Narrative Dynamics and Boundaries: The Undermining of Event and Eventfulness in The Book of Happenstance by Ingrid Winterbach

Abstract

IntroductionIn narratological theory, change effected by event has always featured prominently, on the story level as well as on the levels of plot and discourse (narration). Structuralist models for narrative analysis proposed by theorists such as Mieke Bal1 and Gerald Prince2 describe eventfiilness (or change of state), temporality, and a causal logic as the main characteristics of narrative texts. For these theorists, the term ?narrativity' refers to the narrative intensity of texts;3 to the ability of a ?perceiver' or reader to construct a narrative from fictional data,4 or to the evaluation of a narrative text in terms of its being a narrative.5 However, Peter Hiihn points out that, although narrativity can be viewed either as a binary category (which has to do with a text's being either narrative or not narrative) or as a gradational or scalar category (which indicates the narrative intensity), eventfulness is the differential criterion in both definitions.6 In a binary model, a text is described as narrative if events feature in the text, while in a scalar model, a text which is more intensively narrative will rank higher on the scale of eventfulness.It is clear that in postclassical narratology, narrativity is regarded as an attribute referring to a property or properties of narrative texts rather than to narrative as a thing or narrative texts as a class. These properties include sequentiality, eventfulness, tellability, narrative competence, and fictionality without disregarding the older views in which immanence, emplotment, and narrative logic were more prominent.7 In all these definitions and descriptions it is assumed that the represented sequence of events in a narrative implies change(s), and that the dynamic qualities of narratives are dependent on change in the storyline or as represented in the emplotment and through narration.In this essay, an attempt is made to unravel some of the complexities of narrative eventfiilness in order to identify key aspects of the dynamics in a specific narrative text. The theoretical exposition serves as background for the analysis of aspects of the narrative structure of The Book of Happenstance by Ingrid Winterbach, a novel in which eventfulness is undermined to establish an alternative system of meanings. In the novel, events which would normally be regarded as dominant or at least important are downgraded in the plot by means of the narrating techniques. This is done in order to direct the reader subtly to discover the alternative meanings which are essential to the central thematic points the novel wants to communicate. The direct and popular meanings of external events are replaced by a subtle discourse which is concerned with psychological and epistemological issues.Winterbach has said the following about plot in her novels:Yes, I said just now that I have been recently converted to plots. I think that I am a late developer. I have now ended actually where other people begin. Where other people are discovering the joy of everything else, I am discovering the joys of a plot. Plots, I see now - and it is true that the first novels are rather plotless - gives one enormous freedom. It gives you freedom to meander, to swing from the chandeliers, to do fancy footwork. Previously I did not know that. But, seriously, plot gives you a great deal of freedom to do more. I have written a novel which I have put on ice, and I am going back, I am really looking forward to doing this, to plotify that novel!8This does not mean that Winterbach's novels have conventional plots. She uses and abuses plot as a device, appropriating and disrupting it as she has been doing with other aspects of the novel, such as genre, since the beginning of her career as a novelist.Consequently, this essay is not concerned with borders in a referential sense, nor with the representation in narrative and other symbolic forms of experiences concerned with the crossing of territorial, national, and ideological borders as is often the case in the study of border poetics. …