Les Troubles du récit: Pour une nouvelle approche des processus narratifs by Jean-Marie Schaeffer (review)

Jean-Marie Schaeffer is a key figure of modern French philosophy, mainly working in the field of visual and verbal aesthetics, with major publications on the aesthetic experience and fundamental categories of art such as genre and fiction. His work, however, remains little known in the English-speaking world. As far as I know, only three of his books are available in English today: Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art From Kant to Heidegger, Why Fiction? and Beyond Speculation: Art and Aesthetics without Myths. The reasons for this (relative) neglect are not easy to understand, given the exceptional quality of Schaeffer’s production. Perhaps he does not match the bankable idea of the “public intellectual” (Schaeffer is more “just” an intellectual than a thinker-cum-political activist). Perhaps his highly erudite work is too nuanced (he has strong opinions on a lot of questions, but he always voices his ideas in nonpolemical ways—never a good tactic to get street credibility). Or perhaps he simply prefers to address the bigger picture rather than to get involved in mediatized polemics. Nevertheless, one can only hope that more English translations will follow. His most recent book, Les troubles du récit (in English: story troubles with “troubles” in plural, perhaps to avoid too direct an allusion to Judith Butler?) might be a good candidate, given its size (close to 200 pages), its scope (with a focus on the study of narrative, the book tackles a wide range of important issues that concern the broader field of art and humanities), its clear and didactic way of writing (like all great thinkers, Schaeffer knows the importance of clarity of style and argumentation) and last but not least its emphasis of the ongoing dialogue between continental and Anglo thinking and philosophy and research (the literature of this book is mainly U.S.-based, challengingly combined with classics such as Hume).

The “new approach” of narrative that Schaeffer defends in Story Troubles (and let’s pretend for a moment that this could be the title of the English version) is based on two major theses. First, there is the idea that the study of narrative can only benefit from the input and insights of cognitive studies. This is not the same as pleading for a “cognitive turn,” for such thinking in paradigm shifts (one per season, if the rhythm continues) is quite contrary to Schaeffer’s sharp yet fundamentally open way of thinking. Cognitive studies are able to solve certain problems that other ways of studying narrative continue to struggle with (questions such as what to think of the divide between fact and fiction or the differences and similarities between verbal and visual stories), but other methods and approaches (for instance philology, stylistics, rhetoric and history) remain no less valuable and important for the study of narrative. Moreover, Schaeffer is far from blind to the limitations of cognitive research, such as, for instance, its difficulty in producing the same hard evidence in the field of “story production” as in that of “story reception.”

Second, there is the thesis that it is time to enlarge the definition of what a story is, in order to include a wider range of narrative structures and mechanisms that the traditional hegemony of literary writing (and art in general) tends to keep away from the narrative corpus under scrutiny. Rather than exclusively study complete and full-fledged stories, be they “well made”—that is, conventional (with a neat beginning, middle and end)—or more experimental, Schaeffer insists on the necessity of also including “protonarrative” mechanisms and productions, that is, the temporal and narrative organizations of all kinds of thoughts (memories, dreams, hallucinations, projections, plans, etc.) that do not normally materialize as complete stories but that can be considered an anthropological universal. We are making stories all the time, and these stories make us what we are, as a species...