Review

Reviewed Work(s): On Narrative by W. J. T. Mitchell

Review by: Owen Miller
Source: Style , Spring 1983, Vol. 17, No. 2, Narratology (Spring 1983), pp. 294-297
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/42945472

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 294 Book Reviews

Note

'jaap Lintvelt, Essai de typologie narrative: Le "point de vue" (Paris: Corti, 1981), p. 69,
calls Prince's "variable" monoscopique and his "multiple" polyscopique, both subdivisions of
"variable" perspective. Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), p. 38, accepts Genette's terminology.

W. J. T. Mitchell, ed. On Narrative. Chicago and London: The University of

Chicago Press, 1981. x + 270 pp. $7.95.

The collection of essays that comprise this volume is an expanded

version of a special issue of Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980), which grew out
of the symposium "Narrative: The Illusion of Sequence" held at the Univer-
sity of Chicago in October 1979. A collection of papers culled from a
symposium and published in book form tends to be uneven in quality,
fragmentary in nature, and rarely read in its entirety as a unified production.
Through W. J. T. Mitchell's experienced editing, this volume clearly escapes
all such limitations. Enlivened by a healthy critical exchange which is a regular
part of Critical Inquiry's format, these essays make fascinating reading on
some of the crucial issues of narrative theory and deserve to be approached
less as an anthology of individual pieces than as an intertextual exchange,
preserving something of the cross-fertilization of the symposium out of which
many of them grew.
As Mitchell indicates in his Foreword, the primary aim of the publica-
tion is to reflect the "debates and collaboration of literary critics, philosophers,
anthropologists, psychologists, theologians, art historians and novelists" with
the intention of carrying "the thinking about the problem of narrative well
beyond the province of the 'aesthetic' ... to explore the role of narrative in
social and psychological formations, particularly structures of value and
cognition." First and foremost, then, the collection of essays is an ambitious
attempt to consolidate (one could even say advance) the field of narratology as
a genuine interdisciplinary endeavor, one which, concurrent with similar
attempts in the field of metaphor, is central to any serious reflection on the
nature of culture and perhaps, as Hayden White has suggested, "possibly on
humanity itself." Viewed from this perspective, the seminal studies of the
volume are those of White himself (on historiography), Roy Schafer (on
psychoanalysis), Victor Turner (on anthropology), and especially Paul Ricoeur
(on philosophy).
In the opening article of the volume, Hayden White leads us through a
careful analysis of two sorts of historical representation, the Annals of Saint
Gall and a chronicle, the History of France of Riberus of Reims, challenging us
to see them less as early and primitive sorts of historical writing and more as
specific culturally-grounded modes of conceiving, ordering, and validating

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 Book Reviews 295

events. Thus the ver

and evaluative proced
If White stresses t
distinction) Roy Sch
lysts of different pe
(or different "narrat
doing analysis and
twofold, revealing
open-ended narrati
and analysand. Schaf
psychoanalysis as "an
codes to generate psy
concepts - drives, fr
us with a new set of
and illustrating the
What emerges clear
way in which narr
historical or psycho
- in fact producing i
essay takes up much
between etnie and e
of narrative as a f
particular social gro
latter being non-cu
cerned with formal
forms of narrativi
private affairs of
account of social ac
undertakes an analy
and like Schafer, he
reintegration, recog
set of operative pr
functioning.
Like the studies which precede it, Ricoeur's essay is interdisciplinary in
nature, bringing together philosophical issues concerned with temporality
(specifically those raised by Heidegger in Being and Time) and problems of
narrative (especially those of plot). Here I believe we encounter the seminal
essay of the collection, for Ricoeur is enlightening not only in his dialectical
mode of relating temporality to narrativity but also in the manner in which he
challenges us to re-examine in a new light certain basic assumptions, with
respect to narrative, of the anti-narrativist epistemologists and structuralist
literary critics. His remarks function in so many ways as a sort of metacom-
mentary on several key issues raised by the other contributors and at the same

