The Word “Narrative”

The word “narrative,” in contemporary English, can be either adjective or substantive, as in the expressions “narrative poetry” or “a vivid narrative.” Without any surface determinant, the noun “narrative” further objectifies and universalizes the characteristics contained in the acceptation of the adjective when we say, for example (no matter whether it is true or false): “Narrative is present in every speech act.” “Narrative,” in this case, becomes the concept of the set or sets of features that allow us to call some texts or acts of communication “narrative,” and names the open corpus of all the extant, recorded, or possible/potential texts or acts of communication that do or would manifest “narrative features.”

The identity of signifiers between the English adjective and the two aspects (grammatically determined and not determined) of the noun entails a particular way of apprehending the narrative phenomenon. What this way might be, we can begin to infer from a comparison between the lexical uses outlined in contemporary educated English and those found in other states of the English language and in other languages. Suffice it to note the asymmetry of French and English in this respect: in French, even though the adjective “narratif” could be nominalized like any other similar adjective, this potential nominalization has not been actualized: although the English and French adjectives “narrative” and “narratif” are fully equivalent, we translate the English noun “narrative” as “récit.” This substantive etymologically evokes memory, repetition, quotation, a posteriori telling; it refers more to the oral, written, or visual text of narratives through which the telling is done than to the teller of the tale, who is not necessarily a “récitant”—especially in modern times—and is technically tagged “narrateur” or would be called a “conteur” in an older or an oral context. This fact is all the more important in view of the impact of French or French-inspired structuralism on the worldwide development of narratology and its early insistence on dismissing the figure of the author from this field of study.

Comparison with other languages would show that the terminology in the semantic field of “narrative” is culturally and historically determined and therefore generates large numbers of “untranslatables” in Barbara Cassin’s sense. The semantic field of “narrative” is covered and divided differently in each language, which does not make it easy for us to speak of “narrative” from the standpoint of modern English while purporting to discuss it as an anthropological universal. If the Arabic word qissa covers virtually any kind of story, anecdotal stories or records of matters of the Minor Way (xiaodao), considered as “fiction” because they did not carry a relevant moral message, seem to be separated from other narrative genres in pre-Ming China.

The use of the same signifier, in English, for the adjective and the concrete and conceptual nouns, and the presence of the same Latin etymon in a large spectrum of the semantic field (with “narrate,” “narrator,” “narration”) involve a serious risk of considering narrative phenomena as naturally unified in space, time, and the logic at work. The Proto-Indo-European root gno, unconsciously shared with “know,” can also perpetuate a confusion of informing and knowledge acquisition in general with narration and its reception. Overlooking heterogeneity is as dangerous as denying the possibility of anthropological universals.

The Word “Literature”

Contemporary uses of the words “literature” and “literary” are fraught with difficulties at least as great as those of “narrative.” The variation of social and philosophical values in the present context of fragmented cultural globalization and acts of resistance to these variations contributes to this vagueness. Where people of widely different backgrounds and persuasion, in different languages, could readily agree that (a) “Peter and Mary got married yesterday” is a narrative utterance, even the closest friends and collaborators might well disagree on whether the above sentence, or, alternately, (b) “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” can be literary at all. An affirmative answer, for the first example, would always depend on a relaxation of exogenous and/or inbuilt aesthetic criteria; with the second example, it would depend on the relaxation of the principle of non-contradiction in the name of an aesthetics of surprise or an anti-rationalist stance. One could say that literariness is subject to much wider socio-cultural and historical variations than narrativity. From the standpoint of the early 21st-century West, the criteria and inclusiveness of verbal art (as opposed to verbal non-art and non-verbal art) might perhaps be reduced to four phases for didactic purposes.

In Greek- and Latin-dominant poetics—more Aristotelian than Platonic—and their afterlife, “poetry” or “poesie” would cover the artful verbal (written and oral) imitation of human action in the two large genres (drama and epic) acknowledged by Aristotle, with the necessary addition of the lyric, not considered extensively in Aristotle’s Poetics. From the low Middle Ages onward, with the development of European vernacular languages in writing, with the first traces of secularization and individualization of art, and with the nostalgia and revival of classical know-how, the belles-lettres gradually separated from popular verbal art, tending to include rhetorical and didactic genres (sermon, discourse, eulogy, apology, essay, etc.) in the field. The novel use of the word “literature” in the 18th century did little more than legitimate a process of integration of written narrative fiction that had begun in the 13th century and had seen successively the transformation of the popular tale into the short story, the gentrification of the novel (including the “romance” as supposed sub-genre), and the defense of the epic in prose as a noble art form. “Literature” (or “poetry”), verbal art—although it had always been opposed or sometimes hated and despised since the times of Plato—had on the whole steadily accumulated a huge capital of prestige by the first half of the 19th century. “Literature,” mostly in its narrative guise, had come to embrace almost all domains of knowledge and expression, except those that made use of specific formal languages rather than natural languages. The fourth phase, of which we have generally become intensely aware only from the late 20th century, had already begun in the second half of the 19th century, under the combined pressure of scientific faith and growing distrust of “the word” associated with manipulation, propaganda, exploitation, war-mongering, and genocide.

