Narrative Communication or Communicating Literature?

The invitation to partake in this special issue of Style called for a "considered opinion and scholarly analysis" of James Phelan's target essay. This is quite the daunting task for several reasons. Not only is the essay in itself rich, challenging core concepts of narrative theory, suggesting innovative solutions to methodological problems while offering eye-opening close readings; it also brings with it long traditions of critical thinking while pointing, as its subtitle explicates, towards the future, hinting at the contours of a position still being developed. I happily accept the invitation because it gives me an opportunity to return what I have learned from Phelan, an important favor in the sciences of humanities (as well as anywhere else): the attempt to try to understand. Anyone who has had any scholarly or personal contact with Phelan is sure to have experienced his tenacious yet gentle insistence on understanding literary texts, theoretical texts, theoretical concepts, positions, purposes, and people.

During the last twenty years, Phelan has, based on a core set of assumptions and definitions, developed a comprehensive and influential critical apparatus, rethinking existing concepts as well as coining new insights on topics central in particular to the study of narrative fiction: the recursive relationships between reader, text, and audiences; progression; tension/instability; unreliability; the mimetic/thematic/synthetic; fictionality; and ethics of telling/the ethics of the told, to name just some of the ideas with most impact. The target essay's thoughts on character narration and on improbabilities add to this impressive body of work, even as the general ambition of the essay exceeds this adding of further concepts. The essay takes aim at a concept at the heart of narrative theory, namely, what is commonly referred to as the narrative communication model. My comments retain "authors resources audiences" in the following center on Phelan's rethinking of this model through the suggestion of what he calls the author–resources–audience (ARA) chart. More specifically, I zoom in on the question: what type of cultural artifacts does the chart apply to?

The chart is presented as covering "Constants and Variables in Narrative Communication" (Phelan, "Authors" 7), with the last two words offering a form of delimitation of its zone of interest or relevance. It is about a subset of communication, labeled narrative communication, and thus it appears to cast a fairly wide net in the seas of genres and modes; the types of texts included in "narrative communication" would range from fragmentary, spontaneous acts of verbal interaction to everyday storytelling to journalism to well-formed historical accounts to highly complex pieces of fictionalized discourse. However, the overall project framing the ARA chart is referred to as a "rhetorical poetics" or a "rhetorical poetics of narrative", which seems to signal a more restricted corpus. A poetics is typically concerned with understanding poetry or the poetic, interested not in the dynamics of declaring what happened but in the dynamics of declaring "what may happen," to borrow Aristotle's formulation (qtd. in Phelan, "Authors" 14). So is the ARA chart an attempt to explain any form of communication that narrates, or is it an attempt to explain how (the somewhat smaller dataset of) narrative fiction works? This question, I believe, is key to understanding what Phelan calls "the explanatory power" of the chart and furthermore, key to understanding a more general aspect of what Phelan's position as such is contributing to our thinking about narrative and to our thinking about literary art. I will approach an answer by comparing the definition and principles, upon which the chart rests, to ideas and concerns, voiced by Barbara Herrnstein Smith's essay "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," originally published in Critical Inquiry's now canonical 1980 issue on narrative.

Acknowledging that origins have a tendency to fade into the obscurity of the "dark backward and abysm of time" (1.2.49), as Shakespeare's Prospero puts it in The Tempest, Phelan begins his essay by referring to Shakespeare's play as well as to Phelan's own Narrative as Rhetoric, with the latter serving as the place of origin for what has become known...