Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory

Style, Summer, 2000 by Brian Richardson

In this instance, it is probably most useful to look to adjacent arts, such as film or painting, in which a group of contiguous representations may or may not constitute a narrative sequence. Here David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson provide a telling test case of a series of cinematic images: "A man tosses and turns, unable to sleep. A mirror breaks. A telephone rings" (55). Alone, this is a non-narrative sequence. But one can postulate connections that would weave these images together into a narrative: the man can't sleep because he's had a fight with his boss, and in the morning is still so angry that he smashes the mirror while shaving; next, his telephone rings and he learns that his boss has called to apologize. In this example, causal ties are necessary to produce the work's narrative status; without them, it is merely a suggestive montage.

My own preferred formulation is the following: narrative is a representation of a causally related series of events. [2] This definition would include verbal as well as nonverbal narratives (in painting, ballet, mime, etc); "causally related" would be understood as "generally connected" or part of the same general causal matrix--a much looser, more oblique, and indefinite relation than direct entailment; and it is further assumed that numerous nonnarrative elements may comfortably reside within a larger narrative framework, as Porter Abbott demonstrates so effectively elsewhere in this issue. But, as Gerald Prince goes on to suggest in the ingenious questions that conclude this volume, the story may not end even here. What are we to do with dreams, prophecies, memories, and recipes--all representations of causally related events in a time sequence (though many dreamers are notoriously lax in supplying causal connections)? I leave these for other theorists to tease out.

The Narratives of Narrative Theory

In America, a single, rarely questioned master narrative of modern critical theory has dominated literary studies for some time. It is an extremely familiar account; one of its versions runs as follows: at the beginning of the twentieth century, criticism was dominated by philological studies, historical and biographical speculation, and an impressionistic humanism. These were supplanted by various types of formalist approaches, one important strand of which culminated in the structuralist promise of a comprehensive, rigorous, linguistically grounded, objective, disinterested science of literature. Beginning in the late sixties, a number of poststructuralist theories challenged this orthodoxy and soon overthrew it, setting in its place a new series of issues, questions, methods, and valorizations that seriously addressed ideological issues, established the positionality of the reader, examined historical contexts, and affirmed the inherent impossibility of disinterestedness in such endeavors. Just as formali sm had rightly succeeded the facile yet barren impressionism of earlier humanistic critics, the ideologically sophisticated and politically engaged schools that succeeded the formalists swept away the mania for structure, spurious objectivity, pretentious system building, false claims of organicism, and scientistic excess.