Postmodern Narrative Theory

Mark Currie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781137611963
• eBook ISBN: 9781350309814
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

How have developments in literary and cultural theory transformed our understanding of narrative? What has happened to narrative in the wake of poststructuralism? What is the role and function of narrative in the contemporary world? In this revised, updated and expanded new edition of an established text, Mark Currie explores these central questions and guides students through the complex theories that have shaped the study of narrative in recent decades. Postmodern Narrative Theory, Second Edition:
• establishes direct links between the workings of fictional narratives and those of the non-fictional world
• charts the transition in narrative theory from its formalist beginnings, through deconstruction, towards its current concerns with the social, cultural and cognitive uses of narrative
• explores the relationship between postmodern narrative and postmodern theory more closely
• presents detailed illustrative readings of known literary texts such as Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and now features a new chapter on Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man. Approachable and stimulating, this is an essential introduction for anyone studying postmodernism, the theory of narrative or contemporary fiction.

Part I

Lost Objects

1 The Manufacture of Identities

Is our identity inside us, like the kernel of a nut? Most of the perspectives presented in this book are implicitly dedicated to the proposition that personal identity is not inside us. There are two types of argument. The first is that identity is relational, meaning that it is not to be found inside a person but that it inheres in the relations between a person and others. According to this argument, the explanation of a person’s identity must designate the difference between that person and others: it must refer not to the inner life of the person but to the system of differences through which individuality is constructed. In other words, personal identity is not really contained in the body at all; it is structured by, or constituted by, difference. The second type of argument is that identity is not within us because it exists only as narrative. Two things are meant by this: that the only way to explain who we are is to tell our own story, to select key events which characterise us and organise them according to the formal principles of narrative – to externalise ourselves as if talking of someone else, and for the purposes of self-representation; but also that we learn how to self-narrate from the outside, from other stories and particularly through the process of identification with other characters. This gives narration at large the potential to teach us how to conceive of ourselves, what to make of our inner life and how to organise it.

We perhaps automatically think that characters in novels have ready-made moral personalities. It is tempting to see our response to characters as individual and free judgements as the result of an encounter between our own moral values and those represented by the character. It is part of the referential illusion of fictional narrative, for example, that we make inferences about fictional characters no different from the inferences we make about real people. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the contribution narratology has made to understanding the technical control of such responses and inferences: to show how our responses are manufactured by the rhetoric of narrative. Chapter 2 deals in more general terms with the illusion of reference. This chapter is concerned in particular with the evolution of questions about sympathy for characters into questions about the ideological function of narrative.

It is not too gross an exaggeration to say that narratology spent the first 50 years of the twentieth century obsessed by the analysis of point of view in narrative. The phrase point of view is potentially misleading, suggesting as it does the idea of an opinion or stance on a topic. It is more accurate to understand the narratological meaning of the phrase as a visual metaphor – that in narrative there is a point from which a narrator views fictional events and characters as if visually. Like the camera in a film, the perspective of a narrative is always located somewhere, up above events, in among them or behind the eyes of one or more of the characters involved. Like the film camera, the narrative voice can move around from one point of view to another, often shifting undetectably from outside to inside views. Many of the terms that originated in the analysis of point of view are visual metaphors – like the concepts of narrative distance or focalisation – but they are metaphors in the sense that the only real vision involved in reading is the vision of printed words. In verbal narrative, vision is an illusion in a more obvious way than it is in film. We see a fictional world in verbal narrative in a less literal way than we do in film, however much the narrative aspires to conjure a picture.

The analysis of point of view is one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century criticism. Its power was partly the power of analytical terminology, to describe subtle shifts in the narrative voice, the movement into and out of other minds, or the modes of presenting the speech and thought of characters. But it was more than descriptive power. It was a new exploration in the rhetoric of fiction, the way that fiction can position us, can manipulate our sympathies and can pull our heartstrings, in the service of some moral aim. The analysis of point of view above all made critics aware that sympathy for characters was not a question of clear-cut moral judgement. It was manufactured and controlled by these newly describable techniques in fictional point of view. It was the beginning of a systematic narratology, one which seemed to assert that stories could control us, could manufacture our moral personalities in ways that had not previously been understood.

