Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (review)

In Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel, Yael Halevi-Wise examines ways in which intradiegetic storytelling scenes reflect the historical development of the novel. Looking at novels that range historically from Cervantes's Don Quixote to Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, she focuses on scenes in which characters discuss social and aesthetic expectations for narrating. Although Halevi-Wise does not explicitly articulate her thesis in this way, her study, in effect, suggests that these storytelling scenes follow a unified historical trajectory because they simultaneously reflect and challenge the level of realism (sometimes even truth) that readers from different literary periods expect in fiction. The study includes a number of insightful textual analyses; but its value would have been enhanced if these independent readings had eventually connected into a sufficiently unified larger historical case about the novel's development.

Before she turns to her close-readings of individual storytelling scenes, Halevi-Wise distinguishes between interactive fictions and the more common "non-interactive" embedded stories. Embedded narratives occur when a character tells a story that is clearly sealed off from both the larger framing narrative and the traits of the storyteller and audience (e.g. The Arabian Nights). Interactive fictions, however, have two characteristics that distinguish them from embedded narratives: (1) they interact with and develop the framing narrative; and (2) they involve interaction between the narrator and narratee. As she explains, "the face-to-face setting [of interactive fictions] illustrates . . . the expedient construction of a story in response to active audience participation" (13).

Halevi-Wise begins with Don Quixote and looks at three scenes in which Sancho and Don Quixote debate the expectations of storytelling. She contends that these interactive fictions force Sancho and Don Quixote to reassess the master/servant dynamic even as these scenes allow Cervantes to parody and violate "virtually all the genres and literary conventions existing in his day" (27). More specifically, Cervantes ridicules the notion that storytellers must assert the validity of their tale even when that tale is clearly fabricated or imagined; for him, fiction "does not have to pose as truth or history, yet must maintain coherence and verisimilitude within the boundaries of its fictional constructed world" (49).

The study then turns to two eighteenth-century novels and one from the early nineteenth-century: Tristam Shandy, Tom Jones, and Northanger Abbey. The author argues that "Sterne's digressions and displacements of a promised story denied or delayed" (52) force the reader to measure temporal movement "by the reader's chronological reading time rather than by the emotions and experimental relevance that fiction is expected to generate" (62). Fielding's storytelling scenes (such as the one involving the Man of the Hill) are fertile ground "to address human nature, morality, and manners" (64); but because the scenes' intradiegetic audiences do not actively participate in the construction of the stories, the novel prompts the reader to make moral and intellectual judgments. Austen's Northanger Abbey serves as a transition between romance and realism; here storytelling (specifically the tale Henry tells Catherine on her way to the abbey) is used to defuse excessive romantic impulses in order to help "develop a circumscribed mimetic agenda" (77).

Turning to novels of the later nineteenth century, Halevi-Wise admits that distinct storytelling scenes are rare in realist fiction because they are "consciously perceived as capable of exposing genre and fictionality's inner workings, thus compromising a narrative's claim to an unmediated reporting of the world" (81). Dickens's Pickwick Papers is a notable exception because it reveals the struggle Dickens faced within the realist trend of the time: he uses storytelling scenes to "probe the fine balance between a desire to portray honest and brave facts and a propensity for exuberant fiction" (88).

Halevi-Wise focuses her analysis of modernist fiction on Conrad's Lord Jim. She first distinguishes the storytelling in Lord Jim from many of the other scenes of storytelling she has addressed: Marlowe's tale is not fictional...