The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory

The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

H. Meretoja

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137401052
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137401069
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory explores the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the postwar crisis and return of storytelling and shows their relevance for the ongoing debate on the significance of narrative for human existence.

1

Introduction

Two narrative turns: Theoretical and cultural

If storytelling is as old as humanity, its crisis may be as old as the novel. In ‘The Storyteller’ (‘Der Erzähler’, 1936), Walter Benjamin (1999: 84, 93) suggests that the rise of the modern novel manifests a crisis of the art of storytelling, a crisis of the ‘communicability of experience’ that came to characterize the modern age and culminated in the First World War and its aftermath. Such an experience defined even more acutely the generation that witnessed the Second World War and the ensuing crisis of European humanism. When Alain Robbe-Grillet declared in 1957 that ‘to tell a story has become strictly impossible’, he voiced a sentiment that was widely shared among his contemporaries, particularly by novelists – such as Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute – whom the literary press, in the very same year, began to call nouveaux romanciers.¹ Throughout the 1950s and 1960s they played a seminal role in a thoroughgoing problematization of narrative as a form of representing human existence and of the subject as the agent of narrative sense-making. The nouveau roman thus prepared the ground for and took part in what was once polemically dubbed the ‘death of the subject’, but what now appears more like an ongoing process of rethinking subjectivity.

Since the postwar ‘age of suspicion’ (Sarraute), much has changed in the general attitude towards storytelling and subjectivity, in both the literary and the theoretical climate. It has become a commonplace to note that the subject, narrative, ethics and history ‘return’ to the French novel after the heyday of the nouveau roman.² At the same time, theoretical approaches that foreground the narrative constitution of the subject have played a pivotal role in attempts to reconceptualize subjectivity after its radical poststructuralist problematization, thereby proposing to rehabilitate it in a temporal, processual and antiessentialist form.³ Today not only narrative theory but fiction, cinema and other media abound with such a plethora of reflections on how we are entangled in narratives that it would not be preposterous to claim that ours is an age of storytelling. This book responds to the need to understand in greater depth both the crisis of storytelling, marked by the experience of the Second World War, and the way in which storytelling was then revived – in unprecedentedly self-conscious, metanarrative forms.

In this study, I relate the ‘return of storytelling’ in narrative fiction to the ‘narrative turn’ that has often been declared to have taken place across disciplines since the beginning of the 1980s.⁴ I suggest that the ‘narrative turn’ does not pertain only to theoretical discourse but is a broader cultural phenomenon, particularly perceptible in (but not exclusive to) late twentieth-century French literature – where the preceding crisis of storytelling was exceptionally intense. I propose that the narrative turn is characterized by acknowledging not only the cognitive but also the complex existential relevance of narrative for our being in the world. From this perspective, I suggest conceptualizing it as a shift towards a hermeneutically oriented understanding of the ontological significance of storytelling for human existence. The subject thereby comes to be seen as constituted in a process of narrative interpretation that takes place in a dialogical relation to socio-culturally mediated models of sense-making. As literature plays a pivotal role in renewing and transforming these narrative models, this shift entails seeing literary narratives as crucial to the process by which we interpret ourselves and our situation in the world.

As I propose an interpretation of what is commonly characterized as a (re)turn, I use, with a certain uneasiness, the notion of the ‘narrative turn’ as a shorthand for the emergence of a sensibility characterized by a new kind of awareness of the ways in which human existence is saturated with cultural narratives, and by an acknowledgement of both the need for narratives and their ultimate lack of foundation. Rather than as a sudden ‘turn’, I see this phenomenon, or complex constellation of phenomena, as a gradual movement – overlapping with many other important developments – from emphasizing the profoundly problematic nature of narratives (taken to impose order violently on the chaos of reality) to a sensibility characterized by accepting storytelling as an irreducible aspect of human existence – an acceptance coupled with an awareness of the need to engage in critical reflection and reinterpretation of the cultural narratives in which we are entangled. Rather than as periods, however, I see the crisis and return of storytelling as different ways of responding to the postwar cultural situation. Moreover, I suggest that the two involve, though in very different ways, both metanarrative reflection on the constructed nature of literary narratives as well as on the process and significance of storytelling and giving expression to a certain experience of being in the world. ‘Metanarrativity’ is usually taken to refer to narration in which the narrator reflects on the process of narration, but what I would like to suggest here is that it can be understood in a wider sense to characterize narratives that make narrative their theme and deal with the significance of narratives for human existence in general (for how we understand ourselves, others, the world, history) and that such metanarrativity is an important aspect of fiction that can be associated with the narrative turn.⁵ I am also interested in how the narrative turn (and the metanarrativity linked to it) has contributed to the development of contemporary narrative fiction beyond postmodernism, towards what has been recently characterized as ‘metamodernism’.⁶

