Showing papers in "Narrative in 2002"

The Story of "I": Illness and Narrative Identity

Abstract: A bench on Hampstead Heath, overlooking London. I feel a bit like Rastignac, at the end of Le P?re Goriot, pompously challenging Paris from the height of P?re Lachaise cemetery: "A nous deux maintenant." Even more like the neurologist Oliver Sacks, recounting, toward the end of A Leg to Stand On, his ascent to Parlia ment Hill, one of the highest spots on the Heath, after the abyss into which he had been hurled by a neurological "hole in identity" (186), following a leg operation. To tell a story, it would seem, is to model it on previous stories?a point made before me and to which I shall return later. I am writing in a period of relative remission? thereby probably lending support, almost against my will, to the phoenix metaphor I have stubbornly resisted in Arthur W. Frank's stimulating 1993 essay on illness nar ratives. To this too I shall return later. Illness. It happened in London, in the summer of 1998.1 was spending a month there with my family, planning to stay for two additional months on my own to do re search concerning my current project: the concept of narrative in various disciplines (historiography, psychoanalysis, legal studies). When I came out of the hairdresser's one day, everything seemed alarmingly blurred, objects looked doubled, angles askew, people cut in the middle. Within a short while, I realized that I could no longer read, since lines suddenly collapsed into each other. My eyelids would droop without any warning, and I lost a sense of distance, so that an approaching bus could

The Construction of Fictional Minds

Abstract: In his introduction to a recently published volume of essays, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, David Herman explains what is meant by the term "postclassical narratology." He states, "Recently we have witnessed a small but unmistakable explosion of activity in the field of narrative studies; signs of this minor narratological renaissance include the publication of a spate of articles, spe cial issues, and books that rethink and recontextualize classical models for narrato logical research" (1). He also notes that "Postclassical narratology ... is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses; the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself" (2-3). Such "recent research has highlighted aspects of narrative discourse that classical narratology ei ther failed or chose not to explore"(2). This is a response to that stirring call for papers. I suggest that the topic of fic tional minds is an area of study that would benefit from a postclassical perspective, because classical narratology has neglected the whole minds of fictional characters in action. At first sight, this may seem to be an implausible claim. What about the study of free indirect discourse? Interior monologue? Focalization? Reflectoriza tion? Characterization? Actants? My answer is that these concepts do not add up to a complete and coherent study of all aspects of the minds of characters in novels. Put another way, several of the devices that are used in the constructions of fictional minds by narrators and readers, such as the role of thought report in describing emo tions and the role of behavior descriptions in conveying motivation and intention, have yet to be defamiliarized. As Hegel remarks, "What is 'familiarly known' is not properly known, just for the reason that it is 'familiar' " (92). Manfred Jahn refers, in a different context, to "a number of interesting cognitive mechanisms that have

Defense and Challenge: Reflections on the Relation between Story and Discourse

Abstract: The structuralist distinction between story and discourse, that is, between what is told and how it is told, is regarded as "an indispensable premise of narratology" (Culler 171). Many narratologists have found this distinction helpful in theoretical discussions as well as in practical analyses, but its very existence, let alone its ab- solute status, has been challenged by various critics from different angles. This essay will first offer a consideration of some deconstructive attempts to subvert the distinc- tion, then will present a challenge of its own. Of the five areas of discourse (order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice (Genette, Narrative Discourse)), the distinc- tion is quite clear in the first three, but tends to be blurred in the latter two, especially in terms of (1) narrated speech; (2) character's perception when used as the "angle of vision" by the narrator; and (3) certain homodiegetic narration. The aim of this essay, however, is not only to help clarify the relation between story and discourse, but also to shed fresh light on the nature of fictional narratives through that clarification. A CONSIDERATION OF DECONSTRUCTIVE CHALLENGES I'll first consider two deconstructive attempts to subvert the distinction in ques- tion, made respectively by Jonathan Culler and Patrick O'Neill. Both of them see story and discourse as an absolute binary in which we have to choose one term as privileged. Their efforts, then, in characteristic deconstructive fashion, are to identify the allegedly-existing privilege (story over discourse) and then argue for a reversal.

