Today's Text: Narrative/Theory by David H. Richter, ed.
In reading through David Richter’s Narrative/Discourse I have found an especially rich source that works as an introduction to several different aspects of narrative, including its history, its methodology, and some ideologies surrounding narrative. Richter begins his text with a general introduction to the field as it applies to literature across decades. I find Richter’s extension of Iser’s “gaps” theory illuminating, as he points out that gaps do not just exist in a narrative but indeed exist in that narrative to encourage us to continue engaging with that narrative, as they give rise to either curiosity or desire (3). This notion of desire seems to crop up several times in the remainder of the text, as it seems to be one of the key elements in driving forward the plot, characters, and audiences of any work. Interestingly, in discussing the “truth” inherent to narrative, Richter refers to Aristotle’s assertion that fictional literature is indeed more likely to conform to the “law of the necessary and probable” than real life because it represents what would happen in a life devoid and accidents and incidents. Narrative writers, then, most usually pander to the readers’ inherent conservatism in order to avoid the need for extreme naturalization in order to make sense of the text (4).
Compellingly, Richter highlights the struggle that the novel underwent before being included as true “literature,” a struggle synonymous with the one that is taking place today with newly emerging forms of belletristic discourse such as electronic and narrative discourse. As Henry James discusses in his writing on “The Art of Fiction,” the struggle to define the rigor and form of proper fiction was frequently derided in its early years. This history mimics the recent struggle to make legitimate electronic literature and new media work; a field that is often interpreted to be an unnecessary redundancy of print-media work. John Barth also hits on some interesting ideas that seem to apply strongly to new media work, in his discussion of non-traditional artistic works that bear witness to a rebellion against the traditions that have come before. Barth extends this idea to suggest that this trend to eliminate the traditional ideas of audience and author is best illuminated by Beckett and Borges, writers who have mastered both the form and function of their work. I think that this sentiment seems particularly salient in terms of electronic and new-media works, as the most common insult hurled against this field (indeed, I’ve hurled it myself many times), is that of substance over style. In Barth’s words, too many “technically up-to-date civilians” essentially become hacks delighting in the possibilities of the new medium without considering the art or substance inherent to these new possibilities, and just a few “technically up-to-date artists” exist who can use these new forms and new subjects to make meaningful work.
In Part II of his text, Richter highlights some of the key elements of narrative and narratology, outlining the two major tracks of formal analysis as structuralist-semiotic (exemplified by Ball, Banfield, Barthes, Cohn, Genette, and Prince), and Rhetorical Poetics (exemplified by Crane, Booth, Phelan, Friedman, and Rabinowitz). Essentially, the former group is most interested in what narrative is, while the latter group is most invested in how narrative works. Moving through an introduction to the terms and key concepts of narrative, Richter outlines the key differences between story (which includes plot, character, pattern, and rhythm) and discourse (which includes order, duration, frequency, point-of-view, focalization, voice, language, and audience). The text then continues to include exemplary excerpts from many of the key narratologists applying these different elements to a given text. Many of these critical essays not only demonstrate the application of these principles but also question these applications, such as in James Phelan’s analysis most centrally focused on Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” While outlining the role character plays in this and other narratives, Phelan points out that such analysis raises problematic questions about the role of characters in a text, implying that the presence of literary characters requires that we assume we can define personhood, that we balance jumping to conclusions with making conclusions, and that we allow for more thematizing of characters than occurs in real life. This essay and several others in this section of the text provide excellent introductions to the methodological aspects of the field. In part III of his text, Richter concludes by incorporating the ideological responses to the literary cannon and narratology, questioning the representation of possibility of representation for minority groups within narratives. Overall, this work raises some excellent questions and concepts related to narratology, and provides a nicely broad yet digestible introduction to the field of narrative.
Some questions that this text raises for me:
What is the distinction in Richter’s argument about hypothetical stories and narratives as meaningfully different in terms of their claims to truth (5)?
How does the audience function in terms of narrative? Specifically, I understand that the authorial audience has double-consciousness of mimetic and synthetic, and that the narrative audience has a single consciousness of characters as real, but how does one read the chart on page 103 meaningfully?
James Phelan writes of the elements of dimension and function in a work. Dimension is defined as any attribute a character may be said to posses in isolation from the work, while function is an application of that attribute made through the text’s developing structure (116). This seems to be an important distinction but Phelan’s examples are not entirely illuminating to me on how to apply the two concepts to narrative.
In Gérard Genette’s essay, he outlines three “problems” for narrative discourse: time, mode, and voice (132). Genette then goes on to outline the specifics of the problem of time. I am not entirely convinced as to how Genette is using the term “problem” here; does he mean that these elements complicate narrative analysis or invalidate narrative possibility? Furthermore, given the focus only on the problem of time, I am wondering if there can be some discussion of the concepts of mode and voice, as Genette may see them.
I have always been somewhat sketchy on the concept of the “implied author.” Booth suggests that the implied author is the author’s “second self” (143). How does this “second self” show up in narrative most usually?
How central is ideology to the study of narratology? Is it foundational to the field, tangential, or in flux because of the increasing concerns with representativeness in the current era?
