Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. - book reviews

Style, Summer, 1996 by Kenneth Womack

In Narrative and Freedom, Gary Saul Morson continues his ambitious critical project for redefining the temporal boundaries and ethical dimensions of narratology - a critical inquiry posited previously by the author in the pages of several important volumes, including such works as Boundaries of Genre, Hidden in Plain View, and, with Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin. In his latest study, Morson explores the manner in which elements of temporality - including such issues as contingency, chance, rumor, and the viability of omens, among a host of other topics - inform narratives and the ways in which readers experience them. Drawing upon sources as diverse as Sophocles, George Eliot, network television, It's a Wonderful Life, and the dissident work of Mikhail Bulgakov, Morson attempts to map the "doctrines of inevitability" that mark a variety of fictive modes and their concomitant renderings of time and the illusion-generating nature of the future. Morson accents his study with a number of insightful and innovative features, particularly evinced by his valuable and refreshingly unself-conscious examination of sporting events and the qualities of narrative contingency that problematize their subsequent viewings. In addition to the flexible manner in which Morson traverses the scholarship of other disciplines - including discussion of the diverging, often extraliterary arguments of such thinkers as Mikhail Bakhtin, Stephen Jay Gould, and William James - Narrative and Freedom finds its greatest strength in Morson's prescient interest in the historical narratives of the present, a feature of his text evidenced most notably through his reflection upon the recent passing of the Soviet regime.

Such moments, Morson argues, affirm the openness of time and its uncanny knack for mitigating the perceived inevitability of the future. Following the sudden demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, for example, "the future was no longer guaranteed. After decades of certainty, the possibility of possibility was reborn" (1). Morson applies a similar approach to the elasticity of time in his narratological analyses and reveals the broad range of consequences that writers (and readers) confront when they commit themselves to a specific set of temporal requirements. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of Bakhtin regarding narrative and its temporal foundations, Morson proffers a useful terminology for elucidating the directionality of time and its significance to literary study. By demonstrating the manner in which elements of both possibility and determinism impinge upon history, Morson extends his argument profitably from the shores of popular culture - including the aforementioned sporting events, television shows, and movies - to literary classics from Oedipus Rex to Crime and Punishment. In this way, Morson underscores the value of interpreting what he calls the "human dimension of time" and its application across genres, while also providing convincing testimony regarding the revelatory power of time as a force that shapes both our affinity for and our expectations of narratives.

Originally developed through his association with Michael Andre Bernstein (whose Foregone Conclusion published simultaneously, complements Narrative and Freedom), the concept of "sideshadowing" undergirds much of the narratological theory of Morson's study. In addition to denoting the realm of possibilities and alternatives that pertain to a series of actual events - literary, historical, or otherwise - sideshadowing refers to an open-ended sense of temporality and offers dynamic implications for the way in which we read both narratives and our lives. Unlike foreshadowing, which connotes a kind of authorial predestination and prefiguration, narrative sideshadowing allows readers to dispatch with traditionally fixed notions of temporality and perceive instead the anisotropic - or multidirectional - qualities of time that narratives attempt to replicate. As Morson remarks; "Alternatives always abound, and, more often than not, what exists need not have existed. Something else was possible, and sideshadowing is used to create a sense of that 'something else'" (118). Through this concept, Morson suggests the need to recognize the possibility of contingency in literary study. In his analysis of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, for example, he reveals the operation of sideshadowing as evinced by that celebrated figure of verbal circularity, Pyotr Stepanovich - a character who relies upon rumor and digression in order to propagate wholesale misinformation. Because Stepanovich's narrative perambulations and fabulations construct a web of textual contingencies, as the novel progresses, "it becomes apparent that rumors seem to spread on their own, even in situations in which there was no one to spread them." Morson concludes: "Nothing is ever as it seems, and the novel ends with many mysteries unresolved and the plurality of possibilities unreduced to singularity. The Possessed offers a haze of stories about a haze of stories" (124).