Categories can be social (e.g., the teacher, the lawyer), literary (e.g., the young man or woman in the course of his or her education), or, as just mentioned, the result of certain generalizing formulations in the text. In the case of categorization, further information about the character can reinforce the category, but it can also be seen to work against it. If the category and the new information do not match, this can lead to “de-categorization” and ultimately to personalization. Other text-bound causes of personalization include, first and foremost, indirect self-characterization through the presentation of mental activity on the part of the character. The method of choice in this regard is internal focalization, which “seems rather to be the technique that best meets the reader’s personalization impulse.”291
If in categorization there is still a partial match between the category first established and the new character information, the eventual result will not be personalization but rather “individuation,” in which the character becomes more than the mere representative of a particular group. According to Schneider, “individuation seems to be the norm rather than the exception. What is important in an individuated character model is that the original category membership is not given up.”292 As we see it, individuation suggests that character constructions by the reader always have an element of degree to them. Individuation indicates a degree of personalization, whereas personalization can accommodate a degree of categorization, for instance when “original category membership [ . . . ] can be accepted as one element of a complex personality.”293
Schneider builds his character construction models on verbal clues, but we can extend his proposal to nonverbal media. For those readers who haven’t read any other work by Wasco and are therefore unfamiliar with them, the two characters in the title panel of “City” must look a bit weird. The one on the right is ostensibly a quadruped, which many readers may want to process as a dog, even though the creature’s “ears” are definitely unusual. The character on the left will be recognized as a humanoid figure, but there is an oddness about him or her that matches that of the dog. These relatively vague impressions may lead to a category attribution once the reader takes in panel one, in which a spaceship carrying the two protagonists lands in the city. The weirdness and the futuristic vehicle may add up to the literary category “alien,” which immediately evokes a science fiction scenario through which new information about the characters will be measured and categorized. This poses at least one big problem for the reader of “City.” Aliens usually have bad intentions when they come to earth, but the central characters do not betray any at all, to the point that the original categorization may no longer satisfy the reader. The two protagonists are definitely interested in the city—they take a look around, admire art, and visit many special locations. As a result, the social category of “the tourist” (on a brief vacation trip to the city) may gradually replace that of the alien or at least vie with it in terms of importance. If these two categorizations come about and persist until the end (at which time the two characters leave in their spaceship), their combination in “City” may lead to an interpretation of this graphic narrative as a metafictional story that lets its readers reflect on how we construct the identity of others.
The original weirdness of the characters, however, will probably also lead to a constant de-categorization. Their appearance is so quaint that readers may well give this individual trait priority over the categories that can be brought into play. If readers become aware of this prioritization, it may reinforce the metafictional interpretation as yet another element of how we construct people in real life. If the prioritization does not register with readers, then the quaintness of the two characters will at least result in a form of individuation that nicely accompanies them as they go about their business. On the other hand, if readers are so struck by the way the protagonists look that they understand the story more than anything else as a vehicle for the humanoid figure and the dog, the de-categorization will lead to a personalization on account of their uniqueness. Once readers are confronted with other graphic narratives featuring the two characters, this uniqueness will disappear and the two characters will be on the way to becoming a literary category in their own right.
As a cognitive narratologist, Alan Palmer is convinced that narrative theorists can better grasp the construction of fictional minds by letting themselves be informed by work on real minds (by psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists) than by focusing on the specifics of fiction as a semiotic object. While Schneider still does the latter in the sense that he ties his model to the sequence of actual references to a character, Palmer suggests through his central notion of the “continuing consciousness frame” that the dynamic process of character construction, just like with real people who will remain present to us through a limited number of meetings or comments, “continues in the spaces between the various mentions of the character.”294 A reader has “the ability to take a reference to a character in the text and attach to it a presumed consciousness that exists continuously within the storyworld. [ . . . ] The reader strategy is to join up the dots.”295 This is in fact the reader’s central job, since “readers enter storyworlds primarily by attempting to follow the workings of the fictional minds contained in them.”296 No wonder then that readers remember certain characters so well: they have worked long and hard to produce them, especially in cases where the references to their fictional minds are few and far between.
In an attempt to go beyond the “internalist perspective” of most narratological efforts to describe fictional minds in terms of “those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached,” Palmer wants to develop the “externalist perspective” that is also available from the cognitive sciences and that emphasizes “those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioural, evident, embodied, and engaged.”297 Palmer’s “social mind” is a container term for what comes into view as a result of using the externalist perspective. One of the revelations is the fact that literary evocations of consciousness often indulge in the use of dispositions (defined early on by the psychologist William James as “bundles of habits”).298 Palmer examines chapter 3 of The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, and presents a selection of no fewer than thirteen such instances, including “Mrs. Touchett’s behavior was, as usual, perfectly deliberate,” which is glossed as follows: “The phrase ‘as usual’ shows that her deliberate behaviour on this occasion arises from her disposition to behave in this way.”299 Palmer’s findings in the human sciences indicate that talking about a mind habitually means talking about dispositions, but he implies they are entirely absent from narratology precisely because it is concerned with the specifics of evoking the workings of an individual mind at a particular moment (as can be found in the prestigious work of authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) rather than with taking the more long-term and socially oriented externalist view.
No wonder that in his discussion of the social mind Palmer zooms in on “intermental thought,” or thinking that is “joint, group, shared, or collective, as opposed to intramental, or individual or private thought.”300 In an analysis of George Eliot’s Middlemarch he argues that the provincial town of Middlemarch literally has a mind of its own. It comes through in the text right away, since the narrator’s initial descriptions of the individual minds of Dorothea Brooke, her sister Celia Brooke, and their uncle and guardian Mr. Brooke are focalized through it. The narrator will use the passive voice (e.g., “Dorothea was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever”) to indicate an opinion held by a large outside source (in this case the landed gentry that forms part of the provincial storyworld) or resort to presupposition (e.g., “And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such prospects?”) in order to make a generally held norm explicit. As Palmer goes on to show, the Middlemarch mind is not monolithic and it has various effects on people, but it still provides a set of judgments and presumptions that transcend the individual and are nevertheless essential for understanding how fictional minds in Eliot’s novel operate. Palmer generalizes as follows: “Fictional minds, like real minds, form part of extended cognitive networks. We will never understand how individual minds work if we cut them off from the larger, collective units to which they belong.”301
In the first paragraph of “The Map” the narrator expresses the Christian mind of the village of Dorkwerd. Since he does not mention the name of the village in this paragraph, the reader might even get the impression that this social mind is functioning in a larger whole—an entire region in which Christianity may dominate the thinking. Note that Christianity is not the sole purveyor of thoughts; if the narrator says “Christian shops,” he implies there are others that do not have their shades drawn on Sundays. To convey the shared thinking that also seems to have contained him as a boy, the narrator combines the mention of a feast day without any further explanation (“Saint Nicholas,” December 6, an occasion for children to get as many presents as their parents can afford) with the presentation of how book acquisitions typically go in that time of year. Early on in the paragraph the narrator also provides an explanation for the drawn shades (“so that people would not be seduced on Sunday to return and buy something on Monday”), but the choice of the word “seduced” already seems to indicate that the older narrator has become aware of the motivations and decisions that drive life the village.
Indeed, considered through the lens of the social mind, the rest of “The Map” can be seen as a tale of liberation from the Christian mind. At first there is still a clear connection, not only because the boy spots the map in a Christian bookshop but also because he goes through a phase of enthusiasm for the village and its surroundings as they appear on the map. The fact that he wants to bike all the roads on it even suggests an identification with the village and its social mind. Eventually, however, contacts with the world beyond the village (for which a second, “blank” map has been drawn) lead to a loss of interest; the Christian mind no longer dominates the narrator, who may well have understood that its narrow-mindedness is no match for the wider world. The map of the village was small and inspiring, but the idea that the blank map could work to expand the project turns out to be wrong. Interestingly, the liberation starts because the Christian mind has failed to function for a moment; the boy spots the village map because the shades of the bookstores haven’t been drawn properly. If they had been drawn as they should have, the boy might not have seen the light.
According to Palmer, the construction of characters and their worlds can also be approached through the application of attribution theory as developed in psychology. The best-known contributions to this theory include the work of Fritz Heider and Harold Kelley—Heider distinguished between internal attribution (when someone assigns the cause of another person’s behavior to an internal characteristic such as a personality trait) and external attribution (such as when we explain our own behavior with reference to an external cause).302 Kelley underwrote this distinction and proposed the “co-variation theory,” which holds that a person is capable of managing the information he or she has stored in such a way that a variety and combination of elements can be attributed to an observed effect and its causes.303 Attribution theory has become popular through the concept of “theory of mind,” which Palmer defines as “our awareness of the existence of other minds, our knowledge of how to interpret our own and other people’s thought processes, our ability to make sense of other people’s actions by understanding the reasons for those actions.”304
In verbal narratives, minds and action are often intertwined. Palmer refers to the regular impossibility of separating physical actions from the mental life behind them as the “thought-action continuum.”305 He explains that, compared to “X stood behind the curtain,” the sentence “X hid behind the curtain” adds motive and thus tells the reader something about X’s mind: “The word ‘stood’ is at the action-end of the continuum; ‘hid’ is nearer the thought-end.”306 The thought-action continuum is one of the clearest illustrations of Palmer’s overhaul of the study of consciousness evocation in literary narrative. Instead of focusing, as classical narratology did, on clearly demarcated passages such as interior monologue, he extends the mind into the storyworld at large and insists that the border between mind and world is porous. This turns him into a precursor of the so-called 4E approach to the fictional mind, which we will discuss shortly.
Some texts seem to make it difficult for readers to use their capacity to “read” real people as part of the processing and interpreting of narrative. This can happen, for instance, when texts feature a host of characters with grotesque amounts of behavioral incongruity and thus undermine any kind of direct parallel. In what perhaps amounts to the most famous investigation of narrative through the prism of theory of mind, Lisa Zunshine submits that fiction “engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity,” to the point of explaining why we read it, as the title of her book announces.307 Novels “test the functioning of our cognitive adaptations for mind-reading while keeping us pleasantly aware that the ‘test’ is proceeding quite smoothly.”308 However, depending on the strength and stamina of the reader, the complexity of the representation may of course sooner or later upset the balance between challenge and reward. Zunshine offers as an extra caveat that an awareness of the sophistication of the mind-reading we engage in when reading fiction may lead to doubts about the extent to which we know real people we thought we knew.
In a now classic analysis, Zunshine applies one aspect of theory of mind—our capacity to manage multiple levels of intentionality in a narrative—to the passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in which the title character’s husband, Richard, and his friend Hugh help an aristocratic woman interested in politics, Lady Bruton, to compose a letter to the editor of The Times. By carefully tracing the details of the passage, Zunshine detects no less than six nested levels of intentionality, starting from the opinion of the makers of the pen (used by Hugh to write the letter) that it will never wear out, all the way up to Woolf “intending us to recognize [by inserting a parenthetical observation, “so Richard Dalloway felt”] that Richard is aware that Hugh wants Lady Bruton and Richard to think that because the makers of the pen believe that it will never wear out, the editor of the Times will respect and publish the ideas recorded by this pen.”309 As Zunshine herself makes clear, such a dizzying breakdown of about ten lines in the novel may not represent an average reader’s processing of it, but it does demonstrate that literary fiction can have a lot in store for those who (most often unconsciously) turn to it to exercise their theory of mind. When informed by knowledge about the cultural context in which fiction is produced or processed, the theory of mind approach may also lead to interpretations that incorporate the natural tendencies of many if not most readers to consider, analyze, and judge characters as they do real people.
Since “Pegasian” largely consists of speech report, the reader will have to work quite hard if, as Zunshine suggests, the application of theory of mind is indeed a default inclination. A logical sequence of motivations will certainly help to follow the reported dialogue. Especially in case the reader does not immediately see the point of the real pair of riding breeches, the statement in the first sentence of the story can be seen as the result of a desire or a self-perceived obligation on the part of the riding master to establish authority over a student. The girl’s reaction will then be interpreted either as a relatively modest inquiry or as the expression of a conscious or instinctive wish on her part to thwart the authority the riding master is trying to impose. Is she perhaps one of those adolescents who take a certain amount of pleasure in automatically opposing the powers that be, including riding instructors?
Whether she initially inquires or opposes, it’s clear that the riding master becomes upset. The instructor’s snide remarks result in sarcasm on the part of the girl. This doesn’t have to mean that she wanted to give the riding master a hard time in the first place; she might have felt so aggrieved by the “little girls” statement that she turns obstinate in order to defend herself. What gives the instructor the right to this pompous attitude? The narrator then evokes the thoughts of the instructor, which suggest a didactic motivation for the apparent need to stay in charge. These attributions of motivation for the argument between the girl and the riding master reinforce the sense of hostility expressed in the actual dialogue. It is all the more surprising, then, when the girl comes around in the final paragraph. This development could well challenge the theory of mind logic, since the outcome of the story seems to belie the interpretation of the exchange. Real people who are in a foul mood do not change their minds so quickly and radically as the girl. At this point there are at least three possibilities. One: the challenge is so strong that the theory of mind logic breaks down and the story suddenly turns into a tale about the eagerness to treat fictional characters as real people. Two: the fact that the amount of time between the confrontation and the girl’s insight is left unspecified gives the theory of mind reader a chance to justify her conversion to real riding breeches. Three: the sudden turn at the end suggests that people can change their minds even without apparent reasons to do so.
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, affect and emotion have received ever more attention in cognitively inspired narrative studies. In 2007 Suzanne Keen published Empathy and the Novel, which she presented as a study participating “in the growing interdisciplinary field [of] cognitive approaches to literary study, but it emphasizes affect.”310 In some ways it can be seen as the affective supplement to theory of mind. Empathy can be compared to the capacity of mind reading, as both are all about taking the perspective of the other and as both are claimed to be crucial reasons for reading fiction. However, empathy is perspective-taking on an emotional plane: “In empathy, sometimes described as an emotion in its own right, we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others.”311
Combining psychology with narrative theory, as well as using empirical data taken from her own experiments and from existing studies, Keen succeeds in relativizing stereotypes surrounding empathy, such as the idea that women are more prone to empathy than men or that novel reading turns the reader into a more social human being. She also distinguishes empathy neatly from “related moral affects such as sympathy, outrage, pity, righteous indignation, and (not to be underestimated) shared joy and satisfaction.”312 And she points to “empathetic narrative techniques,”313 without losing sight of Meir Sternberg’s Proteus principle: there is no simple causal link between a technique (such as I-narration or internal focalization) and an increase or decrease in readerly empathy.
The most important narrative techniques that induce empathy are related to “character identification,” which concerns all aspects of characterization and therefore is to be found on the level of “narrative” (the second level of the structuralist three-tier system). A second important domain for promoting or hindering empathy is found in what Keen (following narratologists such Stanzel and Cohn) calls “narrative situation (including point of view and perspective).”314 This is related not just to the use of “I” and “we” versus “he/she” or “they” but also to the thematization of empathy and affiliated feelings, which may be presented as morally right and decent. Many novels and novelists “celebrate the value of narrative empathy.”315
In addition, forms of empathy can be distinguished on the basis of the targeted audience. The first form is “bounded strategic empathy [that] occurs within an in-group, stemming from experiences of mutuality, and leading to feeling with familiar others.” One might say that novels making use of this type of empathy preach to the converted. Second, there is an “ambassadorial strategic empathy,” which is a bit broader than the first one, as it targets “chosen others with the aim of cultivating their empathy for the in-group, often to a specific end.” And finally there is the broadest possible form, termed “broadcast strategic empathy” and calling upon “every reader to feel with members of a group, by emphasizing our common vulnerabilities and hopes.”316 Although Keen remains suspicious of far-reaching claims concerning the value of empathy, she demonstrates very convincingly that emotive responses are crucial for the understanding of both narrative and narration.
Since the 1990s several philosophers of mind have reformed what can be summarized as “traditional cognitivism.”317 This is the idea that cognition is the manipulation of representations by a mind that processes and is supposedly discrete from these representations. In the new, post-Cartesian view, the emphasis is on the fact that the mind is embodied.318 In other words, “some cognitive abilities depend upon features of human bodily experience” beyond the brain.319 Thought is thus no longer abstract and computational but tied to, for instance, bodily resources. A popular example is that of the “outfielder problem” in baseball. How does an outfielder manage to get to the right place at the right time to catch the ball as it comes off the bat? In the old paradigm of cognition, the outfielder would combine a perception of the ball and its direction with a model of its motion, the player’s brain would use a representation based on the model to predict the landing location, and it would then move the body to where it needs to be for the catch. In the new paradigm the emphasis is on the outfielder’s bodily resources. There is debate about the exact explanation.320 However, an important aspect of the solution is that the outfielder’s eyes continuously track the ball as its visual velocity increases or decreases, which makes the player move backward or forward without any computation whatsoever.
The embodied mind is at the center of the new cognition paradigm.321 Given the evident fact that the body is always situated in an environment, other concepts have intensified the recent developments in the philosophy of mind. On top of embodiment, so-called “4E cognition” includes “extended cognition” (which refers to the literal extension of some cognitive processes into elements of the physical world), “embedded cognition” (which involves the claim that “while cognitive processing may take place in the head, it often depends on interactions between the agent and his or her ecological setting”), and “enactive cognition” (which specifies that mainly sensorimotor skills contribute to these interactions).322 The classic illustration of extended cognition, and one that largely fits the other concepts as well, involves two people who wanted to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Inga remembered the address, but Otto, who has a memory deficiency, consulted a personal notebook in which he found the address. From the point of view of 4E cognition, the two address retrievals are alike, since mind is larger than brain processes and thus includes Otto’s notebook.323
As Daniel Hutto and Patrick McGivern suggest, “the various E-approaches are best understood as a family.”324 There are commonalities and divisions, including a variety of opinions about the degree to which the new paradigm undermines the old one. The most useful borrowings from the new paradigm for the study of narrative are characterized by an awareness of these nuances. In their introduction to a special journal issue on “second-generation cognitive science,” Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo duly describe their cognitive approach as informed by “the embodiment of mental processes and socio-cultural practices.”325 They add two “E” words to 4E cognition—“experiential” and “emotional”—since to them these aspects of individual response form an integral aspect of the new paradigm. Pointing to the work of predecessors such as Monika Fludernik326 and David Herman,327 they use an arbitrary passage from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones for an application of essential second-generation insights.
