Narrative Form

Revised and Expanded Second Edition

Suzanne Keen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137439598
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This revised and expanded handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction and creative writing, with refreshed references and new discussions of cognitive approaches to narrative, nonfiction, and narrative emotions.

1

Major Approaches to and Theorists of Narrative

What is narrative fiction?

One of the most striking commonalities of handbooks for writers of fiction and theoretical works for advanced students lies in the evasiveness of their opening gambits of definition. Narrative fiction … what exactly is it? Neither sort of work typically comes right out and states a plain definition of narrative fiction; both assume that readers already recognize narrative and, more particularly, the fictional kinds of narrative. For definitions the advanced student turns to dictionaries and specialized texts, and here the consensus begins to break down. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) refers the inquisitive to Scottish law, where narrative means ‘that part of a deed or document which contains a statement of the relevant or essential facts.’ (From this Scottish source, according to the OED, the words ‘narrative’ and ‘narrate’ enter common parlance around the middle of the eighteenth century.) This definition gives primacy to the documentary nature of narrative and clearly leaves out fiction. For narrative as fiction, the OED offers ‘[a]n account or narration; a history, tale, story, recital (of facts, etc.),’ which brings in oral narration and several examples of narratives real and fictitious. Finally, the OED offers ‘narrative,’ without an article, as ‘the practice or act of narrating; something to narrate.’ Here the emphasis falls on the implicit narrator: narrative is what the narrator does and what the narrator tells. Related definitions fill in more of the picture: in classical rhetoric, narration is the part of an oration in which the facts are stated; the etymology of the verb ‘narrate’ (to relate, recount) suggests derivation from a root meaning ‘skilled’ and ‘knowing.’ A glance at the definition for fiction brings us closer: ‘The species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters; fictitious composition. Now usually, prose novels and stories collectively.’ However, to arrive at this definition, one must note its precedent meanings, which emphasize fashioning, arbitrary invention, feigning, counterfeiting, and deceiving. The senses of fashioning, from fiction, and skill, from the root word for narration, both suggest craftsmanship, but they also carry more negative meanings of deception. A relation of events may proceed from ‘mere invention,’ and the receiver of such a tale may be tricked or taken in. The continuing tensions between disciplinary understandings of the functions of narrativity (in literary theory and history, for instance) may have a distant source in the vexatious relations of ‘narrative’ and ‘fiction.’

Gerald Prince, in his Dictionary of Narratology, scarcely deigns to notice the word ‘fiction.’ He defines narrative as ‘the recounting (as product and process, object and act, structure and structuration) of one or more real or fictitious EVENTS communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATORS to one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATEES’ (Dictionary, 58). If we omit the qualifying parentheses, we can see that this definition deflates to the recounting of events by narrators to narratees. From the OED definitions we recognize the narrator, the act of recounting, and the real or fictitious events (replacing the Scottish legal ‘facts’). Prince, a major theorist of the recipients of narration, emphasizes the narratee, an auditor, viewer, or reader figure whose presence is implied by the activity of the narrator. This contemporary view of narrative has a long pedigree, reaching back to Plato and Aristotle, from whom we derive a traditional distinction between ‘telling,’ or relating (diegesis), and ‘showing,’ or enacting (mimesis). In the narration of Plato’s diegesis, the poet acts as a narrator in his own name, telling about agents and events. (The imitation of mimesis involves a poet who pretends to be the speaker responsible for the utterance.) Thus the mediation of a narrator becomes a core characteristic of narrative.

For most people, narrative is defined by examples—the novels, short stories, films, histories, music videos, epic poems, comics, biographies, ballads, television series, and private conversations that tell stories true and made-up. This incomplete list suggests how ubiquitous narrative is, and also how hard it is to say what it is in a satisfactory short definition that would encompass all the examples. Theorists propose definitions comprised of bare minimums: narrative tells a story; so it has a teller, called a narrator (but this doesn’t work for film or narrative art); it relates events (at least one, though some insist on two); it features characters or agents (though not necessarily in human form). Contrasts have proven helpful: while drama is enacted, lyric speaks, and narrative is told. Other contrasts hold up less well: is it really the case that the first person of lyric is matched by the second person of drama and the third person of narrative fiction?¹ Both definition by exclusion and definition by minimal required ingredients often run into logical or practical problems. Marie Laure-Ryan collates definitions of narrative from a variety of sources and suggests a ‘fuzzy set definition’ concerning temporal, spatial, mental, formal, and pragmatic dimensions of narrative, drawn from ‘prototypical cases that everybody recognizes as stories’ (Ryan, ‘Toward a Definition,’ 28). This seems to me an admirable and flexible approach to the continuing challenge of defining and characterizing narrative.

