A Prince for All Seasons, With Notes Toward the Delineation of a New Yorker Narratee

Gerald Prince does not know this, but he is often in my company. When I was daunted by preparing for an MLA panel on the short story, I was rescued by Prince’s “The Long and the Short of It,” which in just five pages lays out key issues for considering short fiction in narratological terms. When I taught Salman Rushdie in a narrative theory course, Prince’s pioneering “On a Postcolonial Narratology” became my guide. And when I was working out my concept of “negative plotting,” his notion of the “disnarrated” became a crucial point of contrast. Prince dropped by more recently when I first read “Zusya on the Roof,” a short story by Nicole Krauss that led to the metonymic misprision in my title (for as Prince would rightly remind me, the New Yorker, being no narrative, cannot in itself have a narratee). Before I address that misprision, though, I want to explain why Prince is my narratological man of all seasons—no misprision—and to highlight the approach to context through text that seems to me a hallmark of his method as it has developed in the wake of the “postclassical” turn.

For more than four decades, across ten books, over 130 essays, and countless reviews and talks, Gerald Prince has been one of narratology’s most generative intellectual presences. One can hardly think of the narratee or the disnarrated, or engage core understandings of narrativity or narratology, without recourse to Prince. But as my allusions to the short story and the postcolonial already remind us, Prince has lent his voice to an extraordinary range of interventions. That the voice is witty, kind, and unassuming, on the one hand, and assured, informed, and precise, on the other, also tells us something about the implied—and, I dare say, actual—Gerald Prince. These qualities converge too in his heftiest labor of narratological love: the patient creation and revision of a Dictionary of Narratology without which the field would have remained disastrously fuzzy and dauntingly formidable. And if you read French, don’t miss Prince’s similarly painstaking and gloriously whimsical yet richly informative Guide du roman de langue française, which introduces 471 French novels published between 1900 and 1950, each entry crowned by a catalogue of “thematic, technical, stylistic and culinary specialties”—this last on the delightfully ludic principle that, to stretch a point only slightly, what novels eat is what they are. The generosity of these endeavors is echoed in Prince’s consistent collegiality, his eagerness to engage narrative theorists from fledgling students to seasoned stars in the interests of sharpening his thinking and stretching the field. We see this responsiveness in his decision to give up the ostensibly “value free” degree-zero narratee when Mary Louise Pratt called it into question in the 1980s (Pratt 213; Prince, “The Narratee Revisited”); in his spirited defense in the mid-90s of feminist narratology as narratology (“On Narratology”); in his gracious recognition that the gender imbalance in his own corpus, which Robyn Warhol had pointed out in her Gendered Interventions (7), might indeed have made his narratological models less comprehensive and less credible (“Narratology, Narrative Criticism, and Gender”).

But what seems to me the most compelling aspect of Prince’s method as it has evolved since the 1990s is his brilliant way of addressing context through the very building blocks of narrative in ways that sustain his commitment to precision in the encounter with form. We see that method, for example, in Prince’s advocacy for attention to gender on narratological grounds. Against those who rejected gender as a narratological category because it was not exclusive to narrative, Prince argued that if we limited narratology only to its necessary constituents, we could study only narration and event, since the other core elements of narrative, including character, description, and even focalization, are not restricted to narrative. He likewise agreed with feminist theorists that narratology should be “more sensitive to the role of context … in the production (or processing) of narrative” (“On Narratology” 78) and later defined his...