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

Style, Spring, 2001 by James J. Paxson

The "impersonal" quality addressed by Smith proceeds most effectively--and ironically, as I've just implied--from the device, any device, of narratorial distancing. We presume in our culture that personal experience conveyed via homodiegetic narration enjoys epistemological primacy where matters of authority, validity, and authentication are concerned; after all, what more could one expect in a post-Roman-Law society wherein juridical logic enshrines personal experience and the eyewitness account as it rejects as part of legal process admission of hearsay evidence or twice-told tale-telling. Yet the logic of Smith's account about how distancing or impersonalizing discourse "rings more true" itself rings more true than either the structuralist account or the juridical ideal of using testimony. As storytellers speaking from experience, we may intuit the value of distanced narrative. Narrative embedding achieves just this effect of [en]closure, a result of distancing, authentication, authorization. Moreover, to defer once again to Derrida, this result involves the grand philosophical history of the cult of citation, the impulse to enwrap a prior, originary text or experience in frames that are merely "annotational," sheerly parasitic, never as privileged as the thought or experience of the other. (2)

A more quotidian proof of this epistemological process obtains in the folkloric domain of the embedded oral legend. Jan Brunvand has made something of a cottage industry of the American folk legend--the Urban Belief Tale or Urban Legend. In a string of very popular crossover books ranging from The Vanishing Hitchhiker to The Choking Doberman, Brunvand celebrates the twice-told tales consumed and perpetuated by modern Americans, teenagers especially. The tales are always told as truth, and they have burgeoned in a media age dominated by youth culture or by legitimized pop-culture. Chris Carter's cultic X Files well lampooned the pop-cultural status of the effect in a spring 1996 episode, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," in which Chung, a famous though fictive nonfiction writer played by Charles Nelson Reilly, writes a book containing interview stories by FBI Agents Scully and Mulder, whose stories contain stories by UFO experiencers and teenaged abductees, whose stories contain stories by aliens and Men in Bl ack. But more than thirty years ago, Brunvand identified the narratological base underlying the Urban Legend: the retold tales, from "The Killer in the Back Seat" to "The Judge's Hook" to "The Wet French Poodle in the Microwave Oven," always advertise their embedded fabrics. No one arrives among a group of friends or coworkers or classmates to tell of the killer that was nabbed in her back seat on her trip from home that morning; rather, she will tell of an experience read about in a newspaper by her friend's boss. (3) Narrative embedding in this pragmatic model-one animating the efforts of contemporary folklore studies or TV scriptwriting and drawing on the resources of orality theory-helps authenticate the content of the storyteller's narrative. It underlines narrative deferral or distancing as an unavoidable epistemological avenue and as a means for good storytelling. So understood, narrative embedding enjoys primacy as a creative and aesthetic tool imbued with strangeness, with ineffable power, as authori tative novelists of the fantastic interested in the effect have continued to proclaim (see Calvino 101-21).