 510, 521, 522, 557, 599, 603 Ricœur, Paul 339, 352, 383, 384, 387, 389, 390, 391, 393, 394, 396, 507, 508, 522, 523, 568 Riessman, Catherine Kohler 424, 425 Rilke, Rainer Maria 438, 444, 446, 447, 449, 450, 456 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 65, 73, 74, 259 Rizzolatti, Giacomo 486 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 194, 196, 197, 202, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 473 Robbins, Tim 267 Roberts, Geoffrey 409 Robertson, James 158 Robinson, Alan 160, 167 Robinson, Jenefer 491 Rolston, David L. 364, 366, 367 Romani, Felice 289 Rosanvallon, Pierre 400 Rosen, Charles 290, 296 Rossholm, Göran 207, 209, 210, 556 Rossini, Gioachino 440, 441 Rota, Nino 288, 298, 303, 310 Rousset, Jean 515 Rowling, Joanne K. 428

Rukeyser, Muriel 572 Rumelhart, David E. 489 Rupp, Jan 129, 132, 147 Rushton, Julian 288, 297 Ryan, Katy 136, 140, 144, 145 Ryan, Marie-Laure 122, 143, 248, 249, 253, 254, 256, 258, 261, 285, 315, 318, 320, 322, 328, 329, 341, 343, 351, 395, 397, 475, 484, 485, 500, 502, 503, 504, 505, 519, 520, 538, 549, 553, 561, 605 S Sachs, Gunter 129 Sacks, Sheldon 15, 18 Sado, Crown Prince of Korea 161, 163, 164, 165 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 89 Saint-Gelais, Richard 260 Sanford, Anthony J. 480 Saporta, Marc 551, 553 Sappho 348 Sartre, Jean-Paul 136, 388 Savanah, Stephane 78 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 172, 173, 302, 347, 353, 354 Schank, Roger C. 235 Scheffel, Michael 315, 499 Scheidt, Lois Ann 133 Scher, Steven Paul 286 Schlingensief, Christoph 128 Schmid, Wolf 26, 44, 102, 109, 172, 229, 230, 232, 233, 236, 237, 240, 280, 316, 318, 319, 321, 322, 326, 327, 328, 329, 331, 341, 376, 502, 513, 514, 516, 519, 561 Schneider, Ralf 79, 87, 89, 353, 437, 489, 490, 491, 507, 570 Schneider, Susan 230 Schopenhauer, Arthur 136 Schütz, Heinrich 577 Schwanberger, Johann Gottfried 289, 310 Schwanecke, Christine 129, 147 Schwartz, G.E. 77 Schwartz, James H. 481 Schwarz, Monika 508 Searle, John R. 173, 422 Secco, Tom 508

Index 

Sen, Amartya 391 Shakespeare, William 79, 197, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302, 303, 304, 305, 307, 309, 330, 586 Shankar, Ravi 131, 133, 134 Sheen, Charlie 277 Shen, Dan 3, 8, 9, 11, 13, 16, 19, 27, 62, 168, 302, 361, 365 Shepherd, Dawn 130, 131, 132, 133 Shepherd, Laura J. 409, 410 Shpall, Samuel 444 Shukman, Ann 241 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 61, 66, 67, 104, 273, 274 Sisson, Charles Hubert 324 Skei, Hans H. 30, 118, 120 Skelton, John 129 Skinner, John L. 116 Sklar, Howard 491 Sládek, Ondřej 582 Smith, Adam 273, 419, 420, 448, 583 Smolin, Lee 574, 575, 585 Snow, C.P. 595 Sollima, Stefano 178 Sommer, Roy 330, 405, 411, 414, 502, 505, 520, 535, 593, 599, 605 Sontag, Susan 439 Sophocles 344 Sørensen, Gert 182 Spacey, Kevin 278 Spencer, Herbert 567, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, 575, 576, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586, 587 Sperber, Dan 174 Spielhagen, Friedrich 316 Spier, Fred 569 Spitzer, Leo 270 Spolsky, Ellen 439 Springsteen, Bruce 290 Stanzel, Franz K. 101, 102, 103, 111, 316, 317, 510 Stapleton, Mag 452 Steibelt, Daniel Gottlieb 289, 310 Steinrück, Martin 338 Stendhal 445

 625

Stengers, Isabelle 498, 536, 538, 539, 542, 543, 544, 545, 546, 547, 549, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 558 Sternberg, Meir 195, 196, 207, 255, 260, 351, 491, 501, 502, 503, 520, 543, 548, 549 Sterne, Laurence 79, 440, 551 Stewart, James 266 Stoltzfus, Ben 468 Stone, Lawrence 383, 397 Strawson, Galen 388, 418 Stühring, Jan 114, 164 Sturgess, Philip J.M. 502 Suganami, Hidemi 409 Sullivan, Arthur 436 Sweetser, Eve 515 Swift, Graham 156 Swift, Taylor 290 Szostak, Rick 413 T Tacitus 383 Tallis, Raymond 570 Tapiero, Isabelle 508 Tarantino, Quentin 276 Tarasti, Eero 285, 296, 297, 301, 302, 304 Taylor, Charles 387 Taylor, Jennifer Bini 277 Taylor, Lawrence J. 437 Tchaikovsky, Modest 288 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 286, 288, 289, 293, 294, 295, 297, 301, 302, 307, 310 Thackeray, William Makepeace 200 Theocritus 344, 345 Thomas, Carol 142, 144 Thomé, Horst 239 Thompson, Evan 452 Thon, Jan-Noël 265, 266, 270, 276, 561 Thorpe, Adam 158 Thucydides 344, 383 Thurber, Bart 154, 155 Thurman, Uma 276 Tillotson, Kathleen Mary 12 Timofeev, Valery 77, 78, 561 Titzmann, Michael 230, 501 Tocqueville, Alexis de 394

