Editor's Column

A striking feature of this issue is the range and diversity of narratives discussed in its six essays. Greg Forter, writing about trauma theory, focuses on Sigmund Freud's case history of the Wolf Man and on William Faulkner's Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! Kai Mikkonen, examining the implications of the metaphor that "narrative is travel," analyzes Graham Greene's travel narrative, Journey without Maps. David Herman, investigating the reciprocal relations between narrative and what he calls the sciences of the mind, analyzes an oral narrative about an encounter with the supernatural that he titles "UFO or the Devil." Lorri Nandrea, exploring the phenomenon of non-goal oriented curiosity, takes up Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Linda Elegant's true tale called "The Chicken" (a contribution to National Public Radio's Story Project), and Tom McCarthy's film, The Station Agent. Bronwen Thomas, studying the distinctive qualities of dialogue in hypertext narrative, uses Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story and Jane Yellowlees Douglas's I Have Said Nothing as her main examples. Finally, Mary Slowik, meditating on the ethics of visual art, offers close readings of the implied narratives in the paintings of Leon Golub and Sue Coe.

The obvious things to say about this range and diversity of objects of study are (1) that it nicely reflects the range and diversity of theoretical approaches the contributors bring to them and (2) that it points toward the even broader range and diversity of objects and of approaches within the field. Consider the obvious now said. I would like to move on to something less obvious, if only because it is informed by two of these original essays themselves, Nandrea's and Slowik's. Is it possible to freeze the moment at which we perceive this diversity and range of things we call narrative and concentrate on simply taking in the phenomenon as wonderful, strange, extraordinary or otherwise a focus for our non-goal directed curiosity? After all, we have novels, short stories, films, oral tales, case histories, paintings, hypertexts, fictions, nonfictions, and more: God's plenty.

Before hurrying on, then, as theory and theorists have a penchant for doing, to explain the phenomenon, to say what it means about definitions of narrative, to expostulate about narrative across the media, to reflect on how it intersects with the concept of narrativity, to do any of the thousand other intellectual operations we're all so fond of, can we just hold our gaze on this plenty long enough to say, "Look at all that. Pretty amazing, isn't it?" Can we then take a little more time to look and look again so that we genuinely register the diversity, the range, and the commonality?

Look now, theorize later, and you may never think of the phrase "just looking" in the same way again.