Where the Bodies are Buried: Cartesian Dispositions in Narrative Theories of Character

Abstract: What does the recent explosion of work on the body have to offer narrative the ory? And what does narrative theory have to offer work on the body? These two questions frame the following essay. Such questions presume that the intersection of the two areas of inquiry has not been mapped out, and indeed, this is the case. As Daniel Punday has recently observed, "Despite its signal importance to so many schools of contemporary criticism, the human body has largely failed to garner a sig nificant place in narratology" (227). On the other hand, though much work on the body addresses the body's representation in written discourse, very little if any of it operates from a specifically narratological frame of reference. Nowhere is this theo retical gap more pronounced than in theories of character formation, which through out the twentieth century have focused on action, interiority, and consciousness. Narratology's neglect of the body when analyzing character can in part be traced to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's influential Laoco?n (1766). Lessing's famous dictum "[Succession of time is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter" inaugurated a distinction between the two media that has been taken as ax iomatic in twentieth-century narrative theory (91). What has been equally influential,

Queer Post-Politics

Abstract: When I originally heard Lee Edelman give his lecture "The Future is Kid Stuff," I found it so compelling in its passion and coherence and so disturbing in its conclu sions that I had to look back at its argument and ask whether perhaps what was wrong with the argument was its very coherence?its seamless synthesis of political theory and cultural criticism through a psychoanalytic conception of the "subject" and the signifier, jouissance and the death drive. The horizon of my commentary will be to question whether psychoanalytic concepts can provide the building blocks of political theory, whether they can sustain a viable theory or analysis of the body politic. My view is that they cannot. The view that they can is central to Edelman and other queer theorists, especially Judith Butler, as it is to the quite different projects of Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau. First, though, I want to acknowledge the unassailable insight and compelling protest at the heart of Edelman's lecture, published since in Narrative and titled "The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive." As cultural criticism, Edelman's commentary deconstructs a ubiquitous icon in contemporary American politics and culture: the figure of the child, innocence incar nate, full of promise, and destined to fulfillment through whatever norms the prevail ing order cherishes and enforces: heterosexuality, homogeneity, affluence. Edelman tracks down this figure through everything from public service announcements of the liberal Coalition for America's Children to anti-abortion billboards announcing, "It's not a choice; it's a child"; from Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign Save Our Children to the Army of God, a group that claimed responsibility for attacks on an abortion

Still Life: A User's Manual

Abstract: "Still life," Norman Bryson has declared, "is the world minus its narratives or, better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest" (60). Bryson links that narrative capacity to the human subject, which is evacuated by this genre devoted to objects: "Opposing the anthropomorphism of the 'higher' genres, it as saults the centrality, value and prestige of the human subject" (60).l Of course, still life might equally well be seen as an assault on the object, on the vexed philosophi cal problem of the thing-in-itself?an assault that must always fail, filtered as it is by perception and representation. In either case, the end of still life is silence: the object is mute, and narrative, it seems, must shatter against it. This sense of the "stillness" of still life is involved with another sense of the word, a lack of motion that Bryson argues is fatal to narrative: "The law of narrative is one of change: characters move from episode to episode, from ignorance to knowledge, from high estate to low or from low to high. Its generative principle is one of discontinuity: where states are continuous, homeostatic, narrative is helpless. But still life pitches itself at a level of material existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is wholesale eviction of the Event" (61). These assumptions demand to be questioned, and with them the absolute sever ance of still life from narrative that they entail. It is far from self-evident, for one thing, that objects do not move through changes in time?we recall that Hans Chris tian Andersen's tin soldier, darning needle, and bottle neck take long, eventful jour neys. And even if an object is viewed as motionless, there is a paradoxical connection to event in that very viewing. The minimalist sculptor Robert Morris as

Naming and Believing: Practices of the Proper Name in Narrative Fiction

Abstract: 1.1 The power of discourse to construct realities is widely asserted in contem porary literary theory. But what exactly is this power? Surely it is only the divine word which can call into existence a mind-independent, external reality which we can all experience in our common life world! The constructive power of discourse in purely human circumstances is much more modest, and could be characterized as the ability to give rise to mental (cognitive) representations, discourse domains, or belief worlds in the minds of individuals, or to belief worlds shared by members of a group. Such discourse domains may be construed as worlds of the mind, which may or may not correspond to any external, intersubjective reality. Semiotic means of some kind (sounds, letters, words, phrases, sketches, etc.) serve in all such cases as both initia tors and underpinnings of the resultant mental representation. One particular kind of mental representation or discourse domain consists of spatio-temporal frameworks containing both individual entities with their properties and relations and dynamic situations, that is, changing configurations of the relations between these entities. Such dynamic frameworks are the cognitive correlate of the narrative discourse type, be it factual or fictional. For it is not the semiotic or cognitive dimension as such that distinguishes the factual from the fictional, but rather the correspondence, or lack thereof, between a mental representation and an external situation. The power of dis course to give rise to a cognitive domain is most evident when we have access to the mental operations through which this domain gets established and subsequently modified, and when these operations occur in a well-defined and well-circumscribed

