John Neubauer

IS WESTERN NARRATIVE THEORY UNIVERSALLY APPLICABLE?

In the preface to his Noveau discours du recit¹ Gerard Genette notes that the success of narratology, a concept introduced in 1969 by Tzvetan Todorov, irritated those who thought that this “soulless” discipline arrogantly claimed to be a “pilot science” of literary studies. He added, somewhat tongue in cheek, that if all knowledge was to be located between the rigor of mechanics and the eclectic empiricism of stamp collecting, literary studies of his day were oscillating between the philately of interpretive criticism and the mechanics of narratology – a mechanics that distinguished itself at its best by its respect for the mechanism of texts.²Genette was careful not to claim that the “scientific rigor” of narratology would eventually take over all of literary studies; he only asked respect for its respect. In the 1970s and 80s many other scholars went considerably further, believing indeed that narratology would blaze the trail towards a science of literature.

Today, as we experience a revived interest in the historical and cultural conditions of literature, and have become also sensitive to the cultural conditions that shape the making of natural science itself, a naive belief in a “narratological science” has become somewhat of a historical relic, though some of the pioneering enthusiasm for the power of narratology persists and, in an age of multi-culturalism, we may rephrase the issue by asking whether all or some of narratology’s concepts and rules are as historically and culturally invariable as those of say of physics, chemistry, or biology. My short paper represents a reflection on this issue.

I

Narratives, whether in prose or verse, have always been held in high esteem in the Western tradition, though not because of their economy and formal organization. Aristotle had already contrasted in his Poetics the compactness of tragic plots with the spatially and temporally sprawling fictions of epic poetry. After him, new forms came about that had an equally loose structure: the episodic structure of the medieval and baroque narratives as well as the picaresque novel that evolved in the following centuries often seemed to contain no development or progression. Closer to our age, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of “baggy monsters”, those wonderful but panoramic and endless novels we still love to read. Good narratives always brim with accurate observations, but they often lack precision for they tend to contain much redundant information. They are cups that “runneth over.” This inherent redundancy and disorder of narratives explains perhaps why until recently narrative theory did not develop canonic structures that would be comparable to Aristotelean and neo-Aristotelean rules for tragedy, or to the rules of rhyme, meter, and versification for lyric poetry.

But this traditional absence of rules for narratives seems more than compensated for by what one may call narrative analyses that go back as far as Plato’s distinction between mimesis and diegesis, i.e. passages in narrative texts that are spoken by the narrator or by the narrator’s characters. Is the theoretical status of Plato's statement on narratives fundamentally different from Aristotle’s rules for tragedy? The question is crucial if we are to look at narratives from a comparative perspective, not, of course, because Plato and Aristotle are the Alpha and the Omega of literary theory, but because, aswe know, they exemplify two fundamentally different ways of theorizing. Let us examine the philosophical and theoretical status oftheir statements on tragedy and narrative respectively in order to trace their paradigms to later theorists of literature.

Most if not all of Aristotle’s rules for tragedy are empirical in the sense that they are based on the theater practice he was familiar with. Unfortunately, just this empiricism proved restrictive later when new forms of theater deviated from Greek tragedy and comedy. What Aristotle mostly, but not always, meant as a descriptive reflection on what he saw on stage, could not be applied in a prescriptive manner to later theater. The phenomenon is familiar: empirical observations, whether in literature, science, or in the social realm, become questionable when their applications and conclusions are stretched to cover areas that lie beyond the original terrain upon which they were based. Just remember that Newton’s laws of mechanics were considered to be universal and eternal for more than 200 years – until measurements within atoms and speeds close to that of light became possible. In those realms they were no longer valid and had to be replaced by Einstein’s laws.

Now Aristotle’s rules for tragedy never had the theoretical status of Newton’s law for mechanics, because the phenomena he observed on the stage of his day were a matter of artistic and social convention, they could not be traced to nature. Yet the history of his statement that tragedies should preferably not cover more than a day (or half-a-day -- depending on the translation and the interpretation) resembles that of Newton’s laws in the sense that at one point the tentative rule ceased to cover the experience of later generations. Shakespeare violated the rules, and so did many others.

