The birthplace of narratology is inextricably linked to France,1 with initial forays into what became one of structuralism’s disciplinary cornerstones stretching as far back as 1946 and Jean Pouillon’s distinction between “the interior” or “psychic life” (le dedans, la vie psychique) and “the outside” or “the behavior of the individual” (le dehors, la conduite de l’individu) in novels. Among the landmarks in the field stands volume 8 of Communications, on “Recherches sémiologiques: l’analyse structurale du récit” (1966), which gathered contributions by the likes of Roland Barthes, J. A. Greimas, Claude Bremond, Umberto Eco, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gérard Genette. Three years later, Todorov coined the term narratologie in his Grammaire du Décaméron, where he emphasized the need for greater thoroughness in analyzing narratives and explored their logical and structural features, or l’univers de représentation (9). Todorov’s felicitous coinage reached popularity in 1977 with the publication of Mieke Bal’s Narratologie and the word’s English translation is usually ascribed to Marie-Laure Ryan in “Linguistic Models in Narratology: From Structuralism to Generative Semantics,” although Gerald Prince did translate the French neologism in his 1974 review of Claude Chabrol’s edited volume Sémiotique narrative et textuelle (2). Greimas’s Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (orig. 1966), Barthes’s S/Z (orig. 1970), and Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (orig. 1972), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (orig. 1982), and Narrative Discourse Revisited (orig. 1983), which were situated at the intersection of structuralist semiotics and poetics, are among those classics that contributed to establishing narratology as an influential academic discipline.Around the structuralist turn and across the Atlantic, several earlier critics mainly associated with the Chicago School of literary criticism set up by Ronald S. Crane,2 especially Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, were likewise instrumental in reorienting the study of literary texts away from history toward more formal and structural features. A group of English-speaking scholars (Gerald Prince, Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Dorrit Cohn, etc.), whom John Pier characterizes in the present volume as “well versed in French research,” persevered in the developing field of narratology “while the rhetoric of fiction, closer in its origins to the Jamesian tradition than to Russian formalism and structuralism, evolved into rhetorical narratology” (1).By the end of the twentieth century, French narratology had become largely associated with this “classical” phase. The 1999 publication of David Herman’s edited volume Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis ushered in a new “postclassical” phase that attempted to update and broaden the scope of French narratology by bringing to it either new or hitherto neglected perspectives: rhetorical narratology, feminist narratology, digital narratology, unnatural narratology, cognitive narratology, corpus narratology, to which corporeal, indigenous, and transmedial narratology were subsequently added. From this nonexhaustive list, with the exception of the first, all the others had a minor impact on French narratology, a reality that widened the gap between traditional/structuralist and postclassical narratology.Over the last two decades, several overviews, both journal issues and separate volumes that appeared in different countries, bore witness to this opposition. Of note are several edited compendiums: David Herman et al.’s Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005), Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol’s The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (2018), as well as dedicated series: the Narratologia series at de Gruyter,3 the University of Nebraska Frontiers of Narrative Series,4 the Ohio State University Press thematic strand on Narrative Studies (where the present volume appeared),5 to which we can add dedicated journals (Diegesis, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, Narrative, Poetics Today, Storyworlds, and Style) as well as other periodicals in literary studies/criticism and critical theory that ran special issues, such as Word and Text in 2019. Assessing the field of narratology twenty years after the “postclassical turn,” the latter republished John Pier’s landmark essay “Is There a French Postclassical Narratology?” (orig. 2011) to propose “an implicit dialogue between the adepts of postclassical narratology,” such as Jan Alber, Monika Fludernik, Luc Herman, Gerald Prince, Dan Shen, and Bart Vervaeck “who have widely adopted and popularized it,” and “more circumspect scholars,” such as Meir Sternberg and Pier himself “who have been reticent to recognise the label” (Ionescu, “Postclassical Narratology” 15).Published ten years after his aforementioned book chapter, John Pier’s present volume makes it clear why the polarization remains the same, whereas nevertheless endeavoring to map connections between the two separate camps. The main aim of the collection, however, is “to take the pulse of recent developments in narratological research in the French-speaking countries” (1) and present this rich diversity to an Anglo-American readership. As all the contributors to the volume testify without, however, acknowledging that the postmillennial renewed interest in structuralism6 might have indirectly contributed to the revitalization of narratology, the structuralist movement during the 1960s and 1970s in France “faded into the background during the following decades for a variety of reasons as its principal actors took up other pursuits” (1), such as Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics, Roland Barthes’s “text theory,” enunciative linguistics, and so on. By the time Herman’s concept became widespread in the United States, and in French-speaking countries while “narratology continued to be associated with structuralism” (1) to a certain extent, narratologists realized that “narratology cannot be summed up by its formalist and structuralist origins” (2) and began exploring “the transmedial, transcultural, and transhistorical dimensions of narrative,” which called on “the resources of transdisciplinarity” that had already been sketchily adumbrated in Communications 8 (2).7 Indeed several French (but not only) narratologists had remained indifferent if not hostile to transmediality,8 and were not ready “to recognize other narrative modes than the standard way of evoking narrative scripts” (Ryan, “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology” 11). To some extent, some of the volume’s contributions attempt to plug this gap, either through their own object of study or suggestive pointers toward nonliterary media (2, n. 1; quoting Ryan). Yet arguably, more could have been on offer, for instance, in connection with the burgeoning field of ludonarratology9 and the notion of “emergent (or procedural) narrative,” which designates unwritten storylines not encoded into the game by its developers but which are subjectively experienced by the players’ interactions during gameplay,10 the whole area of film studies (Verstraten’s Film Narratology), the role of “experiential museums” (Sodaro, “Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum”) in the suggestive reconstruction and narrative reenactment of lived memories, or even, to stick to traditional or hybrid literary genres, the specific narrative issues raised by so-called “prose poems” (such as John Ashbery’s Three Poems or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life) and “critifiction” (such as “the miscegenation of the critical and the fictional-creative” in Hélène Cixous’s writings).11The very first chapter in Pier’s volume, Raphaël Baroni’s “Pragmatics in Classical French Narratology and Beyond,” offers a bipartite view of the field as two distinctive communities: “Narratologists A,” who would look for “the logical structure of the fabula” in a text, and “Narratologists B,” who would invest more in how a narrative text triggers “cognitive activities, impelling the reader to build up a mental representation of a plot” (12–13), a difference that was also sharpened on esthetic, ideological, and linguistic grounds. Thus, even if works like Fayol’s Le Récit et sa construction and Gervais’s Récits et actions contributed to developing “cognitive models of narrative production that incorporated reflections on the structure of intentional actions and scripts,” and French narratology made “a spectacular twist in the semiotic theory of Greimas” through the “semiotics of passions” (23; referring to Greimas and Fontanille’s Sémiotique des passions), they “seem to have remained virtually unnoticed by English-speaking cognitive narratologists,” all the more so when French was no longer prominent in the English-speaking world of narratology (24; see also Lavocat, 209).Sylvie Patron’s “No-Narrator Theories/Optional-Narrator Theories: Recent Proposals and Continuing Problems” is a survey of “recent scholarship challenging pan-narrator theories” and “favoring optionalism” (31) that draws on both postclassical narratology (Richard Walsh, Berys Gaut, Andrew Kania, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Gregory Currie, Tilmann Köppe, Jan Stühring, and Uri Margolin) and “classical narratology” (S.-Y. Kuroda, Ann Banfield). Patron puts forward a critique of the “non-narrator theory” used for the first time by Marie-Laure Ryan in “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction,” then in her subsequent works, to describe Émile Benveniste’s, Käte Hamburger’s, Ann Banfield’s, and S.-Y. Kuroda’s positions, which Patron considers have been summarized by “an inadequate expression” leading to confusion (32). Patron analyses the alternative of “optional-narrator theory” (35), based on five types of arguments: the analytic argument, the ontological gap arguments, the blocked inference argument, the distinction of fiction argument, the argument from mediation, and concludes that “a common feature of the work of the second-generation optional-narrator theorists, which they also share with most of the work of the pan-narrator theorists of the same generation, is their lack of historical and meta-historical perspective” (43). Building on the absence of “the historical argument,” Patron considers that “historical research that combines questions concerning the structure of theories with an examination of the genesis of concepts” should be encouraged (47), and puts forward a narrative model in historiography, which allows her to make the relation between optional-narrator theorists and pan-narrator theorists “more complex,” a complexity that does not necessarily translate as an opposition but rather a space in between (50).12In “Narration outside Narrative,” Richard Saint-Gelais examines the conflict between “the ‘internal’ study of narrative from an immanent perspective that puts aside extratextual factors such as the author” and “the ‘external’ approach” that studies “elements that belong to the book, but not to the narrative properly speaking,” those elements that are on the threshold or “the ‘undecided zone’ between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the text”: book cover, illustrations, introduction, footnotes, endnotes, and so on. (54), looking especially into “the border between what pertains to the author and to the narrator,” which is by definition “a blurry one” (55). Saint-Gelais shows via Stanley Fish’s work that such questions can be solved by giving more importance to reading options. Taking as an example the famous opening of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, in which Karl Rossmann, on entering New York City, sees the Statue of Liberty’s “arm with the sword [rising] up as if newly stretched aloft” (1), Saint-Gelais shows that both critics and students invest the replacement of the torch with a sword with a symbolic value that is attributed to the narrator rather than to the author and proposes a new interpretation that starts from the conjecture that “this sentence is neither a mistake nor a symbol but a plain and faithful description of the Statue of Liberty—of this Statue of Liberty, in what would then be some kind of parallel America” (56). Making his main aim the examination of “cases in which we may ask ourselves whether the narrative is ‘spilling over into” the paratext or into elements thereof” (56), Saint-Gelais minutely analyses several instances of material versus fictional mode of apprehension, with insights into the segmentation in chapters, epigraphs, typography, and variations on the narrator-as-author formula covering a wide range of literary texts (by Boris Strugatsky, Jean Ricardou, Pat Cadigan, Henk Elsinck, Arthur Conan Doyle, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Leo Bruce, and Georges Simenon), returning to the notion of parafiction that he had previously examined in Châteaux de pages, coining the term parafictionalization as a potentially useful concept for describing the relation between text and fiction since it advocates the inclusion of paratexts into parafictional operations (65). Such a conceptual tool, for instance, would help us come to terms with the authorship of an intricate text like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which forces the reader to accept the segments the novel is made up of: John Shade’s long poem “Pale Fire,” preceded by “a verbose introduction and followed by an even longer commentary by one Charles Kinbote, who snatched Shade’s manuscript from his widow and set himself up as its editor” (66). Wondering whether it is Kinbote who authors the text (as Page Stegner suggested), or Shade himself (as Andrew Field proposed), the Nabokovians were split into “Kinboteans” and “Shadeans,” respectively (67), an issue that can be resolved by paratextual studies in dialog with narratology to establish borders enabling “readers to know where the game begins and where it ends” (67).Benoit Hennaut’s “Narrator on Stage: Not a Condition but a Component for a Postdramatic Narrative Discourse” focuses on a body of work produced in the 1980s and 1990s known under the collective term “postdramatic,” revisiting the views either rejecting (Genette) or accepting (Chatman) the idea that the theater can be a valid medium of narrative discourse (71). Revising Manfred Jahn’s and Monika Fludernik’s findings on “theater’s capacity to inscribe narrative discourse within the performance itself” (75), Hennaut dedicates one section of his chapter to performance as autonomous discourse (76–80) and emphasizes the role of the narrator as a stylistic device (80–87), underlining that “[n]arratorial mediation is used and distills elements that contribute to establishing certain levels of narrativity” in theatrical discourse (87). The artists included in his chapter (The Wooster Group set up in New York in 1975, which is still working under the leadership of director Elizabeth LeCompte, and the Needcompany, founded by Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey in Brussels in 1986) share a certain mistrust in the narrative “as something explanatory and anticipatory,” privileging instead “its transgressive potential” (88).Françoise Revaz’s “The Poetics of Suspended Narrative” analyses a special form of narrative that she deems more worthy of narratologists’ attention: the feuilleton or the media saga, “characterized by its fragmentary mode of distribution,” which, depending on the type of publication or other media (TV serials, among others), releases a sequential narrative in installments (93). For instance, this type of narrative results in “multilevel temporal suspension,” which contradicts Genette’s theories on the narratives’ double temporality (94) and becomes a “fragmented whole” (96), which goes against the Aristotelian theory that regarded the action as complete (96) because wholeness is reached in a suspended narrative only in its conclusion (98). Revaz looks into the different dynamics of series: “the return of the same well-known, familiar characters in successive episodes” (105), emphasizes the “transmedial” characteristics of suspended narratives, and concludes on the full legitimacy of the genre “that has its rightful place amid the vast array of narrative genres” (107).John Pier brings a historical perspective on narrative theory through the lens of discourse analysis, focusing on questions pertaining to “the intersection of constituence, auctoriality, and scene of enunciation” (132). He stakes out important dates: 1955, when structural narratology became fashionable in France through Claude Lévi-Strauss, and 1983, when Genette’s Nouveau discours du récit appeared, the years of the so-called nouvelle critique, showing that although it passed unnoticed