Mieke Bal

MIEKE BAL 375 :ienunciations of such contemporary I cultural' critics of the mass media as I. Robert Sinai. A quotation from Sinai's essay of 1979 entitled 'What Ails Us and Why: On the Roots of Disaster and Decay: may be taken as typical of this flatulent ,"ophetic sul>-genre: The high culture based on privilege and hierarchical order and sustained by the great works of the past and the truths and beauties achieved in the tradition destroyed itself in two World Wars. We are now living in a cruel /late stage in Western affairs' marked by feelings of disarray, by a regress into violence and moral obtuseness, by a central failure of values in the arts and in the graces of personal and social behaviour. Confused and bombarded, modern man is suffused with fears of a new 'Dark Age' in which civilisation itself as we have known it may disappear or be confined to ... small islands of archaic conservation. (P 20) Brantlinger's stated aim is 'to provide a critique of the mythology of negative :lassicism as it has developed over the last two centuries in relation to "mass :ulture:" and he is highly successful in exposing the total absence of original hought in Sinai and numerous other kindred polemicists ofboth Left and Right. :;iven this success, it is disturbing to find Brantlinger himself, in the closing ;entences of his book, apparently embracing at least some of the dubious Issumptions which are inescapably built into the diction and imagery of 'negative :lassicism' itself. The sombre moral of both books under review is surely that, to Idapt the closing words of Chamberlin and Gilman, we can never afford not to ;uspect and question 'the validity of all structures of human perception' (p 294) md the actual language in which these structures are vested. Mieke Bal PETER STOICHEFF Mieke Bal. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Translated by Christine van Boheemen University of Toronto Press 1985. 164· $17.50, $8.95 paper ,arratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative is Christine van Boheemen's ranslation of the second, revised edition of Mieke Bal's De theorievan vertellen en erhalen (Muiderberg: Coutinho 1980). Bal's study has a practical goal - to improve the quality' of the reader's interpretations of texts, and of the reader's capacity to teach.' 'Quality' is a somewhat suspicious word here. The study onveniently assimilates various concepts of narrative theory, regularly avoids nposingtenninology, and reduces theoreticalproblems totheirsimplestelements. nso doing, Narratology:Introductioncreates a system ofagreeable concepts for the UNIVERSITi' OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, WINTER ]986/7 376 PETER STOICHEFF interpreter uninitiated in structuralism. It is the quality of the reader's structuralist interpretation of texts that is likely to be improved here. Bars theory concentrates on three important layers of 'a narrative.' The first is 'fabula: 'a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by ... agents that perform actions' (p 5). Again, 'logically' is a tricky word. Much of the delightfulness of many forms of fabula, particularly though not exclusively post-modem ones, is in the apparent illogicality of the relation. As Sal admits at the close of the discussion of fabula, the 'assumption is that fixed relations between classes of phenomena form the basis of the narrative system of fabula.' Although Bal allows that such an assumption is reductive, it is not really: as with many theories of literature, it is not the adequacy of the proposal but the breadth of texts to which it is applicable that is disappointing. Bal's 'ideal' text is the kind devoid of structural and verbal instabilities. The second layer is that of 'story: the presentational 'ordering' of the 'imagined' fabula (p 49), the apparatus that retrieves a fabula from embarrassing banality, or lends it modesty and decorum. One component of this ordering is language, the other is 'the way the material, the fabula, has been handled' (p 49). Bal does not discuss the first component, a deliberate omission designed to erase complexity. It is this omission that retains structuralist boundaries for the book, though, and somewhat limits its scope as an arbiter of interpretive 'quality'Language is a way of 'handling...