The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier by Hanna Meretoja (review)

Hanna Meretoja’s book is an admirably rich and thorough revisitation of a key theoretical and historical issue in twentieth-century French culture: the changing attitude towards narrativity or ‘storytelling’. The study is structured around the contrastive analyses of the epitome of the ‘antinarrative’ nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe (Paris: Minuit, 1959), and a precursor of the post-1980 ‘retour au récit’, Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Meretoja unravels the intricate context of related ontological, epistemological, historical, and ethical issues underlying each work’s perception of what narrative is (for) and what it should do. She argues that their primary ontological premises are similar: reality is void of sense in itself, endowed with meaning only in human perception and interpretation. However, while Robbe-Grillet concludes in an empiricistpositivist vein that any human addition, including narrative order, is a distortion of ‘raw reality’, Tournier considers, in line with the hermeneutical tradition, that interpretation is constitutive of human experience and there is no perception without it. Robbe-Grillet’s ‘dehumanized’ novel accordingly points at the bareness of reality and refuses to establish a logical order, while the narrative turn’s embracing of storytelling as an integral part of our sense-making activity opens the way towards affirming literature’s potential as a space for experimentation with different perceptions and modes of engagement with the world. The specificity of the narrative turn is, then, that it acknowledges the cognitive and ethical value of narratives, with Tournier also drawing attention to the double-edged role of myths as narrative models that offer guidance but must be interpreted in a dialogical process to avoid the dangers of solipsism and aestheticism. The contrast between the two attitudes is attributed to the historico-cultural context of post-war identity crisis on the one side, and on the other to the rehabilitation of the subject of experience and that subject’s ability to engage in a fruitful interpretative process in dialogue with texts and others, in order to make constructive ethical decisions. The study’s insights, which constitute the convincing overall argument are, however, tarnished by two significant blind spots. Firstly, the key term ‘narrative’ is undefined, and implicit shifts between different uses and its (here) questionable identification with ‘storytelling’ distorts the picture: the nouveau roman’s ‘rejection of narrative’ targets one kind of narrative, a specific tradition that puts forward authoritative explanations of reality (as Meretoja otherwise also makes clear), rather than narrativity in general (whose further potential it precisely proposes to explore), as the well-established but imprecise qualifier ‘antinarrative’ suggests. It is regrettable that the author did not take this opportunity to rethink the misleadingly simplifying terminology. Secondly, Meretoja’s conclusion on the positive ethical potential of storytelling as recognized in the narrative turn comes with a clear suggestion that this is the way forward. This subtly but unmistakably prescriptive tone flies in the face of the narrative turn’s entire ethos, which emphasizes the importance of maintaining the multiplicity of perspectives and the dialogue between them. With this reserve, the book remains a perfectly rewarding — and all the more thought-provoking — read, with its attention to detail and multiperspectival analyses.