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

Style, Spring, 2001 by James J. Paxson

I need to clarify the potentially disparate implications of embedding given what I have discussed so far. The narrative of narrative, viewed as a device for distancing, authentication, authorization, and validation, can be taken as a sign of precisely the opposite function ascribed to it in the structuralist narratological paradigm. Narrative embedding signals not the artificiality and compromised epistemology of narrativity but narrativity's primacy as the dominant cognitive mode in human exchange. This explanation spells out the "paradox" spotted by Nelles in narrative embedding. But, it should be emphasized, the theoretical implications and the institutional locus of this condition amount to more than mere logical paradox.

Rather, we are faced with two competing readings, two hermeneutical situations pitted against each other in antinomian fashion: narrative embedding as a sign of narrativity's en abyme self-reflexivity versus narrative embedding as a sign of narrativity's authenticating pragmatic drive. As such, they name two semiological models that exist not just in antinomian tension, but, more in accord with what must be remembered as a textbook understanding of current critical theory, in mutual deconstruction. Neither of the two models overrules the other; one is not correct or superior while the other is wrong. Rather, the two commensurable but asymmetrical formulations try to cancel one another out. They exist in suspension, arriving at paradoxically opposed epistemological endpoints. In sum, then, narrative embedding or the narrative of narrative is not a mere curiosity in structuralist thought--structuralism being the persistent conceptual motor in virtually all contemporary narratologies. On the contrary, it can be understood to enjoy centrality in poststructuralist theorization where either poststructuralism or deconstruction is understood as the endgame in a semiological program. It can join the panoply of deconstructive master tropes, such as catachresis, prosopopoeia, or allegory, celebrated by such poststructuralists as Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, or Hillis Miller. (4) From the start, narrative embedding signals the deconstruction of narrativity; it enables the deconstruction of narratology. Nonetheless, it still lacks both a more respectable name and the restoration of kinship-bonds to those potentially consanguine master tropes championed by de Man and the other poststructural illuminati.

II

Throughout this discussion I have dutifully called this master trope, this universal device, no more than "narrative embedding." But now I hazard a label based on the device's rhetorical kinship: para-antimetabole. It is a label doomed by its awkwardness, I know. But its fulsome stack of Hellenic prepositional particles (para anti meta) certainly invokes Genette's semantic practices of taxonomy while it conceptually acknowledges that there exists a similarity between all multiply-embedded narratives (especially those above the third degree of embedding) and other narrative structures that (1) draw their identities from certain localized rhetorical tropes functioning at the syntactic or schematic level; and (2) reveal both an imaginary geometry of containment along with a plausible or desired symmetry. The two tropes fitting this bill are chiasmus and antimetabole (more in a moment about the "para-" prefix pasted onto a rhetorical term that is already more preficial particle than Greek root). But, for nar ratology, both tropes already hold significance in their vitality for the large-scale ordering of discourse. This large-scale order literary theorists have long called ring composition. (5)