Narrative Causalities (review)

In this lucid, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book Emma Kafalenos identifies and describes ten functions, ten fundamental interpretive sites, stages, or positions (e.g. destabilizing event, initial act to alleviate destabilization, testing of alleviator) in narrative sequences of events that go from the disruption of a prevailing state of affairs to the establishment of another such state, from the onset of a problem to its (successful or non-successful) resolution. Kafalenos describes the order in which these functions occur and the ways they are articulated as well as the ways distinct sequences can be combined with one another; she shows how the manner in which events are presented (or processed) affects interpretation; and she brings out the functional polyvalence of any event (or set of events), the fact that any event has a different function depending on the configuration of events in which it is apprehended and on its chronological position within that configuration.

More specifically, drawing on such classics as Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale and Tzvetan Todorov's Grammaire du Décaméron as well as more recent narratological work (David Herman, Brian Richardson, Marie-Laure Ryan, Werner Wolf); using a wide range of examples (Hans Christian Andersen's "The Princess and the Pea" and the Brothers Grimm's "The Pea Test"; Edgar Allan Poe's "The Assignation" and Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"; Hamlet, Daisy Miller, and Life on the Mississippi; television newscasts, poems by Yeats, Byron, and Christina Rossetti, movies like Rashomon, hybrid novels like W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, paintings by Magritte); and proceeding from plain cases and simple stories to more complex instances and narrative borderlands, Kafalenos illuminates not only the meaning and importance of the various functions but also the emotional and epistemological effects of such features as non-chronological narration or narrative ellipsis on interpretation, the exploitation by modernist fiction of incomplete sequences to foreground doubt, the play of functional polyvalence, and the similarities between the processing of real-world events and fictional events.

Of particular interest to the student of French literature are the sections focusing on such texts as Phèdre, Sarrasine, La Maison de rendez-vous, and La Belle Captive. With the help of Racine's play, Kafalenos underlines the thematic and hermeneutic comforts a character's decisions can bring; she uses Balzac's novella to demonstrate the effects of context on readers' and characters' differing views of the same events; and she concentrates on Robbe-Grillet to explore what fiction teaches about reading images and interpreting isolated moments and discrete events.

Narrative Causalities offers a consistently insightful presentation of ways in which sequences of events are configured and interpreted. More generally, it provides a fine instrument for discussing varying understandings of verbal and non-verbal, fictional and real-life sequences of events. As such, it represents not only a significant contribution to narratology and the interpretation of narrative but also an important account of narrative as interpretation. It is a splendid accomplishment.