The formation of a concept of literariness no longer tied to questions of moral and social value coincided with and probably contributed to the accelerated rise of a disinterested and above all non-mimetic vision of literature. Roman Jakobson’s “poetic function,” for example, conveniently condoned a renewed sharp separation between high and low, abstract and concrete, pure and pragmatic uses of aestheticization, favoring self-reflexive poetry or the formal structures of narrative over any “referential” semantic contents or conative intention and effect. The polysemy criterion of Mircea Marghescou anticipated a post-communist attitude at odds with the actual or imagined demands of the city;² Roland Barthes’s “readerly” regime, reception aesthetics, and reader-oriented criticism, as well as the demise of the author and the foregrounding of the unconscious, all tended to turn literature into a playground for language games. The denunciation of universals by many postcolonial and “decolonial” theorists, together with the postmodern deconstruction of a coherent logos and the bewildering changes in the human perception of time and practice of memory—all these factors combined to support the idea that literature, at least as we had known it in our lifetimes, was indeed coming to an end. If we are to talk of literature at all, were it to accept or rejoice that it is no more, it is nevertheless a logical necessity to either describe “what was literature” or define what it could be in a differently configured world. It would be meaningless to declare dead a concept that was always empty. Moreover, there are too many traces and records of it—whether official, secret, or unacknowledged—in ordinary language and our everyday lives not to attempt to propose some ample but not vague working definition of what is literary in literary communication. It is a basic requirement here when the current corpus of what passes for “literature” is more dominantly narrative than ever, thus tightly, if unduly, conjoining two universals.

“Literature” must not be equated with the sum of supposedly literary genres any more than “narrative” with the sum of genres conventionally labelled “narrative” in any one cultural context. The fact that, before, during and after the rise of structural narratologies, the theory of literary narrative was always rooted in the study of a limited number of emblematic genres, such as the epic and the fable in the neoclassical period, the fairy tale³ and then the novel⁴ in the long structuralist period, or historiography, comics, and digital games more recently,⁵ never stopped generating as many conceptual distortions as useful insights. The diversity of historically inscribed genre-based theories should, on the contrary, motivate us to work our way toward features that have a chance to be anthropologically, transculturally, and transhistorically shared.

Here, then, an act of literary communication is any cooperative speech sequence that fulfills three minimal conditions: (a) its effectiveness depends on intertextual linkage at least as much as on its internal coherence and its reference to a non-textual world; (b) the resolution of ambiguities and the reduction of tropes and other figures leave a positive surplus to the act of communication; (c) this act of communication actually generates or has the potential to generate some kind of aesthetic satisfaction in the empirical or virtual participant subjects. Literariness, thus broadly defined, can be historically modulated; it is not a static, immutable property of some classes of “texts” that other classes would not possess, but its existence does not depend on particular historical circumstances or on a grand evolutionist narrative of progressive achievement or rise and decay.

The Aristotelian Conundrum

Aristotle’s Poetics remains, after twenty-four centuries, by far the single most influential treatise of its type in the West and, by colonial extension, worldwide. What were the motivations of such a persistent impact in spite of the Judeo-Christian revelation and revolution, when a very different attitude to the Book was now carried by the three monotheisms, when divine authorship and its truth-value imposed a unique, linear master narrative of the history of mankind always already pre-written by God? The Enlightenment; the destabilizing, iconoclastic avant-gardes; the formalist, structuralist, pragmatist, cognitivist, and deconstructionist perturbations of the basic Aristotelian tenets have also proven unable to uproot them. Whether this inexpugnable resistance is due to an ever-renewed tragic vision of life that neither eschatological monotheism nor radical skepticism could seriously alter, or whether it was propitiated by the foundational character of the Poetics, by an incompleteness that gave rise to a number of equally plausible interpretations, or on the contrary by the often schematic pronouncements it makes, pre-figuring a culture of manifestos, its system is still at the heart of contemporary narrative theories that do not refer to it at all.

“Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation.”⁸ If man is a born imitator, if this is one of his key defining features, his dignity and his limit, he can imitate good or evil and his innate imitation skills must be guided: the main function of art, itself imitative qua human, will be to guide imitative behavior by the receiver. And the role of poetics will be to guide art—for which a description and an evaluation are necessary. Evaluation selects the best objects and the most adequate manner within each kind of means/vehicles. But Aristotle, in these lessons, considers only the art or set of arts that uses language as its means, independently of music or meter, prose or verse, a subset that still lacked a name. We could say that this field delimitation is the one in which the notions of “poetry” and later “literature” originate. The focus is not on the materiality of the signifier but on the process of signification and how it achieves the goals of mimesis in the minds and hearts of the receivers, influencing their view of themselves in the world and therefore their actions.

“The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad.”⁹ “Action” (praxis) or actions, “human affairs” (pragmata), are at the core of Aristotelian poetics. The mimesis of human actions is for Aristotle at once the shared and the sole determinant feature and primary purpose of all the arts, considered themselves at all levels as “makings of,” practicing a technique to pursue a goal. Regarding “narrative,” this choice has wide-ranging philosophical implications and hermeneutic consequences that will always complicate and sometimes hamper the task of contemporary narrative theory. On the one hand, it potentially unifies all the arts under the common denominator of narrative, allowing and even encouraging inter-artistic and trans-medial comparison; on the other hand, it excludes from the artistic domain and aesthetic enjoyment, in an unjustifiable way according to our modern view and practice, any act of expression and/or imitation that is either conceptual or merely descriptive or yet refers to natural, non-human events. Unless the making of a house, a decorative frieze, or a symphony is taken as imitation of human action, which is certainly not the primary purpose, an architectural realization, a landscaped garden, or a piece of non-imitative music are not objects of art.

Second, but more important, if non-human events such as meteors, geological, astronomical, physical events at large, or the life events of animals and plants are not valid objects of representation by literary language (unless they serve as metaphors of human actions, as in some parallels and allegories), a radical dichotomy is maintained between human nature and culture, on one side, and nature (what there is or what might be without mankind or discounting man’s action on it) on the other; we could even wonder whether this severance of man from the rest of the universe is not constitutive of the tragic condition that motivates for Aristotle the highest form or genre of “poetry.” Catharsis would serve as the fantasized healing of the repressed but active subconscious separation.

