NARRATIVE.

Although the study of narrative goes back as far as Aristotle's Poetics, narrative theory emerged as a distinct field of inquiry only in the second half of the twentieth century. At that point, work on the theory of the novel intersected with structuralism's project of writing the grammar of stories and storytelling. This intersection in turn opened out to other streams of traffic in narrative studies, including the analysis of oral narrative by sociolinguists; reflections on historical narrative by historiographers; and the varied investigations of film scholars, among others. In the early twenty-first century many other disciplines—medicine, law, business, and psychoanalysis, prominent among them—both draw upon and contribute to narrative theory (see sidebar). In this respect, contemporary interdisciplinary thought has undergone a "narrative turn."

From Novel to Narrative

The most influential figures in the early theorizing of the novel were novelists themselves, particularly Henry James (1843–1916) and E. M. Forster (1879–1970). In "The Art of Fiction" (1888) and in the Prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels (1909–1910), James describes and defends his own novelistic practice. He argues that the artistry of the novel depends on its representation of "felt life," and, in the Prefaces, he describes, often with rich, extended metaphors, how he came to view the "treatment" (the technique) of his novels as even more important than their "subject" (their characters and situations). More specifically, James explains why he came to prefer the technique of narrating from the consciousness of his central character(s): such treatment highlights the impression of felt life even as it allows him to offer fresh ways of exploring his subjects. James's distinction between treatment and subject is a distinction between the how and the what of the novel that reappears in some form in every major theoretical approach to narrative. James's specific preferences soon became codified by his followers into a set of rules for good novelistic practice: use scenes rather than narrative summaries because they are more impersonal and objective; narrate from the perspective of a central consciousness rather than from the perspective of an external narrator because that treatment involves less rhetoric and more artistry. In short: show, don't tell.

If James is the theorist of treatment (the how), Forster is the theorist of character (one element of the what). In Aspects of the Novel (1927), he introduces a distinction between "round" and "flat" characters that is still frequently cited in the early 2000s: Round characters are capable of surprising in a convincing way, while flat characters can be summed up in a single sentence. Forster also distinguishes between story and plot (see sidebar), viewing the first as a kind of necessary evil ("yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story"), and the second with its inclusion of causality as what makes the recounting of events worthwhile. But he regards character as the most important element of the novel. In fact, he sees plot and character as often in conflict—one requires closure, the other does not—and he laments those novels in which he thinks character is sacrificed for plot.

Contemporaneous with Forster's theorizing, the Russian Formalists, a group including Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, and Yuri Tynanov, develop ideas about the novel that provide an especially interesting comparison with James's. They introduce a more formal and ultimately more influential distinction between the what and the how, identifying the fabula as the abstract chronological sequence of events independent of their expression in the sjuzhet, the actual presentation of those events in the novel's text. This distinction explains one's intuition that there can be different versions of the same narrative: different sjuzhets do not constitute different narratives unless they also are based on different fabulas. The Formalists also go James one better by arguing that the purpose of literature in general and the novel in particular is not the representation of felt life but defamiliarization or estrangement: the purpose of literature is to renew or revise our perceptions—in Shklovsky's famous phrase, to make the stone stony. This view leads the Formalists to an account of literary change built on the formal necessity of innovation, especially in the how of the novel: novelistic forms that once provided estrangement gradually lose that effect as they themselves became familiar, and so the inventive novelist discovers new devices of estrangement.

The next significant literary critical approach to form, that of the Anglo-American New Critics, emphasizes the distinctiveness of literary language itself, and so focuses on the image patterns of novels (the how) as containing the key to their thematic concerns (the what) and, thus, their formal artistry. The rivals of the New Critics, the Chicago School neo-Aristotelians, though generally unsuccessful in their effort to unseat New Criticism as the orthodoxy of the critical mainstream, turn out to be more influential than the New Critics in the evolution of narrative theory. R. S. Crane, working without knowledge of the Russian Formalists, develops a concept of plot that distinguishes between its "material action" (the what, roughly equivalently to the fabula ) and the "plot proper" (the synthesis of what and how in the service of a given purpose and set of effects—roughly equivalent to sjuzhet ). Crane's student Wayne C. Booth reexamines, from the neo-Aristotelian perspective, the Jamesian rules for novelistic success and repudiates them with a method that transforms Crane's neo-Aristotelian poetics into a rhetoric. In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Booth argues that techniques of showing are as rhetorical as techniques of telling; the choice is not between impersonal art and inartistic rhetoric but rather between different ways of trying to influence the audience—in short, different kinds of rhetorical appeals. More generally, Booth's insight that the novel is rhetorical from top to bottom paves one road for the entry of ethical and ideological approaches to narrative.