626 

 Index

Todorov, Tzvetan 65, 254, 292, 305, 306, 307, 323, 347, 514, 517, 518, 541, 543, 544, 545, 547, 549, 555, 556 Toffler, Alvin 543, 547 Toker, Leona 65, 70, 73, 74 Tolkien, J.R.R. 218 Tolstoy, Leo 80, 548 Tomashevsky, Boris 554 Toolan, Michael 210, 259, 508, 509, 561 Tophinke, Doris 133 Torriani, Eugenio 290, 310 Toth, Josh 159 Towner, Theresa M. 116 Trabasso, Tom 508 Traxler, Matthew J. 508 Trollope, Anthony 200 Truc, Gérôme 390 Tuomela, Raimo 118, 119 Turner, Mark 507, 509, 524 Ty, Michelle 484 U Ukhtomsky, Alexei 89 Ullmann, Linn 25, 28, 32 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 574, 575 V Vaccai, Nicola 289, 290, 310 Vaina, Lucia 255 Vaio, Franco 536, 537, 538, 544, 547, 553, 555 Varzi, Achille 230 Velleman, J. David 207, 211, 212, 221, 222, 223 Verstraten, Peter 419 Vervaeck, Bart 201 Vico, Giambattista 568 Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 106 Viehweger, Dieter 508, 509, 511 Vogeley, Kai 78 Vona, Alexandru 451, 452 Vonnegut, Kurt 155 Vultur, Ioanna 302 W Wærp, Henning H. 30 Wagner, Geoffrey 265, 497

Waits, Tom 290 Walker, Jill 130, 131 Walker, Steven F. 288 Wall, Kathleen 159 Walsh, Richard 51, 102, 115, 116, 117, 122, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 416, 419, 448, 449, 461, 472, 485, 533, 557, 559 Walton, Kendall 173 Wang, Jing 372 Wang, Liya 365 Wang, Ping 368 Wang, Samuel 482 Warhol, Robyn 4, 7, 506, 521 Warning, Rainer 512, 513, 522 Wehle, Winfried 239 Weich, Horst 514 Weinrich, Harald 288 Weiße, Christian Felix 288 Wells, H.G. 546 Westervelt, Linda A. 200 West, Jessamyn 12, 163, 290, 295, 310, 361, 366, 367, 373, 376, 386, 450 Whipple, Mary 154, 162 White, Hayden 146, 155, 156, 173, 384, 388, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 406, 420, 421, 507 White, Morton 208 Whitrick, Kevin 129 Wibben, Annick 409, 423, 424 Wiener, Norbert 553 Williams, Raymond 110 Wilson, Deirdre 174 Wilson, Edward O. 567, 568, 569, 573, 576, 580, 588 Wilson, George 265, 270, 276, 444 Wisse, Ruth R. 66 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 79, 130, 148 Wittig, Monique 102 Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle 439, 455 Wolf, Christa 1021 Wolf, Werner 81, 220, 286, 301, 304, 318, 319, 328, 329, 331, 502 Woods, Angela 418 Woolf, Virginia 198, 273, 436, 438, 439, 444, 448, 449, 450, 456, 485, 548

Index 

X Xenophon (of Athens) 344 Xenophon of Ephesus 287 Xu, Dejin 168 Y Yacobi, Tamar 20, 21, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 159 Yang, Yi 369, 372, 373 Yeats, William Butler 364 Ye Xie 366 Yŏngjo, King of Korea 161 Yu, Anthony C. 364 Yu, Hong 376 Z Zagorin, Perez 153 Zaidel, Dahlia W. 483

 627

Zalloua, Zahi 467 Zandonai, Riccardo 289, 310 Zeffirelli, Franco 288, 290, 303, 308, 310 Zeki, Semir 483, 484 Zenner, Roman 134 Zerweck, Bruno 19, 20, 62, 137, 159 Zhang, Longxi 361, 374, 376 Zhang, Shijun 369 Zhang, Yinde 365 Zhao, Yanqiu 365, 368, 369 Zhao, Yiheng 365 Zieger, Susan 148 Zingarelli, Niccolò Antonio 289, 290, 310 Zipfel, Frank 147, 172, 173, 185, 186 Zolezzi, Paul 129 Zunshine, Lisa 353, 428 Zwaan, Rolf A. 437, 441, 480