The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

Abstract

That “ours is an age of storytelling” is the basic assumption of this book, whose author analyzes the crisis of storytelling triggered by World War II (Part 1) and the return, in theory and fiction, to storytelling as a fundamental structure of human life (Part 2). The author first focuses on Robbe-Grillet as the champion of the antinarrative turn of the early 1950s, characterized by a strong refusal of the so-called myth of naturalness (the idea that history is as necessary as a natural phenomenon), and of the self-aware subject. Starting from existentialism, the nouveau roman challenged such ideas as instruments of power and oppression.By analyzing Dans le labyrinth by Robbe-Grillet, the author interprets the antinarrative turn as a critical response to the disillusionment toward history caused by the war. Fludernik's notion of “experientiality,” according to which any narrative requires a subjective perspective on reality in order to organize experience, provides the basis to interpret such critique of narrativity made in the nouveaux romans. From this point of view, Robbe-Grillet's novel challenged not only the traditional aesthetics of novel but also its connection with reality. If novel works as an autonomous machine, the meaning of which lies in its functions and structures rather than in its plot, subjectivity and morality appear useless to understand the world. The metaphor of the labyrinth denies the illusion that narratives can make reality understandable. As a consequence, antinarrative theorists accused all narratives of being false and deceitful. If reality is strange and incomprehensible, and subjectivity and narratives are ideological instrument of oppression, therefore the nouveau roman represented some kind of political protest in the name of estrangement. Meretoja summarizes the aesthetics of the nouveau roman in the words “literature cannot have access to reality ‘as such.’”Later on, a new paradigm was juxtaposed in French postwar literature to the antinarrative attitude of the nouveau roman: the so-called narrative turn of the 1970s, which Meretoja considers in particular in Tournier's work. Tournier's approach to literature was based on the assumption that humans are “mythical animals” who make up narratives in order to interpret their experiences. The structuralist paradigm of the nouveau roman was replaced with that of narrative hermeneutics. According to this theoretical point of view, any narrative originates from other narratives. Novel is therefore linked to myth and one can see in this bond the junction between literature and reality.The second part of the book contains the author's innovative theoretical contribution: according to Meretoja, the return to narratives and myths implied a critical dialogue with the tradition which she calls “dialogical intertextuality,” by combining the structuralist notion of intertextuality and the central concept of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, dialogue. The idea is simple: “we—novelists and readers alike—are always already entangled in traditions of narrative interpretations, which mediate our understanding of the world and of ourselves.” Meretoja highlights the ethical implication of the narrative turn, insofar as “the rehabilitation of storytelling is linked to the reengagement of literature with the real, historical world.” By recurring to the theoretical observations of Gadamer, Ricoeur, Taylor, McIntyre, and Koselleck, Meretoja argues that hermeneutics provide new insight into the ontology of the subject and of its relationship with the world. The inference is that “our entanglement in narratives is an ethically complex and ambivalent phenomenon” that requires critical interpretation, because it also produces the risk of viewing myths as pervasive explanations of reality, which was precisely the idea that the nouveaux romans challenged as the ideological illusion of naturalness.Meretoja disagrees with the position endorsed by the theorists of the antinarrative turn, “according to which all narrative interpretation of experience falsifies and distorts experience,” because such position “is based on the assumption that ‘pure experience’ is immediately given here and now.” Conversely, the narrative turn is based on a hermeneutic–phenomenological approach, according to which “there is no level of pure experience, ‘undistorted’ by self-interpretation and self-reflection, and hence no reason to dismiss narrative interpretations as unreal or necessarily false.” As it seems, Meretoja underpins some kind of “quantum theory” of narrative, by claiming that we know reality only by means of narratives that distort our experience of the world. This implies that we should understand that “literature provides, in a narrative form, tools for thinking, narrative tools that also have existential and ethical significance.” This should also mean, though, that literature makes no claim on ontology or epistemology, which undermines the ambitious objective of the author to provide a philosophical interpretation of the narrative turn also from ontological and epistemological perspectives.In fact, to read that “from the aesthetic perspective, crucial to the narrative turn is a reengagement with the world,” is agreeable and easy to understand. More problematic is to accept that “there is an ontological shift from granting reality primarily to what is immediately given in sense perception towards an ontology that accepts the narrative interpretation of experience […] as real and constitutive of human experience.” Is reality an object of experience? It is rather a category of language that we use to mean the complexity of language games that we play to deal with the infinite set of our experiences. If literature—especially that of Tournier as a case study—is interested in myth as a reinterpretation of experience, how could literature represent an ontological shift? According to Meretoja, moreover, the epistemological shift of the narrative turn is aimed at making sense of our being in the world. Is this really epistemology? What sort of knowledge do we obtain through literature? The same as through science?Finally, the author claims that the narrative turn raises paramount ethical consequences, which is agreeable as far as the aesthetic reengagement of literature with the world can encourage rethinking about our being in the world from a problematic and open-ended perspective. But this links the narrative turn's ethics to aesthetics alone, not to ontology and epistemology. To state that “there is no level of pure experience” out of narratives means to say that we can neither tell what reality is (ontology) nor can know it objectively (epistemology).In conclusion, this book can be useful not only for scholars of Robbe-Grillet and Tournier, but also for those who are interested in learning about the ethical value of literature, although it appears somewhat misleading and overabundant as to its philosophical ambitions. Nevertheless, Meretoja points out convincingly that hermeneutics can provide excellent critical tools for investigating the ethics of literature.