Readers have embodied responses to narrative because mirror neurons in the brain fire when they read about specific actions.328 They vicariously experience what the characters go through. In the Fielding passage, Squire Allworthy walks onto his terrace and sees the sun rise. According to Kukkonen and Caracciolo, readers “respond to the words on the page through their bodies,” in this case with “a feeling of elevation.”329 Informed by work in psychology on the specifics of (literary) reading, this fine-grained narrative analysis would gain strength if it were itself subject to empirical verification, but it can definitely help to identify the details of a text and thus enhance an understanding of the sense-making readers enter into when processing a specific narrative.
The work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on metaphor330 (“one of the earliest applications of second-generation cognitive approaches”331) inspires Kukkonen and Caracciolo to focus on the connection in the Fielding passage between Allworthy’s location and his character: “Allworthy’s benevolence emerges once the motion verbs have led us to the top of the hill on which he stands.”332 Because it emerges through an entire set of connections with positive elements such as the majestic sun, the character’s benevolence forms a strong example of what Lawrence Barsalou calls “situated conceptualization.”333 The consideration of this extra cognitive dimension lifts the reading of the Fielding passage onto a level that combines the embodied responses with cultural resonances and individual history. The central concern of the second-generation approach is the “feedback loop” between “physical patterns of interaction with the world and cultural, linguistic meanings.”334
Caracciolo extends the investigation of this feedback loop by considering the nature of the individual experience of narrative. He argues firmly that “stories offer themselves as imaginative experiences because of the way they draw on and restructure readers’ familiarity with experience itself.”335 The “story-driven experience,” as Caracciolo calls it throughout his monograph, takes shape in a network of responses marked on the one hand by “a tension between the textual design and the recipient’s experiential background.”336 This background rests on bodily, perceptual, and emotional elements, but it also includes higher-order cognitive functions and sociocultural practices; some will be appealed to or activated by the narrative, while others will be projected onto it. The other tension that determines the story-driven experience is that between “consciousness-attribution” (explained earlier on in the lead-up to the discussion of Alan Palmer’s views) and “consciousness-enactment” (which refers to the partial overlap between the reader’s “first-person undergoing of an experience” and “the experience attributed to a character”).337
Taking issue with Palmer, Schneider, and David Herman, Caracciolo suggests that the centrality given to consciousness-enactment in his model of the story-driven experience implies a fuller exploration of the “qualia” or “sensory feels” that are critical to the second-generation approach.338 The triggering of consciousness-enactment, however, is a gradual process. In his analysis of the first part of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Caracciolo is careful: “As we read into Benjy’s monologue, we feel that we are penetrating deeper into the character’s consciousness, that we are increasingly familiar with his mental processes. But a character has no mental processes, and only seems to be conscious: in fact, our illusion is produced by the overlap” described above.339
While it could be argued that what Dorrit Cohn describes as quoted monologue would be a primary candidate for producing the illusion of consciousness penetration, Caracciolo suggests that the whole array of her modes of thought presentation (see chapter 1 of this handbook) can have this effect on the reader, an effect that ultimately depends on how a text connects with the reader’s specific experiential background. Individual responses to narrative obviously also vary across the regions of the background. On the bodily-perceptual level, for instance, “recipients respond to the text by producing the sensory imaginings that simulate perception,” perhaps making lasting impressions on readers.340 At the other end of the scale, on the level of sociocultural practices, recipients will come up with “self-conscious interpretive responses to narrative, such as ethical judgments, aesthetic evaluations and literary-critical interpretations.”341 All these may make them aware of how they interact with the world and may perhaps even affect this interaction.
Another theory of cognition that is making inroads into cognitive narratology is blending theory.342 It is based on the relatively simple assumption “that we understand all sorts of semiotic representations by establishing conceptual links between certain features in the mental spaces343 prompted by the communication.”344 A “blend” is the new mental space that results from such a link between two input spaces. Blends are part of networks, the assemblage of which the developers of the theory, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, describe as follows: “Building an integration network involves setting up mental spaces, matching across spaces, projecting selectively to a blend, locating shared structures, projecting backward to inputs, recruiting to the inputs or the blend, and running various operations in the blend itself.”345
María-Ángeles Martínez meticulously uses blending theory to further the study of why and how individuals are taken with a specific narrative. For her, a reader’s engagement with narrative results from and will be enhanced by the development of a “storyworld possible self,” the conceptual integration of two inputs by the reader: “One is the mental representation that readers build for the intradiegetic perspectivizing entity, [ . . . ] be it a focalizer [ . . . ] or the narrator. The other is the mental representation that readers entertain of themselves.”346 Channeling the notions of “self-schemas” and “possible selves” in psychology, Martínez’s storyworld possible self is a network of blends that will give direction to the processing of narrative and its interpretation.347 Take a book that partly deals with overcoming substance abuse, such as A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey. When early on in the act of reading, a narrator or focalizer’s perspective integrates with an aspect of a “drug user” self-schema, chances are that other themes will be blocked out and that certain decisions of the narrative processing will be informed by elements tied to the emerging network. Compared to other work on emotional involvement and empathy on the part of the reader, the storyworld possible selves approach has the advantage of not being exclusively tied to feelings for characters but instead embraces readers’ own feelings about themselves, which in order to become useful for intersubjectively testable interpretation are related to the cultural environment in which they appear.
While Martínez focuses on verbal cues for the onset of storyworld possible selves such as “double deictic you” and “generic one,”348 a graphic narrative like “City” also holds out possibilities for blends of the kind she describes. To begin with, the protagonist’s inconspicuous visual neutrality in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, or social class makes it an ideal nonverbal prompt for inclusiveness, so that readers can easily relate to what they construct as his internal focalization of the city. If the spaceship in which they land activates the reader’s familiarity with science fiction, the little alien could be seen as an explorer looking for signs of life; the tiny humanoid calls the dog’s attention to the bird in panel six, and then both seem to run after it in panel seven, but to no avail. The gate in panel fifteen seems to lead into what looks like a graveyard, with probably some if not all of the city’s human inhabitants buried there (panel sixteen). If the little alien has come to look for human life, it isn’t found. On the contrary, the alien finds what can be construed as evidence of death. This could definitely set off matches with readers’ feared possible selves in an apocalyptic scenario. The perceived character perspective on the city would thus blend with a feeling about the self that would be related to more general cultural attitudes, such as fears about the consequences of climate change.
If, on the other hand (as we have already suggested in the application of Schneider’s model on character construction), the spaceship does not function as a strong enough cue for the reader to recognize the little protagonist as a science fiction character, the focalization could be seen as that of a tourist who is visiting a city that is definitely weird and interesting. The alien’s facial expression is neutral enough to be interpreted as interest. At a time when moving around the world has never been easier and when people are seeking out special destinations in order to enrich their lives, this perspective on the city could easily blend with the tourist (possible) self and thus lead to a storyworld possible self in which the graveyard panel would not feature as a sign of human disaster but rather as another illustration of the reasons for visiting the city. The storyworld possible selves approach evidently cries out for empirical verification, but it manages to combine specific thoughts and feelings on the part of individual readers with the details of narrative representation.
Postclassical narratologies no longer regard narratives as abstract structures detached from their author, context, and reader. On the contrary, they focus on the actual production, function, and comprehension of the text, and in so doing they lay bare the values, norms, and ideologies involved.
Structuralism cannot be said to be blind to the ideology and the values that are present in a literary text.349 On the contrary, Greimas’s structuralist semantics have always been concerned with the ideological oppositions and preferences that are tied to the organization of the text. Even if ideology is defined neutrally—that is to say, as a worldview and a view of humankind—it undeniably comprises a hierarchy and therefore a set of preferences.350 Greimas-style analyses can clarify these preferences. For instance, in a particular narrative the feminine may always be connected to what is light and good, while the masculine may be associated with what is dark and false.
Nevertheless, such a structuralist approach sharply differs from contemporary ideological analyses. First, structuralists often reduce the ideology to a code, a system that is thought to be inherently present in the text and that therefore downplays the role of the reader. In contrast, contemporary approaches emphasize the importance of the reader. Second, the attention to ideology is almost completely absent from Genette-style narratology.
Let us start with the second point. Genette wants to distinguish focalization types in a technical way and therefore does not take into account the historical development of the subject concept, which nonetheless determines these types and their reception by the reader. Multiple focalization may suggest that the subject is represented in the text as a fragmentary or heterogeneous entity, and this may be connected with a certain view of humankind in the social and historical context. There is little or no room for this insight in classical narratology. Even temporal structure, which may at first sight seem to be without value, might actually be ideologically loaded. If Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow pulls the reader’s leg by inspiring confidence in a realistic chronology while at the same time sabotaging it through carefully hidden impossibilities, he unhinges an entire worldview. Genette has set up his tidy temporal categories but hardly pays attention to their ideological dimensions and their content. He limits their concrete meaning to their function in Proust’s work.
As to the first point—the reduction of ideology to a semiotic code—we can start with Roland Barthes. According to him, a story contains codes that refer directly or indirectly to social values, norms, and beliefs.351 An example of this is the cultural code, which connects all textual elements referring to the social domains of science, knowledge, and ideas. Textual elements can thus be organized starting from one’s psychoanalytical knowledge, which may lead to the connection of all the fragments that refer to an Oedipus complex. In Barthes’s concrete analysis, however, the reader disappears and only the codes are dealt with.
The same happens in Philippe Hamon’s structuralist study of ideology.352 The reader’s work is minimized, while the urgency of the text is maximized. Ideology is studied as the “ideology-effect,” but this effect is not conceived of as the reader’s work. On the contrary, Hamon says that the normative aspect of the whole process derives from the formal characteristics inherent in the text.353 He pays much attention to the representation of consciousness: the way in which characters think and talk shows the values and norms that a text displays and imposes.354 Obviously, these values are not independent of the extratextual value scales and the interpretations of the reader, but Hamon does not focus on either of these two aspects.
Many attempts have been made to align these two readerly aspects with the structuralist patterns of thought. A good example is the early work of Liesbeth Korthals Altes.355 She studies ideology in Le Roi des aulnes (published in English as The Ogre), a novel by the French author Michel Tournier, and tries to reconcile Greimas-style semantics with hermeneutical attention to the reader. Her terminology strongly resembles Hamon’s. She talks about the “value-effect” of the text, an effect that she suggests is controlled by the text itself. This happens on three levels. The first two are the well-known structuralist layers of narrative and narration. For the analysis of narrative, Korthals Altes uses Greimas’s analysis of actions by characters; for the analysis of narration she builds on M. M. Bakhtin’s work, which we will encounter again shortly. The third level, that of reading, seems to be an extension of structuralism, but the description of reading as text-driven programming makes clear that here as well the text itself does all the work. The reader is programmed by the system of the text. In later work, as we will see shortly, Korthals Altes focuses much more on the reader’s contribution.
A similar attempt to expand classical structuralism can be found in the work of Vincent Jouve, who combines Hamon’s views with those of Korthals Altes.356 He also investigates the “value-effect” and thinks that the text itself is capable of creating that effect or even imposing it. Just like Korthals Altes, Jouve studies on three levels the values displayed and imposed by the work. At the level of narrative, he too uses Greimas’s grammar of the characters’ actions. He pays considerable attention to the ethics imposed by the evolution of the events and by the final outcome. Morals on this level are exemplified by the plot, which cannot be isolated from the characters, all of whom are carriers of an ideology. Focalization also receives a heavy ideological load, which is not surprising because it literally and figuratively involves a standpoint, an attitude.
At the level of narration, Jouve shows that consciousness representation and the narrator inevitably demonstrate certain preferences and value judgments. In representing the thoughts and feelings of characters, these values are especially apparent in the choice of words, in the syntax, and in their implicit or explicit orientation toward the other characters. Jouve discusses the narrator’s ideology by means of the implied author—a concept that is absent from Genette’s classical narratology but that fits Jouve’s attempt to expand the text. Moreover, the construct of the implied author can provide an ultimate point of reference that remains indispensable for a structuralist like Jouve. Paradoxically, Jouve uses a problematic and nonstructuralist concept in order to safeguard an orderly structure.
Even broader than the implied author is Jouve’s third level, which he describes as the level of the reader but which in practice remains a textual domain. In terms reminiscent of Korthals Altes, he talks about how the text programs reading. This programming is claimed to come about in addresses to the reader (in which readers supposedly identify with the narratee) and in all kinds of paratextual and intertextual elements such as the subtitle, the preface, and references to other texts. In a move similar to the strategy of Korthals Altes, Jouve introduces the reader on his third level with the help of a theorist—in this case Michel Picard, who makes a distinction between a reading that remains detached and one in which the reader identifies with characters or actions.357 Once more, this reference to the reader’s expectations and attitudes remains secondary to the text, which is considered to be the driving force.
Perhaps this emphasis on the text is not such a bad idea after all. The attention to ideology might damage narratology’s practical applicability and utility. The historical and geographical refinements triggered by this choice of focus may lead to a multitude of options that inevitably constrain applicability and do not always lead to a better systematization. For narratologists who do not want to give up this systematization, it is crucial to steer a middle course between classical methodology and postclassical ideological interpretation.
This means, first of all, that one reveals the ideological baggage of a text and puts it into perspective and, second, that one estimates the importance of this baggage for one’s own theory. The work of M. M. Bakhtin provides an excellent first step in this direction. He considered the novel to be a polyphonous genre and showed in his work on Dostoyevsky how every novel is a texture made up of registers and forms of language that each imply a specific ideology.358 Bakhtin especially focuses on voice or, in structuralist terms, on the level of narration. Literary theory has to reflect the fact that a literary text is a confrontation of textual layers and ideologies, which means theory also has to be many-voiced, or polyphonous. In some postclassical approaches, which we will discuss shortly, the polyphony of theory is regarded as an ethical question, a kind of resistance to the monophony and intolerance of authoritarian ideology.
In the slipstream of Bakhtin’s work, Boris Uspensky concentrates on the polyphony of fictional devices to stage a point of view. The first aspect of this polyphony is the “ideological plane”; it is studied primarily by looking at “author, narrator and character as possible vehicles of ideological viewpoint.”359 Uspensky suggests, for example, that a likable character may be intended as an example of a correct or a good value system, but he immediately adds that this is not necessarily the case. A specific narrative technique—in this case the favorable presentation of a character—does not always have a consistent ideological meaning. In one story a likable character may indeed be the carrier of a positive value system, while in another story likability may incorporate all kinds of negative values. Moreover, it is obvious that the reader can resist this type of ideological manipulation. The narrator may also anticipate this resistance, characters may display contradictory ideologies, or their ideology may not match their actions. As a result, it becomes impossible to identify a clear and compelling relationship between narrative technique X and ideological meaning Y.
To refine and complement the study of the “ideological plane,” Uspensky proposes three more aspects: the “phraseological plane” (including the language of the narrator or of a character), the “spatial and temporal plane” (involving the perspective of the narrative, an example being the bird’s-eye view), and the “psychological plane” (such as the “external/internal view of the person who is described,” or the “unchanging/changing authorial position in narration”).360 The combination of the four planes should give a good idea of the textual and ideological polyphony, but it remains anchored in the text itself.
To postclassical narratologists, narrative texts by themselves are no longer carriers of values—as the structuralists wanted them to be—and do not function as compelling programming languages for the reader either. Texts lose their unassailable power. They are no longer at the top of a hierarchical relationship that would condemn the reader to a lower position. They are now integrated into a horizontal interaction between equivalent communication partners—in this case, text and reader. Postclassical ethical narratology uses a frame of reference that differs from the classical one. The central role is not assigned to just one element—the text—but to the interaction. That is why the issue is no longer the ethics of literature but the so-called ethics of reading.
The two frames of reference appearing time and again in this connection are rhetorics and pragmatics. Rhetorics considers a story to be an attempt to persuade the reader by means of all kinds of techniques. These techniques themselves are no longer analyzed in their own right—as in structuralism—but they are studied in terms of their orientation to and effects on the reader. Insecure narrators may have different intentions: perhaps they want to make readers insecure as well or even to seduce them or make them curious. The nature, meaning, and function of a narrative strategy become clear only when readers consider these effects. It is no longer sufficient to limit oneself, as a structuralist would, to the relationship between the narrator and the fictional universe. The reader’s world now plays a crucial role. As we have already suggested at the outset of our sections on communicative approaches, this leads directly to pragmatics, which regards a text as a form of communication, with a sender, a message, and a receiver.
To Phelan and Rabinowitz, the reader plays a central role in the ideological workings of a text. In terms of the distinction between the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic aspects of narrative texts, they claim that the ideological reading is especially geared toward the thematic dimension: “Responses to the thematic component involve readers’ interests in the ideational function of the characters and in the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by the narrative.”361
Peter Rabinowitz distinguishes four rules of reading.362 First, the rules of notice: a reader pays attention only to certain aspects of the text; others are often simply ignored. Second, there are the rules of signification, which are used by readers to assign a (possibly symbolic) meaning to any aspect that attracts their attention. This consists of connecting such aspects to the reader’s everyday experience by interpreting, for example, characters as if they were actual human beings with a specific psychological profile.
The “rules of snap moral judgment” are a specific, and for our purposes essential, subset of the rules of signification and involve “quick judgments” rather than long and nuanced deliberations.363 Apart from direct and explicit moral judgments uttered by narrators and/or characters, two categories can be distinguished here: “metaphorical rules of appearance and metonymic rules of enchainment.”364 The first makes “it appropriate to assume that physical or verbal characteristics stand for moral qualities.”365 For instance, someone who dresses like a dandy may be an unreliable person. The second category operates via contiguity and invites the reader to conclude that one represented aspect (e.g., bad taste in women) will go together with other (equally bad) characteristics. Rabinowitz offers this example: “In Gatsby, we are surely not meant to be surprised when a man who has fixed the World Series—and who is Jewish and talks with an accent to boot—refuses to attend his friend’s funeral.”366 Third, the reader also uses the rules of configuration to connect different textual fragments to each other. This creates patterns that are neither exclusively textual nor exclusively determined by the reader’s expectations but rather are the results of a fusion between the two. Finally, the reader applies the rules of coherence to transform the text into a coherent whole that nevertheless leaves room for paradoxes and deviations.
In Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction (2014), Liesbeth Korthals Altes develops the notion of ethos attribution to come to grips with the reader’s ideological work when processing narrative. The notion of ethos derives from Aristotle’s treatise On Rhetoric: “[There is persuasion] through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence.”367 Two components of ethos specifically relate to the reader: arete, “the audience’s belief in the speaker’s good character or virtue [ . . . ], in particular his honesty and sincerity,” and eunoia, which “refers to the means for convincing an audience of the speaker’s good intentions.”368 In the view of Korthals Altes readers construct an ethos for the author of a (literary) narrative, and for this purpose they connect first and foremost with the author’s “posture,” defined by Jérôme Meizoz (as we have explained in chapter 1) as “an author’s ‘mode of self-presentation’” tied to the possibilities and constraints of the literary field.369
In this way Korthals Altes, like most postclassical readers, puts the reader front and center. However, she does not look at the idealized or concrete figure of the reader (as rhetorical or empirical approaches might do) but at the process of meaning-making in which he or she is involved. More specifically, she studies the hermeneutic and cognitive processes implied in interpreting literary texts and claims that authorial ethos—a mixture composed by the reader, the author, the text, and the context—plays a determining role in these processes. Her reflections on hermeneutic and cognitive processes are united in what she calls “a metahermeneutic narratology, which investigates conventions that intervene in meaning-making processes.”370
This metalevel, which reflects on the frames and concepts narratology uses and which pays attention to social and cultural contexts, is combined with a concrete analysis of narrative texts. In these analyses Korthals Altes does not want to fix a final and correct reading (e.g., one that is faithful to the implied author), but she concentrates on the conditions that lie beneath the definition of such a reading. She simultaneously shows that narrative fiction typically goes against such a fixation: “Literary works often make their readers do some cognitive gymnastics by setting out ambiguous or contradictory framing clues concerning ethos and intention attributions.”371 As a result, her view on ethos attribution diverges from the rhetorical attempt (witnessed by Phelan and Rabinowitz) to arrive at the “right” meaning, intended by the author: “My own privileged image for readers’ ethos attributions and for their engagement with narrative more generally is that of the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope stands for viewing from a certain angle, under a certain aspect, and for reframing a scene or a mental representation with the wonder of seeing configurations change before our own eyes.”372
Korthals Altes links this ambiguity and oscillation not just to specific narrative techniques but also to modes, such as irony, and to genres, such as autofiction. In her concrete analyses she still falls back on the toolbox of classical narratology but to a lesser extent than in the early work we discussed above and only to connect her findings with an investigation into the various value regimes that determine readings in a specific time and place. As a result, she manages to chart a metahermeneutic position from which to consider conflicts of interpretation, as in the case of Dave Eggers or the French writer Michel Houellebecq.
A willing reader may find value in the way Wasco handles the generic framework that could be said to dominate “City.” Science fiction often voices, implies, or activates doubts about the development of technology. However, apart from the space travel suggested by the device that has taken the little alien and the dog to their destination, “City” does not foreground this essential element in the long-established code of the genre. Instead it playfully combines the code with the script of a tourist visit to the city. As we also explain elsewhere, the alien and the dog may very well appear to be tourists who arrive for a quick visit, take in the sights, relax, and return home. The combination of the science fiction script of visiting/exploring/conquering new worlds with the touristic trip may lead the reader to wonder about the ethics of such visits and explorations. Is a touristic visit a bit like conquering a city?
The wish to attribute value to the generic polyphony in “City” (as opposed to rejecting it for what would then presumably be called its silliness) may be enhanced by the posture readers develop with respect to the author, Wasco. If they know he also publishes pornographic work inspired by bondage strips from the 1950s, they may well imagine he has a generic command that will occasionally lead to experiments with the code. And sure enough, in a rare interview the artist confirms this experimental aspect of his work as a conscious goal.373 If readers don’t know anything about Wasco, their attribution of value to “City” may derive from a personal preference for generic sophistication or indeed from a reading environment in which the appreciation of smart oddity brings about more cultural capital. Metahermeneutic though it may seem, this view of “City” is primarily based on the perceived cuteness of its central characters.
It is not surprising that many narratological studies of the ethical interaction between text and reader devote much attention to the narrator and the characters. First, this preference is in line with the expanded structuralist approach (Jouve, early Korthals Altes) and Bakhtin’s work. Second, narrators and characters are the most anthropomorphous narrative elements. In view of the fact that ethical judgments nearly always pertain to people and considering that rhetorical and pragmatic approaches focus on the relationship between text and human being, these anthropomorphous entities are the preferred points of departure—which of course is not to say that there is no attention for other narrative elements.
In the case of the ethics of reading, the connection between text and human being is sometimes taken so literally that the text itself is taken as a human being. The most famous and influential example of this can be found in The Company We Keep, in which Wayne Booth extends his earlier, text-based narratology to an ethics of reading. According to Booth, narrators of stories present themselves to readers as potential friends. Stories are “gifts from would-be friends.”374 Narrators “claim to offer us some moments together that will add to our lives.”375 The reader may feel disappointed when it turns out that the narrator does not live up to these expectations. The story’s value and ethical dimension are shaped by the extent to which narrators keep their promise of friendship. Once more, this value judgment is not unidirectional. The text does not impose, but readers are not totally free either. In their judgment they can adjust and change their already existing criteria. In any case, they judge not only the story but also their own capacity to judge the story: “We judge ourselves as we judge the offer.”376
The judgment’s rigor and accuracy depend on the nature of the friendship. Booth distinguishes different kinds of friendship and thus also different kinds of books. He uses seven criteria in order to do so, including quantity (a friend you see often is more demanding and can be judged better than someone you meet only once a year) and intimacy (the more intimate a relationship is, the greater the demands and the more accurate the judgment will be).377 The value of the text and the reading cannot be separated from the friendship: good readers, as well as good books, are like good friends.
A comparable anthropomorphization of the text can be found in Adam Newton’s Narrative Ethics. He is inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who considers the presence of others to be an appeal to the self. The narrative text similarly appeals to the reader: “Like persons, texts present themselves and expose themselves; the claim they make on me does not begin with dedicating myself to them, but rather precedes my discovery of the claim.”378 Newton studies this ethical appeal on three levels: narration, narrative, and the reader’s interpretation. This corresponds perfectly to the expanded structuralist approach we found with early Korthals Altes and Jouve. They extended the familiar levels of narrative and narration with a third domain as well, that of the reader and the act of reading.
Just like the other two narratologists, Newton holds on to the text’s almost compelling power. He writes about “the imperative aspect of literature” and argues that an ethical or good reading becomes possible only when the reader heeds that imperative.379 Only then is the reader’s reaction legitimate. Only then does “response as responsibility” function.380 Newton places this response in the Bakhtinian tradition, as a dialogue between text and reader that is a reflection of the polyphonous, dialogical character of the text itself.381
Levinas and the appeal to the reader are also present in the work on narrative ethics carried out by Roger Sell and more generally by the Åbo Akademi in Turku, Finland. They combine the communicative approach we discussed above with the philosophical ethics of conversation. Literature is “basically a kind of dialogue” and can therefore be studied from an evaluative and ideological standpoint: “[T]he same ethical criterion can be applied to the writer-respondent relationship as to human interaction of any other kind. What Åbo research is endorsing here is nothing less than the universal human right to respect and fair treatment.”382 Ethical communication works both ways. If a study focuses on the respect that readers show toward writers, Åbo scholars call it “mediating criticism”; if it stresses the respect that writers extend to readers, they talk about “communicational criticism.”383 In both cases a distinction is to be made between genuine communication, “in which people fully recognize each other’s human rights and personal autonomy,” and distorted communication, which is hierarchical and imposes power relations.384 An ethical narrative reading is a form of genuine communication.
This brings us to a curious ambiguity of many reader-oriented approaches. On the one hand they emphasize the importance of the reader; on the other hand they often fall back upon characteristics that supposedly form part of the text itself and function as compelling entities. They seem to be afraid that the ethics of reading will lapse into an ethics of the subjective reader if the power of the text is rejected. Even a deconstructivist such as Joseph Hillis Miller writes about the law that is supposedly issued by a text. But his approach already makes room for deviations from this law and may thus be used as a theoretical systematization of the ambiguity that has just been observed.
On the one hand Miller argues that a literary text shapes “the law as such” and that the act of reading should be subjected to this law.385 On the other hand the reader can never fully grasp the law, which implies two things. First, every attempt to make the ethical law of a literary genre explicit will deform this law. Every readerly attempt to approach the law constitutes a deviation from the law: “this law forces the reader to betray the text or deviate from it in the act of reading it, in the name of a higher demand that can yet be reached only by way of the text.”386 Second, this law is not “in” the text, as a letter or a message is in an envelope. It constantly escapes the formulations of the story. It is never directly or literally present; it is only there as a manner of speaking—figuratively. Or better, the law is a figure of speech that can be approached only in the story’s figures of speech.387
That is why narrative ethics has to concentrate on the study of the text’s metaphors and metonyms. Stories do not literally say what the law is, but they talk about it in similes. The reader has to respect these similes—he or she should not translate them into simple, literal descriptions such as, “In fact, Mutsaers wants to say that we do not need to follow rules.” At the same time, this respect for the figures of speech will always be a betrayal: if one does not want to translate figurative language, one can only try to grasp it in other, new images. As a result, the act of reading becomes an endless unfurling of constantly renewed images. An unstoppable stream of tropes is set in motion, and it is precisely this stream that shapes the reading that does justice to the text. Reading becomes a form of “figuring it out,” a development of the figures of speech.388
For Miller, a good, ethical reading is endless and undecided. In every attempt to approach the law, this reading moves away from it. That is why it never attains the simplicity of a moral or a lesson. Ethics is distinct from morality by remaining undecided. It vacillates between law and transgression, approach and deviation. This uncertainty makes the text literary and makes the reading ethical instead of moralizing. Just like the text itself, the act of reading has to be an infinite unfurling of images. Reading is never finished, and in that sense the text is unreadable. That is why Miller sees “the unreadability of the text” as the outstanding characteristic of the “true ethics of reading.”389
For Hanna Meretoja on the other hand, an ethical reading is tied to the ethical potential of narrative. As she sees it, hermeneutic narrative ethics explores this potential as a culturally mediated interpretive practice, which seems to indicate a degree of relativism, but at the same time she insists that “the hermeneutic ethos implies a commitment to the view that we can learn something from literature.”390 Developing the starting point for her argument that narratives have the power to cultivate our sense of the possible, Meretoja distinguishes between a further five good effects that may transpire: “narratives can (2) contribute to personal and cultural self-understanding; (3) provide an ethical mode of understanding other lives and experiences ‘non-subsumptively’ in their singularity; (4) establish, challenge, and transform narrative [interactions]; (5) develop our perspective-awareness and our capacity for perspective-taking; and (6) function as a mode of ethical inquiry.”391 While she is just as convinced as Miller that interpretation is never finished, her illustrations of these effects always accentuate the positive. For instance, in a reading of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienviellantes (published in English as The Kindly Ones), a novel about the Holocaust narrated by a former SS officer, Meretoja finds great value in the use of first-person narration. She predicts it does not lead to empathy or identification but still creates a perspective on the terrible events, one that works against standard reactions of hate.
In Jakob Lothe’s analysis of readerly reactions to The Kindly Ones, the real reader also disappears and is replaced by the reader envisaged by the implied author.392 Lothe traces the interplay between implied author, I-narrator, and ideal reader in the development of the plot (the five murders committed by the Nazi narrator) as a change in the narrator’s reliability and authority. Contrary to Meretoja, Lothe submits that it is this change, and thus not the I‑narration itself, that forces the reader to face moral issues he or she might want to avoid.
Miller, Meretoja, and Lothe all deal with an idealized reader, a projection of their own way of interpreting narratives. Empirical studies criticize this unrealistic approach and tend to be scornful when it comes to the ethical effects texts may have on readers.393 This, however, has not deterred narratologists from developing exactly that type of approach.
In Miller’s case the ethics of reading ties in with the attention to figures of speech. “Pegasian” teems with imagery, and the story literally and figuratively refuses to take a definitive position. Many of these images, such as the central metaphor of dressage, evoke power. The riding master tries to discipline the girl, while she tries to train the horse in turn. The end of the story shows that nobody really is in control. The riding master does not manage to subject the girl, and she does not succeed in training the horse. But she goes up in the air all the same. Or better, that is precisely why she goes up in the air. Thanks to the undecidability (“Whatever”), the goal has been reached.
Perhaps this refusal to exercise power is the best way to get things done. And in that way, it really is dressage. This dressage is used explicitly as a metaphor for life: “true dressage, just like real life, doesn’t have anything to do with racing.” It is not the speed that counts but “the sensation” you get while riding. The goal is not to arrive as fast as possible but to be on your way. The goal is undecidability, being neither here nor there. The ethical aspect of the text resides in the constant alternation of images and viewpoints and in the refusal to choose a single viewpoint. The ethical aspect of a narratological reading resides in the unfurling of these images and in the suggestion of undecidability.
There is still room for classical narratology here. The undecidability in question is undoubtedly enhanced by the story’s variable focalization and free indirect speech. The latter sometimes makes it impossible to figure out who is talking: the riding master, the rider, or the narrator. In this connection the invisibility of the extradiegetic narrator can also be seen as a means to relinquish omniscient and moralizing power. The narrator does not want dressage, as the exercise of power, either. In the end this narrator will not interfere or choose sides or formulate a moral.
Nevertheless, the reader can ignore the uncertainty and read the ending as a nearly Machiavellian moral: it does not matter how you get there as long as you get there. For Miller this would reduce ethics to morality. It would stop the narrative pendulum between various views and images, but there is no element in the text that can prevent the reader from such a moralizing interpretation. The images, the focalization, the free indirect speech, and the invisible narrator—none of them can compel the reader. Just about every narratologist working on an ethics of reading agrees with Booth when he says, “Systematic correlations between a given technique, open or closed, and a given ethical (or for that matter aesthetic) effect, are, I now think, always suspect.”394
What was said about the image of dressage in the story by Mutsaers holds for Krol’s image of the map as well. This text also centers on an image of power and a metaphor of life. The boy wants to map his life and discovers that by doing so he brings it to a halt. This is clarified in the story by means of the image of the bike trip, which can be compared to Mutsaers’s horse ride. As soon as the boy has gone somewhere and has indicated this location on his map, the trip becomes meaningless. The goal has been reached, the trip has become superfluous: “Some roads (and the number increased) I traveled two times or more, but this did not count. To have been there once is to be there always; my map indicated this.”
“Pegasian” shows what the endless movement of the pendulum and of being-on-one’s-way can lead to: success. The story shows what you can achieve if you do not exercise any power. “The Map,” on the contrary, shows how the endless movement of the pendulum stops when you do want to exercise power. And then even power becomes meaningless. The map becomes uninteresting as soon as it has exercised its power. Once everything has been put on the map, the first-person narrator takes it off the wall: “It had become meaningless. I haven’t kept it either.” This ending is almost the opposite of the one in the story by Mutsaers, but both stories show that value (in these stories, of dressage and the map) lies in being on one’s way to this value and not in reaching the goal.
Following Miller, we have emphasized figures of speech as a potential starting point for illustrating the openness of a text. This openness is considered to make up the value of both the text and its interpretation. Many forms of narrative ethics, however, choose a different point of departure, one that ties in with the already mentioned interest in the text’s anthropomorphous centers. We are thinking specifically about the unreliable narrator, whom Booth considers a “pretender” instead of a friend.395 This narrator is seen by Chambers as being part of the inevitably risky seduction strategy.396 In Newton’s approach the unreliability would fit into the “shaping of power relations” that, according to him, are inherent in narration as an appeal to the reader.397
James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin start from the unreliable homodiegetic first-person narrator to draw conclusions about the “ethical positioning” of the reader.398 The unreliability of such narrators is triggered by their double roles as both character and narrator. As a character this type of narrator may very well come across as a reliable person, while as a narrator the same figure may be unreliable. This ambiguity is often left unresolved in the text and can even contribute to the value of that text.399 The reader often cannot tell whether the narrator is reliable or not or good or bad, ethically speaking. Should readers want to come to a conclusion, they will have to activate their own ethical values and desires.400
People sharing Miller’s preference for openness will call this a moralizing rather than an ethical reading. If Monika Fludernik is right when she says that unreliable narration is the essential characteristic of fictional narrative texts, this type of reading could even be considered a failure to appreciate the core of fiction.401 If we return to the three levels of classical narratology, we could describe moralizing reading as an evaluation of the story, in isolation from narrative and narration. A novel could be rejected, for instance, on the basis of the events described in it—for example, the adultery in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary—or because of the allegedly despicable characteristics of the actantial roles—for instance, the negative characteristics of the female figures. This involves an evaluation of elements that are part of the fabula and that therefore remain outside the literary organization of the syuzhet. In other words, it concerns judgments that disregard the narrative and fictional character of the text—fictional as defined by Fludernik. In this case, one specific ideology (for example, one that is politically correct) would be opposed to another (for example, one that is not politically correct).
Narrative ethics is not the most famous example of the ideology-related developments in contemporary narrative theory. Undoubtedly, feminist narratology can lay claim to that status. It is also one of the most influential approaches: there is probably no other postclassical narrative theory that has analyzed, influenced, and modified so many aspects of narratology.402 Since the 1980s it has been investigating the relationship between narrative texts and narratological theories on the one hand and sex, gender, and sexual orientation on the other. “Sex” is the term used for the biological distinction between men and women, while “gender” refers to the social construction of the sexes. This construction is most often related to sexual orientation. The traditional construction of the roles of men and women includes a heterosexual preference. Gender cannot be disconnected from sex and sexuality even if it does not coincide with them.
