Narrative (review)

In Narrative, the latest installment in Routledge’s “New Critical Idiom” series, Paul Cobley offers an introductory guide to the history and theory of narrative. He begins with the premise that “even the most ‘simple’ of stories is embedded in a network of relations that are sometimes astounding in their complexity” (2). Though “astounding” proves somewhat of an overstatement, Cobley delivers a detailed account that traces the genesis of narrative from its original, oral and written forms, and Hellenic and Hebraic foundations, through its role in the rise of the novel and subsequent multi-century metamorphosis in contexts as diverse as realism, modernism, postmodernism, imperialism, cinema, and techno-innovation. Cobley presents a wide-ranging discussion of the basic fundamentals and intriguing variations of narrative discourse in a 267-page study (including a valuable 16-page glossary) of how narrative structures inform human life.

Cobley grounds his exploration of narrative in a generally streamlined glossary definition that seizes narrative as a movement from a start point to an end point, with digressions, which involves the showing or telling of story events. Narrative is a re-presentation of events and, chiefly, re-presents space and time (236–7). A lucid explanation (with digressions) of the core characteristics and relevant terminology follows, bringing coherence to the notion of re-presentation, and differentiation to the concepts of sequence, signing, time, space, story, and plot. Clear and precise language is Cobley’s forte, and he explicitly details his terms in a manner that neither assumes prior knowledge nor demands analytical leaps from the reader. This generally thorough review spans the social, anthropological, historical, and psychological manifestations of narrative, centering particularly on how humans make meaning and understand identity.

While the chapters proceed chronologically with the historical development of narrative, the intra-chapter organization is occasionally muddled by Cobley’s attention to tangential information, and might confuse a less than patient reader. Much of Cobley’s credibility rests on his deference to the wisdom of both ancient and modern theoretical scholars for analysis of literature and discourse, though at moments his book reads a bit like a clearinghouse of other people’s ideas rather than a synthesis of their findings. Cobley underpins his early discussion, for example, by referencing Aristotle’s view that the cornerstone of narrative is plot, by echoing Paul Ricoeur’s claim that “narrative is the human relation to time” (17), and by confirming Roland Barthes’s assertion that narrative does occupy a “space.”

A significant strength of the monograph is the manner in which Cobley uses canon staples—works by writers such as Homer, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and John Fowles—to study identity and to evidence various narrative forms. With in-depth focus on a few bedrock examples, even a reader unfamiliar with the primary works could follow the analysis. Yet while this early pattern succeeds, the text’s primary weakness emerges when, in the later section on postmodernism, Cobley begins to drift away from a focus on identity and instead glosses over post-WWII literature with vague mention of meta-fiction and the “phenomena” of the “postmodern mosaic” (189). The reader is then rushed into a lengthier discussion of cinema, which although interesting in terms of narrative, seems rather ancillary and disrupts any cohesive synthesis with the preceding chapters. The section on technology is equally disappointing and awkward, revealing what appears to be Cobley’s lack of familiarity with the application and scope of the information highway. Certainly a rigorous examination of “how, why and where [narrative comes] from” (21) inevitably demands an educated guess as to where narrative stands now, and as to what the future may hold—both areas that Cobley insufficiently if barely addresses.

By beginning and ending Narrative with chapters titled, respectively, “In the beginning, the end” and “In the end, the beginning,” Cobley masks the absence of a particularly insightful conclusion. After the final-hour introduction of a new theorist and theory, the hodge-podge of final paragraphs comes together to remind the reader that narrative is a dynamic, open...