Reverie, Sensation, Effect: Novelistic Attention and Stendhal's De l'amour

Abstract: Attention, reader. Perhaps that is the demand, more or less blatantly put, that every narrative makes?a certain quantum of engrossment implicitly requested for whatever follows, of whatever length. Managing that attention once it has been cap tured, however, is a somewhat different matter. There are as many forms of "atten tion" as there might be methods of attracting it; we have some acquaintance with rapt concentration, dreamlike trance, or anxious dread, and the kinds of written forms that usually call forth these attentive responses. But of our largest form, the novel, readerly attention?which, after all, the novel requires so strenuously?has yet to be mapped in any great detail. What, in other words, is the precise quality of the atten tion a novel asks of us? In its length, its traditionally copious use of detail, and the credulity it tends to request, it would seem to need a kind of athletic attention, a fairly frequent tension of our reading muscles, that most other genres allow us to leave behind.1 More than that it is difficult to say. As much as we have learned about the kinds of affect the novel tends to produce (tears, boredom, fear, suspense), we know comparatively little about the ways we are asked to attend to it, the ways in which our often sloppy or compromised attention is marshaled and managed. While we have important studies of other forms of attentiveness?in civic spectacles, in the visual arts?we are as yet lacking a framework, or any critical vocabulary, for un derstanding the particular forms of "attention" that might be called for by the novel.2

Character, Silence, and the Novel: Walter Benjamin on Goethe's Elective Affinities

Abstract: Walter Benjamin's 1924-25 essay on Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften [The Elective Affinities] is widely acknowledged as "standard-setting" in the reception history of one of the most important European novels of the nineteenth century. Yet the essay "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" ["Goethe's Elective Affinities"] has re ceived more thorough discussion as a work of critical theory than as a reading of a novel.1 Recent studies of Benjamin explicate the essay as an elaboration of the con cept of "immanent criticism" described in Benjamin's dissertation on early German Romanticism. Immanent criticism "completes" the literary artwork by articulating or unfolding its own internal tendency to reflection; it was developed and practiced by Romantic critics in close relation with the literary production of Goethe, its critical language a reflection of his literary language. Benjamin's early criticism likewise de velops in a closer engagement with Goethe's literary works than is always acknowl edged. The following article seeks to supplement recent considerations of Benjamin's essay with an account that remains more closely tied to the text and re ception of Goethe's novel.2 When Goethe published Die Wahlverwandtschaften in 1809, the novel produced an immediate and lasting bafflement that was only to be deepened by the author's comments on his own work. Die Wahlverwandtschaften is a novel of manners, but its title, drawn from the terminology of eighteenth-century chemistry, seems to indicate a departure from the social rules that govern manners. Instead, this strange title refers readers to a scientific law according to which elements with innate "affinities" will choose, or "elect," to bond together, even if they must break out of previously formed unions in order to do so. The symmetry that marks the transformations expressed in

Family Stories: Gender and Discourse in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter

Abstract: While being deposed in a class-action suit instigated by townspeople who have lost their children in a tragic bus accident, Nicole Burnell, an adolescent girl who has survived the accident, constructs a lie about what happened in order to sabotage the prosecuting attorney's case. Mitchell Stephens, the lawyer who seeks someone to blame for the town's loss, is obsessed with creating a cause-effect narrative to ex plain the accident, largely because he, too, has "lost" a child and struggles to under stand how and why: the class-action suit to which he is drawn becomes his vicarious means to compensate himself for the fact that his daughter abuses drugs and may die of AIDS. But Nicole is deeply suspicious of the narrative line which Stephens wants to impose on the accident. Not only is she aware that his story is a construct and that the accident was simply that?an accident, no one's fault?but her relationship to her own father, Sam Burnell, is troubled by the narrative that he has constructed for her. Sam promises to turn his daughter into a rock star, and Nicole, initially seduced by this dream, enters into a sexual relationship with her father. Thus Nicole is a sur vivor not only of the accident but of incest as well. These two plot lines merge in the film when Sam becomes involved in the lawsuit because he wants to further use Nicole, who has lost the use of her legs in the accident, for material compensation. Nicole, who comes to recognize herself as an object in both Stephens's and Sam's stories, sees a way to write herself out of both narratives: knowing that the town will drop the suit rather than prosecute one of its own community members, she falsely testifies that the bus driver was speeding at the time of the accident. With her lie, the suit ends.