Feminist narratology shows that gender, sex, and sexuality play a central role in the construction and interpretation of narrative texts, while classical narratology excludes these three aspects. As Susan Lanser observes in her influential essay “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” this exclusion is related to the gender of canonized narratologists and of the texts used by them.403 It usually involves not only male theoreticians (Stanzel, Genette, Chatman, Prince) but also male writers. Many so-called universal concepts from classical narrative theory and many allegedly universal characteristics of literary texts are in fact typical of a specific period—for narratology this is usually structuralism, while for literature this means mostly fiction up to and including modernism—as well as a specific culture and a specific (predominantly male) population.
Narratology is not universal or neutral. It is colored by the context in which it functions, and this context consists of a whole series of factors, such as social class, sex, age, economic and professional position, physical condition, and education. Every narratological concept bears traces of this context, and feminist theoreticians argue that these traces are ideological to the extent that they express the power relations of that context. The structuralist desire to classify, survey, and master, for instance, is the expression of a typically Western and male view of knowledge. More generally, Lanser says in her fundamental Fictions of Authority “that even the broadest, most obvious elements of narration are ideologically charged and socially variable, sensitive to gender differences in ways that have not been recognized.”404 By paying attention to the more general and ideological context, feminist narratology is part of the expansion that is typical of nearly all postclassical forms of narratology. Feminist narratologists such as Robyn Warhol and Kathy Mezei join forces with “contextualist narratology,” which has to complement and correct classical narratology.405
It is obviously impossible to map the entire context of a text and a theory. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, following Louis Althusser, talks about an “overdetermination” (surdétermination) of contextual factors: human beings are influenced by so many factors that they can never have a complete picture of them, let alone systematize them.406 This blindness may lead to the illusion of freedom or to the feeling that one can choose one specific factor as the most important one. In reality no single factor can function without influencing the entire network. Gender functions differently with an old, rich, white academic than with a young, poor Asian immigrant—to say nothing about looks and health. Especially in the early stages of feminist narratology, the eagerness to introduce gender into the textual analysis tended to downplay the role of factors such as class, age, and education. This has been rectified in recent years by embracing “intersectionality,” a concept that accommodates the “overdetermination” we have just mentioned.
Simplifying matters, one might propose three stages in the evolution of gender-conscious narrative theory. The phases can be situated respectively in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s.407 In feminist scholars’ first move, directed against the gender blindness of structuralism, the role of gender looked foundational, sometimes even deterministic, as if narrative forms were the result of gender. Lanser argued, for instance, that feminist narratology cannot find definitive correlations between ideology and narrative form, only to claim later that there are causal relations between gender and genre.408
While the earliest phase gave the impression that gender guided the text, the second step in the development of feminist narratology seems to hold the reverse. Warhol says that the first feminist narratologists accepted gender as a category that precedes the text, while later approaches argue that the narrative text shapes gender.409 A good example can be found in Sally Robinson’s study Engendering the Subject, which starts with this sentence: “I am concerned with how gender is produced through narrative processes, not prior to them.”410 This move toward gender as a (linguistic and narrative) construction ties in with the performative view on gender, exemplified by the work of Judith Butler.411 This means that the text is no longer considered to be the reflection of a given ideology but to be its construction. Obviously, this construction is not free; it is influenced by the context. This results in a nearly dialectical relationship between narrative technique and ideology. As Lanser puts it, narrative technique is not so much a product of ideology but rather the ideology itself.412
In recent years the study of the performative aspect has been broadened to include factors such as class and age, which structure the performance. In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe the intricate and multidirectional relations that exist between domains such as race, class, gender, age, and economic status and that are crucial to hierarchic relations of dominance and subservience.413 As Lanser wrote in 2015, “the intersectional approach is now pervasive in feminist scholarship yet still undertapped for the study of narrative.”414 She clarifies the term as follows: “intersectionality argues that multiple aspects of identity—gender, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, global position, age, sexuality, ability, religion, language, historical moment—converge and interact to create actual or perceived social positions, meanings, experiences, and representations in a world patterned by structural inequalities.”415
As we said before, it is not feasible to pay attention to all these intersecting factors in a narrative analysis. In an effort to map as many sections as possible, recent feminist narratology has directed its attention to empirical studies416 and “big data,” following the leads given by digital humanities417 and by Franco Moretti’s “distant reading.” Lanser suggests “that we might venture the kind of large-scale inquiry that Franco Moretti models in Graphs, Maps, Trees, bringing an intersectional understanding of time and place to an analysis of how individual narratives and groups of narratives work out the dynamics of identity (i.e., character) and movement (i.e., plot), and then map those dynamics across the vast field of the world’s narratives in a new kind of historicist project that would offer a “distant reading” of narrative form.”418 With such a vast corpus, taken from all over the world and from all periods across history, feminist narratology would no longer be vulnerable to the well-known criticism that it restricts its analyses to a limited canon, both in time (basically the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and place (basically the Western world, with white authors the overwhelming majority).419
With intersectionality, distant reading, and an almost limitless corpus, feminist narratology has become a “pluralist bricolage.”420 As Robyn Warhol states, “What began as a ‘feminist narratology’ that focused on the impact of culturally constructed gender upon the form and reception of narrative texts has broadened to feminist narratologies that include race, sexuality, nationality, class, and ethnicity as well as gender in their analysis of texts.”421 This is not seen as a disadvantage but as a welcome (and unavoidable) resistance to unified, homogeneous, and universalistic supertheories, typical of classical, heteronormative approaches.
By embracing its inner conflicts, tensions, and even paradoxes, feminism comes close to queer theory, which became dominant in the late 1990s and which refuses fixed categorizations, clear boundaries, and resolving syntheses.422 In line with Judith Butler, Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan argue that the term turns insult into defiance and thereby rejects the traditional hierarchies. The semantic range of “queer” has become very broad: “In principle this is a stance that denies and interrogates the privileges of heterosexuality and tries to openly question dominant ideas of normalcy and appropriate behaviour. The adoption of the term ‘queer’ suggests a blurring of boundaries between straight and gay sex and validates those who would in the past have been considered sexual ‘outlaws.’”423
It is only fitting then that this rapprochement between feminism and queer theory is itself fervently contested.424 At any rate, present-day feminist narratology rarely posits binary oppositions such as “male versus female” or “heterosexual versus homosexual,” but it accepts the primacy of the sliding scale, the in-between.425 Lanser, for instance, argues “that binaries are less useful than spectra.”426 Whereas the first phase of feminist narratology sometimes seems to suggest that there are typically male or female narrative strategies, it looks like most feminist narratologists would now agree with Ruth Page’s claim that “it is not possible to propose incontestable links between gender and narrative form.”427 According to her, form depends on a large number of factors such as content, function, and context. The selection of one factor inevitably entails an ideological bias. Even with respect to narratives that directly deal with gender-related subjects such as birth, Page argues that narrative strategies are not determined by the speaker’s gender. She rejects the feminist presupposition that the speaker’s gender can explain the form of the narrative.428 This fits the qualification in our discussion of narrative ethics: there is no compelling or causal connection between a formal textual element and a contextual, ideological element. A specific narrative strategy is not the direct consequence of a specific ideological position, and neither does it lead directly to a specific ideological reading.
This, however, does not undermine the feminist approach since it does not, as we said, pretend to design a general and universally valid framework. Precisely because feminist narratology is interested in the ever-changing context and the constantly renewed construction of the difference between men and women, it rejects every unchanging macrotheory.429 Nancy Miller says that feminist textual criticism believes in a “poetics of location”: she realizes that every text—literary or theoretical—is located in a specific context.430
This qualification, made by feminist narratologists themselves, is best kept in mind when reading actual narrative analyses. Especially in the early stages, feminist narrative analyses seem to deal with the “typically female” and the “typically male” in an oversimplified and universalizing manner, but in light of this qualification, such assertions acquire their contextualized value. Teresa de Lauretis emphasizes that feminist literary theory does not work with an essentialist conception of Woman.431 In Mária Brewer’s words, “Women’s discourse has little to do with an ineffable or unnamable essence of Femininity.”432 There is no essentially female narrative form either. If Lanser argues that, historically speaking, female writers use narrative forms that are less oriented toward the public domain than the forms used by men, she does not attempt a universal law or a reification of female writing. She tries rather to connect this writing with the specific eighteenth-century context in which letters and diaries were seen as female genres, while speeches and novels were seen as male ones.433 More than once Lanser warns the reader that she does not propose a real, authentic, and essentially female way of writing and reading.434
Since this handbook focuses on the relevance of theory for narrative analysis, we will not dwell upon the wider contextual dimensions of feminist theory. Instead we restrict ourselves to the relevance of gender for narrative form and content. As a pragmatic approach to the text, feminist research has concentrated on the sender of the text (the author), the message (the narrative form), and the receiver (the reader). In all these domains it pays attention to aspects that have mostly been ignored in the structuralist approach and that here assume the status of leitmotifs: experience and desire; the struggle for authority; ambiguity; the corporeal.
The most striking pattern in feminist analyses is probably the combination of resistance and complexity. Female authors, narrative strategies, and readers are often represented as critical actors in the struggle against an existing male tradition. In this struggle women often use the “male” weapons and transform them. This move makes not only these weapons ambiguous—for example, the traditional narrator—but the female fighters as well. They are supposed to absorb as well as transform the male counterpart. In simple terms this pattern comes down to, first, the assertion of an opposition (man versus woman) and, second, the conflation of the opposite extremes in one of the poles—that is, the female one. Many feminist analyses associate the male pole with unequivocality: well-delineated traditions, pursuits, and identities. The female pole, on the contrary, is characterized by ambiguity: vague traditions, camouflaged (because of repression) pursuits, transgressive identities. This association of “female” with “ambiguous” is often already advertised in the titles of such works, one example being that of the reader Ambiguous Discourse, edited by Kathy Mezei. In recent years this ambiguity seems to have spread across the gender spectrum, underscoring once more that there is no essential femininity.435
With The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published an early and influential study on female authors in the nineteenth century. Their analysis clearly features the mechanism of struggle and ambiguity. The writers in question are supposed to be united by a common struggle against the male establishment, “a common, female impulse to struggle free from social and literary confinement through strategic redefinitions of self, art, and society.”436 At the level of the author, this struggle amounts to a clash with the paternalistic tradition, which (etymologically as well) identifies the author with the paterfamilias, a human version of God, our father. This tradition functions as an order: the woman is presented with a mirror in which she has to recognize herself. She has to subject herself to the image man has made for her: that of the subjected angel who puts her creativity at the service of man and, more specifically, at the service of his procreation. A woman who resists this is a monster. She displays male traits such as assertiveness and aggression. The female author is such a monster: a sick hybrid, a she-man, not dissimilar to the postmodern monster we will discuss later in this chapter.
For the female author this ambiguous status is a struggle between experience and tradition. The male narrative tradition never lends a voice to the female experience except through the male stereotypes of angel and monster. A woman who wants to write must come to the conclusion that there are no prestigious narrative forms or genres in which she can express her subjective experience. She may occupy herself with marginal genres such as children’s books and fairy tales but not with real literary work—the novel. If she wants to write novels anyway, she will do this out of the “anxiety of authorship”—the female version of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.”437 A man who wants to become a writer fears and transforms his great models and influences. He struggles with certain authors. A woman who wants to write struggles with authorship itself, with the literary creativity that, according to tradition, she does not possess and must not appropriate.
The female author’s solution for this fear lies in all kinds of ambiguous strategies such as irony, parody, self-mockery, name change (George Eliot and George Sand are the most famous examples), hidden meanings, and secret messages. Gilbert and Gubar underscore “the duplicity that is essential” to the literary strategies they describe.438 Male literary conventions are used and abused to express the female experience by means of various detours. Behind apparent docility, anger smolders; behind the application of convention, sabotage lurks. The angel hides a monster. And the many female characters who have supposedly gone astray in the novels of authors like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot are bitter parodies of man’s image of women who did not subject themselves to the stereotypes. According to Gilbert and Gubar, these madwomen are the literary doubles of the female author: “By projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women [ . . . ] female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the structures of patriarchal society and to reject them. [The madwoman] is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.”439
Today feminist narratology still includes the author in its textual analyses of characters and narrators: “‘Who is speaking?’ refers not just to the narrator(s) but also to the author. [ . . . ] Therefore the identity, experience, and socio-cultural-historical circumstances of the author [ . . . ] are important in understanding the ways that narrative participates in the politics of gender.”440 In traditional literary theory this direct link between textual figures and real persons is rejected as a kind of naïveté, a confusion of fiction and reality, a misjudgment and reduction of literariness. Feminist narratology, on the other hand, embraces this so-called referentialism and anthropomorphism. It looks in the text for references to social reality and the author’s subjective experience, unlike the structuralists, who considered the text to be an independently functioning system of signs. The emphasis on the personality of the authors distinguishes feminist narratology from the poststructuralist approach as well, which proclaims the death of the author and the impersonality of the literary text.441 Feminist narratology shares its anthropomorphism with narrative ethics, which also pays considerable attention to the human agents of literary communication (the writer and the reader) and the anthropomorphic aspects of the literary text. As we observed in the discussion of narrative ethics, this is not surprising for an ideological approach.
In this connection Lanser talks about the text as “mimesis” instead of “semiosis.”442 “Mimesis” is here assumed to have a much broader meaning than in traditional literary theory and narratology. Lanser wants to avoid “mimeticist traps” by refusing to reduce characters to real persons. This is necessary “to inhibit the more imitative and uncritical investments in literary character.”443 At the same time, however, Lanser wants to get away from formalist approaches that refuse to connect form with reference. Traditionally, mimesis refers to a textual procedure, but in feminist narratology it becomes a political strategy, an attempt to assume the authority of traditional narrative art by imitating and manipulating it. This ambiguous appropriation of tradition is a form of mimicry, described by Luce Irigaray as a disrespectful imitation or playful repetition and generalized by Tania Modleski as “a time-honored tactic among oppressed groups, who often appear to acquiesce in the oppressor’s ideas about it, thus producing a double meaning: the same language or act simultaneously confirms the oppressor’s stereotypes of the oppressed and offers a dissenting and empowering view for those in the know.”444 To the extent that mimesis is traditionally seen as a kind of reflection, this vision ties in perfectly with Gilbert and Gubar’s ideas, which imply that the female author needs to pass through the looking glass that reflects the male stereotypes.445
The female reader encounters a kind of mimicry, struggle, and ambiguity similar to that of the female author. Modleski rejects theories of the reader that conceive of feminist interpretations as a complement to existing male literature rather than as a critique of this literature. According to her, there is a desire for power in this critique. This desire may imitate the existing reading strategies, but it also transforms them, notably by connecting them to the female experience. While this experience is no more than a hypothesis for the male reading tradition, it is a compelling point of departure for feminist readings. Once more, the combination of the male hermeneutic tradition with the female experience leads to ambiguity in the sense that this reading implies both identification and rejection. The singularity of the female reading lies precisely in this ambiguity, and this is where the female reader seizes power. The interpretation of a text is an attempt to gain power over the text. Tradition would like such a reading to be unequivocal; a feminist reading, on the contrary, sees the recognition of ambiguity as a recognition of the female position and therefore also as a form of “female empowerment.”446
The double nature of female readings is itself redoubled by the difference between male and female texts. The male canon distorts the female experience and at best makes that experience tangible for the female reader through the distortion. Such texts evoke a negative and a positive reading: it is negative to the extent that the reading resists male distortion; it is positive to the extent that resistance functions as a means of accessing authentic experience. In this connection Patrocinio Schweickart talks about “a dual hermeneutic.”447 The point of reading female texts is not resistance but rather embracement, an empathic reading with three crucial characteristics. First, the reader is a sympathetic witness, “a witness in defense of the woman writer”; second, readers connect the text with the context in which it came into existence; and third, readers recognize their own subjectivity as the inevitable road to the so-called objectivity of the text.448 With a feminist reader, a male text triggers resistance: she wants to control that text; a female text, on the contrary, triggers “intersubjective communication” in which the reader fuses with the subjectivity of the author, the text, and the context, which are all colored by gender. The male model of distance is in opposition to the female model of dialogue, “the dialogic model of reading.”449
These generalizations about abstract readers are a far cry from traditional speculations about genderless readers. However, as Robyn Warhol claims, it is in “attending to the actual reader” that “feminist narrative theory takes its biggest step away from its structuralist origins. [ . . . ] Unlike classical narratology, feminist narratology is free to draw on what can be known about actual readers to speculate about the impact of reading Austen novels upon individuals and, more importantly, upon the culture.”450 Digital humanities may help in studying sets of empirical data concerning real-life readers gathered from blogs, databases, and internet forums. In that way present-day feminist narratology may realize its empirical and inductive vocation.
One step in that direction has been taken by Ruth Page, who investigates “the response of real readers as they interact with an experimental form of digital storytelling: a multi-stranded narrative presented in hypertext.”451 The text she uses is “an amateur piece of writing by Charles Sundt called Fishnet.”452 Like all her other empirical studies, this one refutes the dual opposition between male and female. The similarities between “male” and “female” reading dwarf the differences. In addition, the variations can never be explained in terms of gender alone but should be linked to a host of contextual variables, such as education and interest. That is why Page stresses the importance “of avoiding an abstract, binary model of gender when examining the readers’ responses.”453
The feminist reading model pays much attention to character as a carrier of gender ideology. Not only the image of a male or a female character comes under scrutiny but also the narrative techniques used in character presentation. Again, feminism, by looking at the textual devices used to depict characters, tries to avoid mimeticist reductions. “As part of my practice of feminist narratology,” Warhol notes, “I try to encounter characters in all their facets as functions of discourse, not as mirrors of or windows on the extradiegetic world. Characters, then, are creatures of the discourse of gender” used in the novel.454 An early example of such a discursive and feminist reading is The Heroine’s Text, in which Nancy Miller analyzes the female characters in eighteenth-century English and French novels. She combines a structuralist focus on the narrative sequence with a feminist interest in the female life story. In the novels she studies, the narrative sequence is driven by the “logic of the faux pas”: the life of a woman is an insecure road that may lead to disaster by a single wrong choice.455 Woman, therefore, is an extremely vulnerable creature, and this vulnerability has to do with her sexual desires. Two fundamental narrative developments are possible: the euphoric one, which leads to the integration of woman in society, and the dysphoric one, which leads to disaster.
