A Reply to Mari Hatavara and Matti Hyvärinen

WE ARE GRATEFUL for Mari Hatavara and Matti Hyvärinen’s response to our article in Narrative 26.3 and will try to answer their questions. The aim of our article about a sameness versus a difference approach in narratology was to suggest that there is a conflict regarding the validity of narratology as a theory of narrative fiction, and that the radicalness of this disagreement is not always visible or understood in the discussion. This leads to a situation in which the critique of narratology that we are interested in is dismissed too quickly or has its ideas regarded as variants within the very theory it contests. The reason why we chose “the polarizing rhetorical strategy” that Hatavara and Hyvärinen find both too simplifying and polemic, was, in other words, to shed light on the incompatibility of two narratological approaches to narrative fiction.

To avoid misunderstandings we will briefly repeat what we see as the salient dividing point between the two approaches. Adherents of sameness base their theoretical practices on the assumption that narrative can be given a general definition, for example “that someone is telling someone else that something happened,” and that this, or similar descriptions, also are valid for narrative fiction. Accordingly, narrative fiction and non-fiction are regarded as variants of the same kind of communicational practice and hence as abiding to the same rule system. Advocates of the difference approach do not accept this reasoning and argue instead that narrative fiction is a particular language game that adheres to a specific set of rules. It has for example been common among narratologists to contend that, in narrative fiction, a fictional narrator tells a fictional narratee that something has happened in a fictional world. Difference theorists describe this as a model of “communication” (Patron) or “information” (Skalin) that is not valid for fiction. They suggest instead that novels and short stories are meaningful and value-laden constructions built up from motifs and devices. Moreover, readers intuitively recognize this and adjust their attention to the correct language game, which means to “follow” the text and appreciate the meaningful whole that is being offered. This reasoning is in line with Käte Hamburger’s when she says “that the act of narration is a function, through which the narrated persons, things, events, etc., are created: the narrative function, which the narrative poet manipulates as, for example, the painter wields his colors and brushes” (136). That is to say, the narrator (i.e., the author) of fiction does not “narrate about persons and things, but rather he narrates these persons and things” (Hamburger 136). It follows from this that established narratological distinctions and core concepts like, for example, story and narrator must be rejected or redefined in order to denote functions in the language game of fiction. Accordingly, we do not agree with Hatavara and Hyvärinen’s suggestion that most narratological tools and approaches “have been developed in and for the study of fictional narratives” (375). While narratological studies have often been carried out on novels, we hold that many of the critical tools are taken from a theoretical model that describes narrative in general and are then applied in the domain of fiction, or else have been formed in order to make it possible to talk about fiction in terms of another language game. It is thus a theoretical construct to claim, for example, that there is a fictional narrator who informs a fictional narratee about events in a fictional world. By contrast, an author is using linguistic signs and different devices to provide certain effects.

Hatavara and Hyvärinen argue that we lack hard evidence and cannot name scholars who represent the sameness approach. However, our aim was to describe a tendency among narratologists. Many classical as well as postclassical narratologists assume the sameness approach when discussing fiction. Only sameness narratologists could, we hold, suggest interpretations like this one concerning Poe’s short story “Metzengerstein”: “The reader sees the young baron Von Metzengerstein’s reaction through the eyes of an agent who is not in the...