Third, the confusion of event with (human) action limits the scope of narrative discourse to its transactive level (A acts on B, there is an agent and a patient), making strangely irrelevant to poetry/literature those events and processes that involve only one (human) entity without any necessary and knowable action on its part, such as being born, growing, falling in love, becoming sick, old or stupid, and dying. Moreover, all human events that occur without the intervention of a third human party would have to be caused by the action of one part or side of a human being on another part or side of the same: the human, causal, and transactive Aristotelian notion of event paradoxically implies the universal responsibility of a subject that is at the same time inevitably fractured. Freudian psychoanalysis could be seen in this light as an attempt not only to explain and overcome the tragic burden, but to open up the Western poetics of narrative to alternate stories in which responsibility is measurable and the purgation of guilt is not the only answer.

Fourth, if the restriction of literary (meaningful) narrative to the telling of human action implies a tight bond to ethos, to character (as a quasi-person), there can be no proper narrative without the continuity demanded and provided by individual human lives and consciousnesses and their continuous interactions: the unity of argument or story line and its successiveness, conveniently reflected by textual unity and/or unity of performance (“the work”), the careful disposition of parts, the clear framing of the whole, all point at a narrativity that depends on the role of the narrator (in epic) or the concerted conjunction of players (in drama). Fragmentation, unsolved riddles, the breaking up of a spatiotemporal continuum, precisely what an event does as such according to most narrative theories, would appear as detrimental to narrativity.

Finally, since faithfully, neutrally imitating uninterpreted past human action, as in historia, would be useless from a moral and social point of view that actively concerns itself with the present and the future, the Aristotelian literary narrative is bound to embrace at least a certain degree of fictional world-making: this narrative, whether it is based on historically recorded facts, on supposed facts, or on myths and the imagination, needs fiction as much as faction, and its storytelling implies a willing suspension of disbelief, a “let us suppose that,” virtually experiencing “what it’s like.”¹⁰ Planning a future is always, after all, a conspiracy.

It is no great surprise then that, although Aristotle’s Poetics focused on drama, it could still easily fit the semiotics of tale and the theory of the novel, as long as they could be forcibly reduced to some form of compositional and referential unity (a storyline and a story-world), and as long as their perceived purpose could be held as at least partly social, ethical, educative, and therapeutic. But, when these two conditions appeared increasingly difficult to fulfill with the formal contortions, the self-referentiality, and the proclaimed disengagement of a not so large but widely publicized and very visible fraction of 20th-century experimental writing—narrative by default—some literary theorists with an interest in narrative were forced to discard post-modern, non-“prototypical” narratives from their investigative scope, assuming also that a lower “consciousness factor” lessened the narrative experience.¹¹ They are doubly wrong when they treat the French nouveau roman, American metafiction, or other unconventional 20th-century prose forms as alien to the representation of consciousness, and when they think that its conventional representation, as in the “psychological” novel, enhances narrativity. From Homer to James Joyce and beyond, the contours of literary narrative cannot be drawn by story fetishism. Literary narrative uses it and questions it at once, as it swings between defamilarization and re-familiarization.¹²

Problems in Contemporary Western Narrative Theory

Narrative and Narrativization/Denarrativization

If “narrative” is so pervasive in the human world that it is finally our only way of making sense of the world and of ourselves, if we are redefined no longer as mimetic (imitative) animals but as narrating animals, if speech is narrative in essence, and if we are ipso facto more human and more alive when we are more “narrative,” “tale-men” like Ulysses, there is no point in distinguishing “narrative” acts of communication from any other act of speech. Moreover, a tall tale would be more “graphic” than a sound, precise description, and the curse on the “accursed kings” a better explanation of their evil behavior than the anarchy that marked the coexistence of late feudalism with the budding nation-states of Europe.

In other words, we would deprive ourselves of the higher understanding of social and personal phenomena accrued by the two opposite mental gestures of narrativization and denarrativization, and their various modalities, depending on the shape, nature, and dimensions of time that condition these processes. Let us consider, for instance, one of the most famous among the many still renderings of the “death of the lovers” final scene from the Greek legend of Hero and Leander, a painting by Paul Rubens, c.1604 (figure 1).

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Figure 1. Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish, 1577–1640, Hero and Leander, c.1604.

Photo credit: Yale University Art Gallery.

Its general structure is characterized by a circular or rather elliptical convolution of the figures, the visible shape of a whirlwind or a maelstrom, caught at a particular moment, but not situated in linear time and endless in principle. The decorative and erotic/anatomical values, typical of baroque art, are complemented by the presence, obscure but close to the few sunrays—a source of light often encountered in Christian devotional painting—of two tiny figures that seem to be flying above the main scene but are also embedded in a secondary marine landscape, under clouds shaped like eagle wings. These figures, whatever they are supposed to represent, contribute to an allegorical interpretation of the painting. If it were only for the livid, presumably dead male body floating on the surface of the sea and surrounded by very lively, full-fleshed Nereids, we could be satisfied with reading the scene as one more representation of “death and the young man,” the fragility of human lives exemplified and exalted by the age and beauty of the young deceased adult. But one human figure, on the far right side, departs from the overall structure and conventions in two remarkable ways: it is partly clad, in a red robe, and it is upside down, falling from nowhere toward the rocks or the foamy waves underneath; we cannot tell. This figure breaks the unity and permanence of the whole. We have to question it in the specific terms of “What is happening?”—“What happened?”—“What will happen next?”—“How will it end?” This figure therefore constitutes what we could call a “narrative prompter.” It is a readerly way of seeing what Amy Golahny already noted about Rubens’s innovations: “Rubens enhanced the dramatic content of his literary and pictorial sources—achieving a marked synthesis of action and expressiveness—by juxtaposing the two deaths and by giving such prominence to the nereids.”²⁶

