The Locus of the Logos: Marginalia on Narrativity in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse

[W]hat can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.

––nietzsche

Narratives, Antinarratives, and Narrative Antinarratives

What is the function of narrativity in the production of theoretical post-modern texts and discourses in the humanities? Can these texts and discourses be viewed as verbal artifacts? The formulation of these questions is influenced by those theorists who are interested in narratives as formed solely on the plane of the relationship sign-sign and who lock in parenthesis the ontological link between signs and referents (an approach that, potentially at least, could always swerve to theoretical idealism and social conformism).¹ What I mean by discourse here is the term’s narratological content: “the ‘how’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘what’” (Prince 21). The “how” and the “what” are tools of theoretical abstraction that should not be absolutely separated, because the “how” is the “what” and vice versa. My main point is that despite the attempts of many recent theoretical texts to scrutinize narrativity critically and in the case of the most self-conscious and ingenious among them to emancipate themselves from it by trying to create a new, nonnarrative type of theoretical and critical discourse, many of these texts, in one way or another, construct narratives themselves. More often than not the good old narratives are still indispensable epistemological tools in contemporary postmodern humanitarian discourse. Narratives still seem to be ineluctable mind frames, and it is from within them that these very frames are analyzed, attacked, and deconstructed. If postmodern theory and fiction (with its literariness) tend to intermingle and fuse, as the postmodern saying goes, then the road lies open to vivisect postmodern criticism and theory by using narratological techniques. It seems that after the first two or three decades of euphoria when adolescent postmodernism challenged the past under the banner of the new struggle for self-identification, now the time has come for mature postmodernism to challenge its own challenge. (Am I not telling a new old tale now?)

To warm up and bring to the fore my primary concern in this article by an illustration, let us consider David Perkins’s interesting book Is Literary History Possible? which analyzes literary history as a narrative artifact. Three intermingled peculiarities should be pointed out as exemplary in the book: first, the partial discrepancy between what Perkins preaches as a theorist and how he practices his own theory; second, the use of a narrative in a metatext that deconstructs narratives of the same kind in texts of literary history and partially in itself; and third, the tendency, especially palpable toward the end of the book, to suppress the logic of the chosen methods in the name of aesthetic and rhetorical suggestions and to round off an impressive scholarly narrative.

In spite of Perkins’s claim that his “procedure is empirical” (ix), it, as a matter of fact, rests on three theoretical trends of thought: phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. In Perkins’s analysis, the last two consecutively sacrifice themselves to each other in the name of a plausible but, after all, artificial metadisciplinary narrative. In order to deconstruct the discourse of literary history Perkins too often alludes to or discovers hermeneutic circles (73, 85–86, 91, 113, 118, 138, 146–47, 150–51). Perhaps if Gadamer’s historical and dialectical approach that surmounts hermeneutic circularity had been applied more often than twice in the book (111–15, the changing of classifications in time; 82–86, Perkins’s ideas of the impossibility of an ideal literary history), the deconstruction operations would have been much more difficult. On the other hand, one may ask what would have happened if Perkins, who self-ironically deconstructs his own narrative of English romanticism (106–9), had done the same with his book as a whole. Practically, his metaliterary historical research is a teleological Cinderella narrative (following the trajectory of decline and rise) with three successive stages: (1) the present “crisis in literary historiography” (60, also 123), (2) “the type of literary history envisioned by [Iurii] Tynyanov [that] will be created gradually by many...