Surveying Narratology

I

Narrative arises from human finitude, shapes it in the act of storytelling, and transcends it in its contribution to memory as tradition, that which can be passed on and mined for meaning. Telling stories is essentially human, like play, thought, language, laughter, and tears; and each story is a unique blend of the universal, formulaic, expected and the individual, singular, original. Stories draw on our experience and knowledge of the world and, whether artlessly told or forming the core of a literary text, they call up a context of tradition and convention, be it in allegiance or breach.

How, then, does narratology address this human invention and archive of human invention, especially as a contribution to literary studies? It is not always clear whether the study of narrative illuminates the power of a story or text or seeks to domesticate it by subduing uniqueness via classification. Structuralist narratology, which was instrumental in the ascendancy of narrative studies from the 1970s on, has a tendency to subordinate creative singularity and artistic originality to parallels, similarities, and recurring patterns in a privileging of formal parameters that has led to a proliferation of terms. The result can be an unproductive degree of terminological wrangling: is the narrator always, sometimes, or never a focalizer?¹ When talking about embedded narratives, is it best to stick with Gérard Genette's confusing "metadiegetic," to go with Mieke Bal's sensible "hypodiegetic," or adopt Schmid's three-level model of frames as primary, secondary, and tertiary?² This tendency towards hyper-classification has not necessarily been superseded but complemented by more relaxed approaches that emphasize, for instance, the playfulness of working with narrative theory.³ On the other extreme we find radical challenges to such key parameters of classical narratology as representation, the existence of clearly definable strata or levels, or the role of "voice" as "the secure foundation that assures the coherence of narrative geometry itself."⁴

Since the 1970s, the study of narrative has made great strides in three directions: first in the 'classical' structuralist development of a sometimes daunting amount of terminology with increasing sub-differentiations; then in moving beyond the confining frameworks of terminology; and simultaneously in branching out into an increasing number of disciplines as well as an array of theoretical, methodological, and ideological inflections. Enough of a development, that is, to engender a desire for stock-taking, and simultaneously to allow assessments of what the state of the art is. This essay presents a number of important publications that have recently contributed to such an overall assessment. Clearly, narratives are a major ingredient in the menu of scholarly occupations and the academic industry, and the significant number of introductions, handbooks, and reference works in the area of narratology that have appeared in recent years⁵ both document and make claims for the status of the field: they serve as evidence that the study of narrative has arrived not only in terms of scholarly credentials, but also as a presence in curricula and the dissemination of knowledge to students. Three of the volumes under review (Abbott, Fludernik, Wenzel) are explicitly geared towards students at least in intent. Abbott—see below—is probably the most accessible; the Wenzel volume is strongly didactic in intent, providing definitions and 'how-to's'; Fludernik targets students...