Despite a pronounced move away from authorial intention in New Criticism, there is always a sense that the analysis of point of view in fiction is the unveiling of authorial control. Sometimes the impression is that a work of fiction is a polemic wearing an elaborate disguise or, to change the metaphor slightly, an act of authorial ventriloquy where the ventriloquist’s own polemic can be hidden among the fictional voices of puppets. Consider, for example, the opening of Wayne Booth’s landmark study of point of view in The Rhetoric of Fiction: ‘In writing about the rhetoric of fiction, I am not primarily interested in didactic fiction, fiction used for propaganda or instruction. My subject is the technique of non-didactic fiction, viewed as the art of communicating with readers’ (1961, p. 1). Booth’s work is an analysis of the art of persuasion in fiction which is not openly polemic. It tends to assume that aspects of point of view in fiction are marshalled by an author in the service of an argument, but an argument that operates through the manipulation of sympathy.

Voice, distance and judgement

How can techniques in narrative point of view control a reader’s sympathy for characters? This question has never seemed to me very different from the question of why we feel sympathetic towards some people in life and not others. I’ll begin with two basic propositions about sympathy which apply to narrative and life: (1) We are more likely to sympathise with people when we have a lot of information about their inner lives, motivations, fears and so on; and (2) We sympathise with people when we see other people who do not share our access to their inner lives judging them harshly or incorrectly. In life, we get this kind of information through intimacy, friendship or Oprah Winfrey. In fiction we get it through the narrator, either reliably reported by the narrator or through direct access to the minds of characters.

There is an obvious objection to these propositions: if our access to the inner lives of characters is access to a sick mind, to twisted motivations, evil or anything else that offends our ready-made moral values, the result will not be sympathy. And yet much contemporary fiction acquires its moral controversy exactly through the creation of sympathy for morally offensive characters. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting are examples of places where access to the inner lives of characters can confront commonly held moral attitudes to murder or drugs through the creation of a strange sympathy for the devil. These are novels which create an intimacy between readers and moral monsters purely through access to their minds. Through this intimacy, readers often find themselves technically siding against their own moral prejudices as they witness the judgements of other characters in the fiction who are not in possession of this detailed background of psychological information.

Information alone cannot necessarily elicit a sympathetic response. Sometimes it is the careful control of the flow of information, of where it comes from and how it is presented, which controls a reader’s judgement. To illustrate the role of point of view in the control of judgement it is worth summarising Booth’s analysis of Jane Austen’s Emma and the way that it creates sympathy for an unlikeable heroine. In a less extreme way than the examples above, Emma does not automatically inspire a reader’s sympathy. She lacks generosity, self-knowledge and understanding. In the course of the narrative, her character reforms to become a more complete marriage prospect. Booth begins his analysis by stating this as a problem facing the artist: given that sympathy is necessary if we are to follow Emma on her moral journey to reform, how can Jane Austen create sympathy for a character with such unlikeable faults?