In another painting, Romantic this time, by William Etty, first exhibited in 1829, the naked, lifeless, livid body of a young man is stretched on a rocky ledge, the abrupt shore of a stormy sea.²⁷ A young woman, over him, upside down, embraces his torso and presumably touches his neck with her lips. Beside its somber and hesitant eroticism, beside the absence of warm colors and the shocking encounter of dominant verticality with the narrow horizontality of the sea horizon, and other formal and symbolic features that generate a whole set of emotions—sadness, admiration, fear, and compassion—in the beholder, the situation depicted is one that cannot last forever in human time, and it cannot have frozen a long time ago. The traumatic moment needs to be motivated in order to transcend trauma and achieve catharsis or at least some sort of moral recovery, and it also wants to be prolonged and/or transformed into an actualizable not-yet. This is when we narrativize our vision of the painting, supposing prior events and events to come without which the present of the scene would not be a present, could not be embedded in our experiential lifetime. We will say that the young man has drowned in the sea a short while before the moment depicted, that the young woman who expresses extreme grief may not survive the death of the young man she loved. The long title given by William Etty to his painting, “Hero, Having Thrown herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned, Dies on his Body,” does half of the narrativizing. But it is the paradoxical stillness of the painting itself that accomplishes implicitly the eventual denarrativization without which the events would remain gratuitous in the ethical realm of legend and myth. The immobility of the bodies in their perfect pose, beyond any movement and defying any alteration, tells us silently that “the lovers are now united for ever (in death as they were in life).” The chain of events also needs to be denarrativized in order to transcend transience and abolish precedence and successiveness so that narrative meaning can eventually be transformed into moral law and injunction.

In a silent movie, the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we can see successively a figure with similar features acting good, then bad, then good again: if we say that they are the same person, we also see this person as changing, transforming, time and again; we narrativize the filmic text. But, if we say that they cannot possibly be one and the same, that there are two different characters to carry out good deeds and crimes, we have two parallel, contrasting portraits, but no change; we de-narrativize the sequentiality of the movie. And, if we hesitate between these two interpretations, endlessly oscillating between ontological identity and non-identity of the two human figures, we relativize the notion of change itself as we are tempted to refuse to choose between the different meanings generated by a linear, a circular, or a spiral vision of time. Italo Calvino has played very cleverly with successive narrativization, de-narrativization, and re-narrativization in his moral tale The Cloven Viscount.

As Jan Alber noted very aptly, Hayden White and Monika Fludernik agree that the general purpose of narrativization (“giving narrative form to a discourse”) is to facilitate “a better understanding of the represented phenomena.”²⁸ For White, it is a manipulation of the reader with ulterior motives—the reader is always in need of coherence, reassured by a causal chain. Fludernik argues on the contrary that “experientiality both subsumes and marginalizes plot.”²⁹ Her “natural” vision of narrativization, that, out of basic necessity, “applies one specific macro-frame, namely that of narrativity, to a text,” aligns once more with Aristotelian thought, and fails to see how the denarrativization of possible plots, by synchronic historiography, lyrical poetry, or even the final stasis of happy and tragic endings, fulfills the equally basic human need of resisting the tear and wear of linear time and confronting mortality with the inscription of permanence: the image of Charles Bovary sitting dead on the bench at the far end of the garden is not there just for the sake of narrative coherence, but because his clumsy love of Emma is now liberated, as it enters the non-time of metaphor.³⁰

Narrative As a Genre of Discourse

Narrative discourse is the whole set of what is said and thought, in a cooperative or conflictive fashion, when the world of reference is seen as actually or potentially transitive, subject to change. This set of communicational transactions is the locus of narrativity.

“The degree of narrativity of a given narrative depends partly on the extent to which that narrative fulfills a receiver’s desire by representing oriented temporal wholes …”³⁷ Discourses can be called narrative when they manifest their participant minds’ desire or acceptation of a world view according to which existents are subject to change at one or several points of a linear temporal continuum. Although story-logic adepts³⁸ minimalize their role in the construction of narrative meaning or experientiality and sometimes risk confusing narrational speech events with change in the presented world,³⁹ events—i.e., the manifestation and perception of change—are unanimously held to be the nucleus of narrative discourse, as maintained by Genette.⁴⁰ Reis also comes to this conclusion in his commentary of Van Dijk.⁴¹ No narrative is ever self-contained; it neither can nor has to represent a temporal whole: a closed temporal whole would cut off the temporal continuum that is the possibility condition of events. Many narratologists, confusing narrative with plot, demand a sequence or series of correlated events to label a text “narrative,” but, if all these events were locked into a closed temporal whole, with no before or after, they would amount to a static world-description, uniformly valid for a certain duration, as in synchronic historiography. Narrative discourse, as the eventful or processual discourse of change, operates in specific contradistinction with various kinds of non-narrative discourses.

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Figure 2. Coste’s (1989) transformational tree, from Narrative as Communication, University of Minnesota Press, 49.

Reproduced with permission.

Consider one of the narrative statements presented in figure 2, “Peter died.” It reconciles in terms of an “event” the contradictory descriptions “Peter is alive” + “Peter is dead” by indicating that they describe the entity “Peter” at two discrete moments on a linear time axis. This kind of narrative is not or is little interested in action and causality; its point is not concerned with who or what killed Peter. Such narratives are more about time (and space) than about agents. The statement “John killed Peter” combines two non-contradictory but otherwise unlinked non-transactive narrative statements: “John became a murderer (or: turned out to be a murderer)” and “Peter died.” Obviously, one key locus of narrative interest, or narrative tension, is the grey zone between the two narrative levels of discourse whose analytical complexity already invites us to indulge in multiple, or even endless, interpretation, with its accompanying emotions (hence, very probably, the temptation to equate literature with the thrill of narrative discourse).⁴² More intricate and more aesthetically and cognitively exciting yet is the game played by those literary narratives of process, of becoming—the Bildungsromanen of Henry James and Marcel Proust—or of decay and decline (Franz Kafka) that hesitate deliberately between mere sequentiality (chance) and a deterministic system of causality.

