Narrative, Reflexivity, and Ideology. - Review - book review

Style, Fall, 1999 by David Herman

Jeffrey J. Williams. Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv 204. $49.95 cloth.

In this intelligent, well-researched, and engagingly polemical study, Jeffrey Williams explores structural markers and interpretive consequences of what he calls "narrative moments--that is, moments in which the act of narrative itself is depicted and thus thematized or called into question" (1). Devoting chapters to a number of major British novels (Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, Wuthering Heights, Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness) and to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Williams argues that self-reflexive narrative moments constitute not optional ornamentation on but rather "the provisional content of narrative" (5). In making his case, the author produces a rich synthesis of ideas drawn from narratology, deconstruction (especially of the de Manian stripe), and politico-ideological critique. Theory and the Novel uses all of these resources to rethink that aspect of narrative communication which G[acute{e}]rard Genette called narration, as opposed to histoire (= fabula or story) and r[acute{e}]cit (= s juzet or discourse), and which Gerald Prince termed the narrating as opposed to the narrative and the narrated. Not only does the author seek to redress what he takes to be a general neglect or even elision of narratorial activity in the theories of Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, Genette, Prince, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and others; what is more, Williams focuses on "narratives of narrative" (the original title of the study [x] to highlight how representations of narrative in narrative serve an ideological function.

Specifically, Williams finds that in the novels he examines, narrative moments work to code narrative as a kind of biophysical essence--as part of what it means to be human. (At the end of my review I return to the idea that narrative is an innate human endowment or disposition.) More specifically still, self-reflexive moments in stories can cue readers to see narrative either as a kind of communicative habitus that cuts across all social classes and types (Joseph Andrews), or else as a transcendental ground for emergent modes of professionalization, whereby one solidifies one's identity as a sailor, for example, by virtue of one's propensity to tell and and listen to stories (Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim). The narrative of narrative can also work to naturalize a particular, culturally constructed image of stories as addictive, all-consuming, worth sacrificing everything for; in such cases narrative moments prompt readers to mold themselves in the image of the narrative-obsessed Marlow, who risks life and limb just to have a chance to listen to Kurtz's apparently irresistible tales (154-65). Articulating his claims in a distinctly Althusserian parlance, Williams suggests more broadly that

narrative reflexivity specifies an ideological structure or process; it is a mode that makes itself inconspicuous but that naturalizes and therefore spurs the reproduction of its own modal form. The reflexive self-figuring of narrative by narrative functions to disseminate and propogate an ethos of literature, of "the literary life," a drive and desire for literature, and finally to reproduce the system of relations of the institution of literature. Novels [[ldots]] constitutively and programmatically glamorize the institution of literature. [[ldots]1 in their valorization of reading, of the desire for literature, and in general of the literary life, the social effects of novels is affectively to imprint those who consume them with the taste and desire precisely to repeat that consumption, to reduplicate and circulate narratives. (21-22)

The author's Introduction (1-23) situates his study in the context established by existing research on narrative, as well as by wider trends in literary criticism and theory. In framing his analysis Williams makes several trenchant criticisms of previous narrative-theoretical models, e.g., of their general (Aristotelian) bias toward defining narratives on the basis of plot or plot-structure, and also their "foundational schema of narrative on a stepladder or 'levels' model" (3). Some of the author's remarks about these and other narratological concerns, however, are less persuasive. Before providing a brief outline of the content of Williams's insightful, oftentime brilliant chapters on the individual novels, I should like to dwell for a moment on features of his "Introduction" that strike me as problematic. I do so (I hope) not to nitpick or to fault the author for views of narrative theory that happen to conflict with my own, but rather to point out what I view as general constraints on research in the fie ld of narrative analysis. In particular, Williams states that hi.s intention is "not to take potshots at or deride the structural doyens of narrative, for I fully acknowledge the usefulness [[ldots]] of the delineations of narrative set out in a seminal text like [G[acute{e}]rard Genette's Narrative Discourse" (3). Debatably, however, the author does not come fully to terms with ways in which a number of narrative theorists have tried to refine and elaborate--rather than jettison--models developed by structural narratologists. The result is that Williams sometimes denies himself crucial explanatory resources that could only help ongoing efforts, like the author's own, to chart new directions for narratological inquiry.