A Loosening of Tongues: From Narrative Economy to Women Writing

Abstract

For interpreters of twentieth-century literary texts, the notion of a 'crisis in narrative' is hardly a revelation. We read and describe with relative ease texts of fiction that contain a multiplicity of narrative voices, dissolution of characters, and perturbations in the logic of events and temporal developments. The challenge to narrative constraints in modern texts may be seen to stem from a discontinuity created between essential terms: process without assigned Finality; multiple textual effects without an identifiable Cause; writing that possesses neither a simple Origin nor End; signifiers without immediate access to a privileged Signified. But the adequacy of such a purely descriptive way of understanding the 'crisis' has been questioned in recent discussion on narrativity now being engaged in French and American theory.1 The critical function of narrative has been recognized as determinant in contexts that previously appeared to lie outside any limited definition of narrative, such as the discourses of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In moving beyond the traditional curtailment of narrative, certain critical discourses have discerned the taut web of relationships that exist between narrativity on the one hand, and power, desire, and knowledge on the other. Women's writing and its theories are essential elements in both the crisis and the generalization of narrative. As I will argue, women's writing challenges narrative closures as well as the limits of the concept of narrativity