Novels from the Enlightenment often choose the epistolary form. According to Miller, the rhetoric a man uses in his letters is a form of double play. On the one hand a man wants to seduce his female addressee, which appeals to the woman’s so-called dangerous sexual desires. On the other hand he wants to subject her to the patriarchal order, which makes female desire subordinate to domestic peace. The narrative is shaped by the woman’s wavering reactions to the man’s paradoxical strategy. The ending—positive or negative—must remove the doubt.
A similar story of uncertainty and relief can be found in many biblical stories about women. In Lethal Love, Mieke Bal aims to compensate for the absence of the subject in Genettean narratology.456 She does this by studying how biblical stories construe the female subject. She calls this construction a collocation, an idiomatic connection between body and morality. In the stories the woman’s body is staged as impure and imperfect. It signifies a lack. This is immediately interpreted as a moral danger.457 Bal emphasizes that the Bible is not a purely patriarchal text and that it does not simply set male omnipotence against female subordination. The male subject is often insecure and powerless. What is more, it is precisely this uncertainty that is externalized and incorporated in the narrative construction of woman. In the story of Adam and Eve in the Creation, assigning to the woman the position of the mother ultimately counteracts the woman’s impurity and the man’s uncertainty. This position domesticates the body, integrates woman into a process of education, and alleviates man’s uncertainty. It is a position that is sealed in Eve’s name, “a name that means, as her mate says, ‘the mother of all living.’”458
The confrontation of male stereotypes and female subjects is an ever-present theme in feminist character studies. In the already mentioned monograph Engendering the Subject, Sally Robinson shows that the work of Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, and Gayl Jones stages women who do not at all correspond to the classical pattern and who also cannot be reduced to a simple reversal or rejection of that pattern. These authors produce complex, often contradictory images undermining the dominant image of women. By means of all kinds of narrative strategies, these texts resist the homogenizing images of Woman that dominate a certain culture at a certain time.
Gender studies of the narrator are also characterized by ambiguity and conflict. According to Susan Lanser, the female voice is polyphonic. At one level it seems to conform to male rhetoric; at another level it undermines it. Just as in the work of narrative ethicists such as Phelan, Korthals Altes, and Newton, Lanser refers to Bakhtin’s polyphony. What was considered to be a general characteristic of the literary text is now seen as a typically female characteristic. Lanser argues that “polyphony is more pronounced and more consequential in women’s narratives and in the narratives of other dominated peoples.”459 The female voice hovers between subordination and authority, between private and public. For instance, in Persuasion, Jane Austen uses heterodiegetic narration combined with internal focalization, which at first looks like a very traditional, heteronormative form. However, through irony and suggestive phrasing, the narratorial voice’s traditional authority is undermined; it becomes ambiguous, and this “double-voicing” ridicules the male character and narration without explicitly saying so: “Austen’s narrator takes the patriarch down without uttering a single word against him.”460 The undecidability and ambiguity of the literary text, which is underscored in many postclassical approaches as a characteristic of literature at large, is interpreted here as a characteristic of femininity—which may be employed by male narrators.461
These narrative strategies fit in the power struggle inherent in the conflict on which feminist narratology wants to focus. Lanser considers every narration to be “a quest for discursive authority,” and obviously this quest is ambiguous: on the one hand the struggle for power is a male desire, while on the other hand it attempts to overthrow male dominance.462 This attempt is realized by exposing the traditional male rhetorical techniques that lend power to the speaker. According to Lanser, this is why female narrators often demonstrate a high degree of self-awareness. In other theories this self-awareness is seen as a general characteristic of literariness (fiction is supposedly always a form of metafiction); in feminist theories it is considered a sign of female narration. The fictionality of male authority is exposed, and in this way female narration tries to gain its own authority.463
Starting from this ambiguous attempt to lend authority to narration, Lanser discusses three fundamental forms of narration. First, there is the authorial voice, which is mostly heterodiegetic, extradiegetic, self-conscious, and oriented toward the public realm. This is the cliché of the male narrator. Often his sex is not indicated explicitly, but the reader simply supposes the narrator is a man. The appropriation of this position by a female narrator has important consequences. Readers may feel so disappointed by their unmet expectations that they consider the female narrator to be unreliable.464 Once again, unreliability does not derive from the text itself (and certainly not from a correspondence with such a problematic concept as the implied author) but rather from the reader’s expectation patterns. It turns out that gender plays a fundamental role in these patterns.
The personal voice is the second kind of narrator that Lanser studies from the gender angle. It refers to all forms of autodiegetic narration. Since it is personal, the reader often considers it to be less objective and more intimate or private. Moreover, if the voice belongs to a woman, it is easily seen as indiscreet—a transgression of the law saying that women have to remain silent on subjects men can talk about without hesitation or castigation.465 The mere transgression of the silence imperative may lend authority to the female voice here. Moreover, the image of women in this personal narration may clash with the dominant images. Finally, this narration can clarify which gender-related presuppositions constitute the basis of the belief that these personal narratives—certainly in the case of women—are small-scale, subjective reports without any general validity. Such a self-conscious exposure of conventions may transform them into weapons in the struggle for authority.
Finally, there is the communal voice, which Lanser thinks is typical of marginal and repressed groups and “therefore” of women.466 There is no structuralist definition of this type of narration. Lanser uses the term to refer to “a practice in which narrative authority is invested in a definable community and textually inscribed either through multiple, mutually authorizing voices or through the voice of a single individual who is manifestly authorized by a community.”467 Precisely because of the female and communal aspect, this narrative strategy is the most natural form of resistance against the male and individual authorial mode of narration. It contributes to the construction of “a female body politic.”468 This amounts to the feminist politics of the collective that opposes the male politics of the individual.
In all instances the female voice attempts to tell its narrative without submission to the male tradition of telling. Warhol quotes Jane Austen’s Persuasion, in which the main character, Anne Elliot, refuses to accept the traditional form of narration: “If you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”469
The collective is often associated with the female and confronted by the individual, which is supposed to be more male. Robyn Warhol shows in Gendered Interventions that at the level of the narratee as well, the female narrative strategy is more oriented toward the realization of togetherness and collectivity than the male voice is.470 In that study of the Victorian novel, Warhol concentrates on the passages in which the narratee is addressed directly. In these passages male authors (William Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope) try to get readers to distance themselves from the events, while female authors (George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe) attempt to get readers involved in the events. Warhol realizes that readers can always distance themselves from suggestions addressed to the narratee, but in any case her evidence quite convincingly shows that female authors writing in English in the middle of the nineteenth century are more didactic than their male colleagues. They aspire to change the world more than their colleagues. It is clear from George Eliot’s essays that she saw a didactic disposition as an intrinsic part of her program of realism, which obviously corroborates Warhol’s hypothesis.471
Warhol easily accommodates counterexamples as expressions of cross-dressing: male ideologies are disguised as female narrative strategies and vice versa.472 At first this interpretation may seem to link up with queer theory, but on closer inspection one could see this as the reproduction of cultural stereotypes. Warhol’s explanation does not fully account for the possibility that the canonization of the texts in her corpus is the consequence of a socially constructed concept of femininity that gives priority to care and affection. According to Warhol, these are the values that the female Victorian authors wanted to convey to their readers. However, these values, as well as Warhol’s view itself, are not neutral: they are themselves dependent on a social conception of “femininity” and on a specific canonization process that has decided who the so-called representative Victorian writers are. Warhol’s corpus is probably too small to justify the generalizations she makes. Nevertheless, her book is a creative attempt to relate the influence of gender to a narratological interpretation grounded in historical knowledge.
According to feminist narratology, the use of genre conventions is colored by gender as well. Female authors, narrators, and characters sometimes take advantage of those genre patterns to claim authority conventionally associated with them. By doing this, they not only undermine the male authority that is traditionally attached to certain genres; they also reform the genre conventions. Sally Robinson interprets Doris Lessing’s four Martha Quest novels as a female manipulation of the male ideal of self-realization described in the bildungsroman. Lessing seems to choose the traditional bildungsroman, a genre reflecting the “male” goal-oriented system, in which elements such as progress, career, and reputation are central. In the beginning of the tetralogy it looks as if Martha is after this form of so-called self-realization. But she clashes with the system, and thus her classical quest fails. Her story progressively deviates from the male values that are inherent in the genre. Instead of efficiency, Martha discovers an “absence of movement.”473 Thanks to this absence, she arrives at a critical conclusion about her ambiguous situation. As a white colonial woman in Central Africa before and after World War II, she is, on the one hand, part of the “male” system in which Bildung is defined as civilization and progress. On the other hand, she comes to realize that this so-called improvement is an illusion.
From an intersectional angle, Susan Stanford Friedman has deepened and widened the study of race, gender, and genre by adding religion and postcolonialism to the mix in an analysis of three “diasporic, Muslim Bildungsromane.”474 She lists “ten key dimensions of religious formations,”475 taking into account “theological, cultural, and institutional” aspects.476 Friedman demonstrates how the novels under scrutiny undermine both the classic female bildungsroman and the stereotypical combination of religion with gender oppression. Moreover, religion here plays a crucial role in the plot, as “religion can function as a causal component of narrative becoming, not solely as a restrictive axis of power. Taken together, they demonstrate how Bildung plots integrate the complex, often contradictory components of identity into narratives of becoming, how intersectional identities (individual and plural) generate patterns of mobility and resolution that are variously teleological or open-ended.”477
The development of a personality is only one of the many potential plots in a narrative text. Nevertheless, considering the goal-oriented evolution, the self-expansion, and the desire to dominate the environment, this development of personality can function as a typical example of what traditional narratology calls a plot. According to Mária Brewer, these traditional plot definitions are strongly informed by male desire that is oriented toward separate, individual development and dominance and that is mostly expressed in stories full of adventures, undertakings, and projects.478 From that perspective many female stories seem hardly to have a plot at all. Supposedly they are static contemplations or descriptions of lives in which nothing happens. Feminist narratology counters this allegation by saying that the narration itself is the plot. That is where the adventure and desire hide. Communication not only provides the form but also the content, the plot of the narration.479 Only from a male, androcentric perspective can these texts be discarded as being “plotless” or as having a “weak plot.”
Often this seeming weakness undermines the male idea of narrativity and tellability. Jane Austen’s plots typically cover only a few months of the heroine’s life, “from the point in her life when she is eligible for marriage to the event of her wedding.”480 The pattern of the plot “follows a feminine inversion of the ancient ‘boy meets girl’ romance plot: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl and boy are united in the end.” The tension of the narrative does not reside in unexpected turns or surprising ends but in the detailed telling itself, which gives the reader the impression that he or she is witnessing something that actually happened: “Given the predictability of the outlines of Austen’s plots, the interest is of course all in the details, the subtle renditions of conversations and situations adding up to the powerful illusion that these figures are people.”481
Ruth Page locates the identification of “female plots” and “weak narrativity” within the canonization process. The canon has a preference for male texts and plots.482 At the same time, she indicates that other factors apart from gender come into play, that female authors can unfold well-designed plots as well, and that male narrations can just as frequently be plotless. According to her, a binary opposition between male and female plots is untenable. From an empirical study of oral narratives on childbirth, she concludes that the similarities between male and female narratives far outweigh the differences and that the initial feminist pairing of “male” with “plot” and of “female” with “plotless” is untenable: “Explaining linguistic differences in terms of gendered behaviour is not only reactionary in so far as it reinforces essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity, its explanatory power is also limited and overlooks the significance of the macro-level similarity between the narratives: that both women and men construct their experiences as a series of linked Anecdotes rather than as more conventional, plot-driven stories. At a basic level, the corollary of this is that a mutually exclusive categorization of storytelling style according to the gender of the speaker is simply untenable.”483
The interpretation of the plot as a form of desire is only one of the many ways in which feminist narratology imports that desire into theory. Writing, storytelling, and reading cannot be separated from the many shapes of desire, such as the desire for communication, understanding, and authority. Lanser explicitly interprets the introduction of desire as a critique of the so-called rational and scientific approach of structuralism. Desire is variable and therefore goes against the classical quest for fixed and universal categories. Desire is impure; it does not care for neat structuralist classifications. And desire is ungraspable; it cannot be reduced to what theory can tell us about it.484
Nevertheless, feminist narratology attempts to introduce desire into theory. Early on Teresa de Lauretis contributed to this effort with her essay “Desire in Narrative.”485 She reproaches the structuralists for treating narration exclusively as a product, an entity, and not as a process, a movement. As a product, a narrative text is reduced to a system of building blocks such as narration and focalization. Viewed as a process, a narrative text is a development through which a subject tries to design itself. This subject is not an abstract category such as the subject role in Greimas’s actantial model but an actual person anchored in both a historical and a psychological context. In this context gender plays a crucial role. On the one hand the story is the expression of a desire that is strongly inspired by gender; on the other hand the story precisely produces that desire. In this sense the desiring subject is created by the stories it creates. It is “a subject engendered, we might say, precisely by the process of its engagement in the narrative genres.”486
Desire’s dynamic is realized through narrative development, which often consists of some sort of quest. De Lauretis analyzes different structuralist approaches to narrative development—in, for instance, the work of Vladimir Propp, Yuri Lotman, and René Girard—and connects this with the Freudian view on subjective development, which also contains narrative elements. According to Freud, the child develops into an adult in a sequence of phases in which the oedipal conflict marks the fundamental transition. De Lauretis argues that Oedipus as a mythical figure is exemplary of narrative heroes: he wants to know and to reign. Woman simultaneously appears as an obstacle (the Sphinx’s riddle puts Oedipus to the test) and an object (Oedipus wants to possess the Sphinx’s knowledge and ultimately desires his mother). Woman is a necessary detour, a phase of transition as part of a boy’s transformation into a man. The hero in fiction and the child in psychoanalysis share the male desire to transgress the boundary, to occupy and dominate woman’s space.
Since the oedipal vicissitudes are “paradigmatic to all narratives,”487 narrative developments have to be associated with the conflict between, on the one hand, the male hero as the active subject and, on the other hand, the female obstacle as the passive object. Narratives are endless movements between these two poles. They create the differences, bridge them, and reproduce them. Therefore, “the work of narrative [ . . . ] is a mapping of differences, and specifically, first and foremost, of sexual difference into each text.”488 The desire to tell, live, and read stories must be seen from the perspective of this mapping of differences. Stories tempt the reader to identify with the subject, a man. For the female reader this temptation leads to an ambiguous identification, on the one hand with male desire and on the other hand with its female counterpart. This “double identification” is an example of the typical form of reasoning we have already encountered a number of times in feminist narratology.489 In this pattern of reasoning an opposition is set up between man and woman and then woman is shown to harbor this opposition in herself, which means that she is ambiguous.
To the extent that the double identification involves an identification with male desire, woman subjects herself to that male narrative template. In this way she can desire to be desired in the masculine way. But to the extent that she combines this with the female position of object and obstacle, she undermines the male position of subject and aspiring agent. This ambiguity too we have repeatedly noted in feminist discussions of narrative forms: on the one hand there is complicity and subordination, while on the other hand there is resistance and undermining. According to De Lauretis, narratology should not resolve this ambiguity nor ignore it but simply map it.
In narrative texts this “mapping” occurs through language that translates desire and the body. Oedipal narratives give both of them an ideological form. They point to locations of desire, erogenous zones, or danger zones—the gaze, for instance, which can kill the hero, as the myth of Medusa shows. Only by means of this translation does the female body seem to be truly defined. It seems as if only now it receives its essence. “That internal condition, the essence of femininity, is then a product of discourse,” a discourse that is propelled by “male pleasure.”490 Here as well, woman is seduced; she is invited to adopt and stage that discourse—literally, to embody it. The narrative expression of the body is one of the most obvious program points for a feminist narratology. As De Lauretis militantly puts it, “The stakes, for women, are rooted in the body.” Not only is the body the seat of desire and sexual difference, it is also “the supreme object of representation for the visual arts, the medical sciences, the capitalist media industry.”491
Traditional narrative language offers a representation of the body that does not fit the female experience. She is forced to look for a language of her own. Many feminist studies call this language “performative” because it does not translate a given identity but instead produces a subjectivity that is never entirely finished or fixed.492 This écriture féminine, a term canonized by Hélène Cixous, is supposed to give to the female body a voice that counteracts the male language of abstraction and subordination of that body.493
The traditional (psychoanalytical) view sees language as a process that installs boundaries and thereby divides and organizes the body. Only in this way does a human being receive an identity. A child supposedly lives in a boundless symbiosis with the environment; thanks to language, this symbiosis is replaced by a well-delineated identity. Ecriture féminine rejects this dichotomy and evolution: it wants to be a language of transgression and corporeality, a language in which identity is not fixed but in which it is always being sought. This quest is the movement of desire that never stops. In that sense the feminist subject is nomadic and escapes the conventional male categorization.494 The same holds for the body, which must not be trapped in definitions.
The language of narratology—and more generally of literary criticism—has to integrate this dynamic corporeality and subjectivity, and therefore it has to distance itself from the rigid, impersonal, and abstract discourse of structuralists and poststructuralists. In Nancy Miller’s words, the theory has to find a way “to reembody the author.”495 This theoretical attention to the corporeal must not lead to a new version of the traditional discourse that aims to master and subject everything. On the contrary, it must demonstrate its own dependence on the context in which it came into existence—including its preferences, predecessors, and backgrounds. For narratologists this means that they have to take their own stories into account. In this connection, Rosi Braidotti says, “I want to practice a set of narrations of my own embodied genealogy.”496 Feminist analysis is, according to Miller, localized; it is positioned in and by the context but refuses to settle down. This makes a general theory undesirable, which brings us back to the start of our discussion of feminist narratology.