Another Russian scholar of the 1920s, Vladimir Propp, provides a model for a different approach to narrative in The Morphology of the Folktale (1929). Propp identifies thirty-one functions that occur in invariable order (for example, hero perceives a lack; hero meets a magical agent) in every Russian folktale. But more important than his specific account of the folktale itself is Propp's insight that underlying the surface variety of the folktale is a single deep structure (an Ur-fabula, if the reader will). The structuralist narratologists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Tzvetan Todorov, Claude Bremond, and, in one phase of his work, Roland Barthes, look back to Propp and to Ferdinand de Saussure in their effort to uncover the underlying structures of narrative. Saussure's distinction between langue, the abstract system of language that underlies any utterance and makes it intelligible, and parole, actual utterances, provides an analogy for the structuralist project of describing the grammar of narrative that makes any given narrative intelligible.

Strikingly the results of these efforts are not a comprehensive grammar but a number of conceptual tools that remain both useful and influential to this day. Chief among these tools are the story / discourse distinction, a new version of the what/how distinction, and Gérard Genette's analyses of discourse. Story encompasses the characters, events, and settings (or states, events, and existents) of narrative, and discourse encompasses all the devices for rendering the story in one way rather than another. Genette groups these devices into three main kinds: (1) those of temporality, which include order, duration (the relation between story time and its expression in discourse time, for instance, twenty years may be summarized in a single sentence, just as one minute may be treated in several pages), and frequency (the relation between the number of times an event happens in story and the number of times it is reported in discourse); (2) voice, the answer to the question "who speaks?"; and (3) vision, the answer to the question "who perceives?" Even more significantly, as the link between Propp and the structuralist project suggests, the emergence of narratology makes possible the shift from novel to narrative—that is, storytelling of all kinds—as the central object of study, even if literary fiction narrative retains a special status within the project. Genette, for example, develops his conceptual toolbox from his analysis of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927; Remembrance of things past). Consequently, in the 1980s the field of narrative theory emerged with a recognizable identity.

Contemporary Narrative Theory: Contextual
and Interdisciplinary Models

Even as the field was emerging, it was being affected by the larger "theory revolution" of the last quarter of the twentieth century in two main ways: (1) the field's focus on narrative form expands and becomes complicated through attention to the relations between form and ideology; and (2) as already noted, the field becomes increasingly interdisciplinary. The discovery and dissemination in the West of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, another Russian scholar of the 1920s and 1930s, is especially significant in the complication of formal approaches. Bakhtin, in one sense, is as concerned with the form of the novel as Shklovsky or any other Russian Formalist; indeed one of his goals was to earn for the novel as a genre the kind of respect and status accorded to poetry in 1920s Russia. But Bakhtin conceives of the novel's form as inseparable from its ideological component, because he conceives of language as always already ideological. He views any national language (English, French, Russian) not as a unified system but rather as a collection of sociolects or minilanguages, such as the language of the working class, the language of the law, or the language of the academy, each of which carries the values of its group. Bakhtin argues that the novel necessarily draws upon multiple minilanguages and puts them into dialogic relationships with each other; this dialogue among languages is also a dialogue among ideologies.

Feminist narratologists such as Robyn Warhol and Susan Lanser participate in the spirit of Bakhtin's work by linking technique to ideology, though they are most concerned with ideologies of gender and their interests extend beyond novelistic language to other features of narrative discourse, especially the devices and techniques of woman writers and female narrators. Although other ideologically based theoretical approaches such as Marxist theory and postcolonial theory have not yet spawned their own branches of narratology, these theories also contribute to a general understanding of the inseparable connection between form and ideology: Each shows how an author's choice of particular narrative techniques and structures occurs within both a formal and a political context and therefore has both formal and ideological consequences.

Another significant complication of the formal model has been the rise of narrative ethics, itself a subfield of the burgeoning area of ethical criticism. Martha Nussbaum argues that narrative, due to its concrete particularity and its capacity to draw on the cognitive power of the emotions, is, in the hands of a novelist such as Henry James, a site for ethical exploration that rivals the explorations of philosophical ethics. Booth extends the rhetorical approach of The Rhetoric of Fiction to the ethical realm by focusing on the quality of one's life in the hours spent reading narrative. More specifically, Booth proposes the metaphor of "books as friends" and suggests the reader can judge the quality of such friendships by attending to the trajectory of desires they invite the reader to follow. Adam Zachary Newton and others develop approaches to narrative ethics through attention to the relation between the specifics of story and discourse, on one hand, and ethical categories derived from philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, on the other. James Phelan seeks to extend the work of both Booth and Newton by exploring the ethics of technique as much as the ethical dimension of characters' situations.

Contemporary narrative theory is interdisciplinary in two related ways. As the example of narrative ethics shows, it either brings the insights of other disciplines to the study of narrative or it brings the conclusions of narrative theory to the concerns of other disciplines. In each case, the interdisciplinarity is a two-way street: Not only does philosophical ethics illuminate narrative's representations of ethical situations, but those representations have implications for philosophy's investigations into ethics. Similarly not only does, say, medicine benefit from drawing on narrative theory, but medicine's use of it has consequences for the field's ongoing efforts. Among other things, this aspect of inter-disciplinarity corrects literary study's attraction to the experimental or innovative case and helps keep the focus on what seems to be the fundamental elements of narrative's power (see sidebar).

One of the most promising current interdisciplinary developments is the cognitive approach to narrative taken by such scholars as David Herman. In a sense, this movement is an extension of classical narratology because it also has the goal of giving a comprehensive view of narrative, its elements, and their combinations. But rather than fashioning that comprehensive view by analogy with Saussure's theory of language, the cognitivists start with the idea that narrative is a way of organizing experience, one that involves, in both its production and consumption, the development of a mental model of that organization. This starting point means that the cognitivists draw upon both the findings of narrative theory broadly conceived—including, for example, classical narratology, rhetorical theory, and sociolinguistics—and the findings of cognitive science about how the human mind processes information, forms patterns from diverse data, and so on. Whether the cognitive approach succeeds in establishing a new dominant paradigm for understanding narrative or becomes, like classical narratology, a movement that is more significant for its local successes than the achievement of its ultimate goal remains to be seen. But the cognitive project is a telling example of the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary narrative studies and strong evidence, along with the undeniable ubiquity and amazing variety of narrative itself, that the future of narrative theory is very bright.

See also Formalism ; Literary Criticism ; New Criticism .

E. M. Forster's King and Queen and Narrative across the Disciplines

"The king died and then the queen" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. Thus spake E. M. Forster, who also points out that the difference between the two is causality. Theorists have debated the validity of the distinction since Forster proposed it in the 1927, arguing, for example, that the very temporality of "and then" entails causality (or at least invites the reader to supply it) so that the only difference between the two versions is the explicit naming of the cause in the second. The debate also includes objections to defining plot solely in terms of causality, since many narrative artists build plots on other principles. Nevertheless the debate itself shows that Forster identified four elements of narrative—character (or agent), event, temporality, and causality—that are essential to the contemporary interest in "narrative across the disciplines." Because narrative spells out the specific relations among agents, events, time, and causality, it is capable of explaining phenomena that escape more abstract analyses such as those based on science-oriented ideas of general laws. In twenty-first-century culture, with its widespread abandonment of a belief in eternal verities, this capability is of great importance for many disciplines.

Many legal cases, for example, involve disputes about the relation among the agents involved, the temporal order of events, and the causes of those events; judges and juries often render their verdicts according to which side constructs the most convincing narrative about that relation. In medicine, the narrative of an onset of an illness with its particular relation of what the patient did when and for what reason can provide clues to both to the nature of the illness and the appropriate treatment. Furthermore many patients find the opportunity of relating their "illness narrative" to a sympathetic medical professional to be salutary in itself. The talking cure of psychoanalysis is a narrative cure: an analysand comes to recognize how the relation among agents, including herself, events of her past, and their causality are still affecting her and, thus, how she can break the grip of that narrative and write another one for her life. More generally, narrative's interest in character, event, temporality, and causality provides the basis for claims that people's identities are constituted by the narratives they tell about their lives. The queen died, in other words, because the event of the king's death made her own passing the inevitable next event in her narrative of her life.

bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel." In his The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." Translated by Lionel Duisit. New Literary History 6 (1975): 237–272.

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

——. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane Lewin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

James, Henry. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction. Edited by William Veeder, and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Lanser, Susan. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Nussbaum, Martha. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed., rev. Translated by Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Originally published in 1929.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger and translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959.

Shklovsky, Victor. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.

Warhol, Robyn. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

James Phelan

nar·ra·tive / ˈnarətiv/ • n. a spoken or written account of connected events; a story: the hero of his modest narrative. ∎  the narrated part or parts of a literary work, as distinct from dialogue. ∎  the practice or art of narration: traditions of oral narrative. • adj. in the form of or concerned with narration: a narrative poem | narrative technique. DERIVATIVES: nar·ra·tive·ly adv.