Nearly every observation that we can make about narrative’s core qualities can be confuted or extended to apply to other forms. Though not an exhaustive list, the following examples demonstrate some of the areas of contestation. Narrative fictions tell stories that are not necessarily true, though they should be distinguished from lies. However, deception through the production of fictions that masquerade as true stories continues to the present day. So sometimes fictions are still lies, or intend to deceive. Narrative fictions have plots; this differentiates them from chronicles of events, or mere lists, or other collections of events presented without causation. As one narratological version has it, ‘a narrative is the semiotic representation of a series of events meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way.’² The events in plots are causally linked, as E. M. Forster famously illustrates—‘The king died, and the Queen died of grief.’ However, some postmodernist narrative artists have made a point of breaking the causal connection between the events in their fictions: the actions are related in the sense of being narrated, but unrelated as far as causation is concerned.³ From Aristotle narrative theory derives the observation that plots have beginnings, middles, and ends. So do dramas and all other art forms that transpire in time. Common qualities of narrative can be found in other forms, and the solution, to my mind, is not to extend the category of narrative to include everything that resembles it in some way.

Even Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose Understanding Fiction (1943, rev. ed. 1959) remains one of the most influential works of Anglo-American criticism of narrative, evade the task of definition.⁴ ‘Fiction’ they assume from the outset; their goal is to argue its artfulness and significance. When it comes to definitions, they suggest that fiction is a ‘unity,’ having a set of ‘vital relationships’ among its elements, relationships that are not necessarily harmonious, but which include conflict and tension. In Brooks and Warren’s view, fiction comes down to the combination of elements. It has action, characters, psychology, moral content, social situations, ideas and attitudes, and literary style (Understanding Fiction, xii). Though Brooks and Warren resist the idea that fiction-writing lies in the deployment of the contents of a bag of tricks, their emphasis on relationships among elements makes the component parts the essential items in achieving ‘a real unity—a unity in which every part bears an expressive relation to other parts’ (Understanding Fiction, 645). Given that any other art form could be asserted to consist of the ‘unity’ much prized by followers of the New Criticism, the unity of its elements does not ultimately make a compelling definition of narrative fiction.

If the ‘unity’ of Brooks and Warren does not satisfy, the various divisions presented by structuralist theorists of narrative have also resulted in incomplete definitions. One common distinction sets description against narration as binary opposites. In description, story time stands still, while in narration, the chronology of events implies passing time (see treatment of temporality in narrative in Chapter 6). Description may have the objects, characters, and even the happenings of narrative, but it presents them without suggesting the succession of events that sets a plot in motion. This opposition makes the possession of plot a fundamental ingredient of narrative. In an even more basic and ubiquitous convention of structuralist narrative theory, the ‘what’ of the story is distinguished from the ‘how’ of the narration. In this binary arrangement, narrative consists of a fabula (story) and sjuzet (discourse), or the events as they actually happen, contrasted with the events as they are told by the narrator. This conception assumes that narrative consists of a sequence of events, told by a teller, and it posits an intrinsic tension between the events as they ‘really’ happened (though as fictions, they didn’t happen) and the events as they are related in the text. Without events, without a teller, or without a sense of order in time, the basic materials of narrative would then be missing.

Where do people belong in a definition of narrative? Most lists of the fundamental ingredients of narrative acknowledge characters, the actors involved in plot events, though some critics use the term ‘actants’ to de-emphasize the human-like quality of characters in narrative. Fictional character poses some problems for the two-level understanding of narrative offered by structuralist narrative theory. Character and characterization bridge the ostensibly separate zones of fabula and sjuzet, for they belong equally to the realm of ‘what really happens,’ the story level, and the realm of ‘how the narrator tells what happens,’ the discourse level. The invitation that characters make to readers, that is to connect their fictional experiences with our real ones, makes character an especially important ingredient of narrative from the perspective of the reading experience.