Of course, Plato's distinction between mimesis and diegesis was based on empirical observations, just as those of Aristotle’s were. Yet here, as in all other matters, Plato was in search of nomological laws that would overcome the contingency and relativity of all things empirical. We may characterize his statement as analytical rather than descriptive, and the difference translates into a different theoretical status. We cannot wiggle out of Plato’s dictum that speakers in narratives are either narrators or characters by producing new narrative discourses with additional types of speakers. All that writers and theorists could achieve in the 2500 years after him was to create modes of discourse like the "free indirect” one, in which it is unclear whether the speaker is a narrator or a character. We have not been able to add a third speaker to the two named by Plato, and I don't think that we shall ever be able to do so. Plato’s law of narrative discourse seems to resist historical change, and appears transculturally valid.

II

Its time to leave Plato and Aristotle behind, holding fast, however, to the distinction I tried to establish. I want to suggest that theories of the narrative tended to follow the Platonic paradigm, and they did this more forcefully and self-consciously than theories of lyric poetry and drama. While theorists of the latter two did, of course, make attempts to establish nomological laws -- think, for instance, of Roman Jakobson’s approach to poetry or recent semiotic approaches to theater – but generalizations about these genres tended to be more often than not based on conventions and hence highly contingent.

It would be an interesting though huge undertaking to study the theoretical status of statements concerning the various genres comparatively. All I can do here is to pursue my remark that theories of the narrative tended to seek Platonic approaches. Since modern narrative theory is relatively young, barely older than 200 years, this means that it tended to emulate, often in a clumsy way, science. Theories of narratives, especially of the novel, were from the end of the eighteenth century onward indebted to theories of science and they aspired to their status. Let me just remind you of the morphological theory in Balzac’s avant-propos to the Comedie humaine and of Zola's Le Roman experimental (1880), but also of Henry James’s theory of point of view, which clearly corresponds to new theories of the observer that emerged at that time in the sciences.

I proceed to the spectacular growth of literary theory in the twentieth century, and start with Vladimir Propp’s Morphologie du conte (1928)³, which is, just like Balzac's theory, indebted to Goethe's idea of a biological morphology. The filiation is evident in Propp’s title as well as in several mottos he uses.⁴ Let me remark, parenthetically that Goethe himself was, however, very hesitant to apply biological morphology to literary texts. Propp (as well as several others I shall name) had no such scruples. As his preface states, “it should be possible to study the forms of the folk tales with just as much precision as those of any organic formation” (1). To be sure, Propp went only a short distance towards that goal: in fact he narrowed the empirical base of his own pilot study by including only folk tales that involve the fantastic (merveilleux), and even of those he included only one hundred.

Propp studied the function of specific characters and events within the narrative structure. He did not ask what the intrinsic meanings are. By function he meant the actions of a character inasmuch as it contributes to the development of the tale’s plot.⁵The character functions are quite limited in number and constitute the tale’s “constant” and “stable” elements. Furthermore, and this was Propp’s most controversial assertion, their sequence in the tales is always the same. Though it may happen that a certain function is absent from a particular tale, this will not modify the sequence of the others. Hence Propp wanted to crystallize a prototype from his tales that would resemble Goethe’s archetypal plant: the “laws” of literary tales are comparable to those that govern organic forms (37).

The delayed impact of Propp’s book in the West through its 1958 English translation, and its contribution to the emergence of structuralist literary studies is sufficiently well-known and need not be repeated here. Suffice to remind you of Greimas’s actantial model of narratives. For my question, whether such alleged laws are universally applicable two remarks are important. The first is rather obvious: by narrowing the empirical basis of his study to 100 folktales of the miraculous, Propp had jeopardized his claim to universality. Indeed, as critics have pointed out, the structure may not even cover adequately his own pool of data, and it could be generalized only by simplifying it so much that it becomes meaningless. This may be the case with Greimas as well. My second, somewhat more complicated remark goes to the very heart of the question whether the importation of a morphological theory of biology into literary studies assures universal applicability. The problems become evident if we turn to the morphological narrative theory of Gunter Muller, which may be less known beyond German studies, though it was one of the major inspirations for Eberhard Lammert’s Bauformen des Erzahlens, which appeared in 1955. Muller formulated his Morphologische Poetik in the late 1930s and the war years.⁶ His theory is even more indebted to Goethe that that of Propp. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Muller was an intelligent and sensitive critic who madeimportant contributions to the study of time in narrative fiction, but his reliance on a biological model had tainted his otherwise rather formalistic approach to literature. Perhaps in order to defend himself against charges of formalism under Hitler, Muller wanted to link literary morphology to studies of race and volk.⁷ Reading art as nature, always a dangerous and questionable equation, became here a tool to undermine the theory’s universal claim. In this view, literature is race specific.

