Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition (review)

Jeffrey J. Williams. Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 220 pp. $59.95.

This study of six novels (Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim) offers a theory of narrative self-reflexivity as embodied by such devices as frames, authorial intrusions, and interpolated tales. Drawing on Hillis Miller's idea of the linguistic moment, Williams calls such devices narrative moments "in which the act of narrative itself is depicted and thus thematized or called into question" (1). Although frames and digressions are often thought to be extradiegetic or ornamental, they are in fact highly literary because they call attention to the act of narration and create "an excess that is not tolerated in normative forms of colloquial communication" (5). This sounds like Jakobson's poetic function, but narrative moments blur the distinctions between Jakobson's six functions because they undo the distinction between story and discourse. Far from being confined to so-called metafiction, narrative moments may occur in any text: hence the canonical selection of novels for analysis.

For Williams, narrative is ideological not because it thematically engages issues of race, class, or gender, but because it "works to reproduce the model of narrative production" (8). Novels promote "the ideology of literature, of literary life, consumption, and production, through their self-reflexive valorization of storytelling and more generally of the profession of literature" (9). The primary effect of literature is the advertisement and circulation of this narrative desire. Thus, The Turn of the Screw, to instance the Jamesian text under consideration, dramatizes "a formalized contest of competing narratives" that questions not the governess's reliability but narrative "enthrallment," the hyperbolic desire for narrative (131, 130).

As befits its topic, Williams's book is notably self-reflexive. The theme of advertisement recurs in his explanation of why he replaced his original title--Narratives of Narrative--with "one that would make sense for" potential buyers (x); his interest in the pedagogical effects of narrative is doubled by his account of the role of theory in his own professionalization; and the theme of consumption appears in the metaphorics of eating that structures his discovery of theory in graduate school. There's a lot of eating in Williams's preface, which thanks friends and colleagues for discussing theory over burgers at the local dive and breakfasts at IHOP. These scenes of eating call attention to themselves as self-reflexive narrative moments in which theory becomes an object for pleasurable consumption. The analogy between eating and reading, which figures also in Williams's analysis of the trope of narrative as feast in Joseph Andrews, raises questions about what it means to consume theory. The metaphor of theory as junk food is difficult to reconcile with alienated images elsewhere, as when Williams explains that he does not mean "to produce a set of new readings of old texts":

There is a familiar way in which theory is taken as a template to produce critical readings that lays a theory pattern over the wholecloth of specific literary works, thus yielding a kind of pre-programmed chapter or article on a particular work--the marxist reading of Wuthering Heights, the feminist reading of The Turn of the Screw, the reader-response reading of Joseph Andrews. Without due respect, you put the theoretical quarter in the reading machine, choose a theory, and get the reading out. (xi-xii)

To invert this, one might read texts instead as registers through which to read theory and the set of assumptions and expectations that prescribe and govern critical practice, and by extension to examine the critical institution.

In the vending machine metaphor, the theory machine dispenses a prefabricated reading that is consumed, not produced, by the reader. Although the passive voice ("theory is taken as") distances Williams from this trope, its status is unclear. Does the...