With the topics of language and body, we have entered a research field that in recent years seems to have supplemented the Freudian logic of desire, although it is linked to poststructuralist versions of psychoanalysis, namely the field of affect theory.497 It is closely associated with queer theory through, for instance, the influential studies of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lauren Berlant.498 The term “affect” is defined in many different ways, but that may reflect its nature, as it is said to precede language, awareness, meaning, and intention. In those respects “affect” differs from “emotion” and “feeling.” The way affect is evoked and constructed by language is, not surprisingly, closely allied with the construction and performance of gender.
The so-called “affective turn” has left its traces in narratology,499 not just in feminist theory but also in cognitive studies, as we have explained when dealing with 4E cognition.500 As to feminism, Warhol’s study Having a Good Cry followed Sedgwick in her plea against a “paranoid” or “symptomatic” reading, characterized by distance and distrust as strategies to lay bare the so-called hidden and deeper meanings of a text. Warhol and Sedgwick advocate a “reparative reading,” based on empathy and pleasure.501
Mutsaers’s story ties in with a number of the feminist points of attention discussed above. For one, there is the female protagonist, who is indeed characterized by resistance and ambiguity. The girl resists the authoritarian riding master, but she wants power herself, more specifically, the power to fly. The character of the riding master too is more ambiguous than a first reading would suggest. At first the authoritarian behavior of the riding master evokes the old-fashioned image of man repressing woman. This image is strengthened by one of the meanings of the Dutch word for “riding master,” which is pikeur, a “womanizer.” In any case the riding master is an authoritarian figure who wants the girl to wear real riding breeches, but this particular pupil has her own thoughts concerning this rather resolutely expressed wish.
However, this sketch of the situation does not take into account the fact that the riding instructor may be a woman. This character is never referred to as “he.” In Dutch it is current practice to use the masculine word for an official in function even if it refers to a woman, and perhaps the narrator of this text follows this practice. There might not even be a feminine word in this case, because pikeuse does not seem to be correct Dutch. If the riding master is female, her words about the heavenly sensation that little girls have not yet experienced suggest that she is an adult who has had that experience. The fact that it is possible to see the riding master as a woman has another important consequence. It unmasks the “spontaneous” presupposition that the riding master has to be a man and thereby exposes the projection of an outdated prejudice, an idea about the hierarchy—evoked by Mutsaers in the shape of the whip—in the relationship between man and woman. This reading is not far-fetched for a text in which the wearing of certain trousers is a central motif. In Dutch de broek dragen (“to wear the pants”) is said of a woman who is in control of her husband.
Moreover, we must not forget that at the end of the text the girl “understands” why it is better to wear real riding breeches. The fact that the riding master’s sex cannot be determined conclusively enables at least two readings of this ending. In the conventional interpretation, in which the riding master is a man, his words turn out to be correct, and this appears to confirm or even strengthen his position of power. However, when the reference to “wearing the pants” is picked up, a reading in which Mutsaers at the same time undermines this power becomes possible as well. In the less straightforward interpretation in which the riding master is a woman, she may establish her authority only to show the girl the pleasure of the real riding breeches. This pleasure may even be taken as a metaphor for power in relation to men. In this context, riding the horse while wearing the right pants, together with the “wings” this gives to the rider, may even invite an erotic reading: the woman “mounts” the man and reaches an orgasm in this dominant position. This may be a little fanciful, but characterization and focalization do invite the reader to interpret this story in a feminist-narratological way. The acceptance of this invitation turns “Pegasian” into a text on sex and power and especially on the conventional images evoked by the interplay of these themes.
This feminist reading puts character and themes into perspective, and the ambiguous narration and representation of consciousness also tie in with the polyphonous female narration as characterized by Susan Lanser. This relates not only to the use of free indirect speech, which sometimes makes it impossible to distinguish the narrator’s voice from that of the character’s. There is also the girl’s voice, which as an ironic echo transforms the riding master’s words into questions. Literally as well as metaphorically, this transformation calls into question the discourse of authority. This questioning continues until the last lines of the story. The question “Is it the idea or is it the sensation?” is followed by a new question, this time without a question mark: “Whatever.” The absence of the question mark suggests that this “response-question” is the conclusion: one shouldn’t look for unequivocal answers to questions. Questions are answers. The answer to the story’s uncertainty—is it discipline or a game, an idea or sensation?—lies in the acceptance of that uncertainty. And it is precisely this acceptance that leads to transgression and thus to taking off. This is the girl’s desire as well as the riding master’s, a desire that constitutes a bridge not only between the characters but also between opposites such as discipline and game, or idea and feeling.
“The Map” also deals with a female character and authority. Mrs. Paalman from the bookshop wears the pants. Her name seems to carry a double sign of her manliness: paal (pole) can easily be regarded as a phallic symbol, and “man” is simply part of her name. That she is in control at home is suggested ironically by describing the bookstore as a living room: “It wasn’t any bigger than a large living room.” This transfers the traditional male traits to the woman, but apparently it does not imply an undermining of the existing stereotypes in the rest of the fictional world. The village (or the customer) accepts that literary preferences strongly depend on the sex of the reader. People ask for “a light novel for a girl of seventeen.”
The village seems to cherish other ideological stereotypes as well. The Christian ideology turns Sundays into days of rest. The shop is closed and shuttered: “Closed off from the world.” The first-person narrator is nonetheless allowed to look at a map and thus violates the stereotypical closed-off world. It calls on him to “bike” all places on the map. This desire is much more individualistic and much more aimed at mastery than Mutsaers’s Pegasian desire, which builds bridges. “What excited me was the thought that it now made sense to have been everywhere. The prospect I was going to cover the earth with my body. To be everywhere . . .” The self does not break free from the earth as in Mutsaers’s story, but it covers the earth, subjects it. The body becomes an instrument of power to conquer the earth by biking.
As soon as this conquest has taken place and everything has been mapped, the map is “meaningless” to the narrator. His desire has been satisfied and disappears. This stands in sharp contrast to the desire of Mutsaers’s girl, who does not disappear in her flight but instead lives on. With some hesitation one could see the individualistic, goal-oriented, and finite desire of Krol’s first-person narrator as an illustration of so-called male desire, while the transgressive and infinite desire of Mutsaers’s girl could be called feminine.
Focalization and narration could be connected to these two types of desire. In Krol’s text the story is told in retrospect. Just like the desire it features, the narrated period is definitively over. There is a distance in time between the narrator and the boy, which by itself suggests that the narrator has distanced himself from infantile desire. Mutsaers’s text features simultaneous narration and eagerly looks forward to the moment when “you take off.” There is no distance—not in perception, not in narration, and not with regard to the desire in question. Krol’s story may be felt to establish boundaries and breaks, while Mutsaers’s story can be seen as building bridges and crossing boundaries.
By way of illustration we have consciously opposed the two stories in a radical manner. This is of course a simplification that runs the risk of making essentialist claims about “male desires” and “female narrative forms.” Nevertheless, this reading also demonstrates that gender does play a role, even in stories that do not explicitly deal with relations between men and women. Undoubtedly this role can be described better or more easily in stories that do tackle these relations directly,502 but it is hard to claim that the use of a feminist reading has to depend on the importance of gender in the plot. This is not an objective criterion. To a certain extent readers can decide for themselves how important gender is for interpretation, and this decision will inevitably be influenced by the importance readers attach to the gender question outside the text. Even in a text that at first seems to have little to do with gender, readers may look for this ideological issue. There is no doubt that they will “discover” a number of things. The ideology found in a text is influenced by the ideology to which a reader adheres outside the text and vice versa: this “external” ideology is also influenced by the act of reading the text. In fact it plays a role only to the extent that it is activated by the text. The reader cannot step out of this hermeneutic circle by saying that literature objectively contains certain gender aspects.
“City” illustrates the importance of the reader in gender issues. The character, whose name we have not mentioned so far, is called Tuitel. In Dutch this may be a noun, referring to the spout of a kettle, or an adjective, meaning “unstable, wobbly, unsteady.” If readers are inclined to use stereotypical gender frames, they may regard this name as an indication of one of the traditional negative traits ascribed to woman, namely her inconstancy rendered famous in Shakespeare’s “Frailty, thy name is woman.” The title of the book that includes “City” is Het Tuitel complex (The Tuitel complex), which may be read as an ironic undermining of the traditional Oedipus complex. The latter is dominated by male desire, struggle, and purposefulness. The former, as can be seen in Tuitel’s aimless wanderings that fill the book, is characterized by the lack of these traits. This may be a further encouragement to the reader to interpret the seemingly plotless and endless travels of Tuitel as a feminine deconstruction of the male travel narrative.
Travelers typically have a clear objective, either serious (e.g., exploration, combat) or light and carefree (e.g., holidays). In the Wasco narrative this kind of purpose is hard to detect. If there is any well-known travel plot evoked by the sequence of panels, it could be the one-day visit to a city. The main character seems to be strolling around the city without a clear route or guide. It remains uncertain whether Tuitel has enjoyed her- or himself or has learned anything by the end of the day. The lack of facial expressions and words makes it impossible to decide on this. The frame of a tourist trip may be suggested, but it is never attested. And as there is no clear end or aim to the wandering, it undermines the idea of Bildung popular in these types of narrative.
Plot (aimless wandering) and genre (travel narrative) may thus be read from a gender perspective. However, the most salient narrative element for a gender reading of “City” is probably the main character. Its clothes look like a dress, or like a shirt with a skirt. That would make Tuitel feminine, if it weren’t for paratextual indications that say otherwise. The blurb on the back cover of the book talks about “mister Tuitel and his dog Phiwi” (and once more underscores the lack of clear plots, stating that the drawings “build a labyrinth in which we are invited to go astray”). In this way the reader’s default option (“a character wearing a dress or a skirt is feminine”) is queered, and the character becomes something in between male and female.
In the preface to the book, the author says that he is showing us his world but not in the referential, autobiographical sense of the word. He presents us with the world of comics, which is the universe he, as an author, inhabits: “My panels are no longer windows through which you can look at the outer world. They are windows through which you look at a comic strip.” This statement of authorial intention may be taken as an antireferential form of poetics, and the gendered reading we have presented can be seen as a refusal to accept authorial intentions at face value. More generally, such a reading is a rejection of the divide between text and context, narrative and reality, though, as we said, it wants to avoid the trappings of simple mimeticism. This is one of the central difficulties we have encountered in our discussion of feminist narratology: it must link text with context, narrative with reality, and it must avoid reducing the first to the second.
In developing a particular politics of narrative form,503 postcolonial narratology mostly probes narrative texts for the issues that postcolonial theory has moved to the center of literary and cultural criticism. In the view of Hanne Birk and Birgit Neumann these issues are identity construction, alterity, and hybridity.504 In the catalog offered by Gerald Prince they also include “migrancy [ . . . ], fragmentation, diversity, power relations.”505 As postcolonial narratology connects these themes and motifs with the aspects of form covered in classical and postclassical narratology, it represents a strong example of “ideological critique,” which according to Amy Elias “examines the ways in which subjects both incorporate and resist definitions of life-world and selfhood structured by hegemonic social powers,” in this case with a specific focus on narrative.506 As a “critical” narratology, postcolonial narratology is therefore primarily a form of narratological criticism that in its ideal form “reveals the political unsaid of both the text and the social conditions that produced it.”507
Put more neutrally, postcolonial narratology is a form of “thematic narratology” in the terms used by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. In this respect it can be aligned with “feminist, queer, ethnic or minority-related” approaches to narrative.508 Roy Sommer categorizes postcolonial narratology under the heading of “corpus-based approaches,” which, as we mentioned earlier, he sets in opposition to “process-oriented approaches,” such as rhetorical and cognitive narratology.509
The fact that postcolonial narratology derives its position in the field of postclassical theories from its themes and corpus may hint at a central problem—the relative lack of unique methods, concepts, and theories. As Sue J. Kim makes clear when considering the state of the discipline, “there has yet been little theoretically and methodologically sustained engagement in the manner of Robyn Warhol and Susan Lanser on the relationship between feminist theory and narratology.”510 Her explanation points to a resistance on the part of postcolonial critics (and therefore, we might add, perhaps also to a hesitation on the part of theoretically inclined narratologists): “White and Western theorists speak the universal, analytical voice, while the minority text is the single instantiation; the narrative theory is the langue, the minority texts merely the parole. Postcolonial and/or ethnic studies’ multidisciplinary and ideological, historical readings become extratextual, specific, while the narrative theory is transcendent, universal, and ahistorical.”511 If theory continues to be regarded as a sign of hegemony, then postcolonial narratology may well forever remain “anticipatory, at least in terms of terminological and modular precision.”512 Still, if the resistance to theory can be overcome, the concerns of postcolonial theory should have a serious impact on narratology at large, perhaps even to the point of “decolonizing” the discipline, as Kim proposes.
Fludernik articulates the fundamental relevance of postcolonial narratology when arguing “that issues of identity and alterity are relevant to all narratives, even though—for thematic and ideological reasons—they seem to be more prominently addressed in postcolonial texts.”513 In our ongoing attempt as human beings to perform our social roles, we all tell a variety of stories to define ourselves, and in the process we also define the other. The narrative constructions of identity and alterity, not just by individuals but also by groups and cultures, are two sides of the same coin. Although perhaps in somewhat more sophisticated ways than their everyday counterparts, artistic narratives obviously partake of these constructions, turning them into visible and teachable instances of ideology. Importantly, (cultural) identity and alterity are always temporary products in a never-ending process of construction, which leads not only to a fragmentation of the self but also to a great variety of narrative resources to accomplish the perpetual task of (self-)narration. These general notions evidently take on more weight when considered against the background of the power struggle in the (post)colonial situation, which therefore merits consideration when trying to integrate the notions of identity and alterity into narratology.
Postcolonial theory highlights narrative “othering” as a “reflection of the colonial scenario in which imperial power and knowledge impact on the native population.”514 According to Birk and Neumann, it is therefore one of the tasks of postcolonial narratology “to describe narrative strategies that help to construct stereotypical representations of the Other, and also to analyze their function,”515 and, with a tip of the hat to the work of Frantz Fanon, “to investigate how literary texts stage the interiorisation [by the other] of attributed characteristics [that mark the self as other].”516
Since postcolonial hybridity is conceived as a positive alternative to the binary oppositions of Western identity construction (Homi K. Bhabha), it also seems imperative “to find out which narratological categories are especially useful to examine the narrative evocation” of such a subversive mix.517 In another founding contribution (inspired by various linguistic aspects of narration), Marion Gymnich518 has thus singled out for narratological treatment in postcolonial texts “the linguistic relation between narrators and characters, strategies of incorporating (untranslated) foreign language material into literary texts, the relative status attributed to the different types of language and the respective roles of the narrator and narratee as translator or cultural mediator and as recipient of translated or mediated linguistic and cultural information.”519
While the program laid out by Birk and Neumann may sound somewhat activist, it could very well lead to the refinement of narrative theory. Given the special importance of perspective in the postcolonial context, the study of the interaction of various angles in the same text might for instance result in a more detailed description of (in)stability in focalization. This is just one of the possibilities allowed by Prince, who sketches a postcolonial narratology that “would inflect and perhaps enrich” classical and postclassical narratology “by wearing a set of postcolonial lenses to look at narrative.”520
This enhanced narratology is not bound to a corpus of (post)colonial texts, but it seeks to integrate and highlight the potential effects of postcolonial issues on narrative form. Since narratology is focused not only on what all narratives have in common but also on the ways they “differ from one another qua narratives,” asking postcolonial questions could strengthen the theory.521 Channeling the essay by Gymnich, as well as Fludernik’s early call for links between narratology and postcolonial studies,522 Prince concludes that on the level of narration “the accentuation [ . . . ] of characteristics like the linguistic power or the communal representativeness of the narratorial voice would foster the (classificatory) study of texts in terms of the ways they utilize such characteristics.”523
A wider possible object of study on the level of narration would be the narrator’s entire diegetic situation, which would deserve extra attention in postcolonial narratology “given the hybridities and inconstancies, tensions, rifts, and shifts in the status, expression, and character of postcolonial entities and their contexts.”524 On the level of the narrated, Prince points for instance to “such postcolonially marked themes and preoccupations as the old, the new, nostalgia and hope, authentic and fake beginnings and ends, or memory, amnesia and anamnesis” to motivate a further inquiry into the transition from story to narrative with respect to time.525
It will be clear from these examples that Prince, in order to make what he considers a necessary distinction between postcolonial narratology and postcolonial narratological criticism, has produced an ahistorical set of concerns. These concerns can indeed be derived from the entire body of postcolonial theory, but in doing so Prince loses some of the theory’s ideological thrust. He has been taken to task for this by Kim, for whom postcolonialism is not an “option” (witness Prince’s repeated use of the modals “could” and “might” in his presentation of the many possibilities for postcolonial narratology) but a fundamental aspect of the world in which we live.526 Unlike Prince, whom she reproaches for reinforcing the distinction between history and form, Kim wants to get rid of it. According to her, every narratology (even in its most theoretical form as classical narratology) is bound to a specific historical context.527
Roy Sommer also rejects Prince’s contribution as a reductive exercise in structuralist narratology. According to him, postcolonial narratology would be superfluous “if we were only interested in refining existing narratological distinctions without inquiring how the complexities and ambiguities of multicultural and trans-cultural identities are dealt with in narrative fiction.”528 However, for the theory to improve, which is necessary for an academic discipline to develop and flourish, a degree of abstraction will have to take place. In our section on cultural narratology we will propose an approach to the inclusion of context into theory that may be less burdened by its ideological load than its postcolonial counterpart is.529
“Pegasian” is about the exercise of power. The riding master is supposed to teach the female protagonist how to ride a horse, but it is clear he or she relishes his or her position of superiority in doing so. When the exchange with the girl has slowed the other horses in the carousel, the riding master brings out the whip to enforce his or her will. These elements of the story might well evoke a time-honored scenario in which the colonizer is seen to educate the colonized as part of the system of oppression developed to extract the maximum of benefits from the colony. Providing the natives with good Western skills boosts local efficiency, and imposing the culture of the colonizer in the process constantly rehearses the arrogance needed to buttress power.