To restate the problem, how can Jane Austen, on the one hand, make us like Emma enough to desire her reform and, on the other hand, make us stand back from her in judgement and thus perceive her faults? His answer is a brilliant demonstration of the oscillation in Emma between closeness to and distance from a character. He argues first that Jane Austen avoids distancing us from Emma by using her as a kind of narrator. Though the story is narrated in the third person, events are often seen through Emma’s eyes, reflected or focalised through her mind, so that the reader can see beyond the surface of Emma’s selfish manipulations and perceive the qualities which might redeem her. For Booth, this redeeming evidence is much more persuasive when presented as an inside view than it would be if the same evidence were offered in authorial commentary. The inside view creates the illusion of unmediated access to Emma, so that judgement of her character appears direct and free from control. But even if the reader found nothing good in her thoughts, the inside view would create sympathy for Emma just by being an inside view: ‘the sustained inside view leads the reader to hope for good fortune for the character with whom he travels, quite independently of the qualities revealed’ (Booth, 1961, p. 246). Booth also points out that by focalising through Emma, we are withheld from other perspectives which might alienate us from her. If we were given sustained inside views of Jane Fairfax, for example, we might prefer her to Emma, see her as the narrative’s positive value or become alienated from Emma’s wrongheadedness about Jane. Control of the inside view, therefore, sustains our sympathy for Emma, prevents us from judging her over-harshly, at the same time as it allows us access to her faults. In so doing it relieves the third person narrative voice of the need to preach about or judge Emma’s moral personality.

An author should never preach. Even in a tale with an obvious moral or philosophical purpose an author should never be seen to preach. Even a sermon acknowledges this, conventionally offering a narrative sequence up for judgement as a preamble to any explicit moral lesson. Like Aesop, the narrative preacher must ensure that readers have reached all the right moral judgements about the story before the revelation of the narrative’s moral purpose. Authors who neglect this principle, like D.H. Lawrence, often find themselves reviled for using narrators or characters as doctrinal mouthpieces. Yet some authors, and Booth treats Jane Austen as one of them, do have clear moral purposes which have to be subsumed subtly in the fiction. In the case of Emma, Booth analyses the oscillation between the closeness of an inside view and the distance of the third person narrator standing back with the reader in moments of more explicit judgement of Emma as a technique for disguising, or creating co-operation for, doctrinal intent. At one pole of this oscillation there is the inside view. At the other there is explicit judgement from the narrator, like this one in the first paragraph: ‘The real evils of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.’ Moments like these, where the distance between Emma and the reader is greatest, then have to be corroborated by moments of direct access to Emma’s mind and the witnessing of her actions.

Between the two poles are degrees of distance. The narrative voice distances itself from judgement of Emma by putting judgemental commentary into the mouth of Mr Knightley. The narrative voice adopts a tone of irony, often slipping into the recognisable voice of a character, creating what Booth calls ‘sympathetic laughter’. The narrator reports a thought in isolation rather than sustaining focalisation through Emma’s eyes. The narrator summarises a conversation or a line of thought without giving us access as direct speech or the inside view. In short, we find ourselves as readers yoked to the narrator, our distance, whether ocular or moral, controlled by the subtle shifts in point of view between layers of represented voices and thoughts, by the information we are given and that which is withheld from us.

This kind of analysis implies several things about the value of narratology and the nature of fictional narrative. Perhaps most important is the stance it takes on the production of sympathy: that it is technically produced and controlled by the devices of access, closeness and distance. Booth, for example, compares the function of access to the technique of dramatic irony on stage, where the audience has information not shared by all the characters on stage. Think of Volpone lying in his deathbed, tricking his suitors out of gifts and favours while the audience, knowing him to be healthy, laughs at their attempts. There is little to choose, morally speaking, between these characters. They are all equally motivated by greed. But the audience is technically placed on the side of Volpone because of the information it shares with him. The moral satire, though applicable to all, is directed away from Volpone and towards the suitors by this information pact between audience and hero which prevents dramatic irony from distancing us from his atrocious actions. As Booth constantly reminds us in The Rhetoric of Fiction, this is a principle that applies to life far beyond the boundaries of fiction, whether it is a carefully planted self-revelation among the complicated dynamics of friendship or a media event like Princess Diana’s Panorama interview in which image management masquerades as a privileged inside view. In such cases, social power derives from moral sympathy which is controlled by techniques in information management and not by rectitude.

