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

Style, Spring, 2001 by James J. Paxson

Narrative's self-reflexive status comes with a price, however. In narrative theory, even more important than the binarism of fiction and fact stands this very issue of narrative's innate duplicity, its failure to validate or authenticate itself as the paramount cognitive mode in human experience. This failure is the fruit of structural semiotics. The signified of that signifier called narrative embedding turns out to be the lack of purchase the sign as a system has on cognitive or epistemological closure. If putting narratives inside other narratives presumes to aid arrival at some ontological origin, then narrativity subverts that purpose. As Derrida fondly reminds us, framing, as a representational act, mainly exposes representation and thus deferral. (1)

More must be said of the authenticating, validating function of narrativity in general and of embedded narratives in particular, for a counter-semiotic exists for the resultant subversion that I have indicated. Nelles has pinpointed how embedding exhibits the antithetical powers of self-reflexive play and confident epistemological validation. He writes, "[N]arrative embedding has the paradoxical effect of producing the illusion of a more profound realism, as the analyses of [Barbara Herrnstein] Smith, [David] Lodge, and [Gerald] Prince explain, but also of undercutting that illusion at the same time" ("Stories" 92). Embedding's "undercutting" of realism and epistemological closure concerns precisely the structural-semiotic effect I've named in my analysis drawn from Todorov and his successors (including Jeffrey Williams). But the pre-structuralist, formalist strand in criticism, a strand animated by humanist drives and protocols (as well evinced in Lodge or the New-Critical Smith of a generation ago), indeed counteracts the logic seen in embedding's self-reflexive semiotic. In this alternate conceptual scheme, embedding serves as a sign of narrative's power and social function to authenticate, to validate, to provide epistemological efficacy. For the storyteller in her presentation of an inset narrative, there exists a sense to distance and thus authenticate questionable experiences. For Smith, the architectonic closure afforded by chronologically prior, non-verifiable, and apodictic narrative nodes signals the authoritative and validating drive of scrubbed journalism, the paratextual authority of news article headlines. Though Nelles covers the genealogy of this "illusion of more profound realism" ("Stories" 92) produced by narrative embedding (Smith 154-55; cited in Nelles, "Stories" 90), more definitive still is Smith's concluding pronouncement about the brevity and epistemological finality afforded by verbal inset artifacts, by narrative nodes advertising their [en]closure:

Certain utterances which neither conform to our expectations nor confirm our experiences (verbal or otherwise) may nevertheless have the ring of truth because of a quality that we might call the tone of authority. The impersonality of press releases, for example, and the brevity of newspaper headlines certainly do not detract from this tone. Indeed, it would seem that the very fact that the assertions they offer are so unqualified enhances their immediate effect. (157)