by many specialists, French discourse analysis was “context-oriented well before the advent of postclassical narratology” (112). Pier proposes erudite surveys of Zellig S. Harris’s “intersentential” distributionalism, A. J. Greimas’s “transsentential” approach, Todorov’s proposal to superimpose “principles taken from the modes of enunciation in French linguistics (histoire, characterized by the absence of addressor and addressee, and discours, where their presence is marked) onto narrative content” (116), and also shows how American narratologists related to Saussure’s langue/parole distinction. For instance, Gerald Prince differentiated between “narrative langue” (“the system of rules and norms accounting for the production and understanding of individual narratives”) and “the individual narrative” corresponding to “narrative parole,” or Noam Chomsky replaced langue and parole in his generative-transformational grammar with the concepts of competence (“the innate ability of speakers to construct and understand well-formed and ambiguous sentences”) and performance (“sentences realized in situations of communication whose interpretation is dependent on context, psychosocial relations, and so on” [117]). French linguists like Émile Benveniste “advocated a linguistics of discourse or enunciation” (118) and introduced “a third domain, that of translinguistics” (119). Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of utterance and speech genres, metalingvistika, translated as “translinguistique” by his French commentators, represented “another source and important predecessor of French discourse analysis” (121), for instance, for Dominique Maingueneau who subscribed “to many of the characteristics of the Bakhtinian utterance” (122) and likewise differentiated “two complementary and asymmetrical ‘regimes’ or ‘systems,’ one conversational, the other instituted” (125) or, several scenes of enunciation and modes of genericity that Pier describes in a brief account of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (127–31).Denis Bertrand’s “Regimes of Immanence, between Narratology and Narrativity” starts from the “hour of glory in Greimassian semiotics” that became “emblematic” of the discipline of narratology, although it may seem outdated nowadays, and examines “the astonishing resurgence of narratology in debates currently taking place in France in the human sciences” (137), where the notion of storytelling, coming from the United States, was introduced by Christian Salmon’s 2010 eponymous book. Bertrand notes that in the previous decade, as evidenced by several conferences, analyses of the role of narrative, notwithstanding its “controversial epistemological powers,” were brought to bear on a whole range of disciplines, such as psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, the language sciences, literary studies, feminist studies, gender studies, education, medicine, health and social action, biology, law, religious sciences, computer sciences, and visual studies (137), thus allowing for concerns with more generalized forms of narrativity. Adapting the concept from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bertrand favors “the notion of regimes of immanence” and that of regimes of immanence, which “take form against a background of veridiction by intermingling [. . .] the dual illusionism of the narrative seductions of the said (pertaining to narratology) and the perceivable constraints of the saying (pertaining to narrativity)” (153).In “Fiction, Expanded and Updated,” Olivier Caïra contributes a sociological angle via an experiment he made: he asked people to write in a notebook the fictional experiences they encountered in twenty-four or forty-eight hours. The results were surprising since, apart from novels, short stories, comics, movies, TV serials, and theatrical productions, people recorded also computer games, mathematical exercises, philosophical examples, jokes, Dungeons & Dragons, chess, live-action role-playing games, improvisational theater, and were uncertain about the fictional feature of radio ads or personal websites (155). This “notebook experiment” revealed to Caïra that “contemporary narratology can gain further insight into the nature of fictionality from this sociological definition of fiction” (156) by expanding the range of fictional objects to ludology, which, thanks to theorists like Espen Aarseth (Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Why Fiction?), and Ryan (e.g., Narrative as Virtual Reality, and Avatars of Story), made video games and text-based adventures legitimate fictional works (158). Such insights lead to the need of redefining fiction, which “is better characterized by the lifting of a pragmatic burden than in terms of what it should be” (163–64). He extends a notion of the frame that could “encourage narratologists to study small-group configurations and shared narrative authority beyond the traditional one-way communication models.” (169)Claude Calame’s “Narratology and the Test of Greek Myths: The Poetic Birth of a Colonial City” approaches Greek myths in the narratives contained in Pindar’s Ninth, Fifth, and Fourth Pythian Odes from a “semio-narratological” perspective (172) and focuses on the “mythical” foundation of the colonial city Cyrene in Libya, which he examines from three points of view: the dense temporal setting, its enunciative and pragmatic dimension, and various semantic registers, which interlace “recurrent isotopic figures” (188), such as mineral, vegetal, human (196), and animal, which “are grouped around certain focalizing themes: autochthony as a manifestation of the