Narrative discourse, whose precondition is the relevance of linear time to its meaning and significance, should not only be analyzed in this respect but also contrasted with other genres of discourse, such as argumentation, commentary, and the lyric, that have little to do with linear time or at least try to negate it through strategies of effacement and dismantling of linearity. For instance, two aspects usually studied are the prevalent question of enunciation (who speaks?) and that of the presence or absence of narrative discourse and narrative programs among the lyric: “the more a poem foregrounds vocal effects, … the more powerful the image of voicing, oral articulation, … the less we find ourselves dealing with the voice of a person.”⁴³ In other words, the more lyrical a poem is, the less it relies on “character,” which is still a way of making out the lyric from narrative in Aristotelian, actional, and anthropomorphic terms. Thus, along the lines of a case grammar, narrative would rather be dominated by the nominative and the accusative, while the lyric would foreground the vocative and the dative, since it is primarily concerned with calling what it names to existence and presence and seducing whoever it addresses with free offerings that would hopefully generate counter-gifts. In the European 18th century, the critique of a futile rhetoric of ornament in the lyric was followed by the Romantic surge of the expressive function: the speaking subject, in a dramatic revolutionary context, became a kind of narrator as he told his transience in an accelerated time stream.

Units and Concatenation

Absolute or Scalar Narrativity

“Narrative designates the quality of being narrative, the set of properties characterizing narratives and distinguishing them from non-narratives … It also designates the set of optional features that make narratives more prototypically narrative-like, more immediately identified, processed and interpreted as narratives. In the first acceptation, narrativity … is usually considered a matter of kind … In the second acceptation, narrativity is a matter of degree …”⁵¹ According to these definitions, narrativity would depend on substantive features or properties that presumably pertain to a text in which they are somehow inscribed (or missing), features ready to be recognized by a reader before he can consider, process, and interpret the said text as (a) narrative.

At the level of elementary units (sentences or even simple clauses), the presence or absence of a predicate of change is certainly decisive. Out of context, the receiver has no choice but to perceive “John came over” as narrative and “John is a boy” as non-narrative, just like a “no smoking” or “no parking” sign posted anywhere must be understood as injunctive, if they are understood at all. When the text exceeds the single sentence or clause in extension and complexity, or when a single sentence needs context to be disambiguated, interpretation is required prior to the attribution of narrative meaning. This attribution depends on framing and selection, on the readiness, desire or fear of the individual or collective receiver: the interpretative communities to which they belong will play a key role. Narrativity, then, is no longer just a matter of verifiable presence or absence of certain features in the text but a matter of intersubjective negotiation. In this sense, there would be three rather than two modes of existence of narrativity, in literature as elsewhere: the absolute and scalar modes described by Prince, but also an optional mode that occurs when we ask: “Did something happen, or what?” or when we deny the eventness of something that did happen in the world of reference, calling it a “non-event” or commenting in a jaded tone: “nothing new under the sun.” Narratives with an open ending—those, like The Magus by John Fowles, that maintain cliffhanging suspense intact until the last word inclusively, or indefinitely, suspended searches like unresolved criminal cases or filiation quests—can by no means be deemed less narrative as a whole than a conventional love romance that in the end happily marries the suitable boy with the suitable girl. Even the disjointed structures, the elusive endings, and the probabilistic futurity of so-called post-modern literary narratives have generally not met with an appropriate revision of narrative theory.

Questioning whether we are dealing with a static world (describable once and for all for the duration of its existence), with one that is in process (becoming, growing, blossoming, or aging, shrinking, and vanishing), or open to change is an essential aspect of narrative communication. Audet, quoted by Porter Abbott, makes an important point when he proposes a notion of “eventness” (not “eventfulness”) “where the tension between a before and an after seems to generate a virtuality, that of a story to come.”⁵² If narrative tenses are most commonly of the accomplished past, the orientation of narrative discourse as one genre of discourse among others, or as a mode among others, is turned toward the future, the possible but not-yet.⁵³ Past counterfactuals, for example, mediate analogically with possible things to come. Again for the same reason, many forms of the disnarrated (“John did not come,” “Mary would not wait for John,” “Mary did not realize that John was always late,” etc.) or juxtaposed incompatible descriptions are indeed more narrative, that is more prone to induce narrative meaning than chronological lists of events (“George W. Bush was elected president, then Barack Obama was elected president, then Obama was re-elected for a second term, etc.”). The former phenomena are pro-narrative; they imply a narrative program; they call for projective narrative thinking to make sense of them. Conversely, consistent cumulative eventfulness will automatically tend toward a static worldview: a character portrait (“as eternity changes him into himself”); descriptions; physical and moral laws (“natural disasters occur whenever man neglects his duty to the divinity”). Beyond the paradox of emplotment, but similarly to its effects, the heuristic value of narrative is equally threatened by its accumulative quest of mimetic exhaustivity: “It has often been said that narrative somehow banishes chance. Leland Monk says this in his study of chance in the British novel, that ‘chance is that which cannot be represented in narrative’ despite the manifest efforts to do so in the novel of the late Victorian and modern period.”⁵⁴ Totalization, therefore, is equally “catastrophic for the categories of choice and freedom, … even while the efforts to represent free choice have produced some of the most important developments in modern narrative technique.”⁵⁵ Narrative theory should now follow the example of such developments; it must not forfeit the unexpected to satisfy the foreseeable.

