Authors, Resources, Audiences: Toward a Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative

Somewhere in the dark backward and abysm of time—1996—I proposed a rhetorical definition of narrative that has since made its way into many conversations in contemporary narrative theory: "somebody telling somebody else on some occasion for some purpose that something happened" (Narrative as Rhetoric 218). I have never argued that this definition was the best among the many definitions that narrative theorists have proposed, because I do not believe that there is a Platonic ideal of narrative that can be invoked as the standard by which to measure the adequacy of any definition. Instead, I believe that our experiences with storytelling of different kinds give us a rough general sense of what narrative is and that multiple definitions have more or less captured that general sense. Furthermore, any one of those definitions orients its user towards one concept of narrative rather than another, and that orientation in turn leads its user to some theoretical and interpretive projects rather than others. Thus, the rhetorical definition orients its user toward narrative communication and the prominence of tellers, audiences, and purposes, even as it has led to some detailed proposals about core elements of narrative including style, character, character narration, plot, and progression.¹ Similarly, the structuralist definition of narrative as a synthesis of story and discourse orients its user to specify the nature of narrative's core elements and to lay out the possible structural relations between and among them. As a pluralist, I have always valued—and I continue to value—the diverse kinds of knowledge produced by these different narrative theoretical projects.

In this essay, however, I want to make some stronger claims for a rhetorical conception of narrative by demonstrating that it provides greater explanatory power for some significant aspects of narrative—my examples here are character–character dialogue and probability—than approaches that conceive of narrative primarily as a structure of meanings.² I ground these claims in two complementary principles related to the rhetorical definition of narrative: (a) Narrative is ultimately not a structure but an action, a teller using resources of narrative to achieve a purpose in relation to an audience. (b) The presence and the activity of the somebody else in the narrative action is integral to its shape. In other words, the audience does not just react to the teller's communication; instead, the audience and its unfolding responses significantly influence how the teller constructs the tale. Ultimately, these principles undergird a project that departs from narrative theory's longtime goal of describing core elements of narrative and their structural relations to each other—whether that description is rooted in the perspective of structural linguistics (as in classical narratology) or cognitive science (as in the work of David Herman [2013] and others), or in a particular corpus of narratives (as in the work of unnatural narratologists such as Brian Richardson [2015] and Jan Alber), or in a synthesis of formal and political bodies of thought (as in the work of feminist narratologists such as Susan Lanser, Robyn Warhol, and the other contributors to Narrative Theory Unbound). The goal of the rhetorical project is a comprehensive understanding of how authors and audiences draw upon the resources of narrative for multilayered communicative exchanges. These layers include cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of author–audience relations. Furthermore, achieving the goal entails offering an adequate account of the resources of narrative, which is why I call the project rhetorical poetics.

Why are characters not in the narrative communication model?

One of the most influential proposals of classical narratology is the narrative communication model proposed by Seymour Chatman in his aptly named Story and Discourse (1978) (entities within the box are located in the narrative text):

Since Chatman proposed this model in 1978, narrative theorists have suggested various revisions. Some theorists have proposed fewer agents—the implied author is the one most often given the axe—and some (like me!) have proposed moving the implied author outside the narrative text, but these proposals have only solidified the model's central place in narrative theory. To be sure, some...