Dictionary of Narratology , and: Who Says This?

The
Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and the Reader
(review)

Wallace Martin

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 35, Number 2, Summer 1989, pp. 374-376
(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.0422

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/243041

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available. Borrowing the term from Erich Fromm, Peavler argues that the term
"novel" should be replaced by the concept of "individuation"—"the process by
which man, both as a species and as an individual becomes a unique personality
and learns to relate to and interact with the environment, be it social or natural."
Peavler understands individuation as the effect of "a dissident voice." Believing
that the dialectic between the individual and the environment is the "parole"
or deep structure that informs the novel as a genre, Peavler complains that the
novel is often identified with its surface structure. Having defined individuation
in his first chapter, he goes on to consider the relationship between the individual
and society, the historical significance of individuality, the role of author of in-
dividuations as a dissident voice, and the incompatibility of the form with certain
social and political conditions. The study seems to argue that the bildungsroman
is the prototype of the novel, but Peavler remarks that this subgenre is "an ap-
plication of the basic concept" of individuation. In other words, his abandoned
New Critical formalism gives way in this work to the formalism of deep structure.
Leonard Orr's Semiotic and Structuralist Analyses of Fiction: An Introduction and
A Survey of Applications has a misleading title in that the book is an annotated
bibliography rather than an introduction or a survey. The "Introduction: Great
Signifying Unities of Discourse" does give a brief (twenty-six page) historical survey
of structuralist/semiotic approaches to fiction. But the bulk of the work is a large
and very useful annotated bibliography. It is divided into five categories: works
which emphasize (1) definitions or principles, (2) codes, (3) linguistics, (4) typologies
and morphologies, and (5) the role of the reader. An attractive aspect of the book
is the glossary of terms at the end. The bibliography is indexed so that one does
not have to guess the category in which a particular narratologist's work might
be listed. The annotations for many of the major works (for example, Roland
Barthes's S/Z) include citations of reviews or criticisms. There are occasional cross
references. It is an excellent reference work for one's personal library.

JAMES J. SOSNOSKI
Miami University

frfr

Gerald Prince. Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 118 pp.

$17.95.
Welch D. Everman. Who Says This? The Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and
the Reada. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988. 142 pp. $17.95.

