Towards a 'Natural' Narratology

Monika Fludernik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134802586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this ground breaking work of synthesis, Monika Fludernik combines insights from literary theory and linguistics to provide a challenging new theory of narrative.This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of narrative, represents the epitome of a centuries long developmental process.

1
Towards a `natural' narratology

Let me start with an apologia for the title of this book. Three sources of inspiration have fed into the term `natural' narratology. For the moment I propose to keep the inverted commas on `natural' as an indication that I am very much aware of naïve and evaluative readings of that term and intend to eschew any prescriptive or moralistic interpretations. My espousal of this controversial label, as the prologue was meant to demonstrate, occurs at some level of sophistication. My own uses of the `natural' do not, however, merely reflect poststructuralist tenets. On the contrary, I attempt to cut through the threads of the deconstructionist and sociological debate and to institute a reconceptualization of the term within a more specifically cognitive perspective. My use of the concept of the `natural' relates to a framework of human embodiedness. It is from this angle that some cognitive parameters can be regarded as `natural' in the sense of `naturally occurring' or `constitutive of prototypical human experience'. The term `natural' is not applied to texts or textual techniques but exclusively to the cognitive frames by means of which texts are interpreted. Nor will the `natural' in these pages be opposed to the unnatural. Fictional experiments that manifestly exceed the boundaries of naturally occurring story(telling) situations are, instead, said to employ non-natural schemata.

The general framework for the theory is a constructivist one (Nünning 1989b, 1990a; Sternberg 1992; Jahn [under review]).¹ Readers actively construct meanings and impose frames on their interpretations of texts just as people have to interpret real-life experience in terms of available schemata. It will be argued that oral narratives (more precisely: narratives of spontaneous conversational storytelling) cognitively correlate with perceptual parameters of human experience and that these parameters remain in force even in more sophisticated written narratives, although the textual make-up of these stories changes drastically over time. Unlike the traditional models of narratology, narrativity (i.e. the quality of narrativehood in Gerald Prince's terminology²) is here constituted by what I call experientiality, namely by the quasi-mimetic evocation of `real-life experience'. Experientiality can be aligned with actantial frames, but it also correlates with the evocation of consciousness or with the representation of a speaker role. Experientiality, as everything else in narrative, reflects a cognitive schema of embodiedness that relates to human existence and human concerns. The anthropomorphic bias of narratives and its correlation with the fundamental story parameters of personhood, identity, actionality, etc., have long been noted by theoreticians of narrative and have been recognized as constituting the rock-bottom level of story matter (G.Prince 1982; M.-L.Ryan 1991). Where the current proposal supersedes this setup is in the redefinition of narrativity qua experientiality without the necessity of any actantial groundwork. In my model there can therefore be narratives without plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human (anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level. This radical elimination of plot from my definition of narrativity is based on the results of research into oral narrative, where, as I will illustrate, the emotional involvement with the experience and its evaluation provide cognitive anchor points for the constitution of narrativity. Merely plot-oriented narratives are therefore here argued to represent a zero degree of narrativity even though they are traditionally endowed with proto-typical narrativity.

In Chapter 1 the basic ingredients for the new model and its general structure are laid out. A discussion of my precise theoretical position in comparison with current typologies, and an explanation of the full significance of the proposed reconceptualizations, particularly of my redefinition of narrativity, will be postponed until Chapter 8. At that stage the reader will have had the experience of observing how the model works in practice. I have also left an engagement with some other theoretical key issues to the end of the book. Narratological discussions frequently rely on a fairly slim realist corpus of texts, and I have therefore felt the need to broach these issues only after the reader has been introduced to a wide range of non-canonical narratives and is able to weigh competing theses against that evidence. Whereas Chapter 1 provides a guideline to the framework of the new theory, the final chapter closes the narrative and argumentative bracket by supplying some more in-depth treatments for professional narratologists. Chapters 1 and 8 are thus designed to mirror one another and frame the historical chapters which they embrace.

1.1
LINGUISTIC CONCEPTS OF THE NATURAL

1.1.1
Natural narrative

Natural narrative is a term that has come to define `naturally occurring' storytelling in the linguistic literature of discourse analysis (Labov 1972). What will be called natural narrative in this book includes, mainly, spontaneous conversational storytelling, a term which would be more appropriate but is rather unwieldy. Natural narrative, in contradistinction to the wider area of oral narrative, comprises only spontaneous forms of (therefore conversational) storytelling but excludes oral poetry and folktale traditions of oral storytelling as they still exist, for instance, among Acadians in Nova Scotia.<sup>3</sup> Although oral poetry and its non-verse `equivalents' will not be entirely neglected, they are considered to constitute a more literary (i.e. institutionalized) form of storytelling that cannot lay claim to being `natural' in the same manner or to the same extent as conversational narration. Oral poetry, qua `elaborated orality' (Koch and Österreicher 1985), although signally affected by the cognitive constraints of oral discourse production (and reception), requires quite different kinds of competence and performance levels from those sufficient for everyday spontaneous conversation.