III

How much of narratology’s universal claims can then be rescued in an age of cultural relativism? My remarks have been skeptical, though I do not want to be wholly negative. The answer will have to be differentiated. To begin with, it may be suggested that Gunter Muller’s position contains a kernel of truth – if we just exchange its racism and holism for a differentiated cultural and historical relativism: the search for a morphological narratology cannot and should not yield the conclusion that all periods and cultures have produced similar or identical narrative structures. Whereas the physical equation “f=ma” is the same the world over and beyond, different cultures and periods produce different narrative formulas. It does make sense to look for local and contingent narrative structures, and, I would add in opposition to extreme formalists, it is also important to ask how these particular and local narrative patterns hang together with the social and ideological forces that shape the surrounding culture. Based on such pluralist conceptions, literary scholars in several non-Western cultures, especially in China, have begun to search for narrative theories specific to their culture.

What remains then of Western narratology’s universalistic ambitions? Quite a bit I believe. To begin with a lesser matter, at least since around 1900 a good many non-Western writers have adopted in their narratives Western narrative modes and theories. Lu Xun, according to many the best Chinese writer of the twentieth century, is a case in point. As a Chinese scholar has shown in a recent dissertation under my guidance, Lu Xun has become familiar with Western late-nineteenth-century narrative techniques by translating. He abandoned the traditional Chinese narrative mode, and his first great story, A Madman’s Diary (1918), shows him already as a master of shifting narrative point of views.

Other cases could also be cited, but they do not show, of course, the universal applicability of Western narratology, only individual instances of adaptation, the traditional fare of comparative literary studies. Furthermore, such studies of such cases are politically and ideologically very sensitive. For nations and cultures, among them certainly the Chinese, do not like to admit that some of their highest achievements are “tainted” by importation, and claims to that effect by Western scholars smack today of neo-colonialism.

I turn therefore to my last and most important point. The cases I have dealt with until now do not constitute genuine and broad-based intercultural connection in narratives theory. The narrative modes and patterns developed in Western countries may be quite different from and irrelevant to modes of narration elsewhere. I am quite convinced (pace Propp) that we shall never arrive at a narrative variant of a Goethean Urpflanze. Neither do individual contacts and adaptations say anything about the universal applicability of Western thinking concerning narratives. Both approaches are too restrictive to encompass the bulk of the empirical material, the endless number and varieties of stories in different cultures and periods.

But the basic tools and narrative modalities may well provide a kind of vocabulary and instrumentarium that is ‘transnational’ and – cultural. Plato’s distinction between mimesis and diegesis, the formalist notions of fabula and sujet, the contrast between external and internal narrators, the categories of factual and fictional narration are useful tools to discuss narratives from all cultures and epoch, if only to show that different cultures make different uses of them, and that in some cultures heavy assaults were or are made to undermine them. Formulated this way, we are no longer talking, of course, about the universal applicability of Western narratology. We should speak, more properly, about the intercultural modalities of narration – modalities that may use different vocabularies but actually speak of the same or of similar phenomena. This, I take, is the purpose of Earl Miner’s pioneering study on Comparative Poetics.⁸ In conclusion I wish to discuss briefly his approach to clarify my own position – which doesn’t always agree with his.

Miner, a leading scholar of Japanese and East-Asian literature, gives a great deal of attention in his chapter on “Narrative” to Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, and doing so he discusses the cultural and historical factors that traditionally shaped Japanese narratives. In previous chapters he distinguished already the mimetic thrust in Western literature and art from what he calls the “affective-expressive” tradition in Japanese and much of East-Asian literature. His approach to passages from The Tales of Genji uses, accordingly, the terminology that has been developed in Japan, partly already in The Tales of Genji itself, to talk about narrative, the art of monogatari. He points out also some of the key attitudes that distinguish that tradition from contemporary Western views, for instance in the matter of separating sharply the narrator from the author. He remarks that “many centuries were required in China and Europe before women could be thought of as narrators, whereas in Japan that was not the case” (184) – for Murasaki Shikibu wrote her novel in the early eleventh century.

