Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology by Daniel Punday (review)

Abstract

748 Reviews Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. By Daniel Punday. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2003. x + 234pp. ?42.50. ISBN 1-4039-6241-3. Daniel Punday announces that 'After a decade of suspicion about language's ability to referto anything beyond itself,the body has emerged as a site where the power and problems of reference play themselves out' (p. 1). He argues that narratology, with its insistence on abstraction, 'has had difficultydealing with the concrete historical object of the human body', while new historicism 'has made no attempt to generalize its analysis of the body in these narratives beyond the particular historical moment that it studies' (p. 9). His own approach uses the body as a catalyst for a combination of elements from both; the resulting synthesis should be taken into account by any serious student of critical theory, especially if the body is a main focus of interest. Punday briskly summarizes the views ofa host oftwentieth-century critics,with every point clarified by a well-chosen illustration from a wide range of Western narrative, discursive, and dramatic literature, extending fromclassical Greek epic and tragedy to modern science fiction. Such an erudite scholar need not fear that plain speaking will incur loss of academic dignity. Consequently, the reader finds the following down-toearth items on the critical agenda: 'we can ask how the body is used as a component of stories', and 'a corporeal narratology can ask how the body contributes to our ways of speaking about and analyzing narrative' (p. ix). Punday's theory, though expressed with admirable clarity, is sophisticated and complex: not every body can be a narrative body. He claims that 'one of the essential conditions for meaningful narrative is to sort bodies from nonbodies' (p. 58). This point is explicated by a contrast between the status of Polynices' corpse in Sophocles' Antigone, 'endowed with cultural and familial significance', and that of corpses in 'most contemporary popular action films and adventure stories', where, 'once the characters are dead, their bodies are inanimate and thus, narratively at least, no longer bodies at all' (p. 59). Punday shows how, in Marge Piercy's He, She and It, the heroine's, and consequently the reader's, attention is directed to the problematic nature ofthe body by her interest in a 'very human-like robot' (p. 58). And what can we make of a novel like William Gibson's Neuromancer, where a character 'is wired with virtual reality technology so that he can share in the physical experiences of another character' (p. 122)? Much of Narrative Bodies1 interest lies in the exciting critical and narrative possibilities that arise from the difficultyof defining the term 'body'. On some rare occasions, an even wider range of reference might have filled gaps or removed obscurities. The philosophie difficultyof 'making truthfulclaims' (p. 20) about fictitious characters provokes a laborious analysis of possible-world theory, in which the statements 'I hope that it stops raining this afternoon' and 'I could bake a cake if I'd stopped at the grocery' (pp. 20-21) are ofTeredas parallels to the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes lives in London' (p. 19). Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry could have saved a lot of trouble, with its reminder that the author of fiction 'nothing af? firms,and therefore never lieth'. It would also be interesting to see how discussion of Tristram Shandy might enrich the argument, especially in Chapter 1, 'Conceiving Modern Narrative', where developments in fiction from the early eighteenth century onwards are intimately related to changing theories about fertilization and embryology . At least, its absence should have been explained. Even without Sterne's help, however, Punday has created a convincing argument?or rather,as he says of Foucault and Butler (p. 109), constructed a very good 'plot'. University of Reading Carolyn D. Williams ...