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

Style, Spring, 2001 by James J. Paxson

But the narrative device that seems to have no rhetorical name (though it deserves one) just as well bespeaks the rhetorical excesses of scholarly hermeticism or textual gaming. The simple grammatical or syntactical embedding found in folk tales (Susan Lanser's "trick-version" of a multi-degree sea tale, 134; cited in Nelles, "Stories" 80) obviously does not rank with the deliberate and hermetic switching of narrative voices, personas, cognitive horizons, conceptual schemes, or narratological domains (expressing wide variations in order, duration, frequency, and the like), seen in such exemplary instances as The Canterbury Tales or Kepler's Somnium. Quintilian and Genette, two poles of the impulse toward taxonomic obsession, might have had labels for metalepsis and many another trope (see Quintilian 8.6.38-39; and ND 234-37), but neither theorist names precisely the intensive or excessive narrative embedding especially marked by internal narratological variabilities. On the matter, a late classical Roman rhe torician would not have bothered with, say, Apuleius' Golden Ass, while Genette, writing on Proust's embeddings, does not name the aggregate device even as he labels metadiegesis any isolable, inset narrative that could be aggregated or laminated. Yet Genette's approach and reputation in critical theory bespeak taxonomic obsession and the drive to reconstructive classical rhetorical taxonomies. At the same time, narrative embedding enjoys a privilege unknown by other tropes in the grand efforts of narrative theorists finally to differentiate "fiction" from "non-fiction" narrative (Genette, Fiction 79; qtd. in Nelles, "Stories" 79).

I dwell on the hermetic, taxonomic, and scholarly investments of the structural narratologists because they have identified the current semiotic role of intensive narrative embedding: it serves as the paramount sign of narrativity. The human power for narrative in the structuralist paradigm, "narrativity," could find no better self-reflexive sign than that particular form of narrative primatizing less the content of plot than the formal discourse, less the story than the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms for making stories. As Todorov has emphasized,

embedding is an articulation of the most essential property of all narrative. For the embedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative. By telling the story of another narrative, the first narrative achieves its fundamental theme and at the same time is reflected in this image of itself. The embedded narrative is the image of that great abstract narrative of which all the others are merely infinitesimal parts as well as the image of the embedding narrative which directly precedes it. To be the narrative of a narrative is the fate of all narrative which realizes itself through embedding. (72-73)

Technical description of the "narrative of narrative" continues to occupy narratological meditation on the langue or competence of human storytelling. As the semiotic markers of narrative artifice, of narrative's self-confessed constructedness and even duplicity, if not Arabian Nights, then such other literary monuments as Tristram Shandy or Wuthering Heights--for, say, Jeffrey Williams (24-50)--still dominate research in narrative theory. In Wuthering Heights, the theme is not ghostly haunting and irreparable loss, but storytelling.