Some Notes on the Narrative Communication Model and Modest Proposals for a Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative

There are few people working in the blossoming fields of narrative studies who have done such seminal work as Jim Phelan, especially with regard to developing a rhetorical theory and poetics of narrative, and even fewer who are so modest about what they have achieved. Being the self-confessed "pluralist" that he is, it would never occur to him to argue that his rhetorical definition of narrative "was the best among the many definitions that narrative theorists have proposed" ("Authors" 1). Nonetheless, Phelan's contributions to the scholarly conversations about narrative have been particularly influential. Many of the concepts that he and Peter Rabinowitz have introduced have become helpful household words for coming to terms with narratives. His target essay provides further evidence of the fact that Jim has been one of the most prolific and generous interlocutors in the lively conversations among narrative theorists, and a jolly good fellow to boot, which nobody can deny.

Although Phelan would be equally unlikely to claim that the narrative communication model proposed by the late Seymour Chatman in 1978 was the best model under the sun, his target essay seems to assume that this model has become almost canonical. While conceding that various revisions and alternatives have been proposed, he goes so far as to argue that Chatman's model has not been displaced by the various alternatives that he mentions and that it was even "a good example of what Thomas Kuhn refers to as 'normal science'" (3); that is, "an accepted way of doing work within the existing paradigm." As a cursory glance at the new narratologies that have been developed during the last two decades would serve to show, however, there is neither one paradigm, as the definite article suggests, nor "an accepted way of doing work within the existing paradigm." What we are rather faced with today is an array of competing approaches and models, and ways of doing things with narratives.

Before we focus on a brief a critique of some aspects of the narrative communication model that provides the theoretical framework of the rhetorical approach to narrative, we should like to emphasize that a brief response cannot do justice to the richness of Phelan's rhetorical poetics of narrative and that it can merely discuss a fraction of the many fruitful suggestions that Phelan makes in his wide-ranging target essay. We should also like to emphasize that we are not only in complete agreement with many of the conceptual proposals that Jim makes in his essay, but also convinced that they will enrich narrative theory—just as they have already enriched our repertoire of concepts for coming to terms with the textual and read-erly dynamics of narrative fiction. These fruitful conceptual suggestions include, for example, the notions of narrative progression, textual and readerly dynamics, "the Rule of Dominant Focus", "the probability system of fictional mimesis" (22), and the invaluable "five Rules and two Meta-Rules of Thumb […] about Readerly Engagement with Breaks from the Dominant System of Probability" (25), to single out only a few.

Our response offers a partial critique of the rhetorical poetics of narrative outlined in the target essay, both in the sense that our critique is anything but comprehensive and that we have great sympathy for the rhetorical project and the myriad ways in which it enriches narrative theory. For our present purpose, we shall concentrate on three salient aspects of the target essay that we want to discuss, while also trying to sketch out possible ways of resolving what we consider to be slightly problematic issues: (a) the claim that characters are not in the narrative communication model; (b) the all-too-broad notion of "resources," employed as an umbrella term for a wide range of heterogeneous narrative techniques; and (c) the concomitant lack of the notions of levels of communication and of narrative embedding.

The first thing that may come as a surprise for many narratologists working outside of the United States is the question raised in the headline of...