Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories

Abstract

Contemporary narrative theory is, in many respects, a quite sophisticated area of study: it is international and interdisciplinary in its origins, scope, and pursuits and, in many of its achievements, both subtle and rigorous. It also appears to be afflicted, however, with a number of dualistic concepts and models, the continuous generation of which betrays a lingering strain of naive Platonism and the continued appeal to which is both logically dubious and methodologically distracting. The sort of dualism to which I refer is discernible in several of the present essays and is conspicuous in the title of Seymour Chatman's recently published study, Story and Discourse. That doubling (that is, story and discourse) alludes specifically to a two-leveled model of narrative that seems to be both the central hypothesis and the central assumption of a number of narratological theories which Chatman offers to set forth and synthesize. The dualism recurs throughout his study in several other sets of doublet terms: deep structure and surface manifestation, plane and expression plane, histoire and r&it, fabula and sjuiet, and signified and signifier-all of which, according to Chatman, may be regarded as more or less equivalent distinctions: Structuralist theory argues that each narrative has two parts: a story (histoire) [that is,] the content... and a discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated.'