Acts of Narrative (review)

This collection of essays—most of them are new with a few reprinted from other contexts—is in part a Festschrift for J. Hillis Miller, who himself contributed an excerpt from a forthcoming book on speech acts in Henry James (15–30). Some of the essays are therefore commemorative, either in spirit or in subject-matter. Henry Sussman’s “J. Hillis Miller and the Task of the Critic” (1–14) reviews Miller’s many contributions to literary theory and criticism. Tom Cohen’s “Trackings” (110–29) uses Miller’s work on Proust and Faulkner to develop what the author characterizes as both an interpretation of Absalom, Absalom! and a method for interpreting other texts. Meanwhile, the final essay of the collection, Jacques Derrida’s “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying (‘abrupt breaches of syntax’)” (195–234) not only reminisces about the author’s thirty years of friendship with Miller, but also engages in a complex triangulation of ideas developed by Miller, Paul de Man, and Derrida himself. Examining a novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes aspects of de Man’s biography, the essay extends Miller’s discussion of the concept of anacoluthon (= discontinuation of a syntactic pattern established at the beginning of a sentence in favor of a different pattern) to reflect on the novel’s “infinite or abyssal resistance to any meta-narrative” (211).

But what is more, as suggested by the preface and title of the volume (and also by Derrida’s remark that “I am told that the texts collected here are supposed to take ‘narrativity’ as their leitmotiv” [199]), the volume is intended to be a sustained meditation on the nature of narrative itself—particularly though not exclusively literary narrative. (Of course, inasmuch as Miller himself has made substantial contributions to narrative theory, the commemorative function of the volume dovetails with its stated thematic focus.) To be sure, the complexity of narrative warrants a mixed-methods approach; as Nicholas Royle emphasizes in his searching critique of the concept of narrative “omniscience” (93–109), classical, structuralist narratology and its offshoots can by no means dictate what constitutes a valid paradigm for research on stories. Thus contributors to the volume draw on a variety of frameworks to develop important insights into the nature and functions of narrative. Cathy Caruth revisits some of the key ideas of trauma theory by examining the narratives of children whose friends were victims of violent crime (47–61). Rachel Bowlby explores the sometimes contrasting, sometimes parallel narrative structures of dreams and daydreams as characterized by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams and other writings (62–80). Dan Shen’s chapter on focalization in third-person versus first-person narratives (81–92) exemplifies the vitality of ongoing work in the narratological tradition. And, in one of the most brilliant and suggestive essays in the volume, Ronald Schleifer shows how the contrast between “marginal” and “total” utility advanced by the neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall depends crucially on a configurational mode of understanding that Paul Ricoeur (following Louis Mink) associated with narrative—in contrast with the theoretical mode linked with mathematical formalisms and the categoreal mode underlying philosophical systems (157–73).

But whereas the book admirably avoids the Scylla of a too-restrictive approach to narrative inquiry, in doing so it comes perilously close to the Charybdis of over-inclusivity. A couple of the essays do work toward a definition of narrative (see Schleifer’s contribution and also Alan Liu’s reworking of Greimas’s concept of actants to explore the “Technology of Literary History” [174–94]); yet the volume as a whole would have benefited from more explicit engagement with recent rhetorical, feminist, sociolinguistic, cognitivist, and other attempts to define and thereby delimit narrative. Without demarcating narrative from non-narrative—that is, without conceding that some things do not fall under the rubric of stories—the concept of narrative runs the risk of being voided of content, trivialized by virtue of its sheer omnipresence. A claim made by the editors in the preface needs to be reconsidered in this...