The analysis of point of view also implies the value of aesthetic distance in reading. Booth claims that ‘only immature readers ever really identify with any character, losing all sense of distance and hence all chance of an artistic experience’ (1961, p. 200). In other words, distance not only specifies a moral or quasi-visual gap between the reader and characters: it also characterises a mature, aesthetic experience of narrative. This is the kind of claim that critics dare not make any more. The idea of this kind of intellectual distance has come to be seen recently as a sham or a delusion. The argument is that a critic adopts a stance of disinterestedness, abandoning naive questions such as ‘do I like Emma Woodhouse?’ in favour of more technical ones such as ‘how is my sympathy for Emma manufactured?’. Recent narratology tends to be more sceptical of the possibility that any reader can suspend his or her identity or climb to some Olympian height, some transcendental aesthetic realm which is no longer cluttered by the thorny issues of identity such as gender, race or class. The analysis of point of view tends to talk of the reader in the singular as if all readers respond in the same way, subject as they are to the same technical mechanisms in the rhetoric of narrative.

This is one of the key issues in the transition to a poststructuralist narratology. In effect it is an issue that walks hand in hand with another unmissable implication in the analysis of fictional point of view – that the author manipulates this ideal reader according to some intentional plan formulated in advance. Ruminating at length on whether Jane Austen’s art was conscious or intuitive, Booth’s reading of Emma gives the impression that the novel sprang from the need to find a solution to the problem of how to create sympathy for an unlikeable heroine because it was necessary for the moral plan – as if the novel were a moral–philosophical tract disguised as a story. But what happens if we analyse the story in a similar way, for its technical operations, for the structure of its multiple voices and for its control of access to the inner lives of characters, without reference to authorial intention? The answer is that we preserve all that is valuable about Booth’s analysis of point of view while leaving behind some of its unsupportable assumptions about the communication between a single-minded author and a singular reader: or we move from the analysis of rhetoric to the analysis of ideology.

Formalism and ideology

Most commentators speak of American New Criticism as if it were incontrovertibly a formalist method of analysis. As I suggested in the Introduction, this is not a simple issue. While the concept of form is most easily definable in relation to that of content, the term formalism derives meaning largely in opposition to historicism. We would expect a formalist analysis, then, to ignore both the content and the historical context of the literary work. Perhaps because the content of a narrative is harder to ignore than, say, that of the modernist lyric poem, New Criticism tended towards rigorous formalism more obviously in its dealings with non-narrative poetry than in its narratology. Booth does declare a certain disinterest in history in The Rhetoric of Fiction, but his writing is engaged with literary history in the sense that he is deeply involved in characterising modern fiction in terms of formal developments which enable the modern writer to explore the representation of thought, consciousness and subjectivity. On the issue of content, it is impossible to argue that Booth’s formal analyses bracket off or ignore the content of narrative. When he speaks of our access to Emma’s mind, we are always conscious of the content of her thoughts, of her faults and redeeming qualities, of the fictional events in which these thoughts are embedded or of the moral personality of the narrative voice. These issues would not be in the foreground of a rigorously formalistic analysis. It might be more accurate to define Booth’s position as an interest in the form of content, or the way in which narrative content is constructed and represented. If one puts on one’s rigorously formalist hat, under which words are just sounds and graphic marks, and narrative techniques are techniques for their own sake, we find ourselves, on reading Booth, constantly taking it off again as we greet the content of his narratives at every turn.

What then would a rigorously formalistic narratology be like? If Booth is operating on the assumption that the content of a narrative is inseparable from form, packaged in it and not unpackable, is it possible to go further towards banishing content altogether? The history of narratology after the New Criticism might be seen in these terms as a quest for a more rigorous formalism. Booth was a formalist in the sense that he was interested in technique and rhetoric, but his study of form always reads like a study in the art of representational content. Fictional characters are perhaps the most apparent case in point. For Booth, they are representations of people, not mere constructs of verbal form. However much they are rhetorically controlled, our responses to fictional characters for Booth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Lost Objects
• Part II: Narrative Time and Space
• Part III: Narrative Subjects
• Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index