generation of a cultured land; herding as a stage in the process of civilization; matrimonial union in reference to the institution of civic order” (197). Calame considers that “symbolic products” can “transfigure reality in the direction of fiction” while also “manifesting themselves in the most diverse poetic and discursive forms and for different situations of ritual, institutional, and cultural performance” (198).Françoise Lavocat’s concluding piece, “Policing Literary Theory: Toward a Collaborative Ethics of Research?”, brings a much-needed, wider contextualizing framework for the renewed importance of narratology in the study not only of literature but also other media in a fast-managerializing academic landscape. Her axe-grinding essay begins with a diagnosis of “French Theory” (which like the other contributors she equates with the fashionable literary theory exported across the Atlantic) as passé, partly on account of the violence of its most influential diktats, from which she selects inter alia Barthes’s “fascism of language” and “contempt for fiction and its pleasures,” but also, much more sweepingly and problematically—because counterfactually—Derridean deconstruction as supposedly promoting the “negation of the possibility of meaning and interpretation” in “Deconstructions: The Im-Possible” (202). Despite finding a latter-day echo in Avital Ronell’s deconstructionist warmongering against the text (203), the virulent catchphrases and anathemas of yore were jettisoned in time, although Lavocat does not provide even a minimal rationale for the broader historical-critical contexts within which, for instance, one of the hapless victims of the troubled 1960s, in Barthes’s iconoclastic “Death of the Author,” could be rehabilitated a quarter of a century later once the “subject,” formerly discredited or at best ensnared in an intersubjective dimension (Lacan), began taking center stage again, especially bolstered by the “affective turn.”13 With the alleged decline of French Theory from the mid-1980s onward,14 then the advent of the “narrative turn” from the early 1990s, which “has spread to numerous disciplines,” Lavocat asks whether narratology can be considered a viable critical alternative and, more boldly, a model for literary theory (202) on account of what several contributors consensually regard as its scientific credentials (209).For Lavocat, the role of French Theory as “policed academic scholarship” was replaced after its decline by “institutional censorship, largely supported by supranational research policy,” with its “control procedures, accountability, research norms, language requirements, and so forth” (203). The ideological police thus gave way to the “research police” (208), but at least Lavocat could ask whether “the following years witness[ed] a victory of ‘common sense’ (207). Disagreeing with the likes of William Marx (L’Adieu à la literature), Tzvetan Todorov (La Littérature en peril), and Vincent Jouve (Pourquoi étudier la littérature?), who see the educational trivialization of technical vocabulary as ultimately harmful to literary studies, Lavocat emphasizes the changed status of literature—competition from other media after the digital revolution and the “preference new generations have shown for activities other than reading” (207)—rather than the abating “theoretical fever” as the cause of literature’s endangered status, alongside “the managerial model” of academic life and research standards, which nowadays represent a “global development” (208) unpropitious to the flourishing of literary theory. Invoking the year 2003, when the first global ranking model, or Shanghai Ranking (ARWU), became operational, Lavocat criticizes the alignment of research with models coming from the hard sciences that transform researchers into managers, but also bemoans the prevalence of English as the lingua franca for academic research output, hence, according to her, the popularity of translation studies today, “a symptom of the lack of comprehension between scholars of widely differing scientific and geographical backgrounds who work together” (209), although one could easily argue that translation studies did not need this additional impetus to flourish as an intellectual discipline in its own right. In spite of all these obstacles, Lavocat makes a plea for the multifarious, contemporary practices of (French) narratology as being able to venture “into a variety of cultural areas spanning several epochs” (209). With these new developments, postclassical narratology and the narrative turn further strengthening the expansion of “the scope of narrative concerns” as well as creating “an atmosphere favorable for collaborative interdisciplinary research,” although the methods and theories are not “always conducive to consensus” (211), can provide inspirational formulas to literary theory. Thus, by way of a fitting conclusion to the volume, Lavocat expresses her conviction that “scholars must transform literary studies and literary theory into a discipline whose contents can be shared, transmitted, and accumulated, a discipline with which other disciplines and cultural areas will find it both possible and desirable to engage in dialogue” (217).Regardless of whether the gap between French and postclassical narratology will remain, only time will tell if Lavocat’s militant prognosis, which permeates the volume as a whole, as well as the collection’s overall belief in a return to scientificity will prove to be a lasting paradigm.Research supported by The Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning.
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