Bookmarks

Bookmarks If it is a mark of success in a specialized dictionary that it makes for good browsing, Gerald Prince's Dictionary of Narratology (University of Nebraska Press, $17.95) must be considered a triumph. While we can be skeptical about scholarship's need for yet another -ology (this one originates with Todorov in 1969), it must be acknowledged that the systematic theory of narrative—which after all goes back to Aristode—has in modern times spawned a large and chaotic technical vocabulary. The usefulness of Prince's book is, hence, considerable . If you need a precise account of the distinction between locutionary, Ulocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, ifyou want to know what zero focalization is, or autodiegetic narrative, or if you were wondering about the difference between Aussage andfiktwnale Erzählen, discours and histoire, and besprochene Welt and erzählte Welt, then the Dictionary of Narratology is just the thing. Prince includes a lot of cross-referencing, since so many of the definitions use terms found elsewhere in the dictionary. Thus the definition of "interior monologue" begins with "the nonmediated presentation of a character's thoughts and impressions or perception," but further refers to other entries— free direct thought, stream ofconsciousness, free direct discourse, autonomous monologue, dramatic monologue, and types of discourse. Things lead on to each otherin turns and circles. There are no entries forindividual narratologists, but Prince does name and discuss figures associated with certain terms (such as metaphor/metonymy) and he at least briefly indicates where a word is used in significandy different senses by different writers (such as "intertextuality" as meant variously by Kristeva, Genette, and Barthes). Entries include bibliographic references given in full at the end of the book. From Stanford University Press we've received a new collection of essays by Clifford Geertz. Works and Lives: TL· Anthropologist as Author ($30.00 clodi, $19.95 paper) contains four lectures given at Stanford, along with a fifth article reprinted from Raritan. These essays are without exception superb; one is reminded everywhere—how to put it delicately—that Geertz is more deeply educated than most others in his academic profession. The allusions range widely, and when names such as Barthes or Foucault appear here, it isn't bluster: their ideas are carefully, intelligibly, and above aU criticaUy worked into Geertz's 221 222Philosophy and Literature argument. The discussion centers on Lévi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Benedict, and Malinowski. The theme is, what kind of writing is it that the ethnographer does? Apropos Foucault, Geertz argues that if authors are on the way out in other disciplines, they are stiU firmly ensconced in ethnography. In order to take seriously anthropological texts, we must view their authors as "having actually penetrated (or, if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of life, of having, one way or another, truly 'been there.' " The power anthropology achieves comes from this sense of authoritative witness, but at the same time anthropology demands the ethnographer stand back, provide disinterested assessment. The problem for anthropological writing is "how to sound like a pUgrim and a cartographer at the same time." "PUgrim" might describe the author of the autobiographical Tristes Tropiques, even if Claude Lévi-Strauss fancies himself a mental cartographer most everywhere else. In his second chapter, "The World in a Text," Geertz gives a brilliant lesson in how to read Tristes Tropiques, a "key work" despite the fact that it "seems like a mere sport, even an embarrassment" in Lévi-Strauss's oeuvre. Geertz sees the book in the first place as a travelogue: "I went here, I went there; I saw this strange thing and that; I was amazed, bored, excited, disappointed ; I got bous on my behind, and once, in the Amazon . . .—all with the implicit undermessage: Don't you wish you had been there with me or could do the same?" Itis also an ethnographywhich, when itwaxes theoretical, contains the clearest litde exposition ofhis Structuralism Lévi-Strauss ever wrote. Geertz points out that Tristes Tropiques is both a phüosophical text purporting to provide edinographic validation to Rousseau and areformist tract—an outburstof"deep social disgust" and "aesthetic repugnance"—making clear what we (Europeans) have done...