This is why a distinction between quantitative and hierarchic dominance of narrative discourse remains useful. With quantitative dominance, in narratives of adventure, travelogues, picaresque romances, surreal and fantasy narratives, biographies rich in varied experience, national histories full of Sturm und Drang, something new happens all the time (discoveries and encounters, victories and defeats, gains or losses, mysteries and explanations …). In vast architectonic epics (John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri) or elongated Bildungsromanen (Great Expectations, Remembrance of Things Past), a comparatively small number of major incidents are highlighted, but all descriptions, non-events, imperceptible changes eventually converge toward the formation of a single and simple summary (“Mankind was—or will be—saved,” “Marcel becomes a writer”). Since the genre of the classical, realist short story or nouvelle (not the anecdote or the folk tale) has a vocation to concentrate on a single story line and only one or a few protagonists and must at once provide enough context to make sense of the key event or process, it will often combine the quantitative and hierarchic or qualitative dominance of narrativity, as in Stefan Zweig’s works—or Guy de Maupassant’s or Henry James’s.

But literary genres like those just evoked are not abstract, transhistorical kinds; they are deeply rooted in historically inscribed, cultural conditions of production, transmission, and reception that orient the production of aesthetic and ideological value without which narrative interest would be reduced to an empty game.

Well-formedness; or the Legacy of Beauty

Even after successive ur-narratives, foundational fictions, master-narratives, and grand historical narratives all started to crumble under the combined fire of the sciences (each with its own field restrictions and limited purpose), the defeats of utopias, the experience of disaster, and the rebellion of the masses, a global narrative vision of the world (in the sense of trying to read it as a single coherent story) keeps creeping back, recalling all the losses suffered with the death of the king, the death of God and the death of empire. Ancient mythical, religious, and genealogical narratives (or their substitutes generated by and for market economy), democracy or human self-rule, the theory of evolution, and physical cosmologies share a sense that a lost order, or one that never was, must be restored or established in the end. Once the epic and even the novel were all but stripped of their credibility and relevance, the object of nostos could no longer be a fatherland; it became the art of narrative itself, in which the deepest truth and the utmost beauty were one and the same (anagnoresis and catharsis hand in hand). But, as the human subject, now a self-made man, no longer preexists its representation, this art in turn is also threatened to be dislocated from the mimesis of action to the mimesis of mimesis.

From the beginning of the 20th century, reactions to this state of affairs have been very diverse; they are all manifested in dominant narrative theories concurrently with the steady production of mainstream literary narrative and the prosification of the lyric. Early structural and formalist narratologies dealt preferentially with simple, popular, traditional types of narrative (Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk-Tale, 1928; Andreas Jolles’s Einfache Formen, 1930) or with the short story (Algirdas Julien Greimas’s, Maupassant: La sémiotique du texte, 1976). French structuralism, in its softer, more flexible version, with Genette’s Narrative Discourse (Figures III) (1972) after Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970), multiplied grids and codes to deal with the underlying structures of complex and ambiguous works. It is striking that the choice by Genette of Proust’s magnum opus to nourish, develop, and test his reading grids applies to a monument with a “good shape,” beginning with the evocation of a preterit habit and ending with salvation (the promise of the recovery of a past wasted because it had not been processed and recorded). The many characters, scenes and incidents in La Recherche appear in this light as so many single-minded moments and objects of a long struggle to retrieve (the memory of) the time lost and therefore become a writer. The condensation of the narrative skeleton into a single backbone (“Marcel becomes a writer”) and the imposition of a hierarchy between the red thread of a life story and its fleshing out with details (the level of “écriture”), was attacked by some early reviewers of Genette’s work, approved by others.⁵⁶ Both blame and praise were motivated by Genette’s openly anti-aestheticist attitude at the time. His structural method of description, like other methods introduced in the 20th century (literary psychoanalysis, sociocriticism), was an easy target for the “old” critics prone to accusing the “new” ones of ignoring the differential value of high literary language, the impact of stylistic complexities and ornament. In fact, we can now realize that Genette, his supporters, and his detractors alike had it all wrong in this respect: the aesthetic criterion was left intact but it found the quality of Proust’s monument in its overall design, in its engineering rather than in the refinement of the stained glass work of the “cathedral.”

Other major and massive narrative fictions of the first half of the 20th century, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities, were not favored by “classical” structural narratology because they did not fulfill the conditions of a successful account imposed by its methods: the outline of Ulysses purports to reproduce that of The Odyssey, but it shockingly combines the complex narrational levels and episodic elements of the epic of nostos with the unities of time and place of classical tragedy, the end product having to be read consequently as a critical, deconstructive parody of the demands of classical narrative aesthetics; Musil’s work, as a “story of ideas” and an errant quest for sense without any likely place to look for it, departs in too many respects from the goal-oriented Aristotelian notion of mimesis of actions; it was unfinishable in its principle and remained unfinished. Theorists were bound to leave most so-called postmodern and postcolonial literary narratives out of their field of inquiry, labelling them anti-narrative, if not non-narrative, or they tried rather obscurely to design specific, dissident narrative theories in order to accommodate the new dissident narrative aesthetics and the parallel oppositional tradition (Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Sterne, not The Faery Queene or Pilgrim’s Progress or even Robinson Crusoe) on which the “new narrative” drew heavily to try and secure a place in the canon while at the same time finding in it “room for maneuver.”⁵⁷