This common account chides the oppressor and foregrounds the terrible abuse of the local population. But is it acceptable to let this scenario determine a reading of the Mutsaers story? Since the riding school might be regarded as an environment for (the children of) the rich, the comparison trivializes the situation of those who truly suffered from violent subjugation. Still, if we suspend this pertinent objection for a moment, the colonial scenario may provide perspectives that might be worth pursuing in a reading of “Pegasian.” In our application of feminist narratology to Mutsaers we realized that the riding master could be a woman. When bringing postcolonial concerns to the story, the colonial scenario makes us see that our default race for the condescending riding master is Caucasian. Needless to say, there are other possibilities, and the girl does not have to be white either. Let us consider two of the many permutations.
If the girl were African American and the instructor Caucasian, the story could play out as a relatively simple version of colonial oppression in which the colonized girl at first betrays her ignorance by asking irrelevant questions but eventually “understands” the importance of the riding breeches. In this reading the colonial riding master typically betrays his or her impatience and does not hesitate to resort to the whip to reinstate power. As an instructor, the riding master “others” the girl as an ignoramus who simply ought to listen instead of “shooting off her mouth.” In this way the story turns into a relatively simple allegory of the colonial scenario, which exposes the psychological aspects of white condescension through a strongly negative characterization of the riding master. Since the girl’s “understanding” contains elements of fantasy (“the horse gives those wings to you”), in this reading it certainly does not undermine the colonizer’s projection of ignorance.
If the girl were Asian American and the instructor African American, the story could become a study in American race relations, with both protagonists possibly activating their stereotyped images of the other. Do their respective behaviors feed off these images, or do they approach each other with respect? Do they accept the terms of the didactic contract, or do they instead flout the conventions the riding school situation entails? If the instructor is African American, that certainly does not seem to affect his or her use of power. True to the American cliché “black aggression/Asian docility and dedication,” the instructor overpowers the girl. However, true to the associated cliché “black failure/Asian success,” the Asian American girl might consider herself more intelligent than the riding master, and that might be backed up by the suggestion that she takes a long time accepting her own supposed ignorance. In fact she might ultimately be seen not to accept it at all, since her idea that “the riding breeches give the horse wings, and the horse gives those wings to you” could be construed as a subversive thought, which does not coincide with the instructor’s (unmentioned, but probably rational) knowledge about the breeches and perhaps even makes fun of him or her.
What is more important is that even though we present it as the focus of a possible interpretation, the mere thought of the clichés above takes this reading into politically suspect territory, since we are two Caucasian academics from Europe who could be thought to further the stereotypes by simply bringing them up, and therefore to turn the people involved into “others.” However, given the apparent lack, in this second reading, of a single conclusion in the confrontation between the two races, the point must be that by leaving gaps in the characterization of the protagonists, Mutsaers has created a fictional arena that allows us to put identity and alterity on the interpretive agenda without privileging any particular point of view.
This returns us to the initial objection concerning the connection between the riding school situation and the colonial scenario. The interpretive profit we expect to derive from a postcolonial narrative analysis of “Pegasian” is predicated on this link. Therefore, we must weigh the value of the various new interpretations (and their combination, which sheds even more light on identity and alterity as never-ending constructions) against the reproach that we belittle actual pain by relating it to a fictional situation with little or no discomfort for the main characters.
The preceding pages indicate that we believe it is worthwhile to develop the postcolonial reading(s) of “Pegasian,” not least because they radically analyze the notion of identity construction and its possibly pernicious effects on the other. In other words, we think the potentially “colonizing” nature of the connection between riding school and colonial scenario will be unmasked and contested as a result of the many postcolonial readings it can provoke. Even if in some of the possible interpretations historical victims play the role of the oppressor, as we have just shown in our second reading, these extreme cases allow for a useful dramatization of inequities in the world today.
Aliens are certainly some of the most widely known embodiments of the other. They are outlandish creatures that shake up normality and threaten what “we” consider our values. Think Invaders from Mars (1953 and 1986) as relatively straightforward movie versions of this dualistic story and Mars Attacks (1996) as a satirical version of it. Although in “City” the protagonist and his or her dog do not have the monstrous traits that would immediately suggest aggressive intentions on their part, the mere fact that they land in what looks like a spaceship gives them a fundamental difference compared to “us.” How does the story handle this inevitable “othering”? Our answer to this question develops some of our earlier ideas about the story. As they walk through the city, the little stranger and the dog could of course be on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for a later invasion, but their actions, as we have already suggested, are more like those of tourists, who take a genuine interest in the new environment, point to something they notice (the bird in panel six), enjoy art (panels twelve and thirteen), stop to relish a view (panel ten), and even sit down on a bench for a moment of repose (panel seventeen). Furthermore, they are so tiny and cute that they hardly seem to pose a threat. If they are indeed aliens, they might just have been dispatched out of curiosity about a different civilization.
We do not know where they come from and how unlike their world is from ours, but they certainly visit what must appear to us as a strange town. So in fact the story presents us with two instances of otherness, and it is exactly this double alterity that could give direction to a postcolonial reading of “City.” As we have already indicated in our interpretation of this story in the section on possible world theory, Wasco’s city is so strange it produces more questions than answers, and a default reaction to that on the part of the reader could be to look for recognizable elements in order to diminish the alienation that the weirdness of the setting might create. The bird in panel six, the various sidewalks, and the art show in panel thirteen can certainly help to reach this goal, and while the architecture and urbanization are definitely bizarre, they seem to have required an ingenuity with which readers might be familiar.
In our view, the size and look of the two visitors can also contribute to alleviating the reader’s confusion when developing the “City” storyworld. As already suggested, they do not look dangerous. In fact they are funny enough to make us feel at ease, and the friendly dog in particular adds an element of peaceful normality despite what we perceive as unusual. Maybe for the visitors this is just another city, which would explain their quiet behavior, but in the interpretation developed here this consideration is overruled by the reader’s quite normal wish to come to terms with a world he or she can only find quite strange.
The two alterities in the story do not compete, nor do they cancel each other out; rather they both feature elements that enable us to behave like the little alien and the dog when visiting the city along with them. We might feel like pointing to the interesting artwork or quietly admiring the imagination of the architects who designed the buildings. Wasco has presented a remarkable world that is sufficiently friendly for us so that we do not have to adjust the identity we perform in its assembly. This allows for at least two different interpretive responses. If the story merely reinforces the identity of those who process it and does not call attention to itself for doing so, “City” might be reproached for the domestication of alterity typical of the colonial scenario. With its harmless visitors and its somewhat quaint setting, the story definitely takes the sting out of the challenge these alterities might pose for the status quo. If the redoubling of strange elements makes the notion of “other” elements explicit, “City” can be said to thematize alterity in pointing us to the ease with which we project “our” experiences and values on “their” reality. Obviously this does not mean that the story eventually has to be considered subversive, just that it may entail a consideration of “our” reflexes in a confrontation with the other.
Just like our postcolonial reading of “Pegasian,” this interpretation of “City” may be decried as an instance of harmful armchair criticism because it relates a fundamental issue like identity/alterity to what looks like a fancy comic strip about a visit from outer space. In this reading we even make an extra move, in the sense that we could be seen to dehumanize alterity by extending the other to the impression made by a city that may lack a human population.
People rarely invent stories from scratch. There are millions of stories out there, circulating through society and influencing our way of thinking and behaving. Narratives, as Arthur W. Frank says, “inform human life. Stories inform in the sense of providing information, but more significantly, stories give form—temporal and spatial orientation, coherence, meaning, intention, and especially boundaries—to lives that inherently lack form.”530 This is a two-way street: people tell stories, and stories shape people. More generally, people structure what is (objectively) out there and are (subjectively) structured in the process of doing so.
The interaction between subject and object is the most general dimension of the framework for the following discussion of cultural narratology and socio-narratology. They both want to grasp the interaction between preexisting stories circulating in society and individual stories using these templates. This back and forth is common to literary narratives and everyday stories: they both inevitably draw on templates for storytelling. Narrative templates take many forms, ranging from clichés, presuppositions, and stereotypes to commonplaces, topoi, doxas, and received ideas. As Ruth Amossy and Anne Herschberg Pierrot have demonstrated, each kind of template has its own way of structuring individual narratives.531 Preexisting templates offer possibilities, but they also imply constraints. The study of how readers process these templates forms the core business of social and cultural narratology.
This broad label covers a wide variety of narrative studies that look at the link between stories and the social context in which they appear and function.532 These efforts range from quite specific to very broad. The “socionarratological approach” David Herman advocated in 1999 is an example of the former.533 It relies on Labovian sociolinguistics and to a lesser extent on discourse analysis, pragmatics, and cognitive science (especially with regard to “narrative competence”) to overcome the problems associated with classical, structuralist narratology.534 Structuralism not only separated narratives from their context; it further reduced them to abstract deep structures, thereby losing the concrete, social functions of narratives. Herman seeks to realign stories with their “linguistic, cognitive, and contextual factors.”535
While this proposal limits the scope of socio-narratology to linguistic and cognitive elements, the “socio-narratology” put forward by Mark Currie takes contextualization much further by including the social, cultural, and political implications of narratives.536 This type of narratology gives up its classical stance of objectivity and neutrality, because it strives for “an ideological unmasking which operates at the level of engaged textual analysis.”537 This entails a view on narrative—partly influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida—that exceeds the structuralist definitions: “narratives are not inventions of the mind but political and ideological practices as much a part of the material texture of reality as bombs and factories, wars and revolutions.”538
Situated between these two extremes of a sociolinguistic and a political socio-narratology is the narrative theory proposed by Arthur W. Frank.539 His Letting Stories Breathe, subtitled A Socio-Narratology, combines a detailed analysis of six narrative texts with a view to their contextual creation, function, and circulation. Frank does not distinguish literary narratives from everyday storytelling but draws attention to what they do in real life, that is, in their social context. To elucidate this practical functioning, he makes use of the “praxiological theory” developed by Pierre Bourdieu. More specifically, Frank develops the concept of “narrative habitus.”540 He combines it with the work of Anne Harrington to study the interaction between preexisting templates and individual narratives.
To elucidate the concept of narrative habitus, it is necessary to summarize Bourdieu’s basic scheme of linking up objective conditions (which he studies as “structures”) with their subjective transformations (or “structurings,” in his terminology). According to Bourdieu, any practice (in our case: of storytelling and interpretation) is the result of an interplay between on the one hand the habitus—the system of dispositions of a person or a group—and on the other hand the more or less institutionalized context or field.541 These two factors are structured by objective conditions such as sex, class, and economic capital. The habitus is the interiorization of those conditions; the field their exteriorization. To the extent that habitus and field are structured by the same conditions, they have been prestructured to work in unison. This is basically an implicit and latent process in which the individual only has to follow his or her own inclination (habitus) to do exactly what he or she has to do according to the institution in which he or she functions. For instance, anyone applying for an academic job typically has the right (i.e., the minimal) requirements for the job. Bourdieu recognizes that there are exceptions, but these, he claims, are rare and are filtered out in the process of alignment between habitus and field.
Groups sharing the same narrative habitus would make up what Ansgar Nünning calls “‘narrative communities,’ i.e. communities forged and held together by the stories their members tell about themselves and their culture as well as by conventionalized forms of storytelling and cultural plots.”542 They could also be called “interpretive communities”543 or “discursive communities.”544 Any reader or storyteller is always part of at least one such community, and this structures his or her use and interpretation of narratives.
Frank distinguishes four dimensions of the narrative habitus. First, he says, “narrative habitus involves a repertoire of stories that a person at least recognizes and that a group shares.” Next, “narrative habitus provides the competence to use this repertoire as embodied and mostly tacit knowledge. Narrative habitus is the feel for what story makes a good follow-up to a previous story; what story fits which occasion; who wants to hear what story when.” Third, the narrative habitus involves “a person’s taste in stories, with taste predicting which future stories a person will be open to.”545 Finally, it implies a “tacit knowledge” that leads to “predictable plot completions: if people are told an incomplete story, how will they complete the plot?”546
Frank proposes “a distinction between stories that people tell about their own lives and commonly available narratives that are the resources people use to construct their own stories.”547 This ties in with our two-way interaction between narrative templates circulating in a culture and personal narratives told by people, including literary authors.548 Frank refers to Anne Harrington’s The Cure Within to distinguish between stories and narratives.549 Harrington holds that
stories are living, local, and specific. They are the things we read in books and newspapers, hear on the bus, tell over dinner, and use to guide behavior and experience. They refer to immediate, concrete events, people, scientific findings, and more. Narratives, however, are templates: they provide us with tropes and plotlines that help us understand the larger import of specific stories we hear, read, or see in action. They also help us construct specific stories of our own—including ones about our own experience—that others can recognize and affirm. We learn these narrative templates from our culture, not in the way we might formally learn the rules of grammar in school, but in the way we might unconsciously learn the rules of grammar at home—by being exposed to multiple individual examples of living stories that rely on them.550
This distinction between story and narrative unfortunately is confusing, since it does not align with the clear narratological meaning of the two terms: story is the reconstructed chronological order, or Genettean histoire, whereas narrative is the way the story is organized for the audience, that is, Genettean récit (see chapter 2 of this handbook). Still, the distinction between concrete stories and cultural templates is essential, and the idea that these templates are culturally structured and acquired implicitly connects with Bourdieu’s ideas on the embodiment of objective conditions. These templates are not simply out there (in the various fields, such as the typical stories of the distracted professor in the academic field or of the brave soldier in the military field); they are also “in here,” embodied, sedimented into our dispositions, our more or less conscious tendencies and cognitive schemes. It is precisely because of their double nature that cultural templates can become forces for creating and interpreting personal and literary narratives. The double nature reflects the reconciliation between field and habitus presented above. This harmonization provides the individual with a degree of freedom to adapt and transform templates. In the next section we call this “narrative negotiation,” denoting the give and take between the personal and the cultural that takes place in this process of adapting what is out there to what is “in here.”
Although Frank takes his cue from Bourdieu, he reduces the latter’s sociological scheme to a form of dialogue. More specifically, he combines Bourdieu with Wayne Booth’s view on narrative as a dialogue directed by an implied author and demanding reciprocal respect between the partners in the conversation. Stories should be treated as friends; telling and interpreting stories is subjected to a type of “ethical criticism”551 that Bourdieu would no doubt relegate to “the imaginary anthropology of subjectivism.”552 To Bourdieu, (authorial) intentions are post hoc rationalizations of the dispositions contained in the habitus.553
As Astrid Erll and Simone Roggendorf have shown in their illuminating historical overview of cultural narratology,554 there is an enormous variety in this field, ranging from New Historicism in the late 1980s to cognitive studies in the late 2010s.555 On the most general level an understanding of the uses of culturally determined narrative templates could start from Stephen Greenblatt’s poetics of culture.556 Much like Bourdieu, he investigates the conditions that inform practices and ideas, especially the aesthetic experience. Greenblatt’s search for “the objective conditions of this enchantment” leads him to a process that is first and foremost cultural,557 whereas the same search led Bourdieu to social and economic processes. According to Greenblatt, “the power of art” and more generally of any cultural product, including narrative,558 depends upon the success of the twofold interaction, mentioned above, between a particular narrative and the “collective genres, narrative patterns, and linguistic conventions” upon which they depend.559 Any kind of storytelling includes the transformation of “a set of received stories and generic expectations.”560
Wolfgang Müller-Funk studies this transformation in his attempt to develop “a narrative theory of disciplines that study culture.”561 He starts from the idea that “narrative is a very powerful—maybe even the most powerful—symbolic ‘weapon’ in structuring a world that is always, in the end, a cultural one.”562 With references to speech act theory and Wittgenstein’s language games, Müller-Funk submits that narratives constitute social and collective reality. With a reference to postpsychoanalytic theories of the narrative self, he claims that narratives are also essential in the construction of individual identity.563 The question then becomes, “To what extent is there a difference between the narrative, identity-forming templates of the individual and those of the grand narratives of the society in which the individual’s life is embedded?”564 Just like Frank and Bourdieu,565 Müller-Funk points to the embodiment as the central link between general and individual: “The present investigation starts from the idea that ‘transcendental’ entities that cannot be experienced, such as society and nation, are translated into experience as they are constructed in ‘bodily’ and everyday practices.”566
More specifically, individual and collective narratives make use of “the same reservoir: the stock of narrative forms.”567 Müller-Funk locates this reservoir and this construction in the implicit realm of common sense. He even adds that the most important narrative templates—that is, those that have a determining influence—are not explicit but implicit.568 They circulate in media coverage, advertisements, and other contexts (fields, in Bourdieu’s terminology) that use a general narrative template when telling a story that seems to be particular.569 They legitimize what is generally accepted (but abstract, transcendental, not experienced) by turning it into a particular narrative (concrete, daily, corporeal, experienced).570
To Müller-Funk “there is by definition no culture possible without narratives and narrating.”571 He holds that shared narrative templates form the basis of any culture, defined as a narrative community: “Without doubt, narratives are the foundation of collective, national ideas and are constitutive of the politics of identity and difference. Cultures can always be seen as narrative communities that distinguish themselves by their narrative reservoir.”572 Individual narratives contribute to this community formation because every narrative, in Müller-Funk’s view, entails a combination of personal and communal elements.
