H. Porter Abbott. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Style, Fall, 2003 by Peter Richardson

H. Porter Abbott. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv 203 pp. $55.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative wastes no time in laying out its goal. The first sentence of the preface reads:

   The purpose of this book is to help readers understand what
   narrative is, how it is constructed, how it acts upon us, how it
   is transmitted, how it changes when the medium or the cultural
   context changes, and how it is found not just in the arts but
   everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives, many times
   a day. (xi)

It is an ambitious goal for a book of just over two hundred pages, but the quick start suggests the possibility of achieving it. Author H. Porter Abbott reinforces that suggestion by noting his discussion will move from simplicity to complexity and will introduce only the most indispensable ideas and terms. When combined with the book's title, which carries the imprimatur of a distinguished university press, these announcements prefigure a crisp, perhaps even elegant overview of narrative and its cultural significance.

This book does not satisfy that expectation. Having pledged parsimony in the terminology department, Abbott devotes page after page to the rectification of names. Chapter 2, "Defining Narrative," considers earlier nomenclatures (especially those of Roland Barthes and Seymour Chatman) without demonstrating how the corresponding ideas illuminate narrative structure or technique. Moreover, Abbott's own usage is inconsistent. For example, he distinguishes between story ("the event or sequence of events"), narrative discourse ("how the story is conveyed"), and narrative ("the representation of an event or a series of events"); but these distinctions blur when he writes, "We get into the habit of assuming that the narrative is identical with the story we read or see" (27). By his definition, we cannot actually read stories, which "are always mediated (constructed) by narrative discourse" (19).

Other terms are mysterious from the outset. Narrativity, which Abbott associates with "the feeling that we are now reading a story," is a "a vexed issue" as well as "a matter of degree/that does not correlate to the number of devices, qualities or, for that matter, words that are employed in the narrative" (22). Does this feeling arise only in connection with written narratives? (And again, doesn't he mean narrative instead of story?) Instead of clarifying this concept and its possible uses, Abbott promises more mystification. "I bring up the subject [of narrativity] first to acknowledge an objection you may have had while reading how narrative is defined," he notes cryptically. "But I also bring it up to show that there are, and always will be, gray areas in a field like narrative that has so much to do with subjective human response. I'll be producing more gray areas for you in the next chapter."

He keeps that promise. Chapter 3, "The Borders of Narrative," continues the nominalism and takes the discussion even further away from basic narrative concepts. The chapter features "paratexts" (book jackets, blurbs, program notes, and so on) and "the outer limits of narrative," including postmodern experimental fiction, hypertext narrative, and role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, which Abbott eventually concedes are neither narrative nor story. Having inspected the margins of narrative, Abbott returns to its relationship to real life. "There are true stories," he reports.

   A limb falls from a tree and knocks a love-letter from a lover's
   hand. The letter blows across a field. Later it is discovered by
   a young woman who secretly adores this man whom (sic) she now
   learns loves another. In despair, she throws herself into the
   millrace and drowns. These things happen every day. Life is jammed
   with events. (33)

Until these events are narrated, however, they do not constitute narratives. Having worked hard to make this modest point, Abbott concludes the chapter by noting that he is sparing his readers more specialized terms, which he then proceeds to list: mimesis, diegesis, heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators, focalization, prolepsis, analepsis, etc. No need to worry, however; the most useful of these terms "will come up in various appropriate places in the chapters that follow, and many more are included in the Glossary." It is an odd ending to a muddled and misplaced chapter.

In short, the book's early coverage does not match its announced purpose or self-description. It forsakes narrative structure in favor of terminological rumination, and despite the declared interest in everyday life, it neglects oral narrative and the considerable body of research that connects it to literary forms in a wide variety of languages and periods. Instead, the discussion tilts heavily toward the modern novel with occasional references to cinema and drama; and even within the category of fiction, it frequently veers toward exceptional or marginal cases. Finally, and unfortunately, the writing style is often ungainly: "But the enabling condition that permits this kind of slippage in figuring out when a story has mutated into some other kind of story is found in what we observed at the outset of this section [...]" (19). For these reasons, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative fails to serve as "a foundational book" (xii).