By rephrasing the description of the discourse level to the realm of ‘how readers come to know what happens as they read a text,’ we can reinsert readers into structuralism’s formal division. Much depends upon whether narrative is understood as a dynamic process involving a reader who does not yet know everything about a text’s content, or whether it is conceived as a completed object, about which generalizations can be made and checked against other completed readings. Structuralist criticism usually assumes the latter. A parallel school of thought about narrative, speech act theory, emphasizes its function as a kind of speech act, a specialized form of utterance that has a teller and a recipient. This approach offers a dynamic view of narrative, and sees its object—a time-bound linear form—as the co-creation of recipients hearing, watching, or reading. The distinction between narrative as a kind of behavior (something humans do with words) and narrative as a kind of object, whose traits can be discovered through close scrutiny, results in very different emphases. This book draws insights from both approaches to narrative, because the influence of speech act theory continues to be felt in narrative theory, especially in recent work in cognitive approaches to narrative. Structuralist models for the description of narrative objects have been challenged and modified by theorists informed by speech act theory (and the related areas of reader response criticism and reception theory) and by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. These approaches have helped to make more central an idea of narrative as an activity that people do. Though a story is a specific thing and one of numberless instances of things of that type, narrative is also a practice. It is often conceived as a universal human trait, even, in the arguments of some cognitive scientists, a habit of the mind that precedes language. As David Herman has written, narrative is ‘a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change’ (Herman Basic 2).

Why study narrative form?

Scholarly interest in narrative has expanded rapidly in the past decade. Theorists and literary critics are more often engaged in interdisciplinary conversations with narrative experts from a diverse array of fields, including anthropology, art, architecture, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, ethics, film studies, history, legal studies, media studies, philosophy, narrative medicine, psychology and therapy, sociolinguistics, and virtual reality theory. This exciting situation means that understandings of narrative that have been accepted for decades are being scrutinized from new angles and for different purposes. Years ago, structuralist theorists called for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the poetics of narrative. Though recent developments in narrative studies do not point towards a new grand theory subsuming all examples and disciplinary approaches into one grammar or science, the scrutiny of narrative from so many different angles promises new understandings and new questions. These are more likely than ever to call upon students’ ability to navigate interdisciplinary crossings in order to converse with interested parties from outside literary studies.

Advanced students of narrative are well positioned to contribute to this interdisciplinary conversation. In literary studies, they are likely to approach narrative through courses of reading in novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose. Indeed, courses on novels and narrative literature (as well as film) still vastly outnumber graduate level courses in narrative theory. This book cannot replace a full course of reading on narrative theory, but it provides a broad and comprehensive introduction to that field for advanced students. Because it is likely to be most useful as a supplement to a syllabus of narrative texts, it focuses on fiction, with one chapter devoted to nonfiction. Questions about the formal distinctiveness of fictional narrative are addressed, and much of the terminology applies equally effectively to novels and stories, to nonfictional narratives, and to narratives in verse. A modest level of reference to films acknowledges narratives in other media. That said, Narrative Form is located squarely in the field of literary studies, where the study of narrative has been going on for nearly a century. Familiarity with the terms and techniques commonly used in literary studies should permit the venturesome to enter interdisciplinary conversations confident of their ability to identify and describe the aspects of narrative that interest them.

Even if an advanced student has no deep interest in narrative form, understanding the claims of narrative theory can still be useful. Narrative theory provides an extremely detailed vocabulary for the description of the component parts and various functions of narrative, but only a few advanced students will go on as narratologists. Many will be drawn to narrative literature, but will find contextual, thematic, or other theoretical approaches more immediately compelling. The approach to narrative form that I take in this handbook emphasizes the craft of fiction, and honors the makers and feigners who shape words to build story worlds in the minds of readers. It is my hope that advanced students who are drawn to narrative simply because they love to read will find the description of the narrative artist’s tool-kit of interest. In the process of reading this book, advanced students will acquire tools of their own for making critical distinctions and clarifying their observations about a writer’s craft. It is true that many critics are skeptical of the underlying assumption of formalist analysis, and that others shrink from anything that sounds like theory at all. I believe that the evidence of contemporary writing suggests that formal choices still matter to the makers of fiction. Further, I believe a finely tuned sense of narrative form should matter to literary critics hoping to illuminate the way discourse moves through texts, through our lives, our self-understandings and misapprehensions, and into the story worlds where we float our theories about possibilities and problems. Describing narrative form cannot by itself answer all the questions that advanced students bring to the critical conversation, nor should it. However, precise observations about the handling of the formal qualities of narrative can easily be combined with many other modes of criticism.

Understanding jargon terms and the debates that make them meaningful is the only significant obstacle. Narratology itself—a term coined by Tzvetan Todorov—has a pseudo-scientific sound, and many literary critics today disdain the structuralist emulation of science embodied by the word. It refers, in its classical sense, to the structuralist analysis of the nature and function of narrative, and it implies an interest in commonalities across all narrative instances. Like the structuralism and semiotics from which it is derived, it de-emphasizes historical and cultural contexts in favor of generalizations that hold true across a broad array of examples drawn from many periods (though in practice, narratology has been limited by the linguistic attainments of its practitioners). When the mere use of narratology’s highly specific terminology provokes negative reactions in otherwise open-minded readers, critics of ...