Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory

Style, Summer, 2000 by Brian Richardson

Still more illustrative is the unlikely history of the morphological approach to the fundamental elements and transformations of story. [4] In the twenties, Vladimir Propp developed this framework as part of his study of the Russian folktale, and derived thirty-one basic story functions from the thousands of examples he had investigated. Soon after, formalism was suppressed by Stalin, and Propp's work was thereby prevented from being widely known in literary circles for many years. In the sixties and seventies, however, it served as a touchstone for several structuralists (including Greimas, Bremond, Todorov, and Prince) who sought to extend and revise Propp's model and map out a universal narrative grammar. This project, after generating considerable initial interest, was rapidly abandoned and had nearly expired by the end of the eighties; it came to appear to many, especially in the U. S., to mark the worst extremes of scientistic excess and reductionism. Suddenly, however, it re-emerged in slightly altere d form as a central aspect of some types of cognitivist approaches to narrative (see Herman). Against all odds, narrative grammar is back in fashion again. It would seem that in the history of narrative theory, old models don't die a timely death--they simply pause for a few years before being resurrected in a moderately new form. In fact, it is hard to think of a major tradition of narrative analysis that has been definitively abandoned; even Northrop Frye's somewhat hoary archetypal theory has recently been refashioned within Allen Tilley's work on "plot snakes."

The actual evolution and development of narrative theory cannot begin to be grafted onto the master narrative of critical theory as told by the poststructuralists. Indeed, the story of modern narrative theory does not fit well into the frame of any narrative history. There are far too many story strands, loose ends, abrupt turns, and unmotivated reappearances of forgotten figures and theoretical approaches to fit easily within any one narrative structure. The history of modern narrative theory is more accurately depicted as a cluster of contiguous histories rather than a single, comprehensive narrative.

Noting comparable problems in the writing of literary history, David Perkins recently suggested that one is ultimately forced to choose between either a necessarily false narrative history or the unwieldy and intellectually deficient form of the encyclopedia (53-60). I suggest instead that for both literary and critical history we use the model of the chronicle, with its minimal causality, openness to multiple stories, and abandonment of teleological trajectories, in order to represent more accurately the purposive clutter and unpredictable successions of the polymorphous past. [5] The chronicle form allows us to chart the varied trajectories of several disparate, competing theories in operation at the same time; it encourages us to note the continuities, interruptions, permutations, and divisions of these models overtime. Eschewing a simple, linear, teleological model, we can be more alert to the abrupt emergences, hibernations, revivals, forkings, and disappearances of different critical schools over time.