Short-circuiting the Dialectic: Narrative and Slapstick in the Cinema of Buster Keaton

Abstract: Halfway into Buster Keaton’s second two-reeler film, One Week, an extended gag develops as Keaton’s character attempts to install the chimney on his house’s roof while his wife takes a bath. The crosscutting between two separate spaces establishes the components of the gag that will eventually intersect in the gag’s penultimate moment. Numerous incidental and isolated gags occur while the extended gag is being articulated. Keaton cannot transport the chimney up the ladder to the roof except by wearing it on his head—he becomes literally a blockhead and somewhat phallic to boot—which causes him to lose his balance and fall. Keaton’s wife drops the soap on the floor and cannot retrieve it except by exposing herself to the camera. She motions to the camera, directing a hand to cover the lens until she is safely back in the bath. On the roof, Keaton now wears the chimney as a skirt (his sartorial extravaganzas contrast with his wife’s nakedness) and slides down the eaves, his legs catching the chimney hole and permitting him to insert the object appropriately. But carried by the momentum of his action, Keaton slips through the chimney and lands in the bathtub in the room below. The coital image that seems to be propelling this gag is, however, ultimately unfulfilled. Keaton does not land atop his wife as we might expect because she has elusively taken refuge in the shower recess, where she stands modestly clad in the curtain. As she scolds Keaton, he escapes through a doorway—unfortunately one that leads nowhere—and he ends up for the umpteenth time on the ground below, a puff of dust dramatizing his fall. This extended gag contributes to the development of the film’s narrative to the extent that Keaton has successfully completed the task of inserting the chimney in its appropriate place, but there is clearly much more to the sequence than this.

Politics, Mortal and Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder

Abstract: Is there a "space that 'politics' makes unthinkable, the space outside the frame within which 'politics' appears and thus outside the conflicting visions that share as their presupposition that the 'body politic' must survive" ("Post-Partum" 181)? What is that space? What would it mean to embrace or assume or embody the prevailing figuration of that space in order to disturb or refuse the political realm as such? Having reflected on Lee Edelman's carefully argued response to my criticism of "The Future Is Kid Stuff," I think that the salient issues of contention between us lie in our respective responses to these questions. There are indeed spaces outside the political realm. The form they take varies according to the nature of the political order. In Eastern Europe under communist rule, for example, there emerged a signifi cant refusal of politics. The Hungarian writer George Konrad called it "anti-politics." Communist states, particularly after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, denied all avenues for citizens to organize or express themselves within the political sphere. Moreover, the mechanisms of one-party rule made every facet of life political by ex erting control over intellectual and artistic life, public opinion, even individuals' choice of occupation and housing and their freedom of movement. The repression of conflict within the political realm went hand-in-hand with the omnipresent reach of politics into the nonpolitical realm. Citizens could counteract the omnipresence of the state, Konrad argued, only by refusing politics and devoting their minds and ac tivities to whatever remaining spaces eluded the reach of the state (see Konrad's Anti-Politics). This withdrawal from politics was painful, precarious, and risky, but had unexpected political effects; the anti-political citizens contributed to the eventual

Precious Time: Pushing the Limits of Narrative in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract: NARRATIVES In the present analysis, the abstract narrative approaches the degree zero of narrative. It is a generic narrative without specified referents. Although there is a co130 Daniel Maher

Of Oaten Flutes and Magic Potions: Montemayor's Diana as Pastoral Romance

Abstract: The importance of Jorge de Montemayor's Siete Libros de la Diana for the de velopment of novelistic writing in Western Europe has variously been pointed out; evidence to its instant popularity with readers and writers alike is furnished by the large number of editions that appeared in various languages in the decades following its first publication around 1559.1 The reasons for its success were probably mani fold and explanations have been attempted. Carroll B. Johnson, for example, traces the popularity of this early modern bestseller to its unique balancing of lyrical con ventions of the traditional pastoral with narrative elements of the Greek romance. The presence of such devices as the in medias res beginning or the novella-like ret rospective narratives of some characters "saves the work from becoming an endless eclogue" (26). Ruth El Saffar is one of the few critics who note that this symmetry does not extend far beyond the surface of the seven books; she finds it "more re warding to find in the work's imperfections a reflection of the author's states of mind in a love situation the inherent dualism of which he was never able to transcend"