Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory

Style, Summer, 2000 by Brian Richardson

In addition, further demonstrating the utility and consequences of the conceptual frameworks in question, the theory in these essays is in almost every case applied to--and helps to reinterpret--an array of narratives by Fay Weldon, E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison, Patrick Modiano, and Joseph Conrad. If one may venture a single, self-conscious teleological surmise, it is that narrative theory is reaching a higher level of sophistication and comprehensiveness and that it is very likely to become increasingly central to literary studies now that the dominant critical paradigm has begun to fade and a new (or at least another) critical model is struggling to emerge.

Brian Richardson (brian_richardson@umail.umd.edu) teaches in the English department of the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (1997) and several articles on different aspects of narrative theory, including time, sequence, second-person narration, reflexivity, and reader response.

Notes

(1.) The limitation of most transactional definitions is that they usually seem to beg--if not miss entirely--the central fact that some texts (e.g., an anecdote) produce or reward a narrative response more than other kinds of texts (such as a mathematical equation). The main problem with Genette's conception ("as soon as there is an action or an event, even a single one, there is a story because there is a transformation" [19]) is that it is far too inclusive to be of much use; virtually any description at all (not only, "The sun is up," but also "The sun is hot") thus becomes a narrative, since it implies a transition from an earlier state to a later one. I believe that narrative, however, presupposes a minimal amplitude. Several of these rival definitions are discussed at some length in my book, Unlikely Stories (89-107). For Prince's recent assessment of Genette, see "Revisiting Narrativity."

(2.) This definition was first proposed in Unlikely Stories (105), which includes additional discussion of this issue and its varied theorists. I see no reason to limit narrative, as Cohn does, to human agents (including anthropomorphic entities); the story of a glacier's advance and retreat or the development of a solar system strikes me as being eminently narrative.

(3.) A deconstruction of the poststructuralist account would point to feminism's independence of (and feminists' occasional hostility to) deconstruction and psychoanalysis and note that for most of the twentieth century Marxism and psychoanalysis have, for instance, opposed rather than complemented each other as interpretive projects.

(4.) The extreme brevity of the following account necessarily collapses some important distinctions between different practitioners; for a more thorough version of the relations between Propp and the structuralists--and among the structuralists themselves--see Culler (205-24) or Ronen.

(5.) I use the term "chronicle" as Hayden White has described it: situated halfway between narrative proper and the purely chronological annals, it "often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it. More specifically, the chronicle usually is marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure. It does not conclude so much as simply terminate" (5). For a chroniclestyle account of the history of modern fiction, see my "Re-Mapping the Present," which elaborates some of the arguments set forth here.