Revisiting the deconstruction of narratology: master tropes of narrative embedding and symmetry

Style, Spring, 2001 by James J. Paxson

To be sure, it is striking that narrative "framing" or "embedding" never enjoyed for Genette a reconstituted Hellenic rhetorical label, given that he and other narratologists excelled at appropriating customary terms from classical rhetoric for their taxonomies. (Take note that Genette's taxonomical or taxonomaniacal hubris in itself has alienated a whole contingent of narratologists, including for instance Susan Lanser, as Nelles has pointed out; "Stories" 81.) But it is not my purpose in this article to re-enshrine rhetorical hermeneutics as the prime method for directing research into narrative embedding and other special problems in narratology. Rather, narrative embedding, suitably located as the master trope in a critical deconstruction of narratology, evokes other master tropes well rehearsed in contemporary theory and in classical or medieval rhetoric. My project, resisting the effect's immurement in postmodern literary studies (witness Richardson 34-37), proclaims its transhistoricality. Embedding becomes not a concept of narrative, but the concept of narrative poetics, tropology, and in turn general cognition. (Its value for understanding general human psychodynamics could not have been more emphasized in Erving Goffman's prophetic study of 1974.) Consequently, allied to antimetabole and chiasmus and in turn to these two tropes' non-local narrative incarnation called "ring composition" or inclusic, narrative embedding signals cognitive modalities and fields of invention well outside the received domain of "fiction" or literary narrative to which it has been tethered. Because, above all, these tropes invoke aesthetic and cognitive values of symmetry, some closing insights from the contemporary study of the rhetoric of science aid me in filling out the picture of narrative embedding's cognitive as well as literary status. I turn, in this closing phase of my argument, to Johannes Kepler's early seventeenth-century allegory, Somnium.

I

I use the rhetorical term abusio, the Latin version of catachresis (a nomination of something that has no name in one's language, though the Hellenic rhetorical term also designates a metaphoric trope that stretches too far the relation between figural vehicle and tenor, between signifier and signified), in order to highlight the whimsical "Russian-doll" effect of fourth- or fifth- or sixth-degree narrative embedding. There is a paradoxical sense that intensive embedding--an effect indeed that really bears no name in rhetoric or narratology though it instills the desire for a name, a taxonomic label--not only bespeaks the hermetic drives of rhetorical scientism but also the quotidian, even juvenile, world of folkloric narrative creativity. (These dichotomies, rhetorical scientism and folkloric creativity, parallel narrative embedding's dichotomies of mystery and durable eloquence I introduced above.) Well catalogued in the monumental Stith Thompson Type-Index of folktales, the so-called "endless tale" often h inges on comically exaggerated enactments of the "tale within a tale within a tale, theoretically without any ending" (Brunvand 117-18). The folkloric resonance finds suitable embodiment in its tri-dimensional icon, folk art's amusing Russian doll.