Dissident Aesthetics

Dissident narrative aesthetics follows many different strategies of estrangement, disturbance, and renewal: foregrounding banality or accident, blurring the ontological statutory difference between objects and events, minimalism, maximalism, self-reflexivity, abstraction, fragmentation, rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, open choice between universes of reference, straining distortion or cutting up of linear time, warped frames, relative or irreversible spaces, etc. These strategies can operate at all “levels” or at any step of narrative communication, one of them can be hegemonic, or they can subtly complement each other to alter and rethink the values borne by “well-formed,” readerly, straightforward, easily recognizable narratives. An unreliable narrator (the liar, the uncontrollable chatterbox, the amnesiac, the mentally deficient, the taciturn and secretive calculating mind) will afford a ready justification for gaps and ellipses, digression, repetition, incoherence, inconclusiveness, over-information and disinformation. Conversely, ironic uses of the disnarrated, denial, and absurd maxims can build the figure of an all-powerful, manipulative author that may draw the receiver’s attention to the unconfessed manipulation carried out by whatever apparently clean narrativization of any represented world. Here, we can only sketch out a few examples of how dissident narrative aesthetics operates and how a self-labelled “postmodern narrative theory” tries to account for the varied operations of dissident narrative aesthetics.⁵⁸ Seemingly contradictory labels for the same work alert us to the high ideological stakes of tampering with the traditional ingredients of narrative significance: When Raymond Carver’s short stories are alternately or simultaneously labelled “minimalist” or “hyperrealist,” is a stock paradox like “less, sometimes, is more” sufficient to sweep off the etymological and conceptual contradiction between these terms? In the worlds of Carver’s short stories, very little happens; what is expected to happen according to the conventions of tragedy, romance, or drama fails to happen, and what does happen is reduced to triviality since it eventually does not achieve the status of story point. If we ask “so what?” the apparently pointless narrative will only echo back: “… what? … what?” The minimalist foregrounding of the trivial and/or the hyperrealist leveling out of the trivial and the non-trivial underscore the arbitrariness of the dispositio of events and the artificiality or utter lack of a causal system, the ideologically determined manipulation of literary as well as historical narratives at large.

Another interesting case is that of the comical, nihilistic, or absurdist narratives of untellability that abound in Western literature from the 18th century onward but have proliferated after WWII, with the nouveau roman, American and non-American metafiction, and Borgesian aporetic constructs. As Mark Currie remarks, “it would be misleading to describe new directions in literary theory as the cause of fictional change. There is a chicken-and-egg problem with fictional and a more general linguistic self-consciousness.”⁵⁹ If theory is not the motor of practice, or vice versa, their changes nevertheless share the same external, socioeconomic, political, or epistemological causes. The progressive but not smooth secularization of philosophical thought was concomitant with the discovery of the autonomous, exorbitant power of language and its dysfunctionality: our stories were no longer always already written by the sure hand of God, language was no longer a precious gift, the instrument of revelation, a tool meant to inform, tell the truth, and pass fair judgments; it could no longer even name mystery; its power of seduction and delusion was now other and proportionate to its inability to truly represent, to say things as they are or even as they might be, to tell (count) events as they happen(ed) or even as they might happen. When the authorship of our life stories was finally transferred to human responsibility without the means to forge a new language, fictional (and historical) literary narratives had to face the inadequacy of language, its vagaries, its constitutive incapacity to stick to experience, its usurpation of experience itself. Hence, in Tristram Shandy, the narrator’s questioning of the irresponsible behavior of his parents when they authored him, and the resolution not to do the same as the author of the book of his life. There is always an irony: the resulting theoretical fiction ponders its possible defects so thoroughly that it has to be content with describing and exemplifying the impossibility of a proper or prototypical narrative (traditionally: a mimesis of actions). The adventure (or the misadventure) of narration, as a substitute for the narrative of adventure, to use Jean Ricardou’s⁶⁰ famous chiasm once again, manifests a deep distrust of the narrative condensation of phenomena, of its facile seduction, of the relevance and accuracy of “narrative intelligence.” Theoretical fictions and metahistories deconstruct and kill narrative seduction, which may be a good thing for the critical mind and a bad one for the senses.

Are there any alternatives to this quandary? Could we find them in post-colonial narratives, and do non-Western works have a local narrative poetics of their own to rely on?

A Different, Non-Western Aesthetics? Rasa, Katha, and Narrative Emotions

Beyond implicitly recalling the principle of anthropological unity, hardcore structural semantics has little to bring to the narrative comprehension of a world increasingly divided by its push for globalization and its resistance to it. In particular, any narratology that fails to take into account the different and often complex sets of time concepts that prevail in any one culture, or its current and historical system of universes of reference, is bound to err grossly even at the elementary level of the definition and identification of narrative discourse and what it stands for.

Because some languages may foreground aspect rather than tense in verb phrases, and some cultures prefer relative to absolute dating, because some prefer to measure distances in time of transport and others in length units, we can no longer accept the diktat that the preterit or “simple past” is, generally speaking, both the natural and dominant narrative tense. Rejecting the hegemony of any one locally anchored notion of narrative does not amount to a dangerous first step toward radical cultural relativism, but to recognizing a systemic variety of contrastive processes by which narrative communication operates as a factor of negotiation—identity and consent, differentiation and dissent. While “West” and “non-West” or “North” and “Global South” may not refer to anything more than historically restricted cartographies of power and values, the objects and methods of narratology have, by definition, an anthropological dimension that makes them responsible to both the unity and diversity of humankind.

Narrative, as we already knew before Benedict Anderson, is heavily involved in the socio-historical processes of colonization and freedom struggles, globalization and resistance. Inevitably it is also, as testimony and as interpreted retelling, at the heart of discourses produced by the social sciences and/or the humanities about these modern cultural and political phenomena. In his suggestive but cautious advocacy of a “postcolonial narratology,” Gerald Prince states that “just as it endeavors to trace explicitly the definitional boundaries of narrative … , narratology tries to account for narrative diversity (for what allows narratives to differ from one another qua narratives).”⁶¹ He insists that categories of time, tense, space, and person should be investigated across cultures. Nevertheless, no sustained effort has yet been made to relate postcolonial or non-Western practices and poetics of literary narrative communication to their respective aesthetic traditions or linguistic conceptualizations.

Indian aesthetics and poetics can be located at a safe and measurable but obvious distance from the Western (Aristotelian) tradition, with which it shares Indo-European linguistic structures and the centrality of the dramatic and epic modes of representation but not the same hierarchy of emotions or time concepts. At first sight, the combination of rasa (flavor, emotion, mood) and dhvani (suggestion)⁶² that appears to be prevailing in long eras of Indian aesthetic thought in the past (although with marked variations of status) and has made a forceful comeback since the middle of the 20th century is much more closely associated with music, dance, and the performing arts, especially stage drama, than it is with verbal narrative, or narrative qua narrative. One contemporary theorist goes as far as saying that “in Indian aesthetics, the moral function of art has never been given a primary place as in the West (e.g., Plato, Aristotle et al.). Bharata in Natya Sastra … justifies dance, which fulfills the simple function of being beautiful, for leading us to delight.”⁶³ And again: “Morality has never been the main issue. One might find this strange. But … the rasa experience is a kind of delight that transcends ordinary levels of reality … Nonetheless [with] santa rasa … rasa experience does serve a moral function—it helps one overcome one’s worldly desires and achieve transcendence to a higher level.”⁶⁴ There are however, even in ritual practices, forms of katha that are told with an avowed moral, didactic purpose, and there are prayers, forms of puja (worship), that require the story of the prayer to be told in order to make the devotion efficient.

When Priyadarshi Patnaik applies rasa theory to Western narrative literature, he tends to denarrativize it, or at least to substitute a mimesis of mind events for a mimesis of actions.⁶⁵ This is particularly obvious in his choice of Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus and its proposed interpretation,⁶⁶ according to which purity of mind and detachment through the experience of emotions and their universalization lead to santa, the rasa of bliss: “he is superior to his destiny and stronger than his rock,” writes Camus. The presentation of Sisyphus accepting his absurd destiny as a victory is not a narrative reading; a narrative reading would show that, by eternally repeating the same useless action, Sisyphus at best defines himself and depicts his (our) world as totally iterative, unchanging.

If we take it for granted that the essence of Indian art (verbal or of any other kind) lies in a total identification of the receiver with the work of art, be it a monument or a performance, “frozen at a moment of time for posterity [or] live for the moment in specific duration,”⁶⁷ and that it always and only moves outward in expanding circles from the still center so as to return to it, we would find it difficult to accommodate in this aesthetics any of the constitutive elements of what we have called narrative communication and narrative significance so far. Furthermore, Kapila Vatsyayan insists that “neither character nor plot is important in itself. They are interwebbed as a labyrinth and drama is always cyclic in nature.”⁶⁸

When one cares to demonstrate the autonomy of Indian narrative by listing aspects, such as interiorization, serialization, fantasization, cyclicalization, allegorization, anonymization, elasticization of time, etc.⁶⁹—some of which are supposed to be present in all Indian narratives but all being in principle absent from Western narratives unless they were influenced by the former—there is nothing much left to compare, and the anthropological notion of narrative itself is dismembered. But, as Amya Dev observes pointedly, a closer analysis would probably show “that there is more in common between the Indian itihasa [epic] and the Homeric epic than not.”⁷⁰ He explains immediately that he cannot “fully understand the distinction … between temporal and spatial narrative. All narrative to my mind is an excursion in time.” Amya Dev had detected that the nationalist effort of dedicated Sanskritists to free the roots of Indian poetics from any proximity or affinity with the West is counterproductive insofar as it enforces a radical discontinuity between Vedic and medieval narratives, on the one hand, and modern narratives, on the other, while continuities exist and should be found, also in the permanent hybridity of all cultures, India included. Sri Aurobindo’s successful fusion of Milton, Ramayana, and modernist narrative poetry in Savitri is a striking piece of evidence to support Amya Dev’s views. Paniker, while acknowledging the deficiencies of Indian “critical discourse on fiction [that] was somewhat stillborn in the Indian tradition,” takes the notion of narrative for granted and limits himself to proposing a typology.⁷¹ However, several of the listed features, such as serialization, provide very vivid insights into universal functions of the more participative narratives, from African griot epics to interactive digital stories. We might suggest that anthropological continuities of narrative functions across cultural spaces and historical times could be found in a non-dualistic or a minima a dialectical relationship between body and mind that are shared by Greek tragedy and the ever-revisited tragicomedy of Shakuntala, in which the key events of abandonment, encounter, loss, and recognition are all present and bodily inscribed, however differently they are ordered and with whatever different outcomes.

When Rukmini Bhaya Nair dismantles the metaphysics of the one and ineffable event presented by Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster as “the ultimate experience, because it is indescribable,” she confirms the necessity of reintroducing affect and individuation in historical telling: “Numbers make history … But in order to render emotion, you need the individual mode, which can only be literary and artistic. That is the paradox.”⁷² Handling this paradox is exactly what has made the modern Western novel since Cervantes possible. Rather than a free-floating postcolonial narratology, this is a good example of a hybrid, glocal narrative theory, one that reintroduces traditional Indian aesthetics along with carrying out sophisticated discourse analysis and displaying a self-reflexive awareness of the theorist’s inscription as a historical (narrated) subject in argumentative dialogue. Such a narratology, fundamentally based on conversational, other-directed oral enunciation, skillfully avoids the shortcomings of both the sublime on the horizon of European romantic thinking—or on that of the suprasensuous achievement of unity in Indian philosophy—and the postmodern sacralization of antinarrative open-endedness. Narrative can easily be another opium of the people, but, if we make out its variations from the constant pleasure generated by its experience, it is also one of the best sites to investigate the verbal ways of telling and showing how self-conscious bodies change and move in space-time—that is, how to cope with the inner and mutual otherness of humans and their worlds. In Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, the book itself metamorphoses all the time as its characters do. Genre shifting and distortions mutually correlated with narrated contents is a shared property of all but the simplest formulaic literary narratives. “Narrative is a moderately historical concept … While narrative reflects particular historical conditions in how it became an object of study and in how it is given cultural meaning at different moments, it nonetheless describes a type of discourse that transcends a number of specific historical manifestations …”⁷³