Two points need to be stressed. On the one hand, oral storytelling comes in a great variety of forms and shapes (see Chapter 2), from spontaneous narration of personal experiences (natural narrative proper) to the telling of jokes and anecdotes, the retelling of other people's experience (narrative of vicarious experience), bare reports and summaries of events, the `telling' of imaginary scenarios, all the way to the longer and culturally institutionalized forms which eventually developed into the epic and the folk tale. Within this range one needs to distinguish not only the quite different institutional settings of these various text and discourse types, allowing for a scale of formal and thematic structures that impinge on the production and shaping of such texts (note, for instance, the very strict formal and thematic requirements for jokes);⁴ one should also examine the varying personal involvement of the teller, the range of linguistic, structural and thematic creativity allowed for each oral genre and the interaction between these institutional constraints and the personal performance features.

Besides the variety of oral discourse forms, I would like to emphasize, as a second major point, the tensions between orality, performativity and narrativity. Discussions of narrativity, even though they have partly relied on conceptually⁵ oral texts (the folk tales of Vladimir Propp, the Greek myths analysed by Lévi-Strauss), have predominantly taken written and especially fictional texts as their object of demonstration. By moving both historical (i.e. non-fictional) and oral (non-written) forms into the centre of my enquiry, I radically depart from this tradition. Taking my bearings from E.M.Forster's The king died and then the queen died of grief (1974: 60), which has never convinced me of its exemplary narrativity⁶ (and that not only on account of its lack of discursivity),⁷ I wish to analyse literary narrative against the foil of naturally occurring forms of storytelling, arguing that natural narrative and jokes tell us more about the workings of narrativity even in more complex texts than do the pseudo-oral stories (fairy tales) and constructed example sentences (E.M.Forster's paradigm) on which narra tologists have so frequently relied.

The narrativity which can be observed to emerge from spontaneous conversational storytelling is a holistic or organic as well as dialectically constituted phenomenon. Taking natural narrative as my departure point, I concentrate on the structural properties of conversational storytelling (its episodic structure) and on the dynamic interaction or dialectic between the news value of the tale and its impact on the experiencer's retrospective evaluation (reportability vs. narrative `point'). Chapter 2 presents a full discussion of the basic types of natural narrative and their formal and experiential variations. A connection will be established between a number of formal points (linguistic markers) and episodic narrative structure, and it will be argued that cognitive parameters correlate with these formal aspects of natural narrative. Second, the entire frame of storytelling itself operates as a cognitively grounded frame. Natural narrative therefore supplies key conceptualizations for the study of all types of narrative.

In this book natural narrative is conceived as `natural' exclusively in terms of its quality of spontaneous (re)production, and on the basis of its universality, its transcultural existence and significance. Natural narrative will not be considered in any way more `normal' or `non-artificial' than the written language; both oral and written forms of discourse are coequal, structurally determined symbolic media which operate within specific generic, cultural and contextual frames. Neither written nor oral forms of discourse can be produced or understood outside such a frame, and since such frames are determined by cultural, i.e. societal and ideological, circumstances, they cannot lay claim to any mythic `naturalness'. Results from the analysis of even prototypically natural storytelling in spontaneous conversational settings indeed document the entirely structured nature of that discourse much on the lines of Derrida's insights into the basically `written' (i.e. formal) nature of the spoken language. Thus, despite the use of the term `natural', any mythic or originary concepts of naturalness will here be decidedly repudiated.⁸ As long as one starts out from a consideration of orality, and specifically of natural narrative, in terms of pure otherness or of an unstructured natural pre-existence and self-emergence, no significant similarities and influences can be observed between the oral and the literary language; which may, in fact, account for the near-complete silence on natural narrative within classic narratology. Interaction between the oral and the written, the spontaneous and the consciously structured, or between the apparently non-institutionalized and the societally determined generic (the legal, the theologico-moralistic, the literary, etc.), becomes possible only on the basis of comparable cognitive structurations which then prepare the ground for processes of intertextuality and cross-fertilization. My methodology therefore fully endorses the analyses of the deconstructionist debate, although I then move on to more pragmatic exploitations of these insights.

