New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective (review)

BOOK NOTES WILLIE VAN PEER AND SEYMOUR CHATMAN, EDS. New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY P, 2001. xiii + 398 pp. In his epilogue to this interdisciplinary collection ofessays from a 1995 conference organized by the Netherlands Graduate School for Literary Studies, Mick Short allows himselfan unfortunate (to this reader) vision ofthe field by identifying his approach as the decent, methodologically sound alternative to the trendy, fashiondriven theory that holds sway and has all the clout in "current literary circles." Short is careful to point out the extremes to which empirical work can go, at times so painstakingly cautious about what it says that it ends with inanities. His antagonistic posturing, however, seems unnecessarily belligerent. It also stands in sharp contrast to the exuberant tone ofthe introduction to a related collection ofessays on narrative , David Herman's Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999). Indeed, Herman's collection is as much "its own best argument for the importance of collaborative research on narrative," and takes some very useful steps toward a psychonarratology that would combine the cognitive psychologist's knowledge about readers with the literary scholar's knowledge about texts. Some essays in the present collection do in fact make it impossible for anyone dealing with issues of narrative to deny the need to submit literary theory to the "rigors ofempirical testing," as Van Peer and Chatman put it in the introduction (8). Whereas narrative theory has long been aware ofthe need to understand what the reader does with the text for an understanding ofnarratives and how they function, few are the studies ofliterary narratives that ground their postulates in experimental research. Yet as the essays in this volume prove, such an interdisciplinary dimension can yield fascinating results. For ifsome findings seem merely to confirm what one always suspected (but doesn't it shore up one's argument?)—for instance, that "the impersonal, omniscient, third-person narrator is an invisible agent to the reader" (Graesser et al. 266), and if much remains inconclusive—for example, because the research was done on too small a scale—there is also research that leads to results that are counter-intuitive, or at least require us to adjust our ideas ofwhat narrative does and can do. Thus manipulations in point ofview show the effects of narrative perspective on empathy to be more limited than one would assume (Andringa et al. 154-6). And experiments with contradictory information attest to readers ' limited capacities in updating their situation models (Oostendorp 176-7). Repeating again and again that what actual readers get out ofnarratives is for a large part what they themselves invest, discourse processing research once and for all relegates the ideal, super, and other implied readers ofreception theory to the realm ofnarratological fiction. It is the juxtaposition ofdifferent (disciplinary) perspectives that best drives home the point. Monika Fludemik's claim that focalization is an interpretation rather than a textual feature throws into sharp relief the otherwise useful summaries of and interventions in the Genette-Prince-Chatman debate about focalization. The assertion that perspective is "not inherent in a narrative text, but rather construed by the individual reader" (Nünning 2 14) troubles de Jong's identification of instances of figurai narration in classical narratives from Homer's Odyssey to the Argonautica of Rhodius. It is, moreover, difficult to reconcile with the concept ofperspective as "the location from which events in a story are presented to the reader," as the editors define it in their introduction to the volume (5; see also the glossary 357-58). Vol. 26 (2002): 174 THE COMPAKATIST The book's strength, then, is also its weakness. The many (relatively short) contributions that complement, supplement, correct, contradict, or offer alternatives to one another offer a view ofa vital yet incoherent field that, moreover, seems incapable ofremaining within its self-set bounds. The study ofperspective, point of view, and focalization appears here to be a very inclusive one indeed. Unfortunately , it is also so all-encompassing because some ofits key distinctions—central narratological distinctions such as those between perceiving and reporting, or between story and discourse—ultimately cannot be maintained. Liedeke PlateUtrecht University JODY ENDERS. 7"Ae Medieval Theater ofCruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and...