The relation between the two narrative turns – the theoretical and the larger cultural, particularly literary – remains perplexing, since the roots of the former have often been traced back to the general interest that emerged in France in the mid-1960s, under the influence of Russian formalism and structuralist linguistics, in the study of ‘narrative-in-general’: in narrative as not only an essential aspect of literature but as a more general cross-cultural phenomenon (see for example Ryan 2005: 344; Herman 2007: 4). Accounts that stress this lineage, however, tend to ignore that this initial interest in narrative was coupled with a thoroughgoing suspicion towards narrative, often seen as a form of ideology, and with a powerful problematization, by narrative fiction and other arts of the time, of narrativity as well as of representationality in general.⁷ Although the critical debate in the 1960s was crucial in preparing the ground for the narrative turn, it was only later, in the 1980s, that it was theoretically articulated why narratives should be generally accepted as crucial to human existence. In this study, I will argue that both antinarrativist and narrativist arguments were developed, challenged and explored in narrative fiction significantly before they were articulated in theoretical discourse.

While narrative studies are presently flourishing, generally speaking the theoretical discussion on narrative has remained lamentably separate from the study of narrative in literary history, and my work is motivated by the need for further research on the relation between theories of narrative and the history of narrative forms.⁸ I draw on the current debate on the relation between narrativity and subjectivity to analyse the crisis and return of storytelling in narrative fiction, but I also hope to show that insights provided by novelists who engaged in problematizing and, later, rehabilitating storytelling in postwar France can be valuable for the current theoretical debate, even if their novels deal with this problematic in specifically literary terms, through their form, characters and narrative organization rather than in abstract, conceptual terms.⁹

My primary example of the crisis of storytelling in narrative fiction is the nouveau roman, most importantly the work of its leading figure and spokesman Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008), who had a profound worldwide impact on the development of the novel during the latter half of the twentieth century.¹⁰ The revival of narrative, in turn, is best exemplified by one of the most distinguished contemporary French novelists, Michel Tournier (b. 1924); he was among the first to articulate the philosophical significance of storytelling, and the way in which his novels deal with its existential and ethical aspects can be brought into a productive dialogue with hermeneutic approaches to narrative.¹¹ The nouveau roman is commonly perceived as the last major literary movement and Tournier as the last grand écrivain (Cruickshank 2009: 59). I will analyse particularly closely Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe (1959, In the Labyrinth), which is one of the first novels to display clearly the antinarrative, textual features that came to dominate the formalist aesthetics of the nouveau roman and other avant-garde novels in the 1960s, and Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes (1970, The Erl-King), which is one of the first major novels that embodies the return of storytelling and yields compelling insights into the complex role of narrativity in the constitution of subjectivity and identity. Both of these novels are, by any standards, classics of contemporary literature that merit detailed attention in their own right: they are multifaceted works that have earned their place as a part of world literature; they have been sites of interpretative controversies that have a bearing on our understanding of literary history in general; and although they are academically highly esteemed, their impact has not been limited to the academic community.¹² The protagonists of both novels are lost soldiers, and the novels develop their (anti)narrative ethics against the backdrop of the Second World War. The analysis of these novels, in relation to other relevant novels and antinarrativist and narrativist theorizing from the postwar period to the present, provides a fertile ground for delineating an important but underreflected development in twentieth-century European literature and thought, for unearthing the complex philosophical underpinnings of the crisis and return of storytelling and for understanding in more depth different positions in the contemporary theoretical debate on the significance of storytelling for human existence.

Storytelling and subjectivity: Ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics

The expression ‘narrative turn’ is employed with reference to several parallel and intersecting developments that have taken place in the humanities and social sciences during the past few decades, but broadly speaking it is used to denote the general acceptance, across a wide range of critical discourse, of narrativity as fundamental not only to literature but to human existence in general. Several developments prepared the ground for this turn, among the most important of which are the above-mentioned heightened attention to ‘narrative-in-general’ in the 1960s, and a debate, launched during roughly the same period, by philosophers of history, such as Arthur Danto (1962), Louis Mink (1966, 1970) and Hayden White (1973, 1981), on the relation between narrative fiction and historiography.¹³ Their studies led to a burgeoning awareness of the way in which explanations offered by the human sciences involve a narrative dimension. It was not until the 1980s, however, that emphasis began to shift to the role that narratives play in shaping the object domain of the human sciences: human reality in its various social and cultural manifestations. At that point, the study of narrative was brought into connection with the problematics of subjectivity and identity, and attention was drawn to the complex ways in which narratives mediate our relation to the world and to ourselves.¹⁴