In a world overrun with theories and vocabularies, there are two reasons for coin-
ing new words or redefining those that exist: to designate something not hitherto
named or to reveal a new system of relations. From Henry James and Percy
374 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
Lubbock we inherited a set of terms that enhanced our understanding of point
of view in fiction. Finding that vocabulary inadequate, Dorrit Cohn, Franz Stanzel,
and Gérard Genette developed different systems to name the phenomena involved,
and each one calls attention to important aspects of narrative technique. The ef-
forts of French structuralists to describe other aspects of narrative left us a more
dubious welter of words. When not renaming phenomena that had already been
named, they often used traditional terms in new senses. And when translated,
a single French word might spawn several in English (thus Barthes's catalyses became
"catalyzers," "catalysts," and "satellites").
In these circumstances, Prince's Dictionary of Narratology is an immensely useful
reference work. It includes nearly all the terms that fall within the field; the only
omissions I noted were words that have not gained currency. He is particularly
generous in presenting the terminology of the French structuralists but does not
slight the Anglo-American, German, and Russian traditions. The multiple mean-
ings of words such as "mode" are lucidly distinguished, and the foreign terms
used by some who write in English ("Er-form," "histoire") are appropriately cross-
referenced. Relevant terms from communication theory, psychology, and folklore
also appear.
To gain an understanding of some words, it is necessary to know the mean-
ing of others, and by following the cross-references Prince supplies, it is possible,
and sometimes necessary, to piece together the theories from which they are taken.
A few entries, such as "focalization" and "function," draw together large areas
of theory in useful ways. Narratologists will want to have a copy of Prince's Dic-
tionary at hand; if available in paperback, it would be useful for courses in nar-
rative. The proliferation of overlapping terminology in the past thirty years has
produced what looks more like a scholasticism than a science of narrative, and
this situation obscures important achievements in the field. Although we do not
need an Academy of Narratology to license neologisms, we might profit from the
efforts of a reductionist who proposed to cut the working vocabulary of the discipline
down to an unredundant size.
Whereas critics classify the techniques of fiction, writers play with them,
disrupting the conventions that separate characters, narrators, and authors, and
thereby caUing into question the ontology that segregates texts, facts, and thoughts.
Everman's Who Says This? is a collection of essays that could serve as a primer
of postmodernism. The first chapter concerns the mixing of fact and fiction in
The Executioner's Song, Kerouac's Visions of Cody, and Cantor's The Death of Ché
Guevara. In his almost desperate attempt to show what really happened, Mailer
is driven to the fictional rendering of consciousness as well as to a ponderous
authentication through inclusion of court transcripts and newspaper articles.
Kerouac's quest for the truth of Neal Cassady leads him to a quest for himself
in "spontaneous prose" and tape recording. (Both approaches are in the American
grain; Mark Twain had used news clippings and imagined an internal tape recorder
in writing his autobiography.) But of course neither of these approaches will yield
a truth beyond textuality—as Cantor realizes.
The next four chapters treat Raymond Federman, Harry Mathews (of
OuLiPo), and Ã-talo Calvino respectively. Everman is a perceptive reader and a
good writer, but the subtitle of his book—TL· Authority of iL· Author, the Discourse,
and the Reader—provides only an occasion for collecting these essays, not a concep-
RECENT BOOKS—MISCELLANEOUS 375
tuai structure that draws them together. Assaults on literary authority have taken
two forms. One challenges the unity of the author as a self capable of validating
a text woven from an inherited language; the other challenges the social and
ultimately political authority of (white male) literary standards. Frequently rely-
ing on Foucault's "What is an Author?" and Barthes's "The Death of the Author,"
Everman's affinities are with the former trend.
Postmodernist practice blurs the line between criticism and creation, as Ever-
man shows in the chapter on Federman (that consists of sections numbered like
those in Wittgenstein's Tractatus) and in the last chapter which concerns the fic-
tion of J. L. Marcus. Everman asserts in the Introduction that "there is no novelist
named J. L. Marcus" despite all evidence to the contrary. Setting aside such
puzzles, readers will not find any surprising new turns in Everman's postmodern-
ism, but they may profit from his discussions of Mathews' Selected Declarations,
Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, and Federman's autobiographical writings.
WALLACE MARTIN

University of Toledo

rrfr

Robert Newsom. A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 1988. 213 pp. $30.00 cloth; pb. $15.00.

Robert Newsom's A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction is an admirable and
important study. In a relatively short work, Newsom not only provides a detailed
historical account of both philosophical and literary discussions about probability,
but he also presents a complex and persuasive theory about the logical relation-
ships between the fictional and the real. More impressively, as he integrates the
scholarly and theoretical threads of his argument to tell his story about the
emergence of the novel, he also contributes to the ongoing project of developing
a coherent theory about how people read fictions.
As a point of departure, Newsom detaUs Aristotelian discussions of probabUity
in order to modify for his own thesis Ian Hacking's The Emergence of Probability;
in that controversial study, Hacking argues that prior to the seventeenth century
the logical space occupied by the modern, mathematicized concept of probability
was simply unavailable. What makes that space available, according to both Hack-
ing and Newsom, is the "transition from the evidence of books to the evidence
of things," a transition from "word" to "world" that coincides with—and has
implications for our understanding of—the emergence of the novel. For as Newsom
argues in later chapters, it is precisely the discovery of the evidence of things
that makes possible not only the science of statistics and the correct calculation
of chance but also the "concept of the Ordinary life' and the self-conscious represen-
tation in language of the circumstances of that ordinary life."
376 MODERN FICTION STUDIES