authorial agency of narrative, The

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Herman, David

JAMES PHELAN, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), pp. 237 + xiv, cloth, $35.00, paper, $12.95.

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The chapters of this book originally appeared as separate essays in the years 1990-1996, and center on fictions as diverse as Vanity Fair, The Waves, and Beloved; the book also contains a discussion of Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (154-72), persuasively arguing that narrative theory provides tools for the analysis of non-fictional as well as fictional narratives. The author has provided headnotes and an "Introduction" to help the reader identify interconnections between essays now grouped into three main sections: "Narrative Progression and Narrative Discourse "Mimetic Conventions, Ethics, and Homodiegetic Narration," and "Audiences and Ideology." But the chapters are also linked by their common emphasis on the situatedness of stories in particular-through multidimensional communicative contexts. Although aspects of Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative may require fuller substantiation in future work, Narrative as Rhetoric affords crucial insights into the dynamism of narrative construed as a collaborative activity. Through detailed, sometimes brilliant readings of specific texts, the book suggests how stories take shape as emergent structures jointly constituted by authors, narrators, and (various kinds of) audiences.

The "Introduction" begins with a striking analysis of Katherine Anne Porter's "Magic," using the story to propose a broadly rhetorical definition of narrative acts. For Phelan, narrative acts entail "telling a particular story to a particular audience in a particular situation for, presumably, a particular purpose" (4). Examining the complex rhetorical transactions enabled by Porter's tale, Phelan isolates the major ingredients of narrative as rhetoric-teller, technique, story, situation, audience, and purpose-and then goes on to outline a general theoretical model that studies "the recursive relationships among authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response" (19) during our encounters with stories. In setting up his model, the author seeks to distinguish the rhetorical approach from deconstructive and neopragmatic (antifoundationalist) lines of inquiry (7-18). The resulting discussion is not always convincing: the polemic is insufficiently grounded in specific neopragmatist and deconstructive texts and therefore sometimes comes across as straw-man argumentation (see especially the account of deconstruction as an approach that purports "to be closer to the literal text" than other approaches [12]). More generally, the array of interpretations featured in Narrative as Rhetoric may prompt readers to ask about the wider contexts of Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative-about its exact relation to other critico-theoretical models, especially (competing) models for understanding narrative. The author takes a helpful step towards contextualization in chapter seven (135-53), which, in a comparative analysis of the concepts of narratee and narrative audience, shows that structuralist and rhetorical approaches to narrative are not incompatible but instead complementary and mutually illuminating.

Part one of the book begins with a chapter on Woolf's The Waves construed as a "lyrical novel." This chapter, in contesting the claim that the concept of character must be completely abandoned when we read a novel like Woolf's, provides a useful overview of the theory of character developed by Phelan in his earlier book Reading People, Reading Plots (1989) and makes the interesting argument that "a crucial difference between narrative and lyric is that in narrative internal judgments of characters (and narrators) are required, while in lyric such judgments are suspended until we take the step of evaluation" (33). Chapters two and three focus on the functions of "voice" in Thackeray's Vanity Fair and the relations between voice and temporal progression in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, respectively. Like the book as a whole, these two chapters suggest how a rhetorical theory of narrative can have important ramifications for practical criticism. Such a theory can sharpen our understanding of how misogyny inflects social critique in Thackeray, on the one hand, and of the paradoxical effects created by the fluctuating distance between the authorial and the narrative voice in Hemingway, on the other hand. Arguably, however, neither chapter spells out the concept of voice in a way that demonstrates its necessity or even utility as a distinct category of analysis. Phelan does acknowledge his debt to Mikhail Bakhtin (43, 202n2) and, like Bakhtin, emphasizes "the connection between voice and ideology: to listen to narrative is, in part, to listen to values associated with a given way of talking" (43). Yet in the ensuing discussion (44-48) of voice as "a distinct element of narrative, something that interacts with other elements like character and action but that makes its own contribution to the communication offered by the narrative" (44), Phelan groups so many narrative phenomena under the rubric of voice that the notion itself starts to become diffuse, even vacuous. Drawing on Bakhtin's description of voice as the fusion of style, tone, and values, Phelan discovers the workings of voice in the formal properties of narrative discourse (syntactic and semantic structures, stylistic registers); in inferences triggered by but not encoded within narrative form; even in "such nonlinguistic clues as the structure of the action" (46). To ascribe communicative functions to such facets of narrative structure may be warranted; but to say that all those functions are manifestations of (authorial or narratorial) "voice" is to make an additional, stronger claim, and the burden is on the analyst to show the explanatory usefulness of making the additional claim.

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