Towards a `natural' narratology

Abstract

Monika Fludernik. Towards a Natural Narratology. New York: Routledge, 1996. xvi + 454 pp. $99.95 cloth. king died and then queen died,' is a story. `The king died, and then queen died of grief,' is a plot (Forster 93). Surely no formulation summarizes more succinctly interface between various narratological theories of recent years and earlier approaches to study of narrative. Accentuating chronology of events, on one hand, and causal links between those events, on other, it gives a favored place to who-did-what-and-why of narrative and, in effect, reflects widely held and pervasive position that narrative is defined essentially in terms of a content composed of ordered events coupled with actantial roles which is then communicated by linguistic or other means to addressee. Scholars of a more theoretical bent than E. M. Forster have sought to provide (without necessarily referring to Forster) models that either render this core conception more precise by pinpointing formal features of narrative, or that are related to it in some other way. Hence, Boris Tomashevsky distinguished between fabula (the aggregate of mutually related events reported in work) and sjuzhet (the orderly sequence in which [the events are] presented in work), and he further proposed a formal method for identifying motif as irreducible of theme included in each work-a program that is generally in line with Vladimir Propp's morphological model, aimed at uncovering invariable functions attributed to dramatis persona so as to define underlying structure of a folktale, independent of its style or textual manifestation. As is well known, this work acted as a predecessor and important stimulus to various currents of narratology as they were formulated in 1960s according to structuralist principles and which, generally speaking, concur in dividing narrative text into signified and signifier, albeit with divergences in methodology, emphasis and terminology: immanent level/apparent level (A. J. Greimas); racontant/ raconte (Claude Bremond); genotext/ phenotext (Julia Kristeva); recitnarration (Roland Barthes); histoirelrecitlnarration (Gerard Genette); story/discourse (Seymour Chatman). Needless to say, connection between Forster and properly narratological research raises issues in narrative theory that are a great deal more complex than previous paragraph suggests. It does give some indication, however, of what Monika Fludernik, in her Towards a Natural Narratology, characterizes as the analytic, non-organic approach to mainstream narratological studies (what some people would call narratology's structuralist heritage) (338). Fludernik's latest book, following lead of her earlier writings, is a highly informed critique of narratology in its structuralist phase but, more particularly, an ambitious attempt to forge a new paradigm for narratological research that incorporates decades of work carried out by other scholars through both a redefinition and reorientation of habitually employed categories and a theoretical framework aimed at enabling narratology to take up questions relating to historical evolution of narrative starting from medieval prose and extending up to recent plotless narratives--questions that have largely eluded narratologists, devoted for most part to synchronic dimension of a corpus composed of novel from eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Globally speaking, Fludernik has sought to put narrativity at heart of matters by demoting all plot-based and actantially-based concepts of term and, as an alternative, equating narrativity with experientiality a feature derived from research being done on oral narrative in everyday conversation along lines laid down by William Labov and continued by specialists of discourse analysis, but at same time a notion with roots in Kate Hamburger's thesis that (as Fludernik herself points out) narrative is only form of discourse that can portray consciousness, particularly consciousness of someone else. …