The narrative meeting point between the collective and the individual here goes hand in hand with an interaction between culture and psychology. This connects with the work of Jerome Bruner, the psychologist and narrative theorist who stressed the constructive as well as the identity- and community-making aspect of culture and its narratives: “By virtue of participation in culture, meaning is rendered public and shared. Our culturally adapted way of life depends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and depends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiating differences in meaning and interpretation.”573 Culture, in Bruner’s view, imposes itself in narrative forms, more specifically via templates.574 Bruner talks of “prototype narratives,”575 that is, “a community’s stored narrative resources and its equally precious tool kit of interpretive techniques: its myths, its typology of human plights, but also its traditions for locating and resolving divergent narratives.”576
Mieke Bal, who started out as one of the founding classical, structuralist narratologists, quickly became uneasy with the context-free close readings structuralism tended to favor and therefore turned “narrative analysis into an activity of cultural analysis.”577 The various editions of her path-breaking book Narratology, which appeared between 1985 and 2017, show an ever-increasing interest in cultural context. She herself mentions “the insistance [sic], in this third edition, on the cultural status of narrative”578 and repeatedly underlines her “move from narratology to cultural analysis.”579 Bal argues that narrative interpretation is always “both subjective and susceptible to cultural constraints.”580 Her combination of cultural analysis and narratology has developed into a form of cultural criticism that does not shy away from political and ideological statements.581 Even in the preface to the first edition of Narratology, Bal had already had this to say about her discipline: “I have myself used this theory for both aesthetic and political criticism, and found soon enough that these cannot, or should not, be separated. Hence, the need of more theory, beyond narratology.”582 While cultural narratology does not always go this far, any analysis obviously has ideological and political implications.
A practical example of the two-sided process by which narratives inform culture and vice versa is provided by Alan Nadel’s work on “a privileged American narrative” of the 1950s: the story of containment.583 This typical story installs a dual relation between the safe haven of American domesticity (inside) and the threat of the communist and foreign outside world. As such it mediates between the individual and the collective, the small scale and the political: “Setting up a mythic nuclear family as the universal container of democratic values, the cultural narratives of my childhood made personal behavior part of a global strategy at the same time as they personalized the international struggle with communism.”584 The containment narrative invents a world of endangered security that not only becomes factual in American life during the Cold War but that also depends upon this life and, more generally, upon national and international political relations. Again, creation and reproduction go hand in hand: “Narratives are not the opposite of facts, but rather their source and their condition of possibility.” Again, the personal narrative depends upon the template it negotiates: “Personal narration is required for any form of historical narrative and also, necessarily, disrupts it.”585 The personal retelling takes care of the reproduction and the dissemination of the cultural narrative, “with a contagion that resembles viral epidemics.”586
An eye-opening study of the link between cultural stereotypes and narrative devices is Challenging Canada, by Gabriele Helms, who starts from the observation that “many contemporary Canadian novels call into question ideas of Canada as a benign and tolerant country.”587 These novels give voice to what the cultural doxa habitually excludes, such as (post)colonial racism, sexual abuse, and incest. Helms takes the idea of voice literally and tries to show how multivoiced narrative devices challenge the authoritative voice of doxa. The prevailing cultural images are studied “as socio-historical constructions”588; the narrative devices are studied in terms of “Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism.”589
This link between sociocultural images and narrative devices is what cultural narratology amounts to for Helms: “To treat dialogism only as a literary device would diminish and depoliticize Bakhtin’s approach. Only a few steps have been taken, however, towards a cultural criticism of literature, especially Canadian literature, that uses dialogism to consider formal practices within social contexts. I believe that cultural narratology would enable us to recognize that narrative techniques are not neutral and transparent forms to be filled with content, and that dialogic relations in narrative structures are ideologically informed.”590
As Helms concedes, “the examination of ideological signification in narrative structures” does not imply that a given narrative technique inevitably has one particular ideological signification.591 The Proteus principle developed by Meir Sternberg holds here: “in different contexts [ . . . ] the same form may fulfill different functions and different forms the same function.”592 This goes right to the heart of cultural narratology, which wants “to examine the connections between narrative forms and the historically determined understandings of reality that inform them.”593 In Helms’s words, a narrative “is not merely reactive”; it also involves “radical action,” challenging prevailing cultural stories and schemes.594
In the words of Ansgar Nünning, who has made a series of contributions to cultural narratology,595 narratives do not merely circulate and pass on “mental dispositions, i.e. dominant ways of thinking, convictions, norms, and structures of knowledge as they demarcate a culture.”596 Narratives are “cognitive forces”597: they actively create and transform mental schemes, cultural norms, and so on. Cultural narratology therefore should look at the two-sided interaction between culture and narrative. As Nünning puts it, “Cultural narratology strives to cross the border between textual formalism and historical contextualism, and [ . . . ] to close the gaps between narratological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis by putting the analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of context-sensitive interpretations of novels.”598 In 2013 he pithily defined cultural narratology as “a theory of narration whose theoretical groundwork takes into account the cultural determination of narratives, the historical variation of narrative forms, and the cultural relevance of narratives.”599
To schematize this dynamic of (re)structuring and being structured, Nünning develops a three-dimensional model based on Paul Ricœur’s three components of mimesis.600 To come to “a clarification of the relation between, on the one hand, narratives, esp. cultural narratives, and, on the other hand, their contexts and culture,”601 Nünning distinguishes between three aspects: “prefiguration” (narratives are culturally formed; in Bourdieu’s terms this would equal “being structured”), “configuration” (narratives feature what structures them in their own specific way), and “refiguration” (narratives may transform existing models and forms; in Bourdieu’s terms this would equal “[re]structuring”). These three terms make clear “to what extent narratives fall back on culturally available plots and prefigured narrative templates.”602 For instance, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge can be said to toy with preexisting cultural narratives about plots to destroy America. These templates belong to the prefiguration. The way Pynchon’s novel may be thought to play with these templates makes up the configuration. If Pynchon’s novel actually succeeds in transforming the cultural stereotypes (e.g., by convincing readers that his plot is actually more “realistic” than the doxa), it is responsible for the “refiguration” of cultural templates and thereby affects the worldview of these readers. Typically, this “refiguration” will affect only some aspects of a template while other aspects remain in place.603
With the approaches outlined above, it is clear the production and meaning of narratives must be studied within the concrete social and cultural context in which these narratives arise and function. Narrative theory must incorporate the production and processing of narratives as a form of negotiation in which “cultural materials” are circulated and transformed, not just by authors, but also by readers and institutions.604 “A culture,” Greenblatt claims, “is a particular network of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas, and—through institutions like enslavement, adoption, or marriage—people.”605 Goods, ideas, and people are examples of “cultural materials,” a term that combines the traditionally distinct symbolic and materialistic approaches to culture and that shows just how inseparable these two aspects are. Any so-called social object is a cultural construct, which in its turn depends upon these objects.
So, cultural materials are exchanged and thereby circulate through culture. This process involves a negotiation in two senses of the word. First, negotiation means coming to terms with cultural ideas or topics, some of which may be quite thorny to navigate, as a driver might negotiate a (sharp) curve. Second, negotiation indicates that the form, range, and freedom of the circulation is open to a continuous give and take: some materials are easier to circulate than others, and some forms of transmission are more acceptable than others. Circulation and negotiation affect all cultural materials, including literary works of art. From this perspective literary writers may become skilled manipulators of cultural materials: “Through their ability to construct resonant stories, their command of effective imagery, and above all their sensitivity to the greatest collective creation of any culture—language—literary artists are skilled at manipulating this economy. They take symbolic materials from one zone of the culture and move them to another, augmenting their emotional force, altering their significance, linking them with other materials taken from a different zone, changing their place in a larger social design.”606
Greenblatt regards works of art as “products of collective negotiation and exchange.”607 The value, meaning, and “power of art” arise in a process of “half-hidden cultural transaction” that moves “cultural materials [ . . . ] from one culturally demarcated zone to another” and thereby produces a “cultural circulation of social energy.”608 In Bourdieu’s terms one would say that narratives travel from one field to another, for example, from the journalistic field (a story in newspapers) to the literary field (the story adapted for a novel), or from religion to law (e.g., biblical characters and stories used in a court of law). This traveling goes back and forth, may entail a wide variety of fields, and always involves a transformation of the narrative, which is precisely what gives the narrative its own dynamic, interest, and power.
To Greenblatt, a work of art (e.g., a literary narrative) is not a form of communication between a sender and a receiver via a message but rather a “collective dynamic circulation of pleasures, anxieties, and interests,” an exchange of “social energy inherent in a cultural practice.”609 The conventional communication model posits abstract and subjective agents (i.e., sender and receiver), whereas these exist only within a group (the communities mentioned above, that is, the groups of people with a comparable habitus) and within a specific context (the fields). Narrative production and interpretation are social and cultural processes of negotiation and circulation, which are in fact often overlooked within a communicational framework.
This cultural criticism of the communication model goes further than a reformulation of the agents and the type of communication, for example, without a narrator610 or directly with the author.611 It confirms the view of Dixon and Bortolussi, who claim “text is not communication.”612 In the case of literary narratives there is no real interaction because the so-called sender (whether it’s the author, the implied author, or the narrator) never talks back to the receiver (the reader) and is in fact a post hoc creation of that reader. Sooner or later the sender’s intentions crop up in the applications of the conventional model,613 and these are, as Dixon and Bortolussi rightly suggest, very hard or even impossible to determine.614 Typically these intentions are inventions of the reader to legitimize his or her interpretation.
Along the same lines the so-called communication model is a legitimation of a readerly construction. From the cultural perspective, this construction arises in the process of negotiation and circulation. It is neither completely free (the reader is formed by the objective conditions and by the field) nor completely determined (the narrative habitus transforms these conditions and fields). Using a communication model with such abstract agents as “sender” (or “narrator”) and “receiver” (or “reader”) suggests—wrongly—that there is a horizontal and reciprocal relation of equals whereas in fact the relation is skewed (in our view the readers have the upper hand, but they are not free) and structured by social and cultural factors.
If we turn to Bourdieu’s scheme, the most general form of negotiation in the case of narrative is situated in the give and take between the habitus (of the narrating and/or interpreting agent) and the field (the context in which the text is produced and/or offered). Most probably, a professional narratologist reading and analyzing a novel in an academic setting (e.g., for a peer-reviewed publication) will come up with an interpretation that differs from the one developed by an untrained reader relaxing on a beach. This interaction between habitus and field is driven and guided by objective conditions such as age and economic capital. The reader’s leeway always derives from the interaction: it depends on the reader’s conditions, context (field, including the narrative text), and (narrative) habitus. As a result, the process of give and take differs with every reader, text, and field. Literary texts are not necessarily or intrinsically more convincing or coercive than other texts. Nor are they inevitably more undetermined or open. All these characteristics are being attributed during the negotiation between reader and field. The text is (merely one) part of this process.
From the viewpoint of narrative production, Greenblatt describes this negotiation between habitus and field without recourse to Bourdieu’s terms: “The work of art is the product of a negotiation between a creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society.”615 The shared repertoire refers to the group habitus, while the social institutions refer to Bourdieu’s fields. The interplay between the two components finds its form in the narrative practice. To Bourdieu the receptive part of the process typically mirrors the productive part as the fields of production and of consumption have normally been structured by similar objective conditions. In Bourdieu’s terms there is a “structural homology which guarantees objective orchestration between the logic of the field of production and the logic of the field of consumption.”616 Obviously, such an orchestration (in the sense of harmonization) on the basis of similar objective conditions does not always exist, and readers may find themselves confronted with texts and fields to which they feel completely alien. In that case too they may want to find some way to negotiate the narrative at hand.617
Narrative theorists too have paid attention to negotiation as an intrinsic part of narrative production and interpretation. Liesbeth Korthals Altes does not merely use the theory of Bourdieu to deal with the authority of the writer and the value attributed to literature.618 She also relies on Greenblatt to come to her first usage of the term “negotiation,” the very general meaning of culture as a “network of negotiation.”619 For her second and more specific use of the term, she refers to our work.620 In doing so, she defines negotiation as “the mental gymnastics involved in individual textual interpretation.”621 Korthals Altes’s analyses show that “culture requires the transmission and negotiation of ways of doing things, of preferences, values, and worldviews; and also the idea that narratives, and the arts, play a central role in this process.”622 Her work focuses on “the negotiation of meanings and values” in literary narratives and reveals the crucial part played by ethos (a negotiation between authorial posturing and readerly constructions) in that process.623
The most famous example of a theorist paying attention to narrative negotiation is probably Jerome Bruner (who has already appeared in this section because of his emphasis on the interaction between culture and narrative). His view on negotiation as a process of conflict resolution presents the first narratological meaning of the term, which is extremely widespread. Bruner claims that “negotiated meanings” solve issues and circulate widely in a culture thanks to a narrative process: “The viability of a culture inheres in its capacity for resolving conflicts, for explicating differences and renegotiating communal meanings. The ‘negotiated meanings’ discussed by social anthropologists or culture critics as essential to the conduct of a culture are made possible by narrative’s apparatus for dealing simultaneously with canonicality and exceptionality.”624
More generally, Bruner claims “that meaning and reality are created and not discovered, that negotiation is the art of constructing new meanings by which individuals can regulate their relations with each other.”625 He is unequivocal in his admiration for narrative’s power: “This method of negotiating and renegotiating meanings by the mediation of narrative interpretation is, it seems to me, one of the crowning achievements of human development in the ontogenetic, cultural, and phylogenetic senses of that expression.”626
Narratologists situate negotiation as conflict solving not only on the level of the narrative process (production and interpretation of narratives) but also on that of the narrated world. The storyworld is regularly studied as an environment for negotiating problems, conflicts, and setbacks.627 A combination of conflict negotiation in the narrative process and the narrated world can be found in H. Porter Abbott’s “Narrative Negotiation.”628 In the narrated world—of Oedipus, for instance—Abbott uncovers a negotiation of antagonisms and differences, typically between subjective longings and cultural demands. This negotiation may have various outcomes, but fundamentally they are either with or without closure. Abbott concludes “that most narratives of any complexity can be read as efforts to negotiate opposing psychological and cultural claims.”629 With a reference to Stanley Fish, he transposes this negotiation to the level of the reader’s interaction with a text that may conflict with his or her reading habits.
Some cognitive narratologists also look upon reading as a conflict-solving negotiation between the frames of the reader—aspects of what we call the (narrative) habitus—and those of the text.630 Building on the work of Charles Fillmore631 and Catherine Emmott,632 Maria Stefanescu suggests that “all comprehension of a literary work is ultimately a negotiation between the interpretative frames imposed by the reader and those suggested by the text itself.”633
In cognitive forms of negotiations the idea of a definitive solution regularly disappears. Derek Matravers, for instance, submits that the mental processing of narrative centers on an unresolved “paradox of fiction.”634 This brings us to a second, more neutral and more general usage of the term “negotiation” in narrative theory, namely as a synonym of dealing with or interacting with culturally available templates, ideas, and narratives. David Herman studies “how stories portray model persons in narrative worlds, and in doing so at once draw on and contribute to the models of persons circulating in a given culture or subculture.”635 Brian Richardson demonstrates how postcolonial narratives negotiate the past and the different, sometimes opposed audiences they target.636 Hilary P. Dannenberg finds that “Britain’s ethnic minorities may find themselves in a theoretically multicultural society, but they are also located in a country full of the cultural memories of colonialism. They must negotiate their contemporary British identity in a postimperial cultural zone.”637
Obviously, this second sense of negotiation (dealing with contextual aspects) can go hand in hand with the first (solving conflicts). Helms studies Canadian novels as narratives trying to deal with colonial and postcolonial ideas, narratives, and templates. In this way the narratives attempt to resolve conflicts: “Only through the analysis and negotiation of these [(post)colonial] constructions, their values, norms, and truths, can we create levels of consensus that will allow us to interact socially.”638 A comparable view on negotiation as dealing with the context and solving conflicts can be found in David B. Morris’s study of narrative in medicine: “In contrast to principle alone, narrative in its detailed, emotion-rich representation of experience can help us recognize implicit values and negotiate conflicts of moral action within a new postmodern landscape of corporations, governments, and health care systems.”639
One particular form of this second type of narratological use of negotiation is coming to terms with another text or theory. In Rethinking Postmodernism(s), Katrin Amian studies the novels of Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Jonathan Safran Foer as “pragmatist negotiations” with Charles S. Peirce: “I seek to engage critically the ‘pragmatist negotiations’ these texts stage. The question that informs my readings of V., Beloved, and Everything Is Illuminated, in other words, is not how these texts reflect the ‘moments of frailty’ Peirce’s pragmatist epistemology allows for but how they negotiate the concepts of creativity and consensus Peirce holds out.”640 More generally, Amian’s study is “opening up potential ways of negotiating the tensions between Peirce’s philosophical ambitions and the cultural politics of postmodernism.”641
A third sense in which narratologists use the term “negotiation” is the everyday meaning of giving and taking in order to find the middle ground. This simply indicates the leeway, the freedom one has in the narrative process. For instance, with regard to actual, oral storytelling, David Herman states, “In general, then, narratives can serve particular communicative purposes only on the basis of a process of negotiation between storytellers and their interlocutors.”642
Another process of give and take appears in Bernard S. Jackson’s analysis of the interactions between narrative and legal discourse: “Narratives provide constraints upon—and perhaps even, at the substantive level, presumptions for—the construction of sense, but within these constraints negotiation remains possible.”643 Narrative meaning arises in this process of give and take. As Barbara Czarniawska says, “the power of the story does not depend on its connection to the world outside the story but in [sic] its openness for negotiating meaning.”644 To Anastasia Christou, “identity discourse” implies “negotiations between the local and the global, the translation of the imaginary and the produced articulations of culture.”645
A comparable negotiation between local and global can be found in narrative theories informed by gender and postcolonial studies. Working within the former discipline, Ruth E. Page mentions that “narratives that come from literature and from other domains [ . . . ] could be useful in negotiating between localized perspectives and wider trends.”646 In postcolonial studies Homi K. Bhabha situates narratives in the “in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated”; he adds that his collection Nation and Narration starts “from such narrative positions between cultures and nations, theories and texts, the political, the poetic and the painterly, the past and the present.”647 On a more general plane Koschorke submits that “cultural distinctions [ . . . ] consist of countless boundary regimes of local and global scope, which up to a certain point imply processes of swapping, negotiation and communication.”648 When discussing the freedom individuals have to formulate their own narrative and identity, Mark Freeman stresses the negotiation with the cultural context: “Narrative freedom—the freedom of the narrative imagination—is not limitless. Rather, it is circumscribed and delimited by innumerable forces both inside and outside the perimeter of the self. Let me be clear about this issue. ‘Cultural givens’ can be, and often are, negotiated by members of a culture. There can also be serious disagreements about what these cultural givens are.”649