My approach moreover complements recent results regarding other aspects of the oral language such as oral syntax (Halford and Pilch 1990; Chafe 1994) which have decisively put to rest any previous notions of conversational language as unstructured, ungrammatical, pure performance, or pure unreflected naturalness.⁹ The discovery of oral syntax and of the existence of discourse strategies which display a wide range of converging structural and dynamic configurations has entirely discredited such earlier snobbery and is forcing us to rethink completely our formal models of linguistics. Although the practical result of discourse analysis has been to carve out new research areas and to put traditional, particularly generative, approaches in their place, the eventual upshot of this development is likely to be a formalization of language within a new paradigm of linguistics, this time from the point of view of oral discourse, a paradigm that incorporates the written language as one of several particularly complex discourse modes.

The use of the term `natural' in natural narrative also needs to be distinguished from Barbara Herrnstein Smith's concept of natural discourse (B.Smith 1978/1983), which she contrasts with fictive discourse. Smith defines natural discourse as `all utterances, spoken or inscribed, that can be taken as someone's saying something, sometime, somewhere' (1983: 47)¹⁰ in the sense that this then constitutes a non-fictive speech act. Smith here relies on Searle's definition of the fictional speech act, a model that (I think, illegitimately) transfers a communicative structure on to literary discourse and is then constrained to define the literary speech act as make-believe.¹¹ For instance, Smith argues that at the beginning of Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich the text pretends to belong to the genre of the biography: Tolstoy is, if you like, pretending to be writing a biography while actually fabricating one' (ibid.: 329±30). Smith's prototype for fictive discourse is poetry which is said to be about language. Since I am concerned with narrative only, which is not a speech act in the ordinary sense of the term, my own definitions in fact cut across those of Smith's. Indeed, my understanding of natural narrative counteracts a distinction between fiction and nonfiction on her lines.¹² Issues of truth and referentiality are bracketed in my account. Discourse analysis, one can note, lends itself to very diverse literary appropriations.

The major theoretical function of natural narrative in this study consists in supplying a prototype for the constitution of narrativity. Moreover, natural narrative, it is argued, operates as one central productive pattern of cognitive origin which regulates the textual production and reception of new naturally non-occurring discourse types and modes (Chapter 6). The term natural here, as elsewhere, serves less as a referential marker of essentialist meaning than as a functional operator that makes it possible to discuss similarities and distinctions between observable discourse types. Although natural narrative is taken to be cognitively prior to, and more basic than, other types of narrative, this priority will be of a typological and prototypical kind and cannot simply be equated with arguments of diachronic precedence or of a privileged generic status. Natural narrative not only serves as a prototype in my theory; within my argumentative discourse the concept of the natural itself displays prototype effects.¹³ Prototypicality and embodiment are not reducible to idealist positions, but instead lend themselves to metaphoric extensions and transfers that increase the potential applicability of the new paradigm. My recourse to natural narrative therefore resembles Alfred Schütz's sociological recourse to everyday experience as a prototype of human relations.¹⁴

1.1.2
The linguistic theory of naturalness: from frames to prototypes

In recent years new developments in linguistics have introduced the term `natural' to designate aspects of language which appear to be regulated or motivated by cognitive parameters based on man's experience of embodiedness in a real-world context. The term features as a label in the Austrian linguistic school of Natürlichkeitstheorie<sup>15</sup> (`theory of naturalness'). Similar phenomena, though not necessarily dubbed `natural', emerge from research in the area of cognitive linguistics, particularly prototype theory,¹⁶ and from many of the contributions to the journal Cognitive Linguistics. Recent studies in iconicity likewise deploy a cognitive framework.¹⁷ A third, largely independent current (which prototype theory claims to embrace) is the older discipline called frame theory as initiated by Schank and Abelson (1977). Frame theory (now at its MOP stage)¹⁸ attempts to explain the cognitive comprehension of reallife situations in terms of holistic situation schemata. Such schemata (whether frames, scripts or schemas)¹⁹ are of a p...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PROLOGUE IN THE WILDERNESS
• 1. TOWARDS A `NATURAL' NARRATOLOGY
• 2. NATURAL NARRATIVE AND OTHER ORAL MODES
• 3. FROM THE ORAL TO THE WRITTEN: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE BEFORE THE NOVEL
• 4. THE REALIST PARADIGM: CONSCIOUSNESS, MIMESIS AND THE READING OF THE `REAL'
• 5. REFLECTORIZATION AND FIGURALIZATION: THE MALLEABILITY OF LANGUAGE
• 6. VIRGIN TERRITORIES: THE STRATEGIC EXPANSION OF DEICTIC OPTIONS
• 7. GAMES WITH TELLERS, TELLING AND TOLD
• 8. NATURAL NARRATOLOGY
• IN LIEU OF AN EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES