Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory

Author(s): Brian Richardson

Source: Style, Vol. 34, No. 2, Concepts of Narrative (Summer 2000), pp. 168-175
Published by: Penn State University Press
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 Brian Richardson
University of Maryland

Recent Concepts of Narrative and the

Narratives of Narrative Theory

Now, narrative is everywhere. The study of narrative continues to grow more

nuanced, capacious, and extensive as it is applied to an ever greater range of fields
and disciplines, appearing more prominently in areas from philosophy and law to
studies of performance art and hypertexts. Nor is there any end in sight: the most
important new movement in religious studies is narrative theology, and there is even
a new kind of psychological treatment called “narrative therapy.” Cognitive science
offers experimental evidence for a claim that only recently was the hyperbolic boast
of a practitioner of the nouveau roman: that narrative is the basic vehicle of human
knowledge. Or in the words of Mark Turner: “Narrative imagining—story—is the
fundamental instrument of thought. [. . .] It is a literary capacity indispensable to
human cognition generally” (4-5).
In literary, cultural, and performance studies, narrative theory continues to
expand, whether in the burgeoning field of life writing or in the analysis of drama
or film. It is no exaggeration to say that the last ten years have seen a renaissance in
narrative theory and analysis. Feminism, arguably the most significant intellectual
force of the second half of the twentieth century, has (as should be expected) ut-
terly and fruitfully transformed narrative theory and analysis in many ways. Virtu-
ally every component of or agent in the narrative transaction has been subjected
to sustained examination, including space, closure, character, narration, reader
response, linearity and narrative sequence, and even the phenomenon of narrative
itself. Some of these reconceptualizations, as Honor Wallace’s article in this issue
demonstrates, continue to be debated and refined.
Broader-based gender criticism and queer studies steadily followed the rise of
feminism, some results of which are likewise evident in this issue. Though rather
less work has appeared from other marginalized or “minority” perspectives so far,
these are certainly areas that can be expected to provide significant contributions
in the near future. Already, several important studies are available, including work
on narrative and race, and in postcolonial studies much attention has been devoted
to the construction of imperial and national narratives. Other movements in critical
theory from Lacanian analysis to “nomadology” to new historicism have been readily
applied to narrative study and have often produced impressive results. Elsewhere
in the field, a new kind of interdisciplinarity is quietly emerging, as developments

168 Style: Volume 34, No. 2, Summer 2000

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Recent Concepts of Narrative 169

in artificial-intelligence theory, hypertext studies, the concept of “possible worlds”

in analytical philosophy, and advances in cognitive science are applied to narrative
theory. Narrative thus seems to be a kind of vortex around which other discourses
orbit in ever closer proximity.
Another interesting development is represented by the work of a number of
younger scholars who retain the analytical rigor of traditional or “classical” ap-
proaches while moving far beyond the relatively limited theoretical parameters of
structuralism to address new questions posed by postmodern texts and positionali-
ties. These theorists (including Ruth Ronen, Tamar Yacobi, Brian McHale, Monika
Fludernik, Emma Kafalenos, and Patrick O’Neill) have produced a number of
groundbreaking studies that are necessitating a radical rethinking of concepts that
hitherto have been foundational to narrative theory: the distinction between fabula
and syuzhet, the nature of narrative time, the concept of plot, the notion of voice,
and the concept of “the” reader. They have applied analytical methods to irrever-
ent postmodern narrative practices and formulated a number of original positions.
Though I suspect that some will reject the name (and perhaps the company) I am
constructing for them, I will nevertheless refer to these works as gesturing toward
a “Postmodern Narratology.”

What is Narrative?
Currently, four basic approaches to the definition of narrative are in use; we may
designate these as temporal, causal, minimal, and transactional. The first posits the
representation of events in a time sequence as the defining feature of narrative; the
second insists that some causal connection, however oblique, between the events
is essential; the third and most capacious, Genette’s, suggests that any statement
of an action or event is ipso facto a narrative, since it implies a transformation or
transition from an earlier to a later state; the fourth posits that narrative is simply a
way of reading a text, rather than a feature or essence found in a text. In additional
to these four, Monika Fludernik in an essay in this volume draws on linguistics to
differentiate narrative from other text types.
Of these positions, the most commonly employed are the temporal and the
causal stances.1 Gerald Prince has defined narrative as “the representation of at
least two real or fictive events in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or
entails the other” (Narratology 4); this formulation appears to be the most widely
cited of any definition. On the other hand, Dorrit Cohn has recently stated that the
following is a fairly consensual definition of narrative: “a series of statements that
deal with a causally related sequence of events that concern human (or human-like)
beings” (12). Choosing between these two positions can be difficult; for many,
mere temporal sequence is too weak a connection, as the following statements
may suggest: “Long ago, Theseus slew the minotaur; yesterday, the mail came
late.” On the other hand, the demand for “causally related” events may seem too
severe: many events in a given narrative—especially a picaresque or postmodern

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170 Brian Richardson

one—may have only the most tenuous connection to the material that surrounds it.
In this instance, it is probably most useful to look to adjacent arts, such as film
or painting, in which a group of contiguous representations may or may not con-
stitute a narrative sequence. Here David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson provide
a telling test case of a series of cinematic images: “A man tosses and turns, unable
to sleep. A mirror breaks. A telephone rings” (55). Alone, this is a non-narrative
sequence. But one can postulate connections that would weave these images together
into a narrative: the man can’t sleep because he’s had a fight with his boss, and in
the morning is still so angry that he smashes the mirror while shaving; next, his
telephone rings and he learns that his boss has called to apologize. In this example,
causal ties are necessary to produce the work’s narrative status; without them, it is
merely a suggestive montage.
My own preferred formulation is the following: narrative is a representation
of a causally related series of events.2 This definition would include verbal as well
as nonverbal narratives (in painting, ballet, mime, etc); “causally related” would be
understood as “generally connected” or part of the same general causal matrix—a
much looser, more oblique, and indefinite relation than direct entailment; and it
is further assumed that numerous nonnarrative elements may comfortably reside
within a larger narrative framework, as Porter Abbott demonstrates so effectively
elsewhere in this issue. But, as Gerald Prince goes on to suggest in the ingenious
questions that conclude this volume, the story may not end even here. What are
we to do with dreams, prophecies, memories, and recipes—all representations of
causally related events in a time sequence (though many dreamers are notoriously
lax in supplying causal connections)? I leave these for other theorists to tease out.

The Narratives of Narrative Theory

In America, a single, rarely questioned master narrative of modern critical
theory has dominated literary studies for some time. It is an extremely familiar
account; one of its versions runs as follows: at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, criticism was dominated by philological studies, historical and biographical
speculation, and an impressionistic humanism. These were supplanted by various
types of formalist approaches, one important strand of which culminated in the
structuralist promise of a comprehensive, rigorous, linguistically grounded, objec-
tive, disinterested science of literature. Beginning in the late sixties, a number of
poststructuralist theories challenged this orthodoxy and soon overthrew it, setting in
its place a new series of issues, questions, methods, and valorizations that seriously
addressed ideological issues, established the positionality of the reader, examined
historical contexts, and affirmed the inherent impossibility of disinterestedness
in such endeavors. Just as formalism had rightly succeeded the facile yet barren
impressionism of earlier humanistic critics, the ideologically sophisticated and
politically engaged schools that succeeded the formalists swept away the mania
for structure, spurious objectivity, pretentious system building, false claims of

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Recent Concepts of Narrative 171

organicism, and scientistic excess.

This master narrative is so well entrenched that it is rarely questioned or in-
deed even noticed, and occasionally attempts are even made to map it (however
clumsily) onto the very different history of narrative theory. These attempts invari-
ably prove inadequate; indeed, the history of narrative theory itself contradicts the
critical narrative just outlined. Like all seamless, streamlined historical accounts
that follow a teleological pattern and lead to a conclusion that is both satisfying
and inevitable, the poststructuralist master narrative is palpably untrue; the rise,
fall, and metamorphosis of critical positions over time is much more complex than
such a simple pattern can express.
As Jerome McGann has stated, “history is a field of indeterminacies, with
movements to be seen running across lateral and recursive lines as well as linearly,
and by strange diagonals and various curves, tangents, and even within random
patterns” (197). The same of course is true of the history of criticism and theory:
it is necessary to radically narrow the definition of what constitutes “Theory,” to
minimize the formalists’ fascination with parody and defamiliarization, and to posit
an artificially unified poststructuralist subject that obscures its multiple schisms
in order for this narrative to seem compelling.3 Poststructuralist insight into the
interestedness of all discourse also contains a blindness that does not seem to al-
low this knowledge to be reflexively applied to the narratives it tells about itself.
In narrative theory proper, a very different scenario has unfolded, as the more
traditional approaches (neoAristotelian criticism, structuralism, linguistics) have
been augmented though not displaced by important new work grounded in feminism,
deconstruction, new historicism, “minority” poetics, and queer studies. The exclu-
sionary antagonisms that have fueled theoretical debates elsewhere in criticism and
theory are often absent here; the choices available to the narrative theorist include
the option of “both/and.” Furthermore, several distinct kinds of interaction can be
seen at work: we find the uneven incorporation of some poststructuralist methods
and concerns into existing narratological practices—some want only a taste; others
take large drafts; all generally choose carefully which nonformalist discourses they
will embrace. Then there are what might be termed “maverick poststructuralists”
like Peter Rabinowitz, Michal Peled Ginsburg, and Jay Clayton, whose analyses are
as vital as they are difficult to categorize. In the writings of yet other narratologists,
poststructuralism does not have much discernible effect at all.
A striking feature of the contemporary theoretical scene is the continued sig-
nificant presence of older schools. Marxist and Freudian paradigms of narrative
analysis have been active and productive for most of the century, despite regular
reformulations of and internecine struggles over central features and methods
(indeed, it is one of the ironies of the history of criticism that revised versions of
these nineteenth century doctrines have routinely been called “post” structuralist).
Similarly, models derived from both linguistics and the basic approach of the Chi-
cago school have yielded impressive results for over seventy years and continue

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172 Brian Richardson

to do so. Many of the authors of more traditional though classic works have gone
on to produce ingenious accounts that extend or exceed the boundaries of their
earlier formulations: I am thinking here of studies like Gérard Genette’s work on
the paratext, Dorrit Cohn’s analysis of simultaneous narration (96-108), and Gerald
Prince on the “disnarrated.”
Still more illustrative is the unlikely history of the morphological approach to
the fundamental elements and transformations of story.4 In the twenties, Vladimir
Propp developed this framework as part of his study of the Russian folktale, and
derived thirty-one basic story functions from the thousands of examples he had
investigated. Soon after, formalism was suppressed by Stalin, and Propp’s work
was thereby prevented from being widely known in literary circles for many years.
In the sixties and seventies, however, it served as a touchstone for several structur-
alists (including Greimas, Bremond, Todorov, and Prince) who sought to extend
and revise Propp’s model and map out a universal narrative grammar. This project,
after generating considerable initial interest, was rapidly abandoned and had nearly
expired by the end of the eighties; it came to appear to many, especially in the U.
S., to mark the worst extremes of scientistic excess and reductionism. Suddenly,
however, it re-emerged in slightly altered form as a central aspect of some types
of cognitivist approaches to narrative (see Herman). Against all odds, narrative
grammar is back in fashion again. It would seem that in the history of narrative
theory, old models don’t die a timely death—they simply pause for a few years
before being resurrected in a moderately new form. In fact, it is hard to think of
a major tradition of narrative analysis that has been definitively abandoned; even
Northrop Frye’s somewhat hoary archetypal theory has recently been refashioned
within Allen Tilley’s work on “plot snakes.”
The actual evolution and development of narrative theory cannot begin to be
grafted onto the master narrative of critical theory as told by the poststructuralists.
Indeed, the story of modern narrative theory does not fit well into the frame of any
narrative history. There are far too many story strands, loose ends, abrupt turns,
and unmotivated reappearances of forgotten figures and theoretical approaches to
fit easily within any one narrative structure. The history of modern narrative theory
is more accurately depicted as a cluster of contiguous histories rather than a single,
comprehensive narrative.
Noting comparable problems in the writing of literary history, David Perkins
recently suggested that one is ultimately forced to choose between either a neces-
sarily false narrative history or the unwieldy and intellectually deficient form of
the encyclopedia (53-60). I suggest instead that for both literary and critical history
we use the model of the chronicle, with its minimal causality, openness to multiple
stories, and abandonment of teleological trajectories, in order to represent more
accurately the purposive clutter and unpredictable successions of the polymorphous
past.5 The chronicle form allows us to chart the varied trajectories of several dis-
parate, competing theories in operation at the same time; it encourages us to note

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Recent Concepts of Narrative 173

the continuities, interruptions, permutations, and divisions of these models over

time. Eschewing a simple, linear, teleological model, we can be more alert to the
abrupt emergences, hibernations, revivals, forkings, and disappearances of different
critical schools over time.
The essays in this volume amply illustrate the wide range of impressive work
being done in narrative theory today as well as the persistence and continued utility
of many earlier explanatory models. The first three intervene directly in ongoing
debates involving different strands of narrative theory. In “Desire and the Female
Protagonist,” Honor Wallace critically examines basic aspects of feminist narrative
theory, in particular the opposition between lyric and narrative and the frequent
valorization of the lyric mode as a progressive alternative to the masculinist biases
of traditional narrative trajectories. In “Maurice in Time,” Jesse Matz argues per-
suasively for a new kind of narrative temporality in Forster that he terms “tense-
lessness”; though eccentric to typical modernist deployments of time, “tenseless-
ness” gestures toward a homosexual form that would elude constricting notions of
“identity.” Eyal Amiran analyzes the work of three central poststructuralist theorists
(Peter Brooks, Deleuze and Guattari, and Michael Fried) and demonstrates how
each ultimately confuses figuration with poetics, just as the earlier theorists they
critique had done; Amiran goes on to offer an approach to the text that eludes this
and other comparably faulty binary oppositions. Daniel Punday in turn imagines
what a thoroughgoing narratology of the body would look like and shows how basic
concepts of narrative theory (character, plot, space) depend on an understanding
of bodies that has yet to be adequately articulated.
The next three essays look at the concept and definition of narrative from
different vantage points. Philippe Carrard examines three types of modern history
writing both to determine whether a genuinely nonnarrative history exists and what
its features might be. Building on cognitive science, Porter Abbott, by contrasting
the dissimilar ways in which “narrative” and “literature” function, provides a bet-
ter understanding of each while revealing the large conceptual gap between them.
Monika Fludernik, drawing on the resources of linguistics, utilizes text-type theory
to better comprehend narrative as a discourse type.
The issue concludes with two important investigations into basic concepts of
narrative analysis that turn out to have significant implications for more general
theoretical concerns. David Herman on the one hand, scrutinizing the concept of
reflexivity, differentiates it sharply from metalanguage and identifies a distinctive
type of “lateral” reflexivity that produces a series of changing versions or “self-
paraphrases” of basic material, rather than a hierarchical order of distinct levels—a
differentiation found elsewhere in narrative discourse, and one that illuminates core
cognitive principles. Dorrit Cohn, on the other hand, breaks down the unwieldy
category of “unreliable narration” into the more useful subtypes of “misinformed”
and “discordant”; in doing so, she discloses discordant narration to be an exclusive
property of works of narrative fiction.

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174 Brian Richardson

In addition, further demonstrating the utility and consequences of the conceptual

frameworks in question, the theory in these essays is in almost every case applied
to—and helps to reinterpret—an array of narratives by Fay Weldon, E.M. Forster,
Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison, Patrick Modiano, and Joseph Conrad. If one may
venture a single, self-conscious teleological surmise, it is that narrative theory is
reaching a higher level of sophistication and comprehensiveness and that it is very
likely to become increasingly central to literary studies now that the dominant
critical paradigm has begun to fade and a new (or at least another) critical model
is struggling to emerge.

Notes
1
The limitation of most transactional definitions is that they usually seem
to beg—if not miss entirely—the central fact that some texts (e.g., an anecdote)
produce or reward a narrative response more than other kinds of texts (such as a
mathematical equation). The main problem with Genette’s conception (“as soon
as there is an action or an event, even a single one, there is a story because there
is a transformation” [19]) is that it is far too inclusive to be of much use; virtually
any description at all (not only, “The sun is up,” but also “The sun is hot”) thus
becomes a narrative, since it implies a transition from an earlier state to a later
one. I believe that narrative, however, presupposes a minimal amplitude. Several
of these rival definitions are discussed at some length in my book, Unlikely Stories
(89-107). For Prince’s recent assessment of Genette, see “Revisiting Narrativity.”
2
This definition was first proposed in Unlikely Stories (105), which includes
additional discussion of this issue and its varied theorists. I see no reason to limit
narrative, as Cohn does, to human agents (including anthropomorphic entities);
the story of a glacier’s advance and retreat or the development of a solar system
strikes me as being eminently narrative.
3
A deconstruction of the poststructuralist account would point to femi-
nism’s independence of (and feminists’ occasional hostility to) deconstruction
and psychoanalysis and note that for most of the twentieth century Marxism and
psychoanalysis have, for instance, opposed rather than complemented each other
as interpretive projects.
4
The extreme brevity of the following account necessarily collapses some
important distinctions between different practitioners; for a more thorough version
of the relations between Propp and the structuralists—and among the structuralists
themselves—see Culler (205-24) or Ronen.
5
I use the term “chronicle” as Hayden White has described it: situated halfway
between narrative proper and the purely chronological annals, it “often seems to
wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it. More
specifically, the chronicle usually is marked by a failure to achieve narrative clo-
sure. It does not conclude so much as simply terminate” (5). For a chronicle-style
account of the history of modern fiction, see my “Re-Mapping the Present,” which

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Recent Concepts of Narrative 175

elaborates some of the arguments set forth here.

Works Cited
Note: See the general bibliography of this issue for full citation of works
mentioned but not cited in this article.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw
Hill, 1990.
Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1988.
Herman, David. “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Nar-
ratology.” PMLA 112 (1997): 1046-59.
McGann, Jerome. “History, Herstory, Theirstory, Ourstory.” Theoretical Issues in
Literary History. Ed. David Perkins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 196-205.
Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Amsterdam:
Mouton, 1982.
___. “Revisiting Narrativity.” Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext.
Ed. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach. Tübingen: Narr, 1999. 43-51.
Richardson, Brian. “Re-Mapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern
Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction.” Twentieth-
Century Literature 43 (1997) 291-309.
___. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: U
of Delaware P, 1997.
Ronen, Ruth. “Paradigm Shift in Plot Models: An Outline of the History of Nar-
ratology.” Poetics Today 11 (1990): 817-42.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” On
Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 1-23.

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