Narrative and Chaos

Abstract

S IGNIFICANT PORTIONS of our culture, ranging from performance artists to academic critics, have grown increasingly chary of narrative. We tend to express this discomfort in two ways. We either actively pursue the disruption of narrative through antinarratival experiments or we concede the power of narrative but cynically assume that it invariably veils some ideological agenda whose demystification is the proper work of analysis. In this essay I will argue that the first of these positions inevitably undermines itself and that the second, although useful in cultural critique, is vulnerable to generalization into the incoherence and impotence of radical social constructivism. In their place, I propose to sketch the outlines of an affirmative theory of narrative. Informed by recent work in biogenetic anthropology, information theory, and the science of chaos, this theory will attempt to rehabilitate narrative by suggesting that it can be a principal agent of cultural change. It is, I think, unnecessary to give an extended account of the attacks to which traditional narrative has been subjected in recent critical theory. However, in the interests of framing the central concerns of this essay, I will begin by outlining some seminal antinarrative positions. (1) Derridian deconstruction, with its emphasis on fragmentation, destabilization, bifurcated writing, multiplicity and the nonlinear nature of the trace, tends to group narrative with logocentric, metaphysical discourse. (2) Radical feminist theory, especially that associated with the French, suggests that traditional narrative is a prime example of patriarchal phallic hierarchical oppression.' The French feminist revolution is fueled by through the body, a kind of writing which enacts a supposedly archaic female economy, a plural, scattered, polymorphic, autoerotic, contradictory, nonself-identical and radically anarchic being in the world. (3) From a neo-Marxist perspective, Fredric Jameson qualifies nineteenth-century narrative as linear and bourgeois, and condemns it for its participation in capitalist domination.2 In another typical