Narrative theorists generally agree that narratives bring about meaningful order: instead of merely presenting what happened, narratives make the related events or experiences intelligible by creating or bringing out meaningful connections between them (see Bal 1997: 5; Hinchman & Hinchman 2001: xv; Abbott 2002: 12–17; Goldie 2012: 14–17). There is less agreement, however, on the precise nature of these meaningful connections. Generally, those drawing on the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition and narrative psychology, and many scholars working in cognitive studies and in the rhetorical tradition of narrative studies, privilege the concept of experience and are interested in narrative as a practice through which subjects make sense of their experiences and exchange them with others.¹⁵ In contrast, those coming from the narratological tradition have, historically, defined and approached narrative primarily in terms of the concepts of event and representation frequently take the connections between the narrated events to evoke a sense of causality.¹⁶ In ‘postclassical narratology’ (particularly in its cognitively oriented versions), however, the notion of experience has assumed a central role, most influentially on the basis of Fludernik’s (1996) concept of experientiality, which suggests that essential for narrative are subjects’ emotional or evaluative involvement and response to their situations (see also Herman 2007: 11, 2009: 140–44).

In the contemporary discussion on the relation between narrative and the subject of experience, one central controversy among those who see narratives as a matter of organizing and interpreting experiences is the following: Is narrative primarily an epistemological category that refers to a cognitive instrument through which we project meaningful order onto reality and impose form on experiences, or is it an ontological category that refers to a constitutive element of the human way of being in the world?¹⁷ What I would like to suggest is that although this distinction is useful, it should not prevent us from acknowledging that the question concerning the role of narratives in human existence has both an epistemological and an ontological dimension. From an epistemological perspective, it is a question of the role of narrative in the subject’s cognitive and epistemic relation to the world. How and to what extent does the subject understand and make sense of reality in narrative terms? From an ontological viewpoint, the question concerns the role of narratives in human existence. Is the human mode of being in the world narratively constituted and, if so, what does this mean? Moreover, as has been increasingly recognized in recent years, the question of narrative subjectivity also has an ethico-political dimension. From an ethical perspective, the question concerns the ethical relevance of narratives for the subject’s mode of existence, for his or her relation to others and to him-or herself and for personal and collective identities. Thereby at stake are such questions as: How do we conceive of the subject’s possibility of moral agency? What kind of ethical potential or risks does narrative interpretation of reality involve? Is narrativity inherently linked to domination and ideological appropriation? Or can it promote an ethical understanding of others and of oneself? Finally, from the perspective of aesthetics, what roles do storytelling practices have in narrative fiction and how do they affect us? As I study the ethos underlying the crisis and return of storytelling, aesthetics and ethics are seen to be integrally connected.

The notion of subjectivity is closely linked to and partially overlaps with those of self, identity and agency, which, in this study, are regarded as sub-aspects of subjectivity. In comparison to the self, the subject is a somewhat more abstract and philosophical concept, but it has the advantage of making it possible to deal with various intimately connected aspects of being a self: the experiencing subject and the narrating subject, the subject of perception, action, cognition, affect, memory and so on. Subjectivity is often taken to indicate the active, self-reflective dimension of the self: for example, according to Seigel (2005: 14), a subject is ‘an active agent, a thinker of thoughts, a doer of deeds’. Its passive dimension, in turn, is expressed in the use of the ‘subject’ with reference to those who ‘lay beneath’ an authority (for example, subjects of the king). Twentieth-century conceptualizations of subjectivity frequently stress relationality as crucial to subjectivity; whereas in premodern thought the notion of the subject referred to ‘substance’ – to the relatively independent underlying substrate that persists through changes in time – from the beginning of the nineteenth century the subject came to be seen as constituted in social relations, as the intimate link between the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity testifies (Hagenbüchle 1998: 5–6). Both self-reflectivity and relationality are crucial to narrative conceptions of subjectivity. On the one hand, narrative sense-making – drawing narrative connections between events or experiences – is a crucial form of the subject’s agency; on the other hand, this narrative activity always takes place in certain cultural, historical and social contexts that raise questions of power and subjection.¹⁸

Identity, in turn, is a question of the ‘who’ of the subject. It revolves around such questions as what brings coherence and continuity to the subject’s being, to the extent that he or she can be regarded as remaining one and the same individual in time, and what allows us to individuate the subject as a specific subject among others. Personal identity is often taken to refer to one’s self-reflective relation to oneself, to one’s self-understanding and sense of selfhood, and narrative identity to a narrative sense of oneself. Narrative conceptions of identity and subjectivity emphasize their social character: we become who we are in social contexts as we experience, act, speak, perceive and apprehend the world with others, and narratives – including the larger socio-cultural narrative frameworks in which they are embedded – play a constitutive role in shaping how we interpret our experiences and (inter)act in the world with others.¹⁹ As Benhabib (2002: 15) puts it, ‘codes of established narratives in various cultures define our capacities to tell our individual stories’. In his late work, Foucault (1996: 440–41) develops a similar view of the dialectic between individuals and social models imposed on them by arguing that even if the subject constitutes himself ‘in an active fashion through practices of the self’, those practices are ‘not something invented by the individual himself’, but ‘models that he finds in his culture and that are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group’.

That narratives are a matter of making sense of the world from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index