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 296 Book Reviews

time serve as a br
between literary
visual art and Seym
is more properly ro
diverse contributi
Guin.
Goodman's analysis of how temporal sequence is spatialized in a
number of "narrative paintings" drawn from both occidental and oriental
traditions leads him to question some of the basic presuppositions about the
constituent elements of narrative and specifically about sequentiality. Of
special interest is his contention that aesthetic criteria may often dictate
temporal ordering in the narrative sequence. A similar concern motivates
Seymour Chatman's close analysis of a Maupassant story, "Une partie de
campagne" and its cinematic rendering by Jean Renoir in a film of the same
name. Chatman focuses specifically on the reductive aspect of many studies of
narratology where the story-structure or diegetic level is examined and the
medium of presentation bracketed. The demonstration here is designed to
illustrate the specificity of narrative representation in film.
Undoubtedly the strength of this volume lies in its attempt to wean the
discipline of narratology away from the exclusive preserve of literary criticism
and to establish for it new coordinates by bringing them to bear on what we
think of as non-literary fields of enquiry. Paradoxically, however, such a
strategy is precisely what brings pertinence to those essays in the volume
which appear, no matter how idiosyncratically, to address problems of literary
narrative. What links such overtly diverse studies as those of Derrida,
Kermode, and Le Guin is their concern for (if we may stretch a little
Jakobson's term) the "literariness" of literature. As the narrative loses its
automatic association with the institution of literature, we are challenged to
take up anew the problem of literary production in this new context.
Kermode's notion of "secrets" suggests tendencies which work against
narrative connexity and causality, evoking agents which resist easily achieved
processes of cognitive assimilation or accommodation and are deployed by
writers such as Conrad in a novel like Under Western Eyes. In similar fashion,
through a clever semantic play on notions of conformity and deviance,
Derrida weaves a discursive pattern which embraces differing conceptual
frameworks of legality, insanity, and literature, specifically in relationship to
Maurice Blanchoťs La Folie du jour. His analysis of the concept of genre
represents a masterly attempt to re-ground literariness in anti-narrative
coordinates whose center is the counter-discipline of textuality. Finally,
Ursula Le Guin eschews almost totally an expository stance, preferring to
communicate her thoughts through a parodically inspired piece, generically
undefinable, which carries us back to that social experience where our early
magical encounter with narrative is more often than not around a campfire

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 Book Reviews 297

but leads us neverth

"storytelling" is a fo
values.
It is difficult to convey in so short a summary the richness of perspec-
tives provide by this collection of essays on narrative. Each contributor (not to
mention the provocative and often insightful critiques offered in the "After-
thoughts" by Paul Hernadi, Robert Scholes, Louis Mink, Marilyn Waldman,
and especially Barbara Herrnstein Smith) succeeds not only in crystallizing a
number of central issues of narratology but also, through a wealth of
bibliographical references mentioned in the footnotes or in the body of the
discussion, in encouraging the reader to pursue by further reading the trails
left. Like the subject which furnished its topic, On Narrative succeeds in
establishing itself (to quote editor Mitchell's own words) "as a positive source
of insight for all branches of human and natural science."

Owen Miller

Michael Riffaterre. La Production du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 287 pp. $14.00.

La Production du texte presents a sampling of Michael Riffaterre's work

that essentially spans the period from the end of the 1960s to the middle of the
1970s. Unfortunately, the French editor gives no indication of the origins of
the various essays that are reprinted here, and one is obliged to reconstruct the
historical sequence of the essays oneself. Short bibliographical footnotes
would have been very helpful indeed. The book is divided into two parts: the
first deals with theoretical questions on a more general level and the second
takes up questions raised by Riffaterre's readings of specific literary texts
ranging from Du Bellay to Francis Ponge and Julien Gracq.
The characteristics of the analytical method developed by Riffaterre over
the last few years may best be adumbrated by noting the manner in which that
method differs from traditional rhetorical analysis, literary criticism as it is
normally understood, and linguistics. For Riffaterre, rhetoric is insufficient for
the analysis of literary texts because it moves in the direction of generalization
and prescriptive codification, thereby neglecting the specific and unique
characteristics of each literary text. Literary criticism is the step in the study of
literature which comes after textual analysis and is concerned with value
judgments. Analysis, or what Riffaterre calls explication, necessarily precedes
criticism per se and yields results that are then appropriated by criticism.
Finally, because explication studies the behavior of words in the context of
literary works, it is closely related to linguistics. However, as in the case of
rhetoric, linguistics tends toward universalization. Linguistics as poetics
attempts to construct a model or grammar of poetic language. In so doing, it

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