But somewhat further into the chapter (181-83) Miner introduces (in a somewhat schematic and not quite up-to-date manner) the presently used Western distinctions between different narrators, narrative points of views, and what Miner calls “points of attention” but most narratologists would call “focalized objects.” It is within this framework that he returns to a discussion of a passage in The Tales of Genji (198-99) in order to show the great subtlety in Murasaki’s art of narration. Miner then translates into current Western terminology the five varieties of narrative that traditional Japanese criticism found in Murasaki’s work (201). He concludes that, in contrast to the mimetic preoccupation in Western literature, “different concepts of, and functions for, narration” developed in Japan, where an affective-expressive poetics dominated (201). More concretely, Miner claims that “the points of attention in affective-expressive narration are apt to have the centrality that points of view usually have in mimetic narration” (202). I take this to mean that traditional Japanese narratives give more attention to the focalized objects, events, and minds than to the minds that focalize them. What is perceived ranks over the perceiver?

Experts of both Japanese and Western narratives (which I am not) will have to decide whether Miner’s generalization holds. I am concerned here only with his method and terminology. For in fact what Miner calls “intercultural comparative study” talks not only about a cultural/narrative difference by means of a Western terminology and concepts like “points of view” and “points of attention;” it goes on to narrow the gap by showing “that what is essential to one poetics will have a counterpart in another” (202). Accordingly, Miner’s subsequent fine discussion of a passage from Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (203) shows that focalized matters (as opposed to focalizers) may also be foregrounded in narratives in the English language. From a theoretical and methodological point of view this means that it is just as possible and useful to employ the concepts developed to describe The Tales of Genji to describe What Maisie Knew as it is to proceed the other way round and treat the classical Japanese novel in terms of concepts we found appropriate to analyze James’s novel. The transcultural methodology may lead not only to fresh insights into the works themselves but may refine, and energize the respective narratological terminologies.

In this sense then the question posed in my title, “Is Western Narrative Theory Universally Applicable?” will have to be answered in the negative and replaced by a different kind conclusion. To paraphrase the final sentence of Miner’s book we need a narratological terminology that “avoids taking the local for the universal, the momentary for the constant and above all, the familiar for the inevitable” (238). Western approaches to narratology will only become universally applicable if they are ready to encounter in an open and flexible manner the narrative experience of other cultures. We must be ready to shuttle and translate back and forth between the traditionally isolated systems.

***

Previous version of this text was published in Narrative in the Light of Comparative Studies / Le recit dans la perspective des etudes comparatives. Ed. Zofia Mitosek and Joanna Mueller. Warsaw: Warsaw University, 2005, pp. 122-30.

¹ Gerard Genette. Noveau discours du recit.Paris: Seuil, 1983. ² “Le succes de cette discipline desole certains (dont il m’arrive d’etre a mes heures) qu’irrite sa technicite sans ‘ame’, parfois sans esprit, et sa pretention au role de ‘science-pilote’ dans les etudes litteraires. … Si (je dis si) toute forme de conaissance se situe bien quelque part entre ces deux poles que symbolisent la rigoroureuse mecanique et ce melange d’empirisme et de speculation que figure la philatelie, on peut sans doute observer que les etudes litteraires oscillent aujourd’hui entre le philatelisme de la critique interpretative et le mecanisme de la narratologie; un mecanisme qui n’a rien, je pense, d’une philosophie generale, mais qui se distingue, a son mieux, par son respect des mecanismes du texte. Je ne pretends pas pour autant que le ‘progres’ de la poetique consistera en une absorption progressive de la totalite du champ par son versant mecanicien: tout juste que le respect en question merite lui-meme quelque respect, ou quelque attention, ne serait-elle que periodique” (7-8).
³ My references will be to the French translation: Vladimir Ja. Propp. Morphologie du conte. Trans. Claude Ligny. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
⁴Pp. I, 6, 32, 146, and 156.
⁵“Les fonctions des personnages representent donc les parties fondamentales du conte, et ce sont elles que nous devons tout d’abord degager” (35). “Par fonction nous entendrons l’action d’un personnage, definie du point de vue de sa portee significative dans le deroulement du recit” (36).
⁶Muller’s morphological essays are collected in Morphologische Poetik. Gesammelte Aufsatze. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974.
⁷ “Auf diese Wese wurde die morphologische Literaturwissenschaft zur Erkenntnis von Volks-, Rass-, Stammes-, Zeitaltertypen beitragen” (Muller, Morphologische Poetik p. 208; cf. also 152, and 195).
⁸ Earl Miner. Comparative Poetics; An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton UP, 1990. All quotations from this book will be documented in the text.