Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative by Matthew Clark and James Phelan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative by Matthew Clark and James Phelan Marshall Lewis Johnson Matthew Clark and James Phelan. Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2020. 232p. Debating Rhetorical Narratology, a collaborative effort between Matthew Clark and James Phelan, seeks to revise and expand Phelan’s own mimetic, thematic, and synthetic model of narrative and to “model a friendlier but still deeply serious kind of exchange” (ix). Clark begins by revising Phelan’s model of rhetorical narratology (MTS) by placing greater emphasis on the synthetic component. Clark’s retriangulation becomes the synthetic, mimetic, and thematic model (SMT): “[s]ynthetic analysis concerns all kinds of verbal construction, from sentences to whole plots, and also the construction of characters and narrative worlds” (11, emphasis original). In other words, the synthetic element is the “foundation for [End Page 101] the fabrication of narrative worlds and the creation of characters in those worlds,” therefore sustaining both the mimetic and thematic elements (19). One of Clark’s early points of emphasis involves realism, as, in cases like Dickens, there is “hardly a realistic novelist whose style is even relatively transparent” (25). It is apparent to any attentive reader that even Dickens’s descriptions of setting are still evidently a “fabrication” and not a “transparent” attempt at describing some kind of fact-based “reality.” Thus, mimesis and theme are encapsulated within synthesis. Clark’s analysis is particularly insightful with the examples of Jane Austen’s Emma and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The structure involves three chapters in which Clark outlines the SMT model by discussing each element in turn. Phelan then responds in four chapters, both refining his original MTS model and defending his own view of rhetorical narratology. While Phelan’s expansive corpus on narratology stands on its own, his responses to Clark are at times unconvincing. He insists, for example, that his own approach treats narrative as “action” instead of “textual structure” or “text-centric” (137-38). However, the advantages to Phelan’s views become somewhat convoluted in his analysis of an audience’s “double-consciousness” regarding an “authorial audience” who are aware of a story’s fictionality and a “narrative audience” who are more emotionally invested in the narrative while disregarding its fictionality (153). These issues are further complicated by an overemphasis on narrative as “action” as opposed to “text.” In a brief examination of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Phelan argues: “the narrative audience believes in ghosts and the authorial audience does not” (159). This raises several questions: are readers conscious of themselves as readers when in the act of reading, making a novel more an act than a text? Are they furthermore conscious of a story simultaneously being fictional while ignoring this fictionality? Why is “belief ” in ghosts a prerequisite for reading and understanding a work of fiction? Ultimately, these confusions tend to indirectly reaffirm Clark’s account of narrative as “text-centric.” In the conclusion, titled “Yes, but…,” Clark offers perhaps the most convincing support of his revision of Phelan’s theory. The SMT model “does not require this division of the reader into hypothetical audiences” (204). If it is readily apparent to any observant reader that the basic “verbal construction” of even a single sentence in a work [End Page 102] of fiction is synthetic in both its creation of some form of mimesis relative to reality and its establishment of any narrative themes, then it is not necessary to inquire on what level a reader does or does not believe in what they are reading. Rather, it is simple enough to point out that readers “don’t object to contrivance; they object to clumsy contrivance” (208). In other words, if the synthetic elements are well-executed, a reader does not question mimesis. When reading The Lord of the Rings, if hobbits consistently do hobbit-type things, then synthesis has supported mimesis. This topic of the behavior of characters in a plot leads, however, to Phelan’s most essential contribution in Debating Rhetorical Narratology: that “[p]